Promo Picture for "Don't Look"

Ah, the mid-Winter theatre festival. Used by the larger North American Summer Fringe companies all over to bridge the gap of their fundraising dry months. New York has the FRIGID Festival, advertised as having something like 150 performances in 12 days in late February/early March. Winnipeg offers something called the Master Playwright Festival starting later this month. And going on right now, Toronto’s Fringe has decided to follow the lead of Edmonton’s Nextfest by putting on the Next Stage Festival, which is rather ambitiously subtitled “The Future of Theatre,” at Factory Theatre, located at Bathurst & Adelaide.

Winter theatre festivals are a curious thing. The challenge: to achieve a festival atmosphere during the coldest months of the year. Outdoor performances are out. Sidewalk vendors won’t come near. Only the heartiest of patrons will hang out in a beer tent all day, and even then only if it’s heated. Passers by lured in by colourful signs are almost non existent.

So you have to have some pretty interesting sounding shows if you want more than the performers’s friends and family to turn up. Or depend on the theatre-starved turning up and seeing whatever’s available. Fortunately for Next Stage, my companion and I were exactly that.

What actually drew the two of us in was the fact that Andrew Penner, musician and lead singer for Panic Manual favourites Sunparlour Players, was appearing in a Next Stage play called Reesor. After arriving at the box office/beer tent in Factory Theatre’s small front yard far too late for Reesor’s 3:15 start time, however, I was a little surprised to see that half of the six remaining shows of the evening were sold out. After deciding not to rush into the clown-based show “L’Ange Avec Les Fleurs” that someone nearby yelled was starting in two minutes, my companion fearlessly suggested we see “Take It Back” on the main stage at 7:30 and “Don’t Look” at the studio space at 9:15. With some trepidation I finally agreed. We got two tickets to the two shows for $50 under the Evening Double Bill ticket pricing. Not a bad deal.

I say trepidation because I’m a little wary of contemporary dance shows. There’s a lot of meaning in most of them, but generally it goes right over my head. I’m an artsy kind of guy, but more often than not, I just don’t get it. But then, after a quick dinner at nearby Craft Burger and a nice oatmeal stout in the beer tent from festival sponsor McAuslan Brewing I was content enough to sit through anything. (Note to Craft Burger & McAuslan: coupons and free samples for plugs are always welcome.)

Truth be known, though, Solid State Breakdance’s “Take It Back” was not that bad. The promo text claimed it “asks the question ‘Why don’t we dance in couples anymore?’” and, in an attempt to answer its own question, offers “a partner dance for our generation…[pairing] the high physicality of B-boying (breakdance) with the partnering structures of Lindy Hop (Swing) and the gestural abstractions of Contemporary Dance.” Now, I don’t know what any of that really means, but on stage it started out as four people, two men and women, kind of miming out a shy rebellion against old couples dancing stereotypes and cliches. By the end it devolved into a kind of oneupsmanship contest between four very talented breakdancers, broken up by some choreographed group dances that were pretty good. It was all pretty light fare, and I don’t know if the issue of modern couples dancing was ever really solved. Certainly I’m not physically capable of dancing like that by myself or with anybody else, and I wouldn’t expect to see much of it in da clubs anytime soon. But the music was good, much of it taken from the excellent Verve Remixed compilation series, the atmosphere was fun and the dancing was energetic, and overall it was an entertaining hour of dance hijinx.

Next up was “Don’t Look,” a play about kissing cousins. Daniel Sadavoy plays Daniel and Rebecca Applebaum plays Ariella, first cousins in a Jewish family who were caught kissing as 13 year olds in the basement of Daniel’s family home. The play traces the two as they explain how they became closer and closer as kids until that fateful day, after which they weren’t allowed to see each other again, then how that one incident preys on their minds and affects their lives and relationships during their teen years and early adulthood. There’s some fun on-stage costume changes that allow the two young actors to play different figures in one another’s narratives as they intertwine and unfold; Applebaum wears big glasses to play the nerdy girlfriend in Daniel’s life story, Sadavoy slips on a grey sweater vest and an air of conceit to play Ariella’s boyfriend in her’s, other less important characters are shown in a similar way. This is even more oddly entertaining considering that before the play even started, the two actors were on stage in their underwear sitting in back-to-back chairs looking miserable as a continuous loop of the Beatles singing “Carry That Weight” played over the theatre speakers.

Mostly naked actors at the start aside, “Don’t Look” has other endearing qualities about it. The two narrative stories come together and criscross quite neatly, and the story and actors manage to make it quite believable how two people’s lives can be ruled by a brief “kissing cousins” incident and resulting sexual tension, even when the two characters don’t see each other for years afterwards. As my companion remarked after the play was over, though, the two actors sure do talk fast, and sometimes when the intention is quick cuts between the two narratives it’s hard to follow. Director/dramaturg Maya Rabinovitch keeps the stage design sparse and things moving quickly, which is ok, but adds to the occasional confusion. Sadavoy, also the play’s author, seems pretty at ease on stage, while Applebaum seems a bit tense at time, tripping over a couple of lines. It’s a pretty good slice of life type show, though, without really having a lot of emotional impact or insights into the human condition that a lot of such plays attempt.

Next Stage is a solid evening’s entertainment; the two shows we saw were good, if unspectacular, shying away from a lot of profound thought or ideas that stay with you for weeks and going instead for the decent night’s fun. This is not exactly a bad thing for a mid-Winter festival show, when a night of escapism is probably needed more by audiences quite possibly exhibiting symptoms of seasonal affected disorder. Wherever you are, take a look to see if your local theatre festival is putting on a mid-Winter special. Because even contemporary dance shows and plays about kissing cousins can provide some relief during dreary winter months.

If you’re in Toronto, Next Stage runs until Sunday, January 18th (click for schedule). Maybe I’ll catch Andrew Penner in Reesor yet.

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