Theatre – Nicolas Demers

7 Important Things

After the sublime and the philosophical, I came down to earth with 7 Important Things, the true story of baby-boomer-turned-hippie-turned-heroin-addict-turned-hair-stylist George Acheson. Directed and co-performed by Nadia Ross, it is a perfectly mundane, perfectly special story of dreams and despair, hope and disillusionment, sex and drugs and love beads.

The short play (about an hour long) is presented in a number of formats: semi-formal Q&As, projecting old photographs, re-enacting scenes from his past, monologues. It almost felt like a bunch of acting and motivation exercises, except that they actually managed to gel into a play. I got the definite impression that George is not an experienced actor (and his life story never mentions any passion for acting), though he held his own very well. And either way, it’s not a bad thing: that bit of roughness made the experience more authentic to me.

At the end, Nadia asks George to step up to the audience and just stand there, to “have them see you as I see you.” And we did: worn but not broken. Unmasked. Vulnerable. Alive. He went through a lot of pain and didn’t really change the world but in the end he found his place, and quiet happiness. We should all be so lucky.

Dark Matter

This was my first PuSh Festival show of the season, and boy was it a doozie!

I honestly had no idea what to expect, and the writeup didn’t help. And that was just fine by me, I was all ready to take whatever experimental mayhem the theatre would throw at me.

At first I was just… bemused. Performer and writer Kate McIntosh, along with her two sidekicks, just did a lot of strange quasi-slapstick antics, moving props around, getting in each other’s way… it looked frantic and meta, like a metaphor for the creative process, or behind-the-scenes work at any production. I couldn’t see a story or a pattern, but I patiently waited, trusting that it would all come together.

Then things got verbal. McIntosh and the others brought up abstract and/or deliberatly silly philosophical questions, and lectured us about Big Scientific Ideas, focusing on the Many Worlds Hypothesis—you know the one, it’s that interpretation of Quantum Mechanics that says every observation, every choice, actually branches off whole new universes that are just as real as the one we’re in now.

Schrodinger’s cat is both alive and dead when you open the box, in different realities. Instead of sitting in SFU’s Goldcorps Centre for the Arts, I could have tripped and fallen on the way to the show—fallen left, and I would have been killed by an oncoming truck; fallen right, and I would have found the love of my life.

(I didn’t make up that last example, by the way. McIntosh pointed in my general direction and speculated about the alternate lives of “the man over here.” I like that she was talking about a man meeting another man. Hey, it’s like she knew me!)

And so the audience got our brains massaged and stretched by the wonder of science, the weirdness of philosophy, and some general clowning around. Good stuff? Sure. Nothing too memorable though, I felt.

But then!

But then McIntosh lifted the backdrop a little.

Picture it: a solid black sheet pierced with little holes, lit from behind for a lovely starfield effect. And picture me: primed by all that high-flown cosmic cogitation, of time and space and higher realities. When the backdrop was lifted my brain clicked on the Aristotelian geocentric model, where stars are just holes in the outermost sphere (sound familiar?) letting in light from the Primum Mobile. This glimpse of the backstage lights, so bright to my dark-adapted eyes, was for a moment like looking into someplace outside reality. I was Dave Bowman entering the monolith, I was Dante reaching the heights of Paradise. It felt transcendent, almost a spiritual experience, and I don’t use that word lightly.

The play wound down soon after this. Its last few minutes were more quiet and low-key, letting me come down gently from my epiphanic climax—which didn’t stop me from gushing about it afterwards, repeatedly.

My brain was buzzing all the way back home, both at the experience, and the cleverness of juxtaposing such an old cosmology with modern theories. If indeed that was the intent. That’s the beauty of non-narrative performances like this, it’s easy to write your own interpretations. All I can say is, this is what I got out of it.

Fortunately I didn’t trip and fall once on the way home. On the downside, neither did I meet my future husband.

Sunny Drake’s “X”

I saw this hilarious fourth-wall-breaking one-man show on Saturday, as part of the Queer Arts Festival. It’s a weird little piece, cleverly self-referential, making great use of props and multimedia, with several stories evolving in parallel, occasionally meeting and influencing each other. In other words, right up my alley!

