Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Perennial provocateur Sky Gilbert is back with a hilarious, gender-bending take on family life and the power of our parents to screw us up. Reuniting the show-stopping duo of Edward Roy and Gavin Crawford, The Terrible Parents pushes maniacal parenting to its most absurd extremes for a touching but also troubling send-up of idyllic family life. Behind the scenes of the Johnson’s family’s seemingly perfect 1960s life, behind Dad’s perfect job and mother’s perfect coiffure — the children endure unspeakable, yet oddly hilarious, horrors that seem almost unreal. The mother, Amelia seems far too intimate with her son Cecil, while Cecil’s sister Odette is forced into early plastic surgery. After falling on her head, Amelia transforms into a completely different and and sexually dangerous mother– a loose-living party girl in love with a drunken, abusive salesman. Somehow her children survive; but both are left with emotional scars.
The Terrible Parents is a nuclear comedy; beneath it’s surrealistic extremes lie truths about the very real nuclear family unit — the family model that constitutes our most common western experience. Do our parents screw us up? Or do we just think they do? Sky Gilbert asks even more questions in this provocative comedy; his first autobiographical play.
The Terrible Parents brings together a unique combination of theatre veterans and up-and-comers. Famous TV personality, film actor, and comedian Gavin Crawford (Because News, This Hour Has 22 Minutes) has won two Doras for his work with Sky Gilbert, including for Gilbert’s Dora Award winning play The Situationists. Award-winning actor, writer, and director Ed Roy (The Life and Times of Mackenzie King) was critically acclaimed for his starring role in Sky’s A Few Brittle Leaves three years ago. Katie Sly (A Wake for Lost Time, Charisma Furs) and and Robin Sharp are queer performers just out of the starting gate; both are also fledgling writers and creators with work that has recently been seen to much acclaim around town. Young designers Joe Pagnan (set and lights), and Michelle Tracey (costumes) both work here for the first time with Sky Gilbert. This incredibly talented collaborative team bring their extensive along experience along with their youthful enthusiasm to Gilbert’s new play.
The Terrible Parents marks a change in Sky Gilbert’s work; along with his 7th novel Sad Old Faggot (to be released in fall of 2016) both works are his first forays into the relatively new and controversial form that has been named creative non-fiction, or fictional autobiography. Sky had a street named after him in Toronto— Sky Gilbert Lane — in 2015.
The Cabaret Company presents
The Terrible Parents
A nuclear comedy
written and directed by Sky Gilbert
with Gavin Crawford, Ed Roy, Robin Sharp, and Katie Sly
set and lighting design by Joe Pagnan
costume design by Michelle Tracey
Preview: April 6
Opening Night April 7; Closes April 17
Runs Wed-Sat 8pm; Sun 2:30pm
Tickets PWYC - $37
Box Office:416-975-8555 or buddiesinbadtimes.com
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander Street, Toronto, ON
The Cabaret Company produces the work of Sky Gilbert, which is personal, immediate, controversial, political, dangerous, sexual and queer.
Photo: Gavin Crawford and Ed Roy. ©2016
2016-03-12
Toronto: The Cabaret Company presents "The Terrible Parents" by Sky Gilbert April 6-17