The Unfortunate Ruth

Written and performed by Tara Travis at Uno Fest

Metro Studio, Victoria, BC

May 18 – 20, 2016

 

Shylock

By Mark Leiren-Young

Performed by John Huston at Uno Fest

Metro Studio

May 19 ­­­­­­­– 20, 2016

 

Victoria’s 19^th Uno Fest, an annual event produced by Intrepid Theatre, is off to a terrific start to 10 days of performance of 14 solo shows.

The running gag in Tara Travis’s The Unfortunate Ruth, is “I have a hunch,” a line delivered by the Ruth, a buck-toothed hunchback receptionist in a white coat. Ruthie, her Doppelganger, is also a receptionist – in a clinic that performs ultrasounds on pregnant women.

I have to admit that I didn’t quite get this show, which grew out of Travis’s fascination with “identical twins, parallel universes, the work of Mind of a Snail and a particularly rare medical condition called fetus in fetu.”

Buck-toothed Ruth has a fetus in her hump that makes its presence known by gripping Ruth’s heart with its legs. Ruth calls the fetus Cordelia, Cordy for short. The other Ruth, known as Ruthie (a quick on-stage costume change takes place), has a fetus growing in her abdominal cavity. She could see it herself with her ultrasound wand, if she cared to. Then, just to complicate things, there are talking cartoon fetuses projected on a screen behind each Ruth. In one video scene, one fetus eats the other. There’s a confusion of names: who knows where the fetus Gertrude fits in? what about this unicorn and the ashes in the urns? And which of the Ruths is the one who survives surgical removal?

Travis, a Vancouver performer who brought this show to the Vancouver Fringe in 2014, gets off some good lines and disports herself with aplomb, puzzling as her show remains to this viewer.

                Victoria playwright Mark Leiren-Young’s Shylock is the stuff of great solo performances and John Huston is the actor to do it justice. Essentially a lecture, this Shylock soliloquy is a literal undressing as an actor bares his heart before his post-show audience.  Huston is John Davies, an actor trained in the classical tradition (think the Stratford Festival as run by an Englishman), and currently embodying a villainous, obnoxious Shylock in a festival’s controversial production of Merchant of Venice. He enters — swarthy, dirty, costumed with a hawk-like nose, grey page-boy wig and full Elizabethan accoutrement  — and delivers his most memorable soliloquy. “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? . . If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute . . .”

                This Shylock is either a victim of anti-Semitism, or a reason for inciting it. In his one-sided “talk-back” address to the audience,  Davies, Jewish himself, answers his critics (“you must be a Jew-hating Jew,”) and makes a plea for returning to theatre that is about art and not about pandering to patrons or protecting the public from things they’d rather not acknowledge. Davies believes Shakespeare was an anti-Semite; Shylock is his villain, not someone with whom we need to sympathize.

As he’s raising issue after issue, eloquently displaying the power of “dangerous words,” the actor is wiping off his make-up, removing his wig, working down to his leggings and stocking-feet.  Huston holds our attention every minute. (He performs  an adaptation of  The Screwtape Letters at Christ Church Cathedral, Saturday, May 21 at 7:30 pm.)

 

 

 

Song of Lahore

Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken

 

Song of Lahore

Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken

Cinecenta, University of Victoria

May 17 to 19, 2016

This documentary opens on a very sad note, as the camera follows some Pakistani  musicians – artists who all learned at the knee of a father or uncle –  through the ruins of the once vibrant Lahore music scene. After independence in 1947 tabla, flute and sitar players, violinists and guitarists enjoyed fame and thrived, making music for the Bollywood film industry. In the cold war years, an American program of jazz ambassadors, including Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and other greats, introduced the subcontinent to a form of music that was similar to their own centuries’ old instrumentation. Improvisation came naturally to them and the rhythms were not hard to match.

Then in 1977 came General  Zia, Sharia law and suppression of music and all the other arts. The Taliban only made things worse. At the time this film was made, musicians were still playing in semi-secret in Pakistan’s second largest city. And they feared a complete loss of a proud and complex musical tradition. It would be like losing your language.

As we hear from Saleem Khan, son of Namdar Khan, considered the country’s finest violinist, things had come to such a pass that instruments were broken beyond repair and in scarce supply. No musician could make a living with his art form. But in 2004 Izaat Majeed pulled together seasoned players and started the Sachal Studios for recording music. Returning to the jazz they’d heard as young men, the players recorded Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” on tabla drums, Indian keyboard. flute and sitar. It went viral.

Next came an invitation from Wynton Marsalis to perform with his band for a special concert in the Lincoln Center program “Jazz at Lincoln.” In one scene we’re in the grimy lanes of Lahore and in the next six brown guys are strolling through Times Square, jamming with the Naked Cowboy.

Conductor Nijat Ali, who loses his father and mentor during the course of the film, has to struggle to bring off this unusual merger of East and West, but as Marsalis says, musicians will always come together. What started as a lament becomes an uplifting story of how art overcomes difference and conflict in a vivid documentary that recalls Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club. The closing credits roll over images of the musicians finally getting to give a concert before a huge audience in Lahore.

Photo credit: Frank Stewart