Colleen MacIsaac as the thwarted scientist Kate is framed by, left, Christine Daniels as Grace and Mauralea Austin as Alice in Matchstick Theatre’s production of John Mighton’s The Little Years, on Oct. 13 and 14, 2 and 8 p.m., at the Bus Stop Theatre. (Samm Fisher)
Given the idea — or hope —  that young women today can do anything they want with their lives, John Mighton’s The Little Years is a throwback to a time when women’s roles were very limited.

The 1995 Canadian play, staged by Halifax’s Matchstick Theatre at the Bus Stop Theatre just through Sunday, is a sad, bitterly comic, occasionally magical story of an oddball teenager in the 1950s whose passion for physics is thwarted by her society, her school and her mother.

When she is steered away from science to stenography, a huge sigh is felt within the audience, for it knows nothing good can come of that.

The young Kate, in a glittering, exuberant performance by Kayla Gunn, evolves into the older Kate, an embittered, socially-hostile, spiritually-crushed woman in drab clothing who can’t hold a job and ends up briefly in a mental institution, forever crimped by her celebrity-poet brother.

Colleen MacIsaac brings a Sheldon Cooper-esque quality to this part as well as a real pathos. She suggests the glimmer of a candle within this frozen creature.  And in the end Kate sees she has a legacy.

Mighton, a mathematician as well as a playwright, wrote The Little Years as a plea to make sure kids reach their educational potential. The founder of the JUMP Math (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) program, he was asked by the Stratford Festival to expand his play in 2011.

Mighton pencilled in some of the side characters who revolve around Kate, which adds to the humour, though each character also faces disappointment as the years pass.

There is the lionized artist Roger (Matthew Lumley), the caring, environmentalist sister-in-law (Christine Daniels) and the loving but cutting mother Alice, in a wonderful, nuanced, sensitive and comically rich performance by Mauralea Austin.  (Also on stage in smaller roles are Amanda Mullally, Sean Skerry and Sam Vigneault.

Kate is fascinated by the nature of time and wonders if it is cyclical instead of linear, a concept that Mighton carries out beautifully in his structure and that is amplified in the direction.

This production, directed by Matchstick’s artistic director Jake Planinc, has a magical quality with a beautiful set piece of hanging disco balls like planets around the sun, lit in colourful flares by lighting designer Alison Crosby. (Other designers are Wes Babcock, set; Jordan Palmer, sound, and Kelsey Stanger, costumes, with a great hole-riddled sweater for Kate.

With its filmic writing, The Little Years needs a faster pace with quicker set changes. This production also suffers a bit from unevenness in acting levels but overall it’s well  worth seeing.

The Little Years runs 90 minutes including a 10- minute intermission today and Sunday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 and $20 online (https://matchsticktheatre.ca/tickets/)

Matchstick is an emerging company founded in early 2017 to “revitalize” contemporary Canadian plays. Next up is Michael Melski’s Joyride Jan. 23 to 27 at the Scotiabank Theatre as part of Neptune Theatre’s Open Spaces program.

It’s interesting to reflect that Mighton covers in time the 1950s to the 70s to the 2000s, not little years at all, but years that have caused great damage to the world, in which increasingly scientists of both genders have not been supported or listened to, and in which women have not achieved equal power.

 

Comfort food meets scratch and sniff technology in Emily Lawrence’s playful, poignant art exhibit about Alzheimer’s at the Craig Gallery, Alderney Landing.

The viewer steps on foot-shaped pieces of shag carpet, as cozy as old knitted slippers, to look at luscious photographs of 1950s and 1960s home-kitchen favourites that smell, when scratched, like apple pie, or birthday cake, or fresh white bread just out of the oven.

Lawrence, exhibiting Scratch & Sniff Menu through Oct. 7, was inspired by her grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s to create an initial series of non-scratch and sniff photographs of her grandmother’s favourite foods which connected her to her fading memories.

For the scratch and sniff series, she worked with a group of residents with dementia and Alzheimer’s at Berkeley Halifax.

She asked them about their favourite foods “aided by my Betty Crocker cookbook collection and oodles of jam thumbprint cookies,” she says in her artist’s statement.

