✭✭✩✩✩ / ✭✭✭✩✩

by Anna Chatterton & Evalyn Parry, directed by Karin Randoja

The Independent Aunties, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto

November 6, 2005

The third entry in Theatre Passe Muraille’s lively “Stage 3” series is a pair of one-act plays about pairs of women.  In both works, performers Anna Chatterton and Evalyn Parry and director Karin Randoja create a type of revisionist comedy in which period costume functions as drag.

Frances, Mathilda and Tea, the more substantial work, concerns two Victorian sisters celebrating the birthday of their deceased mother.  Amid forced gaiety, the ultra-repressed sisters not so covertly use storytelling and party games to punish each other and force out confessions.  What were the real circumstances of Mother’s death?  Sending up the image of cloistered Victorian women with their needlepoint, hymns and headaches raises laughter, but the text is actually richer than the actors’ camp approach brings out.

The Mysterious Shorts is a collection of four skits looking at female pairs in the 1920s, ‘40s, ‘60s and ‘80s.  The great pleasure here is how Chatterton and Parry so accurately capture the look and especially the language of each decade, with the hard-boiled ‘40s newspaper gals the highlight.  It’s fun but doesn’t add up to much except to suggest the devolution of women from ‘20s intellectuals like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas to clueless valley girls of the ‘80s.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-10-27.

Photo: Evalyn Parry and Anna Chatterton. ©2005 The Independent Aunties.