REVIEW: TK Fringe brings a strong mélange of summer shows to Kingston

Reviews

/By Haley Sarfeld / Aug 10, 2024

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You haven’t really been to Kingston until you’ve spent a summer here. From September to April, everything from the traffic on Princess Street to the tides of Lake Ontario seems to move with the phases of the academic calendar — but when the mayflies appear and the students scatter, Kingston runs on summer time.

Torontonians who visit find it utterly perplexing. What are you doing tonight? Catching a Fringe show, probably. Which one? I don’t know, which one were you thinking of seeing? Who do we know there? It’s a mindset that even my Ottawan brain — programmed for productivity but not, despite recent mayoral objections, for fun — took a while to grasp, but it’s one that I’ve learned to embrace over the past ten years in this small, wanderable city.

TK Fringe, presented by Theatre Kingston as part of the annual Kick & Push Festival, kicked off over the Civic Holiday weekend, featuring 18 shows across three venues. This year’s lineup includes a mix of touring and local productions, and of the made-in-Kingston variety, there’s a good blend of student, amateur, and professional work. For this review round-up, I’ve chosen to highlight shows written, performed, and produced by Kingston-based artists — some of which will travel to other cities and festivals over the course of the summer.

Crazy Bitch Boss Bitch

Maggie’s big, shiny, corporate job has provided her with a life-changing salary — and all the collegial misogyny, weaponized incompetence, and recurring nightmares a person can reasonably handle. So why be reasonable? Written, produced, and performed by Thea Fitz-James and directed by Kelsey Jacobson with dramaturgy by Mariah (Mo) Horner, Crazy Bitch Boss Bitch offers a tight take on mental health and femininity in the workplace.

Before we meet our heroine, we hear her heels click down the hall toward her office. Designed by Cam Sedgwick, it’s an unassuming workspace with carpeted flooring, a desk, a rolling chair, and…wait, is that a metronome? Throughout much of the play, Maggie’s monologue is accompanied by the metronome’s trusty mechanical tick, punctuating her quick typing, pen clicks, mouse taps, and — most delightfully — the rhythm of her speech. Every now and then, Maggie lowers the pendulum and increases the metronome’s speed, and with each new tempo comes a new emphasis on the lines’ musicality. Meanwhile, understated white lighting moves from warm to cool tones at just the right moments, giving the room an eerie aura.

As she explores what it means to lean so far in that you’re practically toppling over, Maggie finds solace in one of life’s simplest pleasures: Profanity. With a manic glint in her eye, she walks us through the mouthfeel of the most satisfying swear words — the percussive “fuck”s and “cunt”s — and explores the softness of the much-used, ostensibly reclaimable “bitch.”

Living, breathing, and dreaming work can drive a person crazy (yes, I am currently cramming Fringe coverage into the evenings and weekends around a brand-new day job and three other gigs, why do you ask?) and Crazy Bitch Boss Bitch perfectly elucidates the simultaneous sense of sanctuary and sacrifice that a work-obsessed life entails. Though Fitz-James’ performance reaches heights of intensity that turn her face as red as her pantsuit, the pacing of the show is varied enough that it remains engaging, even when her character hits burnout.

Society wants women to be givers, and Crazy Bitch Boss Bitch cheerfully gives society the finger, balancing backstory with philosophical ranting in a way that keeps the show engaging. Crazy Bitch Boss Bitch presents a character who is so fucked up and — even though she doesn’t owe us likability — still so likable. And just wait until you see her sticky notes!

The End of the Line

All aboard! Breedbate Theatre is leaving the station with The End of the Line, a tale of two travellers whose paths cross on an otherwise empty train. Next stop…well, let’s not go there yet.

After being ditched by friends who were supposed to meet him for a day trip, Milton (Jake Henderson) boards the train alone and is dismayed to discover that his seat has a gross stain on it. Like, a really gross one. As he contemplates his excruciating quandary — whether to accept the fate on his ticket or to switch seats and risk being asked to move — Milton encounters Jacob (Aiden Robert Bruce), the train’s lone service crew member, who remembers every passenger he’s ever served, and who seems to have quite the nosy streak. As the two begin to talk, they find themselves forming a tentative bond — though their relationship is not without bumps as the train chugs along to the end of the line.

Sara Starling’s script features a compelling mix of witty dialogue and private soliloquies, bolstered by strong comedic delivery and an easy rapport between the actors. At first glance, the duo appears almost cartoonish — the casting of jovial, card-carrying baritone Bruce and angular, resting-serious-faced Henderson plays this up remarkably well — but there’s a strong, subtle emotional range embedded in the text that both actors find and perform with great precision.