Lawrence explores how smell stimulates memory and how essential food and food preparation are to human life and memory. Many of the residents talked to her about how wonderful their mother’s cooking was.

This exhibit, with a pastel, colour scheme shared by the images, the foot pads and comfy stools, takes viewers to Grandma’s house, reminds them of their own childhood — that pink-iced birthday cake is a cultural touchstone – and, perhaps, also reminds them of reading Pat the Bunny to a sleepy child at bedtime.

Scratch & Sniff Menu is a wonderful example of sophisticated, intelligent art expressing an idea with humour and humanity in a way everyone can understand.

Lawrence is a NSCAD University graduate, an interdisciplinary artist living in Dartmouth and currently artist-in-residence at the Macphee Centre for Creative Learning.

Dartmouth metal sculptor Barbara Schmeisser is also exhibiting steel, flower sculptures — delicate, intricate and strong — in You, Me, Them . . . Us in the Craig Case Galleries.

This is a continuation of her 2017 series of plants found in Denmark and Canada with, she says,  “additional steel plant portrayals relevant to the theme of people’s response to plants be they iconic, common weed, native or transplant.”

She has been inspired by artists including Cal Lane, Elisabeth Brim, Alexander Calder, Giuseppe Penone and Claes Oldenburg.

NOTE: There is a huge Alexander Calder exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through February.

Next week is very busy for The Craig Gallery with Blue Mondays Life Drawing Monday,  the  20th Annual Mosaic for Mental Health opening Oct. 11 and open for Nocturne, Oct. 13, 6 to midnight, which also features the Nostos Dance Collective with Women of 100 Faces in the market area and an interactive collaborative project, That Which We Cannot Own, in the theatre and rotunda.

Rachel Hastings as Wendy receives a potato from Amanda LeBlanc as Mona in The Bitterest Time: The War Story of Mona Parsons, by Andria Hill-Lehr and Sarah Jane Blenkhorn.  (Bruce Dienes)

The Bitterest Time: The War Story of Mona Parsons is a powerful, deeply affecting play about the resilience of the human spirit as two women struggle to survive in a Nazi prison cell.

Thanks to Wolfville writer Andria Hill-Lehr, the story of Nova Scotian Mona Parsons – the only female Canadian civilian to be imprisoned by the Nazis in Occupied Holland – has come to light.

The Middleton-born nurse and dancer for the Ziegfeld Follies in New York married a Dutch millionaire and, after harbouring Allied soldiers at her estate, was arrested by the Nazis when she was 41, first sentenced to execution and then, on appeal, to prison. She spent three years in Nazi prisons including at Vechta where she befriended a young baroness.

This is their story of friendship and endurance as Mona buoys Wendy’s spirits with her infectious humour, imagination and love of song, dance and poetry.

Beautifully structured as a narrative with flashbacks, The Bitterest Time starts with an unseen voice, that of Hill-Lehr on her journey to discover the personality of Parsons as she talks to the elderly, rigid and unfriendly Wendelien (in a fine performance by Carroll Godsman).

Wendelien reluctantly agrees to open the closed box on her war experience and reveal the astonishing, tough, loving, lively, artistic character of Mona Parsons.

This co-production by LunaSea Theatre and SarAndipity Theatre, which just wrapped a mini-tour of Nova Scotia, featured a remarkable performance by Amanda LeBlanc as Mona.

The actor had to climb mountains of brief joy and then burrow into the depths of despair as Mona struggles to keep her sanity and her will to live.  She needed to dance like a light-hearted sparrow then hobble on bloodied feet; she needed anger and she needed lyricism when Mona quotes from Emily Bronte’s poems (the source of the title).

The success of The Bitterest Time depends on the casting of Parsons and the young Wendelien, called Wendy. Director Ryanne Chisholm struck gold in the chemistry between LeBlanc and Rachel Hastings as the rigid, fierce 23-year-old Dutch woman reluctant to share her story or yield to the power of Mona’s imagination.

In focussing on Mona’s time in prison, this play traps its audience in the grimness of a cell with an excellent design in sets by Vickie Marston, lights by Vicky Williams, costumes by Noella Murphy and sound by Jenny Trites. You can almost feel the grime and see the little bird singing outside the cell window.

