Reviews by Tasha Hefford
Fool Muun Komming!
When I fall in love with a thing, I fall hard. I fall completely. I am locked into the love with a magic oblivion. I can’t see what others perceive as weird, as ugly, my heart is a triumphant thing in love, generous and full. When I love a strange thing, my admiration drizzles over it like clarified butter.I can’t see what others see as strange, I see what my heart sees. When I was told at the box office that the Fringe show I was about to see was “weird, but good weird”, I felt apprehensive. In aggregate, I believe I encountered the word “weird” several times before getting to the theatre, and by all accounts, Sam Kruger’s Fool Muun Komming![BeBgWunderful/YEsyes/ 4sure.Hi5/TruLuv;Spank Spank:SOfun_Grate_Times] is palpably weird. But it is also hilarious, poetic, lewd and lovely. It’s the kind of show you need to fall into fully, triumphantly, or otherwise lock up all your passions in a cage called ‘weird’.
When the first warm spotlight appeared on the stage, Sam’s alien is presented tearing his way out of a black garbage bag like a serpentine hatchling, music glorious and loud. As the bag is ripped away he stands before us, poised and proud in a white turtleneck, tights and red gym shorts. Sam tempers sci-fi absurdity with an affecting intimacy. The alien exudes genuine affection for humanity, he wants us to know he’s here to “have a perfect moment together”, often breaking through the quasi-fourth-wall in his monologues by engaging with us while entertaining us. The setting, after all, is within the alien’s mass hallucination and it only makes sense that the audience too, becomes a kind of prop.
On paper, the writing is surreal, delicate and destructive. Stories are fed through an alien mimetic machine, cranking out illustrations both glitchy and on fire, as in his opening proclamation to meet humans of every “colour, creed and wallpaper”. Kruger is fantastic at delivering each line as if it were a final crescendo — he has you laughing, crying and uncomfortable in equal measure. Amidst the chaos and disco, there are moments of robust loneliness and equalizing fervor. Kruger ties everything together with a furious dexterity, like a slideshow of shuffling thoughts, cascading into unforgettable scene after scene.
Most of the play takes the form of illusion and daydream as the alien grapples with some impending destruction we are not privy to. The fantasies sprinkled within the story arc are some of the most vivid and exhausting performances I’ve seen, bending with lucid soundwork and exceptional lighting cues. In a sudden mid-whirlpool lull, after the Studio 54 orgy, children’s tears cosmo crystal David Bowie, the alien drops to his knees while Ava Maria bellows from the speakers. He recreates a cartoon animation using his face — prominently his nose — as the terrain and his fingers as mountain climbing puppets in love. I can’t explain to you how to love a strange thing, because like any good art, you can’t know how much you’ll treasure a thing until it’s uncloaked, and it’s amazing, because somehow you got there through someone else. And how often does that happen?
Pieces of Eight
Hardly did I encounter the word “weird” prior to seeing Nathan Narusis’s Pieces of Eight because as concepts go, it could hardly be more topical. It is also, a fairly streamlined concept with little interpretive room. The synopsis is hopeful, wedged in the belly of the Vancouver housing market crisis, far away from the flaming cycle of cynicism and apathy one would expect. Even in an art world indebted to market forces, Pieces of Eight offers a reprise to our grievances, an idea rather than a complaint, though it finds itself overwhelmed by a few gimmicky trappings.
At the narrative center is “Romulus”, the frenetic and sexually repressed patriarch played by Daniel Frost, who dons a grecian robe and crown. By his guardianship a group of 8 individuals decide to beat the system by purchasing a house together. The conditions are thickly economic, a financial breakdown lays down the first scene, and is provided in pamphlet form for takeaway.
In this universe, life is ruled by contractual obligations and diplomacies. There are various domestic dances in which the characters steer a course through — gardening, chores, overnight guests, pets. Ergo the ubiquitous boardroom table which becomes furnishing as well as metaphor. There is emotional aftermath too, but the tone of work lends itself more to tactic and problem management. For instance, when the group has finally adopted dogs they do not gush but rather note the pets are adequately “playful and adventurous”.
Though it’s streamlined, dense language, the characters are themselves exaggerated archetypes —fun, but perhaps odd in contrast. However it is clear we have a talented cast, especially in the case of Shayne Walker’s “Dex” who, sharp as a paring knife, lends an essential groundedness. Eventually, there is a coupling up in our household of 4 men and 4 women and this is when control begins to slip for the enterprising Romulus.
The beating heart of Pieces of Eight lies not in its bid to lower Vancouer’s average housing expense—it’s in the reevaluation of the ‘nuclear Canadian family’. It becomes clear the objective of the 8 is to live together as happily as possible, rather than simply productively. Changing the terms on what constitutes a family and how this idea metabolizes in the different spaces we come to occupy is as important as is the bylaws we face. Needless to say, these things are lively and diverse in practice — when you crack open the notion of expected, you’re going to see a lot more than cis gendered heteronormativity, and you’re going to want to humour a little oddity.
Tasha Hefford is a visual artist and writer based in Vancouver. She is a graduate of ECUAD and has exhibited work throughout Vancouver, but you can read her in filling station, Prism International and Discorder Magazine. Her work often addresses the complicated relationship she keeps with technology. Accordingly, she can be found @Tashateeth and at www.tashahefford.com