Ape Play by Hal Rotman
I started off today at Point Pleasant Park for Hal Rotman’s Ape Play. It is ideally presented in a little walled in picnic area across from the Black Rock Beach by the lower parking lot.
This is a great little Fringe play written and directed by Hal Rotman. We are transported to the forests of Indonesia where we encounter a community of apes. One ape in particular, Diane, played by Laura Spencer with a New York accent, has grand ambitions. She wants to write an opus on a typewriter that she found that will live on after her death and bring her esteem, even amongst humans. Her friend, Bonzo, played by Max Miller, is worried that her preoccupation with besting the humans is divorcing her from appreciating the best parts of being an ape, and making her miserable in the process. Indeed, the other young monkeys played by Ella Haefele and Dylan Jackson are even less sophisticated and articulate than Bonzo, and they are happy as clams playing blissfully and joyfully together. Bonzo decides to take Diane to see the wisest ape in their community, played with great gravitas by River Moser, who can hopefully help her find a more emotionally and intellectually fulfilling path. Diane resists at first, but gets coaxed into finding community with the other apes through her love of Bonzo.
The writing is very funny and engaging, with lots of clever puns and word play, and the audience moves around the space a bit with the actors making it feel like a more immersive experience. The setting in the park allows for a fun interplay between the humans dressed as apes and the squirrels who are often running about there. All the actors do a great job at bringing their characters to life, and the costumes by Sarah Cooper and the makeup design is a great mixture between realism and silliness. The play reminded me a lot of David Ives’ play Words, Words, Words, in both subject matter, but also in tone. Have you ever been surprised by a banana? Go see Ape Play and maybe you will be.
TWISI FRINGE RATING: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Ape Play written and directed by Hal Rotman plays once more inside at Grafton Street Dinner Theatre (1741 Grafton Street, Halifax) today September 10th at 12:30pm.
I then went over to DanSpace to see Jon Bennett’s show American’t. There’s a woman who I follow on Instagram, Brooke Black, who is American, but her husband is Danish, and they along with their two young children got stuck in Denmark during the Covid lockdowns and they ended up staying there. Her account is all about an American acclimatizing to a much better life there, especially for their kids. Jon Bennett’s show is kind of the opposite. He is from Australia, but he has been a touring performer for the last eighteen years, and so, effectively, he actually didn’t have a home base when he got stuck in Portland, Oregon when everything shut down in March of 2020. The person there that he knew the best was a woman named Gina who he’d had a one night stand with the night before he was supposed to leave Oregon for his next show in California. They got to know each other much better after spending six weeks together in the first round of lockdowns.
This is an engaging and funny exploration of how Bennett, someone who has thrived by travelling and performing all over the world had his own world turned upside down by the pandemic when he suddenly had to ask himself where he wanted his home to be, and the answer couldn’t have been more surprising. Bennett is a charming and affable performer who is very easy to connect with, despite the fact that it’s likely that not many will have experienced this specific set of circumstances. The play has a lot of humour, he did write an entire show once where he went around taking photos of himself posing with things that looked like (often giant) erections, so there is a lot that is silly and wild and fun here, but there is also a real darkness that comes over the latter part of the show, and Bennett speaks very poignantly about how being deemed non essential and being kept from his vocation through Covid really cratered his mental health, which I think is, sadly, an experience that many folks can relate to.
It’s a weird time for Bennett to be here doing this show in Canada. His jokes at the expense of the Americans will likely go over much better with the crowds here than his attempts to redeem them, but the storytelling is very well constructed, and I was riveted listening to this very unique, and at times harrowing, pandemic experience.
TWISI Fringe Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Jon Bennett’s American’t plays on September 10th at 8:00pm, September 12th at 3:30pm, and September 13th at 12:30pm at the DanSpace, 1800 Argyle Street, Halifax.
I then travelled across the water on a ferryboat to the Sanctuary Arts Centre to see Rachel Rubin Ladutke’s play The Fabulist, a story about how Helen Creighton and Doreen Senior travelled around Nova Scotia collecting songs and stories, mostly from the rural communities, and mostly from the elders in each of these, in attempt to preserve our culture and these aspects of our histories when very few others were really making this a priority.
I really liked the way that this play incorporates real letters written from Doreen Senior to Helen Creighton, and a bit of the music that they were finding, and the true vernacular that the ghost stories were written in really does wonders not just to bring them to life, but also to ground them very much on this land.
