Theatre Gives Toronto a Break from Itself

This year’s Fringe Festival is unique, absurd, funny, and well worth attending.

After the G-20 rain-drenched protests, a rather unsavoury grumpiness settled over the city of Toronto. The debate over police tactics has yielded much hostility and little clarity. Excitement about the Queen’s visit induced the tired and repetitious discussion about the ongoing relevance of the monarchy. Even the usual cause for end-of-June revelry, Gay Pride week – culminating with the parade through downtown this past Sunday – generated acrimony between the partiers and politicos over the true roots and meaning of Pride.

Enough of all this whinging! The answer: start Fringing! We three Torontonians – one procrastinating professor and two young actresses – successfully escaped the urban malaise by giving ourselves over truly, madly, and deeply to Toronto’s annual Fringe Festival. The festival began last Wednesday and continues until July 11.

Fringe Festivals have become a Canadian summer tradition. Virtually every major urban centre across the country now has one. The largest and oldest Fringe Festival in North America is the Edmonton International Fringe Festival, which runs from August 12 to 22, 2010, and usually attracts more than half a million visitors. Unlike the original Fringe Festival in Edinburgh where actors and artists must find their own space, and run their own production, Edmonton pioneered Canadian fringe philosophy. Here, Fringe Festivals organize the venues, provide limited front-of-house service, and create a program that allows for multiple performances at many theatre spaces simultaneously. The acceptance process is highly democratic in the ancient Athenian sense – by lottery – or by another non-juried and non-elitist decision-making process. The best part is that 100 per cent of ticket revenues return to the performers and, though there is an emphasis on theatre, the festival usually includes a wonderfully ecumenical mix of performance art, comedy, cabaret, and stand-up comedy. There is even a self-governing association, the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals (CAFF), which is just so darn inclusive that its 21 members include six American festivals. In general, fringing involves honing skills that Canadians are intrinsically good at: polite queuing and gossiping, audience appreciation, genuine curiosity, artistic discovery, and a highly developed sense of irony.

One of our top picks for this year’s Toronto Fringe is Randolph Entertainment’s production of The Killing Game. In the last decade Toronto survived SARS, West Nile, and the hyper-inflated threat of H1N1, thus Eugene Ionesco’s dark and absurd comedy about a mysterious plague that randomly kills the inhabitants of a city is bizarrely appropriate. Through the dialogue of paired characters we learn about the meaning of death and life amidst the civic manipulation of fear.

Another play worth attending is Monster Theatre’s The Shakespeare Show, a superbly well-written and hilariously-acted tale of literary historical revisionism. Soup Can Theatre has re-created a 1920s Berlin Cabaret in Love is a Poverty You Can Sell, a tribute to the music and legacy of Kurt Weill, accompanied by a warning to potential “customers” that the performance contains “Hedonism, Tomfoolery, and Indulgently Floral Language.” Performed in Toronto’s Bread and Circus Theatre in Kensington Market, Weill’s songs are performed by people who can truly sing. This is not something that should be taken for granted. Another must-see is The Plank, an aerial dance show featuring women as pirates hitting the high seas, described by my companions as “dangerous, daring, difficult, and delightful!”

Pick of the Fringe! features a sketch comedy threesome at the Factory’s Studio Theatre, and an intriguing title meant to attract crowds. The show follows the fine tradition of "22 Minutes" and The Kids in the Hall, with fast-paced contemporary dialogue that is both feminist and funny. There’s plenty of Canadian content too, including a musical comedy about the Avro Arrow, appropriately titled The Flying Avro Arrow and staged at the United Steelworkers Hall, and Trudeautopia, premised on the 1970 October Crisis. Additionally, for the first time at Toronto’s Fringe, there is a production entirely written and presented in French, entitled Jean et Beatrice, which is a black comedy about relationship challenges.

Fringing isn’t just fun; it presents the opportunity to witness the cutting edge of something big. Following its appearance at the Toronto Fringe, The Drowsy Chaperone went on to become a major Tony-award winning musical on Broadway. Da Kink in My Hair became a television series. Last year’s Fringe hit, My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish-Wiccan Wedding, was extended and mounted as a successful Mirvish production merely three months later. While waiting in line to see a production, you may often encounter the actors or writers, either hawking their own shows with frenetic sales pitches, or giddily trading roles from performer to spectator, happy to share the latest buzz.

The Fringe Festival is an intimate view of live theatre at its best, pushing boundaries and bursting with energy.

This essay was written with the help of Alannah Bloch, a Grade 12 student at The Linden School, and Miranda Jones, a Grade 12 student at the Etobicoke School of the Arts.