But in addition to all this, it’s very painful and personal, with the theme of addiction (specifically alcoholism) running through the main stories. And the thing is, those stories were extremely relatable, being all about the need to escape into a magical world where bullies don’t exist and you can be any beautiful pop princess you want; about it’s not just about you, and the harm you cause yourself does affect others; about how trying to quit and living in the real world will mean dealing with all the emotional issues that drove you to escape in the first place. So, check it out if you can. Whatever your vice is, this show will definitely speak to you. It made me reflect, made me feel, made my brain spin. That’s a Saturday night well spent.

PS: actually, maybe it made my brain spin a little too much because there were some parts I just couldn’t follow. The puppets in the magical world, for one were doing things that seemed unrelated to the humans’ doings. And the thing with the heart and the ribcage, what was that about? At first I relaxed and expected it all to come together eventually but it never did as far as I could tell. Part of me wants to watch it a second time to see if it might make more sense… but I think if I did it would lose its magic, so I’ll just let it go.

When The Sun Comes Out

The last show of the 2013 Vancouver Queer Arts Festival is a lesbian opera—apparently, the first lesbian opera in all of Canada! I hadn’t been planning to go until a friend invited me, and I’m very glad I accepted that invitation.

First, the negative: I admit I’ve never seen opera, lesbian or otherwise (unless you count What’s Opera Doc?, in which case I’m totally an expert on Wagner’s Ring Cycle), and so far I’m not crazy about the genre. Yes, the vocal gymnastics were damn impressive, but all they did for me was to make the dialog hard to understand. If not for the lyrics projected on the back of the stage, I wouldn’t have been able to follow the story except in the most general sense. And it meant that most of the time, I was looking either at the written lyrics or the performers.

Now that that’s out of the way…

The story takes place in an unnamed country with an unnamed but deeply misogynistic religion, where women and men are largely segregated and any hint of homosexuality is punishable by death. (The show notes call the country “Fundamentalia” but that name was never mentioned in the play itself; for what it’s worth, to my ears the characters’ names sound kind of Persian / Central Asian.)

We’re first introduced to Solana, a tough, confident butch lesbian. Originally Canadian, she’s traveled the world, seduced lots of women, but always left before things got serious. This is how she’s always wanted it, but now the unexpected has happened: she’s fallen in love! Before leaving forever, she decides to visit her love’s home for one more night of passion, and perhaps take a memento for the road. Staying is definitely not an option, since Fundamentalia is not friendly to women like her.

Lilah is married, with a daughter, but before meeting Solana she had never known passion or love. When she comes to visit in the night, Lilah tries to send her away, but finds herself unable to resist her feelings. They kiss and settle on the bed, but then Lilah’s husband Javan comes home. He catches the two of them together, and immediately decides to kill both. Lilah manages to calm him down (Solana, more pragmatic, just takes his knife away) and all the secrets come out.

It turns out Javan has had lots of male lovers, about whom Lilah has been keeping quiet for both their sakes. He did find love, many years ago, but his lover was found out and beaten to death; ever since then, Javan has been wracked with grief and survivor guilt, unable to find joy in anything, even his fleeting trysts.

Gradually, the three come to an understanding. Lilah and Javan will keep each other’s secrets, supporting each other as needed (though it looks like the support will be mostly one-way; he’s far more damaged than she is). And Solana? She begs Lilah to come with her, away from this country that will kill her if she steps out of line. She can bring her daughter, raise her in a country where women and queers are free. Javan categorically refuses to give up his daughter, threatening again to kill Solana if she tries it, and Lilah is on his side this time. Because how free can she actually expect to be? Lilah argues that Solana is likely to get tired of her soon, leaving her alone in an unfamiliar country, far from her roots and her family. True, this country is difficult, but it’s not without its joys. Besides, if she stays she can work for real change.

Solana has a difficult choice. Should she stay safe and go home, leaving Lilah with her heart torn in two? Or should she stay, prove to Lilah and herself that she can be more than a love-’em-and-leave-’em woman, put down roots somewhere and make a positive difference in someone else’s world?

In the end, Solana chooses to stay. Not forever, but as long as she can bear life in an oppressive woman-hating country. She also invites Lilah to come to Canada at some point in the future, so she can see other ways of life and make a choice herself. And so the opera ends on a cautiously optimistic note: it’s not clear what the future will bring, but whatever happens we can be sure that Solana, Lilah and Javan will face it together.

When The Sun Comes Out is a love story, but there’s much more to it than that. The love that it portrays is not so much about passion, but about loyalty, openness and mutual support. It is a love that conquers fear, despair and, perhaps someday, an oppressive culture. And there’s no trite Happily Ever After, which I do appreciate. It’s better to bravely face an uncertain future than to relax in an unrealistic cliché.

Speaking of clichés, I also liked how the story steered away from Solana blithely sweeping Lilah off her feet, out of her marriage, her miserable oppressed life and into a bright future in the liberated West. There are no black and white answers; though she doesn’t love him in the same way she loves Solana, Lilah is committed to her husband and their daughter. The same religion that justifies killing queers and uppity women, is the religion that gives her strength. All the things that Solana sees as chains, that she’s been running from her whole adult life, Lilah knows are her roots. Solana’s freedom would be Lilah’s loneliness. Besides, no country is perfect; after all, wasn’t Solana herself kicked out of her parents’ house at a young age?

When The Sun Comes Out is a great milestone, and an amazing experience in its own right, moving and thoughtful, full of nuanced points and surprisingly complex themes. It is a true masterpiece, and I applaud Leslie Uyeda and Rachel Rose for having created it!

Reflection / Refraction

The first Reflection / Refraction took place two years ago as part of the 2011 Queer Film Festival. It was an interesting experiment, and I’m glad they’re continuing it in the Queer Arts Festival.

The format is simple: five short films, curated by Jen Crothers and Kristina Lemieux, were each assigned to one performing artist that then have several months to create a response. The variety of those responses was amazing! Every artist picked up on something different and pulled the orginal film in a new direction.

Galactic Docking Company by Clark Nikolai / response by Ralph Escamillan

You all know Clark Nikolai, right? This short film is a classic, mixing old footage of the NASA control room with footage of model rockets docking, and men docking. Ralph Escamillan’s response is a dance that at first left me cold. He’s a great dancer, and the reverse strip tease—ie: starting out naked then putting on multiple layers of clothing—was a neat twist, but aside from briefly being able to see his penis, I didn’t get what it had to do with docking or rockets.

But as he explained later in the Q&A, his inspiration wasn’t the dicks, but the offbeat humour. His piece was meant to be a subtle satire of his generation: since other youth tend to take their clothes off as much as possible, he decided to do the reverse. Which makes sense, and maybe I was being overly literal in how the performances should go. I guess this is why I’m a Web developer and not a performance artist.

Dance to Miss Chief by Kent Monkman / response by Mette Bach

Kent Monkman’s ultra-catchy film remixes clips from old German Western films with an eye to deconstructing them. Mette Bach’s response is a very moving spoken work piece about her father’s sudden death and learning to dance the Argentine Tango. Apart from the “dance” theme the connection is extremely tenuous—and (I may be paraphrasing a bit) Mette herself admitted that she already had her story to tell even before seeing Miss Chief.

Which makes her piece not really a response to the movie. But you know what? Inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes and if this show gave Mette the impetus to tell her story, I won’t complain.

Herr by John Greyson / response by Tran ÀPus Rex

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen drag kings performing, either in movies or IRL. It’s quite an eye-opener: the jerky and overly controlled motions, the stylised swaggering, it all adds up to something weird and crazily over-the-top. I wonder, do women see something similar when they look at drag queens? Huh.

Anyhoo, Herr is a hilarious little film about a group of four drag kings that start out peeing in the snow and comparing how far it goes, walk and sit in sync when they’re not dancing, and bully their youngest member (while dancing). I thought Tran ÀPus Rex’s dance / strip piece (to Davie Bowie’s Fame), appearing as he did in a buttoned-up suit and tie, was just a continuation of that… but then it went in unexpected directions. Because underneath the suit? bright spandex tights and funky jewelry. And inside the plain leather briefcase? a gold lamé purse. I’m not sure what kind of symbolism I should read into that, but it was startling and awesome fun.

The Bus Pass by Narissa Lee / response by Cris Derksen

The Bus Pass is a cute and sweet movie of a woman silently pining for another woman on the bus, almost working up the courage to get her number… and then the other woman makes the first move, writing her number on her bus pass. Cris Derksen’s response is basically to remix and loop bits of the film (audio and video) while playing an electric cello. Catchy and simple. No extra story, no extra meaning. Sometimes that’s all you need.

The Hawker by Elisha Lim and Coco Riot / response by David C. Jones

A very short heartwarming film about trans visibility and community is refracted by David C. Jones into a wordless piece that’s mostly (I think) about hiding and then choosing not to hide. I missed some of the details of the story because, well, I do better with words and a clear narrative. But David pulled off a great performance, especially since apparently this was the first time he tried something without spoken words. Kudos.

The Secret Doctrine

Last night I went to see The Secret Doctrine, a play about the 19th century mystic, cult leader and huckster Madame Helena Blavatsky. It is directed by Ines Buchli and shown at the SFU Woodward’s Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. It’s a great play, with some very impressive sound and visual effects, and though condensed and somewhat fictionalised, it’s a fascinating summary of Madame Blavatsky at her peak—the conjuring tricks, the philosophy, the intelligence and charisma.

Last night I went to see The Secret Doctrine, a play about the 19th century mystic, cult leader and huckster Madame Helena Blavatsky. It is directed by Ines Buchli and shown at the SFU Woodward’s Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. It’s a great play, with some very impressive sound and visual effects, and though condensed and somewhat fictionalised, it’s a fascinating look at Madame Blavatsky at her peak—the conjuring tricks, the philosophy, the intelligence and charisma.

The other main character is Richard Hodgson; historically, he was an Australian-born lawyer sent by the Society for Psychical Research to do a report on Blavatsky. Though he concluded she was a fraud, he did believe in paranormal phenomena. The play made him a Canadian-born physicist working on electromagnetic theory. His first scene shows him doing work related to the Michelson-Morley experiment, trying vainly to prove the existence of the luminiferous aether. He is also a strong skeptic, pooh-poohing his colleague’s latching on to Blavatsky’s teachings. This Hodgson traveled of his own volition to India to live in Madame’s compound, mostly to keep a promise to his dead colleague to give her a fair chance. He falls under her spell a little, but eventually snaps out of it and denounces Blavatsky to the SPR.

Making Hodgson a scientist was an interesting choice, because while the story is centred on Blavatsky and Hodgson, it’s really about the 19th Century as a whole: an age struggling towards reason, trying to build an understanding of the universe based on science instead of faith. Darwin killed God, so they said, or at least made Him unnecessary, but many people were still hungry for miracles and revelation. Add to that a more connected world enabling increased contact with other cultures, and it made for a strange and potent mix. Blavatsky’s Theosophy borrowed from Hinduism and Buddhism and various mystery religions, but also the language of science, and tried to connect all of them into a sort of Grand Unified Spiritual Theory.

In the play, some of the Mahatmas’ revelations hinted very strongly at Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, both theories still a couple decades away. More poetic license, I guess, especially since they end up guiding Hodgson’s research towards brilliant new discoveries upon his return to London. But here’s a thought: yes, Theosophy was a gobbledigook mish-mash of conflicting philosophies and faiths, claiming to deep and ancient truth but not delivering. However: it inspired scientists. It apparently inspired Einstein, who was said to own a copy of Blavatsky’s book The Secret Doctrine. That may or may not be true but if it is, it’s not really that surprising; isn’t one of his most famous quotes that “Imagination is more important than knowledge”? Atheist though he was, I always found Einstein to have a little bit of the mystical about him.

So you could look at Theosophy and similar cults as a kind of Victorian proto-science-fiction, collections of narratives, tropes and memes centered (to varying degrees) around science and scientific knowledge, guiding practitioners to build on them and take them to the next level. We take it for granted now, but science as a institution and a culture was still very new. The scientists and engineers who got men on the Moon were inspired by old-time sci-fi pulps—Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and Captain Future; those writers and the scientists of their time owe much to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells; but where did Victorian scientists find their inspiration? From what was there: esoteric ecumenical philosophies, outdated (to us) and rather mystical beliefs about energy and life and electricity/magnetism, and Enlightenment-friendly organised religions. I guess inspiration is where you find it. And beliefs don’t have to be true to be inspirational.

It’s possible I’m overanalysing this. That’s okay, though. I expected The Secret Doctrine to just be a critique of a fraud and/or the weird pseudo-scientific philosophies she preached, but it gave me a lot of food for thought. I love when that happens!