It’s not easy to tell where the play is going until it reaches its destination, but no line of dialogue feels superfluous — Starling’s writing strikes a solid balance between tangible details and big ideas, shooting the shit and getting into heated arguments. Jacob’s observations about Milton — the stain on his shirt, how long he plays sudoku, and how many mistakes he makes — provide some of the funniest moments of the play, while Milton’s frustrated monologues constitute the most heartrending. The pair’s discussion of the train car’s life expectancy underscores themes of time, loss, and what it means to be ready for change.

The End of the Line passes through devastating territory on its route, but its final lines leave the audience in a sweet, hopeful place — and all the happier for having made the journey.

The Fall After Midsummer

She may have forsworn his bed and company, but Titania’s not done dealing with Oberon just yet. For TK Fringe, Mad River Theatre presents The Fall After Midsummer, a terrifically tense two-hander written and directed by Chloë Whitehorn. With a savvy blend of flowery language and punchy comedic sensibilities, this present-day sequel to A Midsummer Night’s Dream knocks toxic tropes off their dusty pedestals, conjuring a spellbinding, Shakespearean whodunnit full of twists and turns.

In The Fall After Midsummer, faerie queen Titania is reimagined as modern-day actress Tania (Shannon Donnelly), whose on-again, off-again, ne’er-do-well husband Ron (Michael Donnelly) visits her dressing room with an ill-timed request. Iridescent shades of strength, derision, vulnerability, and sensuality gleam in Shannon Donnelly’s performance as her fairy wings and ethereal makeup scintillate under the stage lights. For his part, Michael Donnelly embodies the snide, jealous Ron with the overconfident swagger of a 500-year-old faerie king and a level of glottal fry that would make any self-respecting radio host quake in their booth. The real-life couple brings intense, almost blush-worthy chemistry to their performance, and the power dynamic between Tania and Ron shifts palpably throughout the play, maintaining an air of suspense until the very last moments.

The show exudes an elevated energy that might come across as over-the-top compared to the hyper-realist acting style that seems to be the more popular choice nowadays, but the dialled-up drama serves this play well — it’s Shakespeare’s world, and Tania and Ron are thriving in it. While Oberon and Titania play an important cosmic role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the arc of their relationship — their fight, his revenge, her humiliation, their reconciliation — leaves several troubling questions for a modern writer to explore. In this adaptation, Whitehorn casts Tania as a member of the mechanicals, the troupe of actors led by Nick Bottom who perform the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In doing so, she weaves The Fall After Midsummer cleverly into the canon, offering the perfect stage for these larger-than-life characters to hash out another argument, and, perhaps, to change the outcome this time.

Whitehorn’s critique of toxic relationships — more specifically, the way that readers and audiences are trained to see toxic love as true love — is made all the more lucid by entangling it in a tale of romantic fantasy. Dressed in the dreamy trappings of its genre, The Fall After Midsummer manages to capture both the guilty pleasure of reading a bodice-ripper and the satisfaction of listening to a smart, funny friend give that same bodice-ripper a brutal feminist takedown.

Coming to the Table

If you could share a meal with anyone, alive or dead, who would you choose? Directed by Tim Fort, A. M. Bergman’s Coming To The Table follows Annie (Bergman) who, upon receiving a text message from a stranger, visits an unfamiliar diner in search of comfort food and a listening ear. A series of contemplative conversations ensues, pointing to a reveal as unmissable as a neon OPEN sign.

When Annie arrives at the diner, she meets its proprietor, Jo (Walt Freeman), whose uncanny ability to anticipate her every need makes her feel right at home. Sitting for a cup of coffee, she remembers a question her mother used to ask, and soon, Annie and Jo are discussing who they’d invite to their tables — Marilyn Monroe? Mahatma Gandhi? — and reminiscing about everything from meatloaf and peas to The Twilight Zone. When Johnny (Donald Mitchell) walks in, he and Annie strike up a conversation where they share their interests, insecurities, and regrets, and eventually discover that they have more in common than they know.

The cast has a warm dynamic, with Bergman embodying Annie’s endearingly frantic side, and Freeman and Mitchell both exuding an easy-to-talk-to charm. Though the coffee served at the diner is purportedly fresh, the prolonged lead-up to the play’s predictable twist leaves the dialogue tasting slightly stale. Other than Annie’s flustered demeanour, there is no real conflict or tension in her initial conversation with Jo, and having two characters agree about everything isn’t a great way to sustain interest in the plot.

