"Things are like they should have been here."

The character in Mike McPhee's play, Now-Nothing, is talking about Alberta, the promised land of mountains, clean air, and pure water, where well paying jobs abound, nobody knows you're a recovering junkie, you don’t have to twist yourself into a Celtic caricature to amuse the cruise ship visitors, and you don’t have to sell pain meds you stole from little old ladies howling in pain at death's door in the final crush of their cancer.

Wendy (Yvette Rogers) is the substance abuser, fresh out of rehab; Derrick (Michael Taylor) is the would be entrepreneur preparing for a sales pitch, and Bernadette (Erin Gillis) is the home care worker switching her patients' "oxy" with Tylenol. They live in a trailer in Glace Bay. Their brother, Danny (Mike McPhee), made it off island only to become a small time thug. But he has the connections to sell the drugs which makes him something of a saviour.

It’s a simple plan: sell the drugs, use the money to leave Cape Breton and all will be good. If you can achieve good by doing bad.

The play deliberately slaps in the face all the familiar clichés about Cape Breton: familiar songs are used ironically, bleakly; the family is not only shattered, the memory of abusive parents continually stomps on the pieces; and the rubic of "better to be poor in Cape Breton than anywhere else" is tossed in the gutter.

The language is brutal: every second word begins with "f", but that's the way these characters would normally talk. More disturbing is the moral awareness they have; they know they are performing criminal acts, they are hurting other people, but the alternative is to give up any dream of success they might have desperately nutured.

The cast was excellent: Michael Taylor, most familiar locally from his work with Improv U, shows a tough side that, without his trademark dreadlocks, belies by his baby face looks. His character's participation is motivated by his desire to rescue his sisters from the dead end of remaining in Cape Breton. Taylor expertly conveys the conflict of a young man torn between being society's straight arrow and helping his family.

Erin Gillis, last seen another but totally opposite family play The Feast Of St. Nicholas (which I directed), gave a strong dynamic performance: she says she's torn about taking the painkillers but there is an unacknowledged selfishness to her character that Gillis lets out without overplaying it. She's also a great actress to watch listening to other actors: she remains in the scene and reacts in character.

Yvette Rogers, a talented singer and songwriter, captured the vulnerability of Wendy, desperately trying to stay clean and sober in an environment that insists on knocking her off her mission. She also had a sympathetic motherly side that made the audience connect with her character. Although she had some problems with vocal projection, not an uncommon problem for new actors, she remained a strong presence throughout.

McPhee, as an actor, is a magnetic presence on stage: he can be charming, funny, vulnerable, and in a flash, full of menace. His Danny is the snake in the garden of Eden: quit your whining and just bite the apple is his pitch. McPhee and Taylor have a great climatic scene together that recalls some of the best Sam Shepard.

As director and playwright, McPhee cannot be faulted except for, out of necessity, having to take on perhaps one too many jobs; although he did excellent work overall, once or twice a scene could have been more tightly focused. The characters are well defined on the page and on the stage, and he used the intimate space of The Upstairs to immense advantage. (Performing in a bar lent the play a gritty authenticity, even if it lowered the audience capacity to about 30). Although unrelentingly grim, nothing about the play seemed gratuitous: well, except for the ironic use of trademark Cape Breton tunes (but that could just be me).

Now-Nothing is a production of the Cape Breton Stage Company and was staged at the Upstairs on Ferry Street, within spitting distance of the Tar Pond, as a part of their mission to bring live theatre back to downtown Sydney. They’ve done outdoor theatre and "fringe" theatre; this is their most mature work yet in three years of shows. Some people might prefer the warm and fuzzy stuff more, but this work, bleak, downbeat, and profanely funny, speaks directly about the darkness in the hearts, not just of Cape Bretoners, but all people. It deserves another, longer run in front of audiences ready to be challenged by theatre uncompromising in its honesty and its anger and its truth.

Panda mimes, chance meetings, ex-boyfriend "statues", 40 short scenes, and a philosophical smoke break were the five theatre pieces all based on one song that made up Notes 2, the latest offering from the Cape Breton Stage Company at the Lyceum last week.

Last year, the Stage Company staged the first Notes with three plays based on three songs by local songwriters in the "round room" at the Sydney Civic Center. They had a packed house every night and one of the pieces, a dramatic/comedic improv-ed monologue by Aaron Corbett, was restaged as a longer piece in the fall.

