Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✩
written by David Ives, directed by Jonathan Dufour & Michael Melnikoff
Miller's Son & From the Oven, Toronto Fringe Festival, St. Vladimir’s Theatre, Toronto
July 3-12, 2014
Before Venus in Fur (2010), David Ives wrote this collection of absurdist playlets about language and meaning first performed together in 1993. Could three monkeys at typewriters eventually write Hamlet? What if you could reset your conversation every time you said the wrong thing? Directors Jonathan Dufour and Mikhael Melnikoff omit Philip Glass Buy a Loaf of Bread (1990) which requires musical accompaniment, and wisely present the five remaining sketches in ascending order of cleverness. They begin with Words, Words, Words (1987) about the three monkeys, and move on to Variations on the Death of Trotsky (1991), where the exiled Russian revolutionary dies several times after discovering an ax buried in his head.
The Universal Language (1993) about Unamunda, a fake Esperanto composed entirely of terrible puns, is absolutely priceless. The Philadelphia posits that some of us are trapped in space-time bubbles that take on the characteristics of various US cities. (Hint: being trapped in a “Philadelphia” is not good.) The show concludes with the now-classic short play Sure Thing (1988), about resetting conversational errors with a counter bell.
While the whole cast is in full command of Ives’s wit, the show is worth seeing just to hear Nicholas Porteous speak amazingly fluent Unamunda and to enjoy the incredibly rapid verbal replays of Eve Wylden and Yehuda Fisher in Sure Thing.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in NOW Magazine 2014-07-10.
Photo: Eve Wylden and Yehuda Fisher in Sure Thing. ©2014 Jonathan Dufour.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.
2014-07-10
All in the Timing