Northern Voice 2013, epilogue: You Are Very Star

Friday June 14^th was the premiere of the experimental play You Are Very Star. It took place at the HR MacMillan Space Centre, and they offered Northern Voice Attendees half off on their tickets. Deal!

It’s an odd mindfuck of a play, with themes of change and progress, religion, faith and the desire for transcendance. It wasn’t perfect (the interactive elements needed some work) but made for an enjoyable and mind-expanding evening.

Friday June 14^th was the premiere of the experimental play You Are Very Star, created by Kevin Kerr and Craig Erickson, and directed by David Hudgins. It took place at the HR MacMillan Space Centre, and they offered Northern Voice Attendees half off on their tickets. Deal!

It’s an odd mindfuck of a play, with themes of change, progress, faith and transcendance. It wasn’t perfect (the interactive elements needed some work) but made for an enjoyable and mind-expanding evening. This review is going to be a little incomplete because it’s been two weeks and I can’t find the program anymore, so I can’t actually name the characters. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other details.

The play is divided in 3 loosely connected acts, taking place in 1968, 2013 and 2048.

The first act, “Orbiting the Cusp of Greatness,” begins/ends in the Space Centre (yes, where we physically are) on December 21st, 1968, the night Apollo 8 went up. It was a time of turmoil and change, a time when people questioned everything. It follows backwards (interesting choice there!) a UBC Literature professor as he loses his mind, reinvents himself as a cult leader and attempts to achieve apotheosis with his small group of ex-student followers. And fails, because an ex-colleague pulls the plug on the TV so they miss the Apollo launch.

The second act does not take place on stage with actors; the audience are the actors. To prime us for the future and transcendence, we have to go through ten stations scattered around the Space Centre and participate in specific activities. One of the stations is a laptop running a Skype conversation with a sweet older lady. You sit down in front of it, tell her your age, and she gives you a brief story about what her life was like at that age. It invited us to look back and look forward: what kind of changes will we see when we’re her age?

Unfortunately, with a couple of exceptions this second act didn’t work so well. There were just too many people and even though everybody got a map with a different order for the stations, in practice there were usually long lines at every one. Too bad: it was a bold experiment in immersive theatre.

In the third act, “Transcendance,” a small group of Augmented humans—mentally connected through an advanced network, able to multitask like you wouldn’t believe and interface directly with technology—are anxiously waiting for “Neil”, their creator (played by Michael Rinaldi, who played the cult leader professor in the first act) to wake up and take them all to the next level, a perfect transcendental machine state that will usher in a brand new age for them. Too bad for the rest of the Earth, which is suffering from terrible climate change and widespread extinction. The story is partly narrated through one Augment, a young woman who’s decided to dictate a journal the old-fashioned way, with words one after the other.

Things heat up when Neil’s ex-lover (a baseline human) decides to visit him after many, many years. Wacky intercultural hijinks ensue with the young woman narrator—though they both speak in English words, they live in totally different worlds and can’t really relate to each other. She meets Neil, speaks to him briefly, and leaves. He wakes up, and in doing so disconnects himself from the worldwide Augment network, crashing it and bringing all his creatures down to normal.

The action eventually moves to the Space Centre again where… things happen. Sorry, I can’t be any more specific than that. My memories are a too hazy, and I don’t think I could do the scenes justice. Suffice to say, I think the Augments achieve transcendance, though not quite in the way they expect. And the audience gets to leave with their minds nicely scrambled.

So… my first thought was, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the Singularity and transhumanism explored on the stage! These are big sci-fi topics about the future of humankind and what it means to be human, and boy was it a trip!

The neatest twist about these Augments is that they’re not really that evolved. They’re mostly portrayed as scattered time-wasters, using their vast fractured minds to play games and live in mental simulations. For all their powers, they’re still immature and weird and creepy and idolise their creator, desiring transcendance though they don’t even understand what it means. They’re still human, and I don’t know if that’s depressing or hilarious. I guess it all depends on how you look at it. The Augments’ lives are determined by their choices, as ours are, after all.

The choice to have the 1968 segment unroll backwards is an intriguing one. Here’s how I read it: the past and future are symmetrical, both centered on the present, which just moves forward moment by moment. It’s in the present that we remember the past and create the future. And it’s up to us to be present, to learn the right lessons and create the right things.