This production also featured the striking Sharleen Kalayil as a pregnant prisoner and nasty, apple-eating prison guard and the charming Garry Williams as Mona’s husband as well as the young Nova Scotian soldier, Clarence Leonard, who rescued Mona after she walked out of Germany. In fact, the real Clarence Leonard’s son attended this show.

Garry Williams as Nova Scotia soldier Clarence Leonard giving the freed Mona Parsons a cup of tea. (Bruce Dienes)

Co-writers Hill-Lehr and Sarah Jane Blenkhorn, of SarAndipity, plan to present The Bitterest Time again. “Given the power of the story and the interest it attracts, we think that it has a future here, and beyond Nova Scotia as well,” says Blenkhorn.

That would be great because this is a woman’s war story, a Nova Scotian story and, as another glimpse into the horrors of war, a warning about the savagery of humans beings if their cruelty is left unchecked.

Sharleen Kalayil as a prison guard with Amanda LeBlanc as Mona Parsons and Rachel Hastings as Wendy. (Bruce Dienes)

Onelight Theatre’s artistic director Shahin Sayadi is the actor, writer, director and scenographer, among other things, for Asheq: Ritual Music to Cure a Lover, at Halifax’s Sir James Dunn Theatre and Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre in December. (Onelight Theatre)

It’s amazing what one man can do with cloth, music and light.

In the hour-long Asheq: Ritual Music to Cure a Lover, Onelight Theatre’s artistic director Shahin Sayadi tells a Middle Eastern story as an enchantment of light and music with the basic pain of human experience.

His story is set in the hot sun by the sea on the Persian Gulf in a southern Iranian village where men dive for pearls and believe in a Zoroastrian goddess-figure of light, Mithra. They live in a world where light struggles with dark, good with evil.

Sayadi travelled to Spain and his native Iran to create Asheq with glorious, driving music commissioned from two, international musicians with southern Iranian roots: Habib Meftahoushehri and Mohsen Sharifian.

Sayadi was inspired by the East African and Persian traditions of southern Iran where modern Zar exorcism rituals are still held.

Sayadi creates an exotic world on a simple stage of sand with cement blocks and ropes to lift white, cloth walls that become, through light and moving image, heat, sun, sunset, the surface of the ocean and its watery depths.

The story is about a man whose simple path in life is interrupted by grief and about his son’s love for an outcast woman which leads to a Zar exorcism of ecstatic dancing, drumming and chanting.

Sayadi is gifted at moving from his main character into a woman and a young boy simply by shifting his body and using a length of cloth.

Anyone interested in theatrical lighting must see Asheq for its fantastic, lush, expressive lighting design by Mike Mader, with stunning yellows and chilly blots of grey and floods of red when the bad stuff happens.

Asheq is a fascinating mix of basic, primitive storytelling with a sophisticated technology involving light, live video and sound with digital technology by Jake Dambergs and projections designed by Mader.

It’s takes a while to relax and get into this mysterious world which becomes mesmerizing. Sometimes the music fights too much with Sayadi’s voice for attention.

Asheq straddles theatre and contemporary theatrical dance. It’s up to the viewer to decide what it is about exactly.

For me it is an insight into stories of the outcast, of one seeking refuge, of communities expelling who they perceive as evil, of the nature of family shame – concepts I like to think are old-fashioned but really are not.

Onelight Theatre takes this hour-long show to Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre Dec. 6 to 8. Its Halifax premiere is part of the Prismatic Arts Festival, an annual multi-disciplinary professional arts festival featuring work by Canada’s Indigenous and culturally diverse artists, running through Sunday in Halifax with a slew of music, theatre and art including a show on a bus. For Prismatic details go online (http://prismaticfestival.com/)Shauntay Grant launched her new book Africville at Prismatic and reads Saturday, 11 a.m. at Halifax Central Library as part of Word on the Street.

A  merry band of reprobate actors and producers in Shakespeare in Love, Neptune Theatre’s rollicking, witty season-opener, on stage to Oct. 7. (Stoo Metz) 

Neptune Theatre’s popular new artistic director Jeremy Webb makes the winter of Atlantic Canadian actors’ discontent glorious summer with his first season-opener.