This year, all of the pieces were based on one song, "Days and Days" by Colette Deveaux, who opened the evening with a strong performance of her tune.

Despite being a novice mime, Wayne McKay did a fine job as Panda Mime, who, in a series of scenes interspersed throughout the other pieces, grew from infancy to old age, learned to juggle, fell in love, became a father, all the while finding companionship in his "reflection", played by Aaron Corbett. It was a simply executed piece, becoming more focused as it went along, a welcome diversion between the other pieces.

"Flawed Links" was another wordless piece created and directed by Allison Cann. Jennifer Cormier was a problem drinker, Ron Newcombe was her frustrated boyfriend, and Maura Lea Morykot and Kyra Foulds (real life mom and daughter) were a mom and young daughter facing hard economic choices. The piece suggested that when one door closes, another opens, and was effectively and expressively performed by the four actors (especially the young Ms. Foulds). The acting was fine enough to render the explanatory placards unnecessary.

"One Goodbye", a short silent film by Keith Morrison, concerned a loving couple who break up but one partner finds it impossible not hold onto some mementoes, especially a particularly grisly one. "Is he a statue?" one younger member of the audience piped up as the fate of one character was revealed. Yes, young man, yes he was a statue with its eyes wide open and a cord twisted around its neck. Excellent acting by Ashley MacLeod and Kevin MacNeil as the happy couple was expertly lensed by Morrison, who is a founding member of the Cape Breton Filmmakers' Association.

"40 Short Scenes", by the members of Improv U, James F. W. Thompson, Brent Martin, Michael Taylor, and Lindsay Thompson, broke the silence by taking each line of Deveaux's song and creating a short scene from it, usually less than 30 seconds long. And a line like "he was a boy anachronism" just screams comedy; well, it did. The piece had the funky throw everything at the wall and see what sticks appeal of an improv comedy game. Maybe they can use it in their upcoming show happening this Saturday, February 28, at 7 pm at The Royal Bank lecture theatre at Cape Breton University.

The final piece "Smoke Break" was an old fashioned play with characters and dialogue that almost seemed quaint after the experimentation that preceded it. But in some ways it was the strongest piece for it. Three co-workers huddle outside for their smoke break and worry about a fellow smoker that inspired them to consider how they came to be where they are. By the end of the break, they have all made life altering decisions. Kristin Petite, Lori Kelly and Michael Taylor (again) gave well defined performances and were well directed by Erin Gillis, who with the cast, created the script.

The Stage Company has made its mandate to bring theatre back to downtown Sydney, finding appropriate spaces, like in the Civic Center and the Lyceum or Charlotte Street parking lots, to perform in.

Although Sydney has many large venues, like Centre 200, the Membertou Convention Centre, and the Marine Terminal Pavillion, it does not have any medium sized spaces, about the size of the CBU Boardmore Playhouse, in its downtown. Their hope, shared by a number of other people in the local arts community, is that if they create an audience, the need for an appropriate venue will become obvious to other community leaders.

Having a downtown arts center, with a performance space, art gallery and maybe a book and gift shop, might help in reviving the city's downtown, which, as it stands now, virtually shuts down in the evening with the exception of a few bars and clubs. A discussion sponsored by CBU a couple of weeks ago between university officials and invited guests seemed to suggest the university might take the lead in this effort. I think CBU can be a partner in this project but the Cape Breton Regional Municipality needs to seriously consider this idea as well.

Years from now, hundreds of people will be saying they were there for the first three nights of Waiting For Dad and only about 90 of them won't be lying.

But it'll be like Woodstock, you'll have to say you were there or you won't be cool.

Aaron Corbett's one man play, almost completely improvised on the spot on each night of its brief run, was always gut splitting funny and, at times, moving.

Aaron's character, Timmy, is a boy of divorced parents: he and his mother live in an inner city apartment pinching pennies while his dad lives in a pricey suburb with his new girlfriend. His mom drops him off at Dad's and speeds off before making sure Timmy makes it safe inside. The lights are out and nobody is answering Timmy's frantic knocking, so Timmy strikes up a conversation with a neighbour's dog.

