Ottawa Fringe Festival 2008

Die Roten Punkte – Super Musikant (Super Musician)

Written and performed by “Otto and Astrid Rot”

An absolutely hilarious, achingly funny production; this one was definitely my pick as most entertaining show of the entire festival. Die Roten Punkte is a layered confection of a show that is impossible to categorize, but equally impossible to forget. This story of brother and sister punk musicians from Berlin named Otto and Astrid is equal parts lunatic clown show, intense rock experience and dysfunctional family comedy. Otto is as sweet and dense as pound cake: a straight edge punk who speaks to his sister in the language of family therapy, and sings sweet love songs to a chosen audience member. Astrid, on the other hand, is a lustful foul-mouthed alcoholic drummer whose chosen song is a not-at-all subtle paean to sex whose only lyrics are “Oh my god, yeah!”

These two are beautifully practiced performers. Not only do they never leave character, but each and every moment, each facial expression, is individual and immediate and fully present. Never is there the sense that any moment of the show has been rehearsed in any way, but everything feels completely natural. It’s an incredibly polished experience. No matter how lunatic the performance, or how bizarre the song, it rolled over the audience as seamlessly as the skin of a sports car.

The music was an absolutely priceless send-up of musical tropes. “A great song only needs three notes,” claims Otto, as he teasingly plays the first two on a tiny keytar. Everything about them is comically imbalanced: a song about the accident that took their parents comes out with an overblown wash of dourness, as translated (fictionally) by Nick Cave. Otto deals with that tragedy with an album full of songs about lions and robots. Their anthemic punk song tells the audience, in broken English, that “we want to push our rock in you.” This show very notably won best production at the Montreal and Ottawa Fringes.

Boat Load

Written and performed by Jayson McDonald

Jayson McDonald is a veteran at the Ottawa Fringe. His previous show, Giant Invisible Robot, was incredibly well received at last year’s festival, and this new production was equally welcome. It’s an altogether beautiful story about a young actor who has to weigh the cost of leaving his small town and pursuing his career against the cost of his cat’s surgery. His young creation, Gary, is void and angry and bitter, unhappy and frustrated with his lost opportunities; he’s unable to draw happiness from anything in his life, and so those things then turn on him. His father is cloyingly false and patronizing, and his mother seemingly lost in a depressive world of fantasy; his girlfriend is erratic and volatile. The only thing wonderful and stable in his life becomes obvious to us the one time McDonald speaks through the voice of Gary’s cat. It’s an incredibly poignant moment, as Mr. Tangerine’s digestive problems are slowly starving him to death, but the cat’s love remains fixated solidly on Gary all the while.

Some of my favourite moments are when the play drifts laterally. When playing Gary’s mother, McDonald moves tangentially into her fantastic dreams of floating and sinking into the depths of the ocean. It is a fantasy that echoes Gary’s own inner world, and he plays the scene by punctuating her vaporous words with a hypnotic repetition of the words “snip snip,” mimicking the sound of real scissors. It’s a beautiful thing to lose yourself in a reverie while watching a show. To come back to your senses and realize you’ve been lost in a fiction.

McDonald’s ability to switch from character to character is a very particular strength. It’s a real pleasure to watch a professional do this trick, to pull a list of traits and habits from memory and fill the body with it, to watch the new way he stands, the comic tilt of the head, to hear the new voice’s tint and timbre.

Iron Sticks

Written and performed by Brigette DePape

I’ve always been partial to the idea that the form of a piece of theatre writing should suit its function. And for such a young performer, Brigette DePape has written an absolutely captivating show. Iron Sticks rings pitch perfect all the way through as both comic and deeply moving. Elegant metaphors stretch through the show and recurve on themselves again and again. Beautiful phrases emerge from the heart of her character Sophie’s loneliness, but aren’t always aimed head-on at the ideas of grief and longing; more often than not they are thrown sidelong, tangentially, and curve around to strike at isolated parts of your heart. Even the grief over losing her mother emerges tangled up with Sophie’s everyday longings and desire for a boyfriend. Where theatre is often a list of feelings presented on stage, this is a woven texture of emotions, with the actual feel of a living, breathing person.

At one point, tiring of that loneliness, Sophie wanders around her empty house, lighting lights, running hot water, throwing away recyclables to speed global warming, then sitting on the roof of her house waiting for “ultraviolet rays to destrooooy her!” as she yells. It’s an amazing comic moment. At once the ineffective, hilarious tantrum of a child coupled with the underlying shadowy desire for the total rest and quiet of suicide.

It helps that she’s remarkably beautiful, with a button nose and great beaming smile, clothed in a skin of sweet vulnerability and staring out at the crowd from saucer-sized sea-blue eyes. Standing on a small, intimate stage, she seems every bit the damaged and hopeful young girl she’s projecting. It was a mesmerizing show, and though other shows were certainly funnier, and had more individually poignant moments, there were none that I regarded as being as well crafted and interesting as a whole than Iron Sticks.

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – July 03, 2008
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=15043