He casts local and homegrown talent, instead of importing from Toronto, and he casts inclusively with African-Nova Scotian and Asian actors.

But the play’s the thing and this must-see Shakespeare in Love is fun, witty, intelligent theatre with the bravado of The Three Muskeeteers, a zip-line pace and some real, stir-the-loins romance.

The actors – and one adorable dog –  converge on a beautiful Globe-esque stage of dark wood with a prerequisite balcony and lush, painterly lighting.

The cast is fantastic with perfect, intense, articulate performances by the leads: Sarah English, who played Juliet at Neptune, as Viola, the noble young woman who would be a player, and Allister MacDonald as Will Shakespeare, the intense, playful, dissembling and desperate writer with a deep capacity for love.

Allister MacDonald and Sarah English as Will Shakespeare and Viola. (Stoo Metz)

They tease out the tangle of a play-within-a-play, gender-bending and swashbuckling to make the love scenes pure, sweet and real  – real enough to convince Jennie Raymond’s arch and wonderful Queen Elizabeth I that a play can demonstrate true love.

Jennie Raymond is Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. (Stoo Metz)

Webb, a classically-trained British actor with a talent for comedy, directs the merry, penniless band of actors, writers and producers for maximum comedy and lovable qualities.  These folk move in a rough and tumble Elizabethan England at the rapid, lively rhythm of any Shakespearean comedy.

The actors clearly relish their theatrical, over-the-top characters. Stand-outs include Marty Burt as the desperate producer Hemslowe, Jacob Sampson as the swashbuckling actor Ned Alleyn, Simon Henderson as the equally bombastic, self-adoring actor Burbridge, Josh MacDonald as the simpering Lord Chamberlain, Jim Fowler as the money-man Fennyman and Susan Stackhouse as Viola’s nurse.

Heck, every cast member is accomplished so I’ll name them all:  Wayne Burns as Marlowe, Kevin Curran as Lord Wessex, Andrew Chandler, Adrian Choong, Colby Conrad, Lisa Corey, Kya Mosey and Nathan Simmons.

The play is produced by a creative team of 11 including set and costume designer Joanna Yu, who does a remarkable job working in sepia browns of olden days with the marvellous exception of Queen Elizabeth’s stunning, red gown, lighting designer Jessica Lewis, choreographer Mary Lou Martin, fight director Karen Bassett and musical director Chuck Homewood —  the music being a lovely added layer.

Shakespeare in Love is based on the 1998 award-winning movie with its screenplay written by British playwright Tom Stoppard – which is why the movie and play are so literate – and American screenwriter Marc Norman.

It belongs to the canon of wonderful plays about theatre with lots of inside jokes, familiar stereotypes and a love for art, life and love. Neptune also presents Noises Off, a farce about staging a play, Feb. 26 to March 17.

Webb demonstrated his lineage on opening night  in bringing former artistic director Linda Moore and founding artistic director Leon Major on stage.

They are directors in The Lear Project, March 22 to 24, with Richard Donat.  Also for Shakespeare lovers is Hamlet by Below The Salt (Ken Schwartz and Jackie Torrens). Jan. 9 to 20. Torrens is Hamlet in an immersive production  in an Edwardian dining room.

shalan joudry, left, and Matthew Lumley perform in joudry’s fireside play Elapultiek, commissioned by Two Planks and a Passion Theatre, first staged at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, now touring Nova Scotia. (Macky Schwartz)

Being non-indigenous, the experience of seeing the Mi’kmaw play Elapultiek is both  illuminating and warming.

That’s not just because it’s told around a blazing fire with the croaking ravens, the wind, the trees and the stars echoing the play’s messages about land, culture and ecology.

It’s because playwright shalan joudry gives her audience a rare and true insight into Mi’kmaw culture as she portrays Nat, a young M’kmaw drum singer in conflict with Bill, a biologist counting endangered Chimney Swifts on disputed land.

As they meet on count nights, the two try to forge the vast cultural divide between the Mi’kmaw and Nova Scotia’s European descendants.

jodry’s quiet passion is clear in both her words and her acting as Nat,  who is feisty but  falters when the odds are stacked against her.