After this brief introduction, Aaron quickly turned to his audience for material. Using a "soft, safe" yellow ball, which he tossed out into the audience, trying to make the invisible fetch it back, he took a suggestion from whomever caught it. Haircuts, first kisses, Santa Claus, and Barack Obama, school bullies, and, of course, that nagging suspicion maybe you're not Mom and Dad's first priority any more were offered up as starting points or became punchlines.

For something that spent most of its time skirting an abyss of tragedy, the three shows were always funny, often in a weird stream of consciousness kind of way: Mom rips up the hardwood floor to get at the moldy carpet underneath, a Boy Scout troop leader who dresses up as a bear to ambush his little charges in order to toughen them up, the trip to Santa becomes a dream visit to an outer space shopping mall where Timmy line jumps a group of aliens to sit on the knee of a Santa with somewhat menacing laugh, a riff on the manliness of Mohawk haircuts, a monster under the bed that taunts Timmy by calling out the boy's shoe size.

But always the stories circled back to his parents and the infuriatingly comic way they manage to sabotage Timmy's self worth. To be honest, the only one over the three nights that didn't work for me was the Barack riff and mostly because it strayed too far away from the Mom/Dad/Timmy relationship.

Because The Cape Breton Stage Company asked me to play guitar while the audience came in, I got to see all three shows and watched it evolve. The most interesting difference over the run was watching Aaron's performance style become more physical: The first night was like an assured stand up show, but the next two nights Aaron acted out more of the stories, making the bare dark wood floor and white stone wall of the St. Patrick's Church Museum on Sydney's Esplanade into a suburban lawn, a boy's bedroom, a basement party, and an alien mall.

He wrestled, slow danced, did home repairs, bounced on his bed, fished, and made Timmy's imaginary world a very real place. It reminded me a lot of Daniel MacIvor's one man play, House, but taken one step further by being re-imagined anew every night.

I know that each night's performance was recorded and may hopefully end up on YouTube or somewhere and it can better convey Aaron's accomplishment than my faltering descriptions.

And you'll be able to use it to bolster your claim that you were there. Just make sure you don't confuse those three shows with any material from the Waiting For Dad World Tour.

Doing an outdoor fringe festival in August must have struck the organizers at the Cape Breton Stage Society as a no-brainer.

It's Action Week, after all, when the weather has traditionally been hot and sunny.

So why was I standing in Wentworth Park in the drizzle wearing the clothes I usually don for unseasonably cool Octobers?

Because I was attending the dress rehearsal of six of the eight plays in the second Cape Breton Fringe Festival during some of the abyssmally aweful weather I can remember.

Around me, huddled on tarps on the grass or standing under umberellas and blankets, were the performers and directors of the other finge showing watching The River, the first one act play written by my friend Maura Lea Morykot. After The River, we were heading up Charlotte Street to the two other outdoor venues for the dresses of the remaining shows.

It would be wrong for me to review Maura Lea's show since I had been one of a circle of friends she consulted during its composition. I can say the four actors, Adrienne Collins as the young woman who falls in love with her doomed soulmate, Eric Letcher as the conflicted poet, Stephanie Johnstone as the friend with some Mi'Kmaq wisdom to impart, and Walter Carey as the poet's brother, all did excellent work under difficult circumstances.

It was cold and gloomy and they had pretend it was a bright and sunny spot on the Mira. Behind them, the children's fountain was a-gurgling, children were a-shrieking, the fountains in the middle of duck pond contributed a steady ambient wall of white noise, and there was a guy from CBC-Radio trailing them around recording their performance (and sometimes getting between them and their audience). Nevertheless, I gradually bought into their little world.

After the River, our merry little band trekked up to the parking lot next to the Canada Post depot for three more shows.

With the exterior walls of the surrounding buildings acting as sounding boards, the actors had a better chance to be heard and the paved lot would have made a slightly better acting surface than wet grass except for the rain puddles dotting the area.

The Best Game You Can Name, written by Erin Gillis and Wayne McKay, and directed by Gillis, is a short funny kinetic piece about a road hockey playing gang of best buds (Michael Taylor, Garrett Sears, Collette Deveau) who can't figure out why one of their group would give all that up to be in, of all things, a play. At least, one of them muses, it's about guys calling each names and cutting pounds of flesh off each other, which sounds cool. One of the character's homophobia gets the worst of him and leaves the others to decide how they want to play their next round.

The four actors gave equally strong performances and Erin directed them well in their playing area.

Lado Di Strata (Side of the Road), was written and directed by Jenn Tubrett had a very large prop: a car that supposedly overheated stranding its four passengers on the side of the road. What was supposed to be a pleasant to the country (with an agoraphoblic under a blanket in the backseat) turns nasty when one of the young women discovers the other young woman has slept with her boyfriend. PG-13 words are exchanged.

Tubrett's play in last year's fringe was an ambitious revenge melodrama that needed some focusing. This short snappy comedy of sexual manners hit all its beats, delivered a high quota of laughs, and got back on the road and off the stage before it had exhausted its premise. Her cast, Ashley Harding, Will Bonnar, Walter Carey, and Tubrett herself gave bold, assured performances.

Keith Morrison's script, The Bicycle, turned an everyday incident, an elderly lady clipped by a flustered cyclist, into a philosophical black comedy. Directed by Jonothan Colins with a slightly maniacal edginess, it confidently navigated between slapstick pratfalls and high flown rhetorical jibber-jabber (although a long windy section on the nature of blame could use some pruning).

I have an outdated cast list but I think I recognized Greg Wadden as the cyclist, Chris Doucette as the cop, Clayton D'Orsay as a lawyer, and Wayne McKay as the victim's son. I must recognize, Amy D'Orsay, the valiant young actress who spent almost the entire play immoblie on the ground as the accident victim.

Next, we marched up the block and across Charlotte Street to the lot between the Bank of Nova Scotia and the Finishing Touch Center. We had been out in the drizzle and damp for two hours and were beginning to resemble a group of bedraggled refugees. But we perservered: we had our mission-to give our viewing support to the final two shows.

First was Nine Characters In Search Of A Vogue, an experimental piece in genre acting as nine movie types from different film styles and eras go on a quest for a new home after their old moviehouse has been demolished. The young cast (Wesley Colford, Nicole MacDougall, David Hutchins, Neil Spencer, Colin Spencer, Tyler Popwell, David Dobson, Scott Cuzner, and Kristin Petit) all created vivid characters and gave huge Cinema-scope sized performances. Their quest could have used a bit more focus but it's impossible to be hard on a play that ends with Jason of the Friday the 13th horror franchise giving a heartfelt inspirational speech.

After almost three hours, we came at last to The Problem by A. R. Gurnery, the only published piece presented, and a wry, funny chamber comedy of a WASP couple confronting the tepidness of their lovelife. It was concisely directed by first timer Don Clark and adroitly played Jeff Bushnik and a talented young actress whose name I can't relate, because there were no programs and I forgot to ask, and to whom I sincerely apologize for this oversight. The play itself was like a strong shot of brandy after a long, many coursed meal.

These were dress rehearsals and in most cases the first time the casts got to work in their assigned spaces. Any problems with entrances and exits, being heard, audience positioning, and the occasional dropped line, I'm sure will be fixed by the time they return to their "stages" this evening. There were two shows, Crumbs of Culture, a dance piece, and Cop Life, about a police shooting, that were not performed because of scheduling conflicts.

Last year's Fringe had three plays at one venue over three nights. This year, they have eight shows at three locations over three nights (they also had a festival of short films which I'll discuss in my next blog). Next year, I hope they have more shows, more nights, more venues, and more people flocking to see them have at it.

And for next year, and for this year as well, I wish them blue skies and dry ground.

On Friday, February 22, I caught the first night in a two night run of Notes, three one-act plays presented by The Cape Breton Stage Company in the "Round Room" on the Boardwalk level of Sydneys' Civic Centre.

I was extremely happy to see the place packed with audience members who, like me, were entertained, challenged, and intrigued by the three plays, all based on original songs by local songwriters. I was impressed with how the Company had converted the space into a playhouse with risers creating an intimate amphitheatre around the floor level stage area. I would have liked a program to give praise where praise was earned, but that's life on the cutting edge of theatre. But the nature of how the plays were created, a song used as the basis of a collaborative written script with a polish by a writer (or maybe a couple of writers) then interpreted by a director, would have made a program a complicated document. So please excuse any omissions and mis-identifications.