Johnny’s arrival brings a little more intrigue, but his heart-to-heart with Annie lacks the specificity that would give the audience something to hold on to — for instance, we learn that she’s having problems with her sons, but not really what those problems are. For the plot twist to work, she can’t know too much about Johnny too soon, but Coming to the Table could likely get away with revealing more of Annie’s story.

The last five minutes of Coming To The Table are when the emotional impact becomes truly potent, and that’s where I wanted to linger. There are moments throughout the play when the liminality of the diner feels sincerely spooky — even Serlingesque — and I’d love to see those dreamlike elements highlighted further. A high-concept premise is on the menu, and the ingredients are all there, but it may take a few more tries to perfect the recipe.

The Cape As Red As Blood

Her cape wasn’t always red, but then again, she didn’t always have blood on her hands. With immense creativity and a scrappy, DIY sensibility, The Cape As Red As Blood offers a fresh retelling of Little Red Riding Hood through song, dance, and puppetry. Themes of environmental stewardship, grief, and defiance in the face of greed mingle with folk-inspired melodies in a coming-of-age musical created by writer, composer, and music director Kathleen Greening. Brought to life with dynamic stage direction and choreography by Kyra Mevis, this ambitious project by Of The Sea Productions offers an exciting proof of concept for a show that will surely grow into its enormous eyes, ears, and teeth.

Beginning with a flashlight sequence reminiscent of campers telling scary stories in the dark, Bluebird (Elsa McKnight), Phoenix (Hailey Hatfield), Nightingale (Syd Chinnick), Canary (Elise Wight), and Crow (Meg Gibson) emerge with a story to tell. The Cape As Red As Blood is almost entirely sung-through, and the performers take turns playing instruments — two guitars and a keyboard — to accompany themselves and each other. Stomping feet and rhythms knocked with fists on the bodies of guitars create an intense soundscape, and there’s something caring, even intimate, about the way the performers share the load of accompanying one another. Singing and playing guitar at the same time is a tricky task that can throw off otherwise strong and expressive vocalists, and at the performance I attended, it seemed that the multitasking stifled a few character-defining moments, but this will likely become smoother as the show continues to find its footing.

The ensemble shifts characters throughout the story, with Hatfield playing the Red Riding Hood figure, who contends with apathetic sock puppet villagers and patronizing predators as she tries to save her beloved forest. Gibson makes a delightful villain, minor key and all, and is one of the strongest accompanists in the group. All five actors give solid vocal performances (vocal direction by Grace Delamere), with particular oomph from Wight’s powerful soprano.

The a cappella numbers are my favourites — there’s an increased starkness and intensity, and the thick harmonies sit like a cold fog over Greening’s rich, dramatic lyrics. In an era when even amateur musical theatre productions tend to mic their performers, it’s a special treat to hear voices blend and balance without intervention, resonating naturally in a small theatre space.

The plot is fairly thin, with more of a thematic throughline than a narrative one — The Cape As Red As Blood sort of feels like a song cycle, which at times works well, but occasionally makes it slightly difficult to connect with the story. Familiarity with the source material does a lot of the heavy lifting for the storytelling, and a critical turning point in the show takes place in silence behind the shadow puppet screen, where slower and clearer execution could make its effect more powerful. There are some gorgeous concept pieces — including one especially beautiful song in which a pine, a weeping willow, and an ironwood sing of being cut down — and as the minutes pass, the scale of the show feels increasingly mythical.

From a generation of students who cut their teeth amid a global pandemic and looming environmental catastrophe, The Cape As Red As Blood is both an outlet for despair and a call to rise from the ashes and take action for a world we love. I admire the show’s ability to show the deep rage that comes with being a woman in a misogynistic society without depicting violence against women outright — a deeply Gen Z sensibility, and one that makes it feel safe to sit in the shadows and open up to the story. Creepy, satisfyingly dense harmonies and energetic performances make the show worth attending a second time, and I truly can’t wait to watch it develop further in the coming years. If, from time to time, the team bites off more than they can chew, it’s a voracious, mouth-watering bite that leaves me eager to see them take the next one.

TK Fringe runs until August 11. You can learn more about the festival here.

WRITTEN BY

Haley Sarfeld

Haley Sarfeld (she/they) works as a theatre critic for the Kingston Theatre Alliance and the Kingston Whig-Standard. As a playwright and composer-lyricist, she has been featured in the Shortwave Theatre Festival, Watershed Music Theatre Festival, and Kick & Push Festival. Haley loves word games and is a regular crossword puzzle contributor for The Skeleton Press.

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