Lastly, it’s a given that transcendental events are by definition impossible to explain or even show. I’ve complained about that before but this time it didn’t feel like a copout. I feel like I’ve been touched by something weird and wonderful. Kudos to The Electric Company for putting together a unique and brilliant experience!

Leave of Absence

On Saturday I went with some other BC Humanists to the premier of Leave of Absence. Written by, and starring, Lucia Frangione, it deals with life in a small Catholic community—life and death and spirituality and sexuality; also rigid orthodoxy, misogyny, homophobia, and bullying. It is at once a meditation on Catholicism, and a passionate rant against small-minded bullies and those who stand by and do nothing while their peers suffer.

The play’s five characters are all flawed and three-dimensional, with weird contradictory facets that make them deeply human, in some ways tightly connected and in others so far apart, playing off each other in lots of interesting ways.

Father Ryan, undoubtedly the sanest of the bunch, open-minded and compassionate, a wonderful father figure to his congregation, who never really had faith in God but kind of wishes he did. His objectivity is constantly threatened by his unacknowledged love for…

Single mother Greta, a little bit turned on by her daughter Blake’s budding sexuality, in love with Father Ryan and subconsciously flirting with him, not terribly religious but valuing the church because it makes her feel safe and protected and childlike.

Leap, Greta’s ex from many years ago and Blake’s biological father, a boxer, very macho and sexist and out of touch with his feelings, but metrosexual enough to primp and moisturise and trim his pubes. The play opens just after his wife dies, and half the plot deals with him and the community working through their grief. Though Leap is very blunt and appears at first not very smart, he learns to appreciate his wife’s collection of books and dreams. His wife, never seen, also has layers: though she was probably suffering from depression (which Leap doesn’t take seriously), she had a rich inner life and planned to travel to Europe some day.

Teacher and worship leader Martha waxes eloquent about misfit saints, female mystics and the Feminine Divine, and maybe-possibly getting off on the sexually charged hymns. But when it comes down to it she has to play by the rules and doesn’t looks like she really believes that kind of revelation can happen in real life anymore.

15-year old Blake starts out as a bit of a rebel and outcast and gets more so as the play progresses. She starts out ironically rewriting the Apostles’ Creed, but then, inspired by Martha’s sermons she receives an actual revelation and starts (maybe) communing with the God the Mother directly. At the same time she’s plagued by false rumours of being a lesbian and increasingly severe bullying, culminating in a sexual assault that leads to her death.

And so the play ends just as it began, with a death. Ryan and Greta finally acknowledge their love for each other and he invites her to join him on the St James pilgrimage.. Leap discovers new worlds in his wife’s books and may do some traveling of his own. And Martha is left to pick up the pieces and carry on with an inexperienced new priest she doesn’t like much.

The tragedy here, I think, is that all these people’s flaws and bad situations are made worse by religiosity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular. A culture of sexual shame and homophobia leads to Blake’s bullying and death—and it’s not just asshole teenage boys either. The bishop—unseen and unheard—lays down the law first by stopping Martha from preaching about rebel mystics and a Mother God, then by nixing an anti-bullying program because it could be seen as promoting homosexuality. Which is an “intrinsic disorder” according to church doctrine, as we all know, and we can’t have a priest suggesting it’s not okay to bully or discriminate based on ~~sexual orientation~~intrinsic disorders. And if the bishop ever learns about Blake’s death, it will be in some footnote of some report, and he will not give a shit.

And what are we to make of Blake’s spiritual experience? Whether or not it was “real” is left deliberately ambiguous, and that’s fine. What’s interesting to me, though, is the contrast between stories of female mystics and the reality of having one in your class, spray-painting the girls’ washroom door with a crucifix and generally being kind of a pain. It goes to show, religion-born ideals and myths crash headlong into reality all the time, and the collision isn’t always pretty. At best, you get people like Father Ryan who are able to relax and adapt their beliefs to a changing world. At worse you get people who either deny reality or bend it to their fantasies. Sometimes you get people who live with one foot in either world.

And I have to ask: if she hadn’t been inspired by Martha, if she hadn’t lived in a culture steeped in tales of saints and mysticism and complicated Catholic tradition, would Blake even have had her revelation? And if not, how would she have turned out? Better? Worse? I guess we’ll never know.