Matthew Lumley is endearing as the baffled and stodgy but kind Bill. The biologist has dedicated his whole life to species conservation and cannot believe he’s seeing someone talking to a fire.

Nat believes rocks are animate and that Euro-centric science can’t explain the world as well as her ancestors did.

Two Planks and a Passion Theatre commissioned joudry to write for its fireside stage and the company’s artistic director Ken Schwartz directs.

The one hour, 15-minute piece has the rhythm of a sacred ritual with the actors’ movements in the dark lit only by fire.

This effect is particularly lovely when Nat tells a story of the passing seasons with joudry prowling around the fire as a bear star.

Elapultiek  is a healing journey for its characters and its audience with a glimmer  of hope at the end.

When Nat questions if she can make any meaningful change, joudry throws that same question out to her audience.

Schwartz thinks this is the first full-length play by a Mi’kmaw writer commissioned by a Nova Scotia company. “We plan on touring this work again next year.”

Elapultiek (ehl-ah-bool-dee-egg) — “we are looking towards” —  plays Eskasoni tonight (Sept. 6), Millbrook (Sept. 7) and Kejimukujik National Park (Sept. 8, 8 p.m., The Campfire Circle in P2 Jeremy’s Bay Campground.)

joudry, who writes with humour and grace, is an oral storyteller and ecologist from the traditional district of Kespukwitk (southwestern Nova Scotia). She first worked with Two Planks and a Passion in 1998 in its production of Drew Hayden Taylor’s 400 km. She lives in L’sitkuk (Bear River First Nation).

“It’s a crucial time to have these conversations,” she says, in a press release. “The power of performance can engage audience in ways that moves them to ask more questions about the past and future.”

 

The cast of Shakespeare by the Sea’s Alice in Wonderland at Cambridge Battery, Point Pleasant Park. (Nick Harrison)

I have watched my little girl grow up watching Shakespeare by the Sea’s all-ages, comic variations on classic tales.

Now the company is 25 and she is 18 and living in Montreal. So this summer I took my Ontario great-nieces — eight and 13 – and my sister. I knew the show would be great but they were dubious. At the end the beaming kids  said, “Can we see more of their shows?”

Alice in Wonderland is a reprise of the company’s 2012 hit and a laugh-out-loud, musically-rich, high-energy comedy. The remarkably talented actors and singers totally invest themselves in the wacky world of Lewis Carroll, made even wackier here.

The show, directed by its first director Jesse MacLean, brings back 2012 audience favourites of Kathryn McCormack as The Mad Hatter, Simon Rainville as the White Rabbit and Tom Gordon Smith, who is so funny and wickedly imperial as The Queen of Hearts.

This production is blessed with the golden-voiced Melissa MacGougan as Alice, who plays the imaginative, adventure-seeking heroine as an earnest, genuinely perplexed, ultimately savvy 12-year-old. (She has a wonderful soprano voice for hitting some tricky notes.)

As is usual in these popular, collectively-created adaptations of children’s classics, Alice   is full of rapid-fire, contemporary references from the Brady Bunch to the movie Bodyguard that may go over kids’ heads but leave adults like my sister in stitches.

The show moves so fast and with so much energy, talent, dance and song that it doesn’t matter if a child doesn’t know or understand all the references, or hasn’t read both Alice books. However, it’s richer if you do; for instance, the giant Cheshire grin rising like a moon makes more sense.

Told by four cards singing barbershop harmonies and making tons of puns, the play has a wonderful, purple-clad, somewhere-between-helpful-and-menacing, Cheshire cat in Peter Sarty, a jazzy caterpillar split in two performed by McCormack and Jade Douris,  a sweet, sleepy Dormouse (also played by Douris) and a great manifestation of the multi-eyed and truly scary Jabberwocky.

This is a showperson’s piece complete with jazz hands.

Alice in Wonderland, with its award-nominated score created by Jeremy Hutton and fantastic, detailed costumes, runs to Sept. 1 at 7 p.m. at Cambridge Battery with indoor matinees at 1 p.m. at Park Place Theatre.  You can reserve in advance if you wish online (http://www.shakespearebythesea.ca/index.html).
Great-niece Illyanna Ellis with the Cheshire Cat (Peter Sarty) and the Mad Hatter (Kathryn McCormack).