The first play, directed by Mike McPhee and based on a song by Yvette Rogers, concerned a family of sisters, particularly an older sister (Serena MacDonald) at odds with her younger sister (Erin Gillis), and their problems with miscommunication and non-communication. It was funny, insightful, and memorable and proved that James FW Thompson, who is credited with the script, can write strong female characters.

The middle piece was an improvised monologue by actor/songwriter/playwright Aaron Corbett inspired by a tune by Wayne McKay was a hilarious and scary peek into the mind of a near adolescent boy as he waits for his dismissive dad to realize he is outside of his house waiting in vain for the two of them to go on a camping trip. Except for a few pre-planned observations, Corbett made the whole thing up on the spot in a virtuoso performance. He should take it on the road to our fine nation's many fringe festivals.

The final play, inspired by a song by Aaron Corbett, directed by Wayne McKay and scripted by Walter Carey, was a fractured girl meets boy tale where the potential couple breaks up over a squabble about the negative nutritional value of romaine lettuce and the girl's frequent visions of being attacked by a giant potato head while a slinky belly dancer unsuccessfully tries to protect her. Wayne, who is a friend, seemed disappointed that I didn't think it was the weirdest thing he's ever done. Remember Wayne I was there that cold spring day performing with you and some friends on Glace Bay's Senator's Corner to promote another of your productions as the cars whizzed by. This play was fun and thought provoking even if its meaning was somewhat elusive and inconclusive (not necessarily bad things in theatre, in my opinion). The juxtaposition of the fairly naturalistic love story with the fantasy elements was a bold stroke but the actual nightmares themselves seemed to me a bit repetitive and longish, something more might have happened in them.

That said, I was happy to have seen all of the shows and look forward to their next project. I also applaud the Company's mandate to bring theatre to downtown Sydney, especially during the week when the fate of the old Vogue movie house sparked debate about its immenent destruction to make way for an office tower.

First off, sorry about the length of this blog entry but I felt the occasion deserved more than a passing mention.

With a lot of anticipation I attended the opening night of the first Cape Breton Fringe Festival presented by the Cape Breton Stage Society at Christ Church Hall on Friday, August X, and I was not disappointed by the evening's performances. I did not think everything I saw on stage worked but I thought all of the participants caught the take a chance and challenge the audience spirit of what a fringe festival is.

I went to the Halifax Fringe Festival in 2000 with Frank MacKenzie as part of the cast of David Mamet's "The Duck Variations" directed by Bernard MacKinnon. We had performed it at the (then) UCCB Dramagroup's One Act Play Festival and Bernie thought it would fun to take the show up to Halifax. We weren't the only group from UCCB at the Fringe that year, my friend Aaron Corbett also brought his original one act play, Life After Minimum Wage up to Halifax.

The Halifax Fringe that year featured a varied lot of venues: the studio stage at Neptune Theatre (a community group doing an adaptation of the Players' scenes from Twelfth Night), the lecture theatre at the Science Center (a funny one woman show about love, longing and 80's music idol Corey Hart), and recently closed private art gallery where they had turned the lights back on but not the water (Aaron's play shared this space with an incredibly funny play about two gay men trying to ingratiate themselves into "proper" gay society). The Duck Variations was in The Khyber, an arts center on Barrington Street in a former ball room on the second floor.

Audiences for all of the shows varied in size but there wasn't a single lazy performance in the whole week of I attended. In fact there was an intensity to the work that was intoxicating. I returned home wondering why, with the abundant theatre talent we have locally, Sydney could not host its own Fringe Festival.

And now at last we do. Thank you, Cape Breton Stage Society.

That said, the three plays were of varying ambitiousness and varying interest.

Doug MacAulay is a New Waterford actor/director/playwright, currently studying at the National Theatre school and he offered the first play of the evening, Waiting For Whom?, a satiric exploration of theatrical conventions and tensions built around a quartet of actors preparing for a performance of Beckett's Waiting For Godot.

I was directed by Doug in another of his original scripts, The Clouds That Veil The Moon, a kind of Tarantino re-write of a Greek tragedy, and if tomorrow he asked me to be another of his shows, I'd do it. But just not this one.

I found the script overlong and a little too impressed with its own cleverness. With character names like Attic, Calcus, Koragus, and Lyric, we know we're deep into Symbolania. (The last production of Godot I saw was performed by five guys named Todd, Mike, Kelly, Maynard and Michael.) Some of the jokes worked ("$50 per scene!") but a lot didn't (after a twenty minute wait after its set up, my suspicion that the "climax" of the play would be a Bleu Nuit punchline was confirmed). And if you insist on dragging an audience member onstage in an attempt to shatter the fourth wall, at least give them something funny to do, as any improv comedy group would tell you. (And speaking of conventions, why is the fourth wall always the one between the players and the audience? Why don't they try to find out what alternate universe lays behind the back wall of the set? Or either of the side walls? Or the fourth ceiling? Or the fourth floor?)

Doug as director ably served the hit or miss script well. He elicited strong performances from the well cast foursome (and even provided a well turned cameo himself as a beleaguered stage manager.) With few technical resources, he kept the play going at a brisk pace, but, where it was supposed to going is anybody's guess.

Christian Young, as Attic, stood out from a uniformly strong cast. Wound a couple of turns too tight, Young was a portrait of actorly anxieties. Jon Jon Collins as Koragus, the fussbudget director, was also a compelling presence. Adrienne MacIntosh, as Calcus, made the best of the evening’s funniest line ("Scene!") and Stephanie Johnson, as Lyric, was, like her castmates, full of energy and conviction.

As a final criticism, for a play that sought to challenge theatrical conventions, it missed, or more accurately, half missed the most obvious one. Beckett, during his lifetime and through his literary executors after his death, forbade any of Godot's characters being played by female actors. He had nothing against women performers-he wrote any number of iconic female roles-but he had a definite idea of how he wanted his play to be performed. There were two fine young women in this production but Beckett's injunction against their presence went unremarked. Maybe that's an idea for a play: a troupe of renegade female actors trying to perform an outlawed all female production of Godot just one step ahead of the theatre police.

Dick's, a modest sex comedy by Walter Carey and directed by Mark Penny, was an amusing froth and closet in spirit to the plays I remember from the Halifax fringe. A studious nerd and a horny jock share an apartment. The nerd stays home to cram for a math exam while the jock hatches a plan to attend a male strip night at a local bar pretending to be gay to hook up with any easily fooled female who, juiced up on the onstage male striptease, would want to cap the night off by "turning" a gay man straight. This hare brained plot works and the jock brings two giggling honeys. The next morning, when they discover they have been duped, they concoct an amusing revenge while tempting the nerd to loosen up a bit.

Carey's script was cute and funny, and managed to be sexy without being lewd. Krysta Tynski and Danielle McKinnon as the young women had a confidence and intelligence that played against conventional expectations for their characters. Justin Dauphinee and Kevin MacNeil as the male half of the cast were a perfect pairing of jock and nerd and you actually believed that despite their differences they were friends.

Penny directed with a sure touch and kept the pacing nimble from start to finish, although an extended reference to Rocky III at the end seemed unnecessary and a bit self-indulgent. But it also did not overstay its welcome.

Tragedia di Vendetta, the final offering of the evening, was a full blooded melodrama set just after the Second World War and written and directed by Jennifer Tubrett. The plot resembles a verse from the J. Geils tune, Love Stinks, he loves her, she loves somebody else, so he brings home his psychotic war buddy to do her in. There is also another thwarted love obsession thrown in the mix. There are a lot of plot and emotional complications and Tubrett as writer and director did well in keeping them well explained for the audience. I read an earlier version of the script that had a clumsier ending where one of the characters addressed the audience to explain what happened after the denouement. The new version is more tidier and bloodier and should have gone the extra step by killing the one remaining totally unsympathetic character still standing.

This is the stuff of high opera and the cast, to their credit, played it that way. They also worked well as an ensemble: Wayne McKay as the troubled jealous Charles, Stephanie Johnson as his troubled adulterous wife Gloria, Mark Penny as their troubled lady killer friend Gabriel, Ainsley Doyle as Gloria's troubled meddling friend Lillian, and Zach Dunford as Jack, Charles' war comrade who is untroubled about just being trouble.

There were some anachronisms in the script (men in the 1940's didn't "bond", and the phrase "perfect ten" didn't come along until the 1980's) and Jack's space age athletic shoes were not exactly G.I. issue. Also, as much as I found Dunford's performance compulsively watchable, in terms of plot development, his character as the instrument of Charles's revenge was superfluous. An unnecessary fifth character, again no matter how well played, sapped Charles's character of some its urgency, served to prolong an already protracted climax (with a clunky halt in the action for some exposition), and used up floor space in a set already occupied by four characters in a life and death struggle and a lot of period furniture.