Speaking of Ryan and his lack of revelation… I found it more sad than anything. He basically chose to believe in God, not out of conviction, but because it seemed just as valid as unbelief. This is a very silly and wrong position to take. True, he’s led a good life and has few regrets, but again I have to ask: if he hadn’t been given the false dichotomy of belief vs. anti-belief, what else could he have done with his life? Kept on studying Physics, inspired others to fall in love with the Universe? Again, who knows?

The ending, though, robbed the play of some of its power. Blake’s death was too shocking, Father Ryan’s final speech (about him and the Church being absent from Blake’s life) too preachy; both clashed hard with much of the rest of the play. Still, for the most part, it worked: Leave of Absence is a deeply moving and thought-provoking story, wonderfully acted, a multifaceted look at a strange and multifaceted religion.

High School Confidential

The Out on Screen Society does a lot more than put out quality queer cinema. They also run Out in Schools, a program to put queer films in schools all across the province, to facilitate discussion and fight homophobia and bullying. The news have been full of stories of gay teens committing suicide due to bullying—and don’t think it doesn’t happen in Canada. That’s why Out in Schools is such a vital program, because it may be the difference between life and death for some students.

But in spite of the seriousness, there was a lot of fun to be had. Yummy baked goods, a stint in detention where you might have to do lines or get spanked by a nun, dressing up as a nerd or jock, it all adds up to a freaky fetishy fantasy of a high school that never was, where queer is either just another word or the word of the day. And it was awesome. Looking back I probably should have dressed up, if only putting tape on the bridge of my glasses or something, but oh well.

And then you had the cabaret acts. Because these days you can’t put “high school” and “queer” together without it adding up to “Glee,” the first act was a chorus doing “Don’t Stop Believing”. Then you had the usual gamut: a couple drag acts, a truly awesome gardening-themed stripper, a nerdy librarian who tries to keep it classy but can’t help stripping, and a poetry reading. Great fun.

Apologies for the low quality, all I had was my iPhone and the light level wasn’t too good.

Vancouver International Fringe Festival

I don’t think I’d ever gone to a Fringe show before, and this year I went to two! It should have been three, but I’d double-booked myself on Friday and missed Morgan Brayton’s Raccoonery. I thought about rescheduling (which would have meant buying another ticket, since Fringe policy clearly states there are no refunds or exchanges), but I’d just come down with a cold, so that plan was kaput. Still, I got to enjoy two really excellent shows:

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Dr. Horrible, live on stage, in front of an audience! And it was awesome. All the scenes, all the songs, plus a few extra surprise ones from Commentary: The Musical, which I’ve never watched so they were brand new (“Ninja Ropes,” “Nobody’s Asian In The Movies”, and “Nobody Wants To Be Moist”). All the classic lines were there, eagerly awaited (“The hammer is my penis.” “The thoroughbred of sin?”), along with a brand new one that got a big laugh from the crowd: when Billy and Moist were discussing truly evil deeds to impress Bad Horse, Moist suggested “slashing funds to the BC arts community.”

(Ooo, politics! See, it’s funny because the Campbell government is evil.)

They did a great job of adapting the action for a small stage with very few actors (for example, in the heist scene the truck was first a tiny remote-controlled one, then left completely offstage.) The actors were fine; the actress playing Penny was a little weaker, and I thought her voice was too soft, but aside from that, no complaints. I absolutely loved the show.

Fucking Stephen Harper

I wasn’t really sure what to expect with Fucking Stephen Harper: How I Sexually Assaulted the 22^nd Prime Minister of Canada and Saved Democracy. I sort of thought we’d get a humorous retelling of the incident where he accidentally touched Stephen Harper’s junk and was charged with sexual assault (though that charge was eventually dismissed). What it turned into was a blistering rant on Canadian Conservative politics, the explicit homophobia of lots of Conservative neanderthals past and present, including the dead-eyed Bush Lite currently running our country, and the apathy of many gay Canadians who think we’ve got it pretty good here. And we do, no question, but there are people in power right now doing their best to turn back the clock and impose their version of Christianity on the country. Whether or not they succeed is up to us.

I really should start on Marci McDonald’s The Armageddon Factor, shouldn’t I?