Two late-season offerings at our two major theatre festivals

We're getting down to the final few shows at both the Shaw and Stratford Festivals this season, so we'll look at the final Shaw show opening this season and another late season offering at Stratford today, and next week wrap up the Stratford shows for the season.

The Shaw Festival has been going from strength to strength at their small Studio Theatre the last couple of seasons, and the final offering this season which opened a week ago Friday, is no exception.  Australian playwright Andrew Bovell wrote When the Rain Stops Falling as a commission for the Adelaide Festival of Arts, where it premiered in February, 2008.  The Shaw Festival production is the play's Canadian premiere, directed by Peter Hinton.

The play, to put it bluntly, is a bit of an enigma.  It looks at the Law, York and Price family histories in the context of the future, if you will.  As such, the play's first hour is more than a little confusing for many in the audience, as we struggle to come to grips with several people playing the same characters at different times in their lives.  We go from London in 1959 to Australia in the year 2039, with the plot-line following the many events that happen in the lives of the characters over that 80 year period.  Thanks to director Hinton who had the presence of mind to include a "family tree" on one page in the programme to help us understand the family lineage in each household.

Hinton has also decided to project the time/place of each scene over top of the set, which does help you put each scene in the proper context.  He also added character's names and birth & death (if applicable) dates on the backs of chairs surrounding the huge table that makes up a large part of the stage.  Trouble with this, of course, is you have to really squint to see what they say, and you can only see the chairs in front of you; the other three sides of the table are out of view to you, and with no intermission to allow you to walk around the stage and read them, you get only some of that helpful information.  By the time you realize this fact it is too late, and you have to struggle to keep up with the myriad of time and place changes.

Each character present has their own form of emotional baggage, and all effect what happens in the play at some point, as we see what happened in the past as well as in the future.  It is a fascinating concept, and  quite a challenge, but suffice it to say the challenge is worth the effort.  This is a play, as Hinton points out in his Director's Notes, wherein the characters are haunted by the past; it is a play about family and secrets and the ways in which we pass on our unresolved struggles from one generation to another.  I don't want to give away too much of the storyline, as it is difficult to do in a small space with this play, and besides I don't want to jeopardize the ending in any way.  But the journey, however convoluted it may be, will bring the audience to a heartfelt, compassionate conclusion in the year 2039, resulting in more than a few tears in the audience, at least at the performance I attended.

The cast rises to the challenge of presenting this difficult play with some degree of clarity, and each and every one is perfect for the role.  Ric Reid opens and closes the play in the year 2039 as Gabriel York, a man who is faced with the prospect of his son coming to visit him after many years apart.  Donna Belleville as the older Elizabeth Law and Tara Rosling as the younger Elizabeth Law are both great, as is Peter Millard as almost an odd-man out in the role of Joe Ryan, the second husband of Gabrielle York, played by Wendy Thatcher, who is sent packing by a wife suffering from a memory disorder.  Others in the cast worthy of note include Krista Colosimo as the younger Gabrielle York, who runs a cafe in Australia and falls for Gabriel Law, played by Jeff Meadows, who is on a mission to find out what happened to his father, sent to Australia by his wife for indiscretions back home in London.  Graeme Somerville as the disgraced Henry Law is very good and manages to pull at our heart-strings in spite of his indiscretions.  You can see the story is a complicated one just from this brief description, right?

Anyway, you don't have much time left to catch When the Rain Stops Falling; it runs only until September 17th at the Studio Theatre, and rates a strong 3 out of 4 stars.

Meantime, over at the Stratford Festival, we have the prospect of another difficult storyline at their Studio Theatre, with Michel Tremblay's Hosanna, set in early 70s Montreal, when the country as a whole was coming to grips with the acceptance of gays moreso than in the past, and two men who live together in a Montreal apartment who find themselves on a journey of self-discovery.

Hosanna, as director Weyni Mengesha mentions in her Director's Notes, is "an investigation of the classic human struggle to face who we truly are."  The two characters in the play, Hosanna, played by Gareth Potter, and Cuirette, played by Oliver Becker, both have to come to grips with their own insecurities and acceptance of each other if they are to continue living together.

Hosanna is a former farm boy from the countryside, who now lives fast and loose in the big city as a hairdresser by day, and a transvestite prostitute by night.  His male companion, a leather-clad biker boy nicknamed Cuirette, still likes to think of himself as able to play the field whenever he likes.  Trouble is,  Hosanna is needs him more than he realizes, and by the end of the play he realizes he is in the same boat.

Now, as When the Rain Stops Falling can be seen as a confusing collection of characters, how about this with Hosanna:  Gareth Potter plays Hosanna, who is the alter ego of Claude Lemieux, the farm-boy from the sticks.  On this particular night as the action of the play unfolds, Hosanna is playing the role of his idol Elizabeth Taylor, in her role as Cleopatra.  How's that for confusing?

It all comes together in the end, as both characters come to realize the compelling universal truth that love is all that really matters.  While some parts of the play may appear to be somewhat dated to some, in many respects the story is entirely relevant today.  The seedy set and characters are as real today as they were when the play premiered in 1973, and in this production they become much more human as the play progresses, allowing the audience to actually care about them despite their insecurities and lot in life.

I can't imagine either character is easy to play, with Gareth Potter having a deeply troubled character to explore; both rise to the challenge, however, making Hosanna a challenging play worth catching this season.  Hosanna continues until September 24th at the Studio Theatre, and rates a strong 3 out of 4 stars.

September 3rd, 2011.