Rubin Ladutke’s play focuses on the relationship between Helen Creighton and Doreen Senior, and she really focuses a lot on a true story of when the two of them visited Devil’s Island, and Senior found the island “oppressive” and “as if it harboured evil spirits and had been tainted by incest.” She was so embarrassed by her dramatic behaviour that she asked that Helen not use her name when she relayed the journey in her autobiography, and so it seems sort of curious for Rubin Ladutke to choose to focus so much on this in the play. In real life Senior recovered almost immediately from the incident, “returning to her carefree, jolly self” as soon as they went back to the mainland, but in the play we don’t see a lot of this aspect of Senior’s personality. Instead, she can’t let the experience go, in fact she doesn’t seem to enjoy much about Nova Scotia at all, and it becomes the defining aspect of her personality. I would have liked to see more of these two women enjoying being in each other’s company, having pure adventurous fun together, and being the brave badasses they were traipsing through some of the most remote areas in the province, putting themselves entirely into the mercy of strangers, and approaching their work with an abandon of curiosity and wildly nerdy interest. This would help to raise the stakes when they have their falling out.
There is a little mention of the Gàidhlig songs that Creighton and Senior collected during an early trip to Cape Breton, but there’s room for Rubin Ladtuke to delve deeper into the complexities that would be at play, especially in these rural places, when it comes to language, religion, and nationality. Despite the way that the narrative has been written in earlier books and articles, I find it hard to believe that Creighton and Senior couldn’t find too many Cape Bretoners who were able to share the old songs with them. It seems more like they couldn’t find too many who were willing to share this aspect of their heritage and culture with someone from England, and someone from the mainland of English ancestry. Senior was much less interested in the Scottish songs, anyway, her own research was focused on looking for old English folksongs that may have survived in the colonies when they had disappeared back home, and Creighton seems to have had her own hierarchy of which songs she felt were the most important or interesting to archive, at least initially. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was met with hesitation and skepticism too by the Acadians, not to mention the African Nova Scotians and the Mi’kmaq, as all of these interactions between different classes and races of folks would have been tinged with generations’ worth of history, which makes this story so interesting. I’m curious to know more about what made Creighton begin to branch out more beyond her interests with Senior to try to capture the full breadth of the cultures in the province, and what challenges she may have faced in doing so.
This play really makes me want to read more about Helen Creighton’s life, and especially to read her bestselling collection Bluenose Ghosts. It’s amazing that Rachel Rubin Ludutke, who just moved here very recently, is interested in bringing this story to life, and audiences in Dartmouth tonight were excited to have this part of their history being told. I hope that as the play continues to be developed that the team will keep working on creating both more complex three dimensional characters, as well as a rich three dimensional world that shows Nova Scotia as the vibrant mixture of cultures and histories that Creighton was contending with as she tried to categorize and capture something that is actually very wild and ephemeral. Over the many, many decades that followed, a select few of these songs actually became a rallying force for all of us to unite together as Nova Scotians. That is Helen Creighton’s legacy.
The Fabulist at Halifax Fringe has closed.
I find it difficult to review stand up, especially because I admire the spirit that anyone has getting up there in front of a crowd and launching into a set; I would be too terrified to even try. Karim Tuffaha’s Seen Worse is playing at the Stardust Bar + Kitchen. He is a local, emerging, I would say, stand up comedian. He recently immigrated here from Lebanon, and he has some funny stories about growing up there, and then moving here, some astute observations about how the two countries are different, and how they are similar, and he peppers in humorous observations about becoming immersed in a new culture, and navigating through it. Just from my own personal perspective I feel like the state of the health care system right now under the Progressive Conservatives is so dire that it’s hard for me to get to an objective level where I can laugh at it. I don’t know if other Haligonians feel the same way- that there are certain things that are too enraging to be funny- that might just be me. But, I appreciated all the other ways that he poked fun of his experience living here. It’s fun to have some stand up shows at the Fringe this year, and the Stardust Bar + Kitchen is an ideal space for it.
Seen Worse plays at Stardust Bar + Kitchen (1688 Barrington Street, Halifax) at the following times: September 11th at 8:00pm and September 12th at 6:30pm.
I also saw Harmeet Singh Kohli’s White Samosa at the Stardust Bar + Kitchen yesterday evening, and it is another stand up show exploring similar themes- from someone who emigrated from New Dehli to Surrey, British Columbia, and is now visiting Halifax for the first time. In this show you also get a lot of humour coming from cultural misunderstandings, living in the quite segregated suburbs around Vancouver, and exploring the way that folks of different cultures and languages cohabitate in Canada, but also Kohli gets quite a bit of material from the stupid things racist morons say to him. It’s neat to also hear Kohli’s very fresh take on what he’s noticing about Halifax. I saw his first show here, and I’m sure he’ll be working out new material as the shows go on, so there’s likely to be more local content as the week progresses.
White Samosa plays at Stardust Bar + Kitchen (1688 Barrington Street, Halifax) at the following times: September 10th at 9:30pm, September 11th at 6:30pm, September 12th at 3:30pm, and September 13th at 5:00pm.
