Hamilton Fringe: Mini reviews
It's the last weekend of the city's celebration of independent theatre. Don't miss your chance to see these final fantastic shows!
Grabbing The Hammer Lane: A Trucker Narrative
Mills Hardware
David M. Proctor gives a spellbinding performance as a grown son and his father navigating the recollections and old hurts of their relationship. What starts with the humorous bantering of a trucker in a therapy session gradually reveals a tale of identity, memory, family, choices, and regret.
Proctor’s voice is rich and magnetic, easily enthralling the audience with a story that gradually reveals its true emotional gravity. His ability to embody younger son and older father has an amazing physical authenticity, and his characterization of each man comes across as true-to-life and fully formed. Proctor populates the stage with a number of unseen scene partners (a therapist, various relatives), with the exceptional timing and commitment he gives to his one-sided conversations.
Don’t miss this gem from a visiting American artist.
More info here.
Gringas
The Players’ Guild
When I see a cast of young women on stage, especially a group that is ethnically and physically diverse, my story-loving heart is hopeful for what that means for both representation and the future of the theatre arts. The cast includes Alejandra Angobaldo, isi bhakhomen, Mercedes Isaza Clunie, Katarina Fiallos, Gloria Freire, Julianna Olave, and Rachel Quintanilla. They each bring an energy, commitment and passion to the well-choreographed play that makes Gringas feel like a truly ensemble piece.
We meet a motley crew of personalities brought together by their immigrant parents’ determination that they improve their language skills at a Spanish camp in the Muskokas. Gradually, the girls reveal their vulnerabilities and bond through scenes that highlight the growing pains of adolescence and in developing a personal identity when the pressure to assimilate pulls in one direction while the urge to belong to something greater, ancestral, primal, beckons in another. Humorous, raucous, even supernatural, Gringas has joy, pride, trepidation and rage in equal measure.
More info here.
The Little Black Fish
Mills Hardware
The staging is striking: piles of brown archival boxes hold items belonging to various individuals, each labelled on the side with a name. There’s something solemn and even foreboding about the collections of possessions without their owners.
Aytak Dibavar and Faezeh Daemi take turns performing vignettes that tell of the experiences of queer Iranian people and the strain of being true to oneself, discovering love, building a life in the face of people and systems bent on denying the selfhood of queer people.
If there is a shortcoming of this show it is, quite literally, its run time. Narratively, it feels a little brief and indeed, it is promoted as being an hour-long but was over within 40 minutes. This seems a happy problem to have if there are plans to stage the show again. I had an appetite for at least another round of vignettes, and from the mood of the rest of the audience it seemed others would have been game for more as well.
More info here.
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Things Are Fine Actually
Theatre Aquarius Studio
Think of Things Are Fine Actually as one-part stand-up comedy show, one-part lecture from a quirky, likeable overthinker who comes by it honestly. Neil McArthur has been a philosophy professor as well as a Fringe performer.
There are many moments of laughter to be found in McArthur’s show as he considers the funny yet terrifying reality in which we find ourselves, where we are constantly able to "rate" one another through various apps and social media platforms, and a three-star rating on AirBnB can feel like an existential disaster. He considers the quest for perfection in various areas of life and how, inevitably, many of us come up short, including himself.
He brings with him an odd box of items to illustrate that things – as well as people – can be "three-stars in a five-star world." From time to time, I couldn’t catch a word or two when McArthur paced or his voice rose emphatically. Still, it’s a fun ramble in which audiences will nod in recognition and maybe even learn something new.
More info here.
Menno-Morphosis
Mills Hardware
Sandra Banman was raised as a Mennonite and grew up fully immersed in a non-traditional but evangelical form of its religious culture. She came of age in the '80s, married, and was decades into raising a family when divorce exploded her well-ordered life and sense of self. Over time, she learned a whole lot about herself and worked to unpack her memories and the norms with which she was indoctrinated as a Mennonite girl and woman.
Banman has an undeniable earnestness and likability that helps smooth some of the awkward aspects of her delivery. The device of the tongue-in-cheek, motivational, multi-step program she uses to frame her story may not be entirely essential but offers several moments of genuine laughter from the audience. She hints at some more harrowing moments of her own experience and that of her relatives in the old country, but holds the narrative to a lighter, upbeat mood. This is a show to which you could bring your daughter, mother or grandmother and have all feel it was an hour decently spent.
More info here.
Izad Etemadi: Let Me Explain
Theatre Aquarius Studio
Playwright/performer Izad Etemadi first came to Hamilton Fringe 11 years ago with the first of his solo shows, Borderland. Then came several more shows featuring his lovable, comedic original character, Leila, which delighted local audiences. Let Me Explain is Etemadi’s first new Fringe show post-pandemic, and this time it’s personal. As we’ve come to expect from him, Let Me Explain is also very funny.
Etemadi starts with his name, and the many, many, inexplicably mangled "interpretations" of his name people have called him in school rooms and audition spaces. He leads the audience on a journey through his precarious start in a refugee camp in Germany through his childhood in Victoria and into young adulthood building his career as an actor. Whether indignant, puzzled or exhausted by people’s capacity for ignorance, Etemadi never loses his core sense of self or determination. What is it the young people call it these days? Main character energy? With only a bedazzled microphone and a stool, Etemadi skillfully charms the audience and inspires all the laughter we’ve come to expect from one of his shows. A highlight I never knew I needed? A glorious German language rendition of the opening song (with Belle and the villagers) from Beauty and the Beast.
More info here.
The Underwear Fairy and Other Love Stories
The Staircase, Studio Theatre
Kristi Boulton has been a mainstay in Hamilton comedy/Improv circles for many years as a member of troupes including Executive Indecision and The Understudies, which enjoyed multiple sold-out runs at past Hamilton Fringe Festivals. Now she has brought her first autobiographical solo show, The Underwear Fairy and Other Love Stories to this year’s Fringe, and has knocked it out of the proverbial park.
Boulton is such a likeable, charming, effervescent storyteller that the hour will speed along and you’d be willing to sit for several more as long as she has more tales to tell. She uses a set of bookshelves to display props representing each major story point as she guides us from her childhood through adolescence to adulthood. She is so self-aware as a storyteller that momentary word fumbles just become another part of the comedy, and her side commentary shows she knows exactly how moments will land as the skilled performer she is. At the same time, there’s a sweetly vulnerable undercurrent to the performance that suggests Boulton is more used to taking risks in improv, and less about saying “yes, and…” with her own tender inner workings. As wonderfully funny as The Underwear Fairy is, it’s my hope that she will continue to plumb the depths of her quirky, valiant heart in future shows.
More info here.
Gavin Stephens: Object of Strangeness
The Staircase, Bright Room
Scarborough native and stand-up comedian Gavin Stephens has brought his first Fringe show to this year’s festival, and it’s full of uproarious laughs. He integrates sharp, unflinching social commentary with funny insights about himself and the whole mixed up human race.
From the show synopsis, I thought we would hear a bit more about Stephens’ upbringing and experience as a multiethnic individual, though what we do learn in Object of Strangeness about his family, his experience of the pandemic, and his unenthusiastic navigation of middle-age (I’m right there with you!) resonates and rings true. Looking around the audience, Stephens was able to elicit lots of chuckles and outright belly laughs from people of a range of ages and comfort levels. He connects the crazy dots of our society and says the quiet parts out loud in a way that is hilarious and really, kind of cathartic. Here’s hoping this isn’t the last time we see Gavin Stephens at Hamilton Fringe.
More: info here.
