Rachel Blair's Wake, the winner of the 2008 Fringe new play contest, is the most polished work I've seen so far at this year's Toronto Fringe Festival. Written by Blair while in her final year in York University's playwriting unit, it concerns three Irish-Canadian brothers who have reunited for their father's funeral. During the course of the one-hour play, the cause of their estrangement is revealed.
It's a well-worn premise. New immigrants. A dead mother. A stern patriarch. A tragedy buried in the past. Told partly through direct address to the audience, with the characters moving from their present adult selves into childhood and back again, it is very "Canadian play".
While the trappings may be familiar, Blair's depiction of the brothers' relationships is quite fresh and perceptive. She understands well the way alliances shift in three-child families; it's always two against one, with the competitive older boys trying to get the youngest on their side - when they're not teaming up to tease him, that is. As quiet, young Shane, Frank Cox O'Connell rivets with his sad eyes; he is supported by solid performances from Christian Bellsmith and Derek Moran.
Wake is better than most of the original scripts you'll come across at the Fringe, but it did make me wonder about the purpose of the Toronto Fringe's new play contest. Open to the public, ideally the annual contest would discover an exciting, original, if unvarnished "Fringe" voice, rather than a play that would be a comfortable fit in the Tarragon's normal theatre season. Of course, I don't know what else was submitted, but the contest's judges seem to have gone for the safe choice.
Think of George F. Walker in 1971, working as a cab driver and spotting Ken Gass's flyer on a lamppost seeking scripts for his Factory Theatre Lab. Walker, who had only ever seen one play in his life, submitted the distinctly "unCanadian" play The Prince of Naples and then was nurtured into one of the country's most formidable playwrights.
Canada's Fringe festivals, which are unjuried, tend to be where you are most likely to see an "unCanadian" play these days. What is heartening about Fringe writing isn't necessarily the quality of the shows, but the energy that comes from new (but not always young) writers who are creating out of a personal passion and who don't give a darn what an hour-long play "should" sound like. So you get charismatic storytellers like TJ Dawe and a crowd-pleasing country-rock musical like The Christian Republican Fundraiser in Dayton Tennessee and a solo show about magical tapeworms who talk in haiku like Free Range.
I'm glad to see a serious drama like Wake find a place in the Fringe atmosphere, but I do have mixed feelings about it being selected as the wild and woolly festival's standard bearer.
A recommendation:
Lupe: Undone, which takes place behind Honest Ed's at Bloor and Bathurst, is a loosely structured delight. It stars Melissa D'Agostino as her Latina clown character, Lupe, who fled revolution in Guadalupe to come to Toronto "where the streets are played with gold". She has set up a boudoir behind Honest Ed's where she is waiting for her lover, theatre producer David Mirvish, who she met while working the phones at TicketKing. When he stands her up, she passes the time chatting with audience about her love troubles, feeding us tortilla chips and salsa, and performing a dances to songs by Gloria Estefan and Lionel Ritchie. It's silly, it's funny, it's the kind of show you are only likely to see at the Fringe.
You can get a taste in this YouTube video of Lupe interviewing none other than Mayor David Miller:
