All of my officially published pieces of journalism
Her play delivers powerful poetry Leo is a marvellous yet occasionally uneven production from a young author whose potential – as demonstrated in her latest work – is absolutely amazing. Rosa Laborde’s play tells the story of Leo, a poet whose youth and growth parallels the Socialist revolution of Chile’s Salvador Allende. Leo (Salvatore Antonio)…
Ottawa’s small press Chaudiere delivers as good or better At a reading, I once watched an author bring the microphone to his lips and say, “Book awards are the new book reviews.” Not quite up to Oscar Wilde standards, but with a bottle in my hand it seemed to be graced with a beery concinnity.…
Yellow Rabbit’s Dream Machine nearly complete One Yellow Rabbit’s Ottawa debut comes in a flashing tangle of limbs, a ringing soundscape, and, above all, in sublime words. It is a stylish and extremely ambitious presentation, a homage to the literary Beat movement of mid-century America, centred on the legendary (and Canadian-inspired, incidentally) mechanical device that…
T.E. Lawrence and Robert Graves’ rebellion When you’ve been part in the unimaginable slaughter of WWI, what does one do in its aftermath? With the world reshaped through monumental sacrifice, do those men who once lay at the very burning core of events simply become the flotsam of history? Written by playwright Stephen Massicotte, The…
Londonstani delivers manipulating ‘devices’ It was with some narrowing of the brows that I picked up Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani. The North American dust jacket is a piece of delicious eye candy, but absolutely littered with glowing words like “electric,” “ball-grabbing” and “brilliant.” One British review of the book even gave the silliest praise modern society…
An XPress sit-down with NAC’s Peter Hinton The Wrong Son begins with a floor – a beautiful, black, lacquered floor that seems to reflect the world like a dark and gleaming pool. It anchors the production, pulls together the simple black and stainless steel accents of the set with an elegance that, in its featureless…