Buzz 08/09 Season

Buzz 0809See something new you’ll want to talk about.

BUZZ is the forum where audiences and plays develop together from the ground up.

If you were a part of Theatre Passe Muraille’s BUZZ in 08/09 you were the first to see new work and collective creations by the likes of Catherine Hernandez, Dave Bidini & Ted Dykstra, Maja Ardal, Ravi Jain, Boonaa Mohamed & Weyni Mengesha, Diane Flacks & Beverly Cooper, Donna Michelle St. Bernard & Philip Adams, Madd Harold, Lisa Codrington & Eda Holmes, Jason Maghanoy & Jovanni Sy, Theatre Rusticle, Simon Heath, Greg Thomas, Anusree Roy, Naomi Snieckus & Matt Baram & Shari Hollett, Kelly McIntosh & David Ferry, Thomas Morgan Jones, The Big Win Collective (Maja Ardal, Sally Han, Mary Francis Moore, Sedina Fiati, Bea Pizano, Edda Kristinsson & Anusree Roy) and more.

And then afterwards you went upstairs into the world’s hardest working bar and further engaged with the new works by talking one-on-one with the artists that created them – often until late in the morning. These were highly successful and energetic evenings filled with excitement, exploration and sharing.

Join us this year for one week in the fall, winter and spring and see something new you’ll want to talk about.

The shows were:

  • THE CURE FOR EVERYTHING (Maja Ardal) Elsa (from the critical acclaimed play You Fancy Yourself) enters the treacherous world of sex, the Cold War and a new realization that things are getting so bad that she had better find a cure.
  • NIGHT OF THE DOGS (Dave Bidini) is about an aging rock star, his son, and the mother of all deli wheels.
  • THE BIG WIN COLLECTIVE (Maja Ardal, Sally Han, Mary Francis Moore, Sedina Fiati, Bea Pizano, Edda Kristinsson & Anusree Roy) is researching and developing a theatre piece that makes the connection between the “lottery” dream of coming to Canada for a better life, and the “lottery” dream of wealth. The result will be a play about a lottery win, from the perspective of first or second-generation immigrants. The Big Win Collective is rich with personal immigrant stories, which will be a foundation for the work developed. The story will take place in a lower income-working world; a community that struggles to make ends meet.
  • REFINED (Lisa Codrington, directed by Eda Holmes) Abandoned at birth, Sweet Girl doesn’t know much about who she is or where she came from. All she knows is that she’s got flat feet and must be the daughter of some ‘flatty flat foot’. That is until one stormy night those same flat feet lead her out and into Ms. T’ings shop. It’s there that Sweet Girl embarks on a journey that introduces her to the family she never knew, a history she never imagined and a legacy she must fulfill. Apparently there’s more to her feet than just the flat.
  • THE FIVE STAGES OF WOMANHOOD (Diane Flacks & Beverley Cooper) Four women friends gather at a dinner party and, between courses, are confronted by worries and guilts – the kinds they often default to on the surface – their looks and bodies – as well as what is underneath – fears about sexuality, failures, death. The Five Stages of Womanhood explores the funny and frank (and not so frank) ways women talk with each other, and how we expose, or hide, our deepest feelings from our friends. The other participants in this collaboration are Leah Cherniak, Martha Ross and Alisa Palmer. Writer/performers Cooper and Flacks will be performing sections from this work in progress.
  • Siddhartha (Madd Harold) Set on the subway platform of Toronto’s Union Station, Siddhartha is an epic and archetypal exploration of the unity and oneness of all people. Siddhartha is a cross-cultural exploration of what it means to be alive, to be human, and to dwell in the eternal Now.
  • CANADA, 1986 (Simon Heath, directed & dramaturged by David Ferry) plays a 13-year old boy’s vision of Canada and the world against two Canadian icons of the imagination: Stompin’ Tom and Tommy Douglas. What’s real and what’s our imagination? Are we who we think we are? Am I who I thought I would become? And most importantly, where do we go from here?
  • KILT PINS (Catherine Hernandez, directed/dramaturged by Ruth Madoc-Jones) develops a piece where in a rough neighbourhood of Scarborough, some teens aren’t battling it out in gang warfare. They’re simply struggling between the voice of God and the voice of their own bodies.
  • BRIMFUL OF ASHA (Ravi Jain and his mom) In Dec 2007, Ravi Jain went to India to explore his culture; the theatre, people and places in India. Having been before, it was the first time he ever had to travel the sub-continent. To his great surprise, his parents also came to India, and tried to trap him in an Arranged Marriage. Yes. It is true. This is a work in progress, in which my mother and me will talk about what it is to be a 2nd generation immigrant, stuck between two cultures, and the trials and tribulations of the process that is the Arranged Marriage, from both of our perspectives. It really happened.
  • PURPLE DON’T CRY (Boonaa Mohamed, directed by Weyni Mengesha) A young man’s internal struggle to survive in his surroundings without compromising his faith. Award winning storyteller Boonaa Mohammed has been taking the city by storm with his poetry and is now branching into the theatre. Inspired by his late friend’s unfinished screenplay Boonaa has created a piece of theatre to tell his story of a young man’s struggle to survive in his surroundings without compromising his faith. With Boona Mohamed, Araya Mengesha and musician Waleed Abdulhamid.
  • TORONTO STORIES (Thomas Morgan Jones) brings together four theatre artists (Jones, Stewart Arnott, Edwige Jean-Pierre & Anusree Roy) to tell their tales of living in Toronto and the beauty and malice they have experienced as Torontonians. The people on the streetcar, our friends, our parents, our neighbours, we all have stories. The stories we only tell in secret, the stories we only tell at dinner parties, the stories that are our own. What will happen when we share them? From the greatest act of kindness, to a horrible act of violence, these are the stories that we share.
  • AUCTION GIRL (written by Kelly McIntosh, directed by David Ferry) is a play about Girls, Horses, Evil Auctioneers, and Loser Poet Farmers. When Ivy’s mum left her ten years ago with her Father Fred and a bunch of cans of carnation milk on the counter, she also left behind a stunning young Clydesdale horse. Now that Fred is Selling the Farm, Ivy, who has virtually ignored the beast in her care for ten years, casually takes him to auction. When he is sold for Dogmeat, her heart breaks. Expect a real life auctioneer and an immobilizing confrontation between M’Other and daughter in a Windsor Motel Room.
  • THROAT (Jason Maghanoy) is a new work-in-progress inspired by post-Katrina FEMA communities, Throat follows a young couple, Teresa and Trevor, living in a government sponsored trailer “village” after being displaced by a terrible storm. Struggling to find a sense of hope and normalcy, they start a business cleaning up the trailer park to raise money to buy back Teresa’s old house in the city.
  • BROTHEL # 9 (Anusree Roy) explores the sex-trade industry in Calcutta, India. The play brings light to issues of the illegal sex trade while taking a closer look at the fearless and resilient women of this society.
  • BIRNAM WOOD (Theatre Rusticle) is the story of a great forest that has been devastated by time and humanity. One very cold winter’s night, a night where slumber is impossible, six trees gather in a clearing. Rather than counting sheep, they tell stories about what they have seen in their hundreds of years of life. Specifically, they tell the story of a great hero, the love of his life and how he fell from grace and took the whole world (including their forest) with him. In a world where winter and death have dominated, there is renewal ~ there is spring. Using Shakespeare’s bloodiest and most horrific play, Macbeth, as a springboard for this project, Birnam Wood is about what and how Nature remembers. It is about our forests and environment. It is a nightmare. It is a bedtime story. It is a storm. It is a love story. It is hope.
  • YOU AND ME BOTH (Naomi Snieckus & Matt Baram, directed by Shari Hollett) is a romantic comedy about how two complete opposites find each other, fall in love and then desperately cling to the hope that they can somehow make it last.
  • GAS GIRLS (Donna Michelle St. Bernard, directed by Philip Adams) Plying her trade with the truckers at the Zimbabwean border, Gigi works for gas. Her young protégé, Lola wants to learn and can’t figure out why it isn’t love she is finding. Caught in this cycle, Lola believes that their pimp, Chick’n, will take care of her. But when Lola starts working for oil, things take a turn. Now crossing over the border to another world appears dangerously possible.
  • I SWIM GOOD: Knowlton Nash Never Wore a Speedo (Greg Thomas) was born in the far north but had a crush on the U.S.A., preferred to bathe but went swimming instead, got really angry at Peter Mansbridge but let it go.