Indy Time

Summer always brings out the most interesting, experimental work.  Not only is there Fringe (I have tickets to 3 shows and will probably be adding one more) but then Summerfest is the first two weeks of August, with many (most?) of the shows at the Factory Theatre.  I've sort of tentatively penciled in two.  Often these shows ignore the basic "rules" of theatre, which can make them really interesting but also increases the odds that they will flop.  One of them is called "Reality Theatre" and it involves a number of interconnected sketches, which worked quite well for The Best Dad in the World at Red Sandcastle.

Speaking of Factory Theatre, I'm more interested in their line-up this year than last year.  While it is quite long (unless the writer has trimmed it), The Fish Eyes Trilogy looks pretty interesting.  Then Kat Sandler has a play called Bang Bang, which is mostly about a white male writer trying to write about the shooting of a Black man.  While I assume much of the play is about cultural appropriation (and this is a debate I am frankly tired of having, since the local arts community has so heavily landed on one end of the scale), Kat Sandler plays are almost always worth watching.  To get to the magic number 3 (for a half-season pass), I'm leaning towards Prairie Nurse, which is about 2 Filipino nurses coming to work at a Saskatchewan hospital, so it is a fish out of water comedy.

In other news, Unit 102 has apparently found a new home in Parkdale and will be launching their season with Miss, a drama set in a private school.  I'll be giving this a miss, as I just am not in the mood for heavy dramas lately, but I am really glad they are back in business, and I'll loop back around to write more about them if they announce a full season.

I'm still waiting for Coal Mine to announce.  I'm fairly sure they will be doing Annie Baker's The Aliens in the fall, but still no official word.

Somewhere in here, I have to find time to do the table read and staged reading of my pieces, and once I have the date for the staged reading, I will certainly post it.  I was pretty bad this weekend in terms of the writing, but some ideas are now starting to percolate.  More soon.