Despite my criticisms, I applaud the first season of The Cape Breton Fringe Festival. I take its work seriously so I won't condescend in my comments. I look forward to the 2008 edition. I hope it prospers and expands: more works from more artists from on and off the island, more nights, more venues, more raves, more controversies, more excitement, more recognition of how fortunate we are to have such a deep pool of stage talent committed to making compelling theatre.

See you next year.

(...)

A week later, I was back outdoors on Hospital Hill, the site of the former City Hospital, to see Wayne MacKay's production of Eddie In The Ditch, a (very) loose adaptation of Oedipus Rex. At a very early point in this show's evolution (back when it was still a Greek tragedy complete with eye gouging), I was part of the cast but had to withdraw for family reasons. Watching this energetic and funny social satire, I kind of wished I had been able to stick with it but that would have meant rehearsing in the summer and that sucks.

Hospital Hill, which many of the residents living around it had been fighting to keep as a green area, is in the process of being bulldozed in preparation for the construction of housing units. So to get to the playing area, one had to walk around mountainous piles of old concrete and rusty rebar. It was very bleak in a retro 1960's happening kind of way. At the playing area, the players performed on a flat piece of grass with a backdrop of trees that bordered a bubbling brook that burbled at the bottom of a steep drop. There were also, somewhere in those trees, an unseen chorus of male and the occasional female voices conversing in loud tones that were not part of the show but provided a coarse mouthed commentary that harkened back to the play's Greek origins. At least, that's what I told myself as I tried to filter out their jabber and concentrate on the play.

The play itself was preceded by a short round of improv games which lightened the tone of the evening (along with the setting sun, cool breezes and bug attacks). One game, party quirks, I particularly enjoyed since it gave me the opportunity to select a character for singer/songwriter/actor/musician/director/playwright/barhound Aaron Corbett. "Mike Holmes" I hollered out. "Who?" Aaron said. "Get a TV, you Luddite," I riposted. "Luddite?" Aaron countered. "Get a dictionary," I said. So Aaron's character in the game was a dictionary. But my new favorite game, and one I'm itching to play, is Half-Life where the same skit is performed once and then repeated three times with smaller time limits: it starts with 2 minutes, then one minute, then thirty seconds, and concludes with a ten second version.

Eddie In The Ditch itself was well adapted and well played if at times a bit too preachy about not judging outsiders without knowing their life's journey. Down and out Eddie Pouce, played by Dave Boutilier, staggers into the playing area and finally collapses in a drunken stupor in a ditch. The other players set about portraying of his life led him to this fate, with James F.W. Thompson as Eddie, Jennifer Tubrett as his abused mom, Erin Gillis as his whiny sister, Lindsay Thompson as a narrator, writer/director Wayne MacKay as drummer, and a male actor whose name escapes right now (and my apologies for that) playing Eddie's abusive father and weird uncle, and Aaron Corbett as a variety of inanimate objects. It was a strong tight ensemble performance intelligently and inventively directed by MacKay that balanced the drama of the human tragedy with some absurdist comedy: in fact, never has an a cappella version of Lou Reed's Take a Walk On The Wild Side been put to better theatrical use.

Eddie In The Ditch was another effort by the newly formed Cape Breton Stage Society which also presented the Fringe Festival during Action Week. Most of them (whose names I can remember) are friends and former castmates from other productions I have been a part of, so I naturally support any and all of their efforts while trying to be objective about the merits of the actual shows. That said, our little corner of Cape Breton has a rich theatrical tradition that ranges from the mammoth Broadway musicals of the legendary Rotary Shows to challenging original scripts performed in any venue cheap enough to be rented (like Angus MacLean's Northend and Attic). Purely out of personal preference I've always pulled for the smaller scrappier original shows. They face tougher odds in just getting onstage and, once there, endure the mostly good natured jibes of the local theatrical community (a hazard in any small community) or what is harder to bear the indifference of the larger population. But yet they soldier on. So CB Stage Society, let me know what your fall and winter schedule is when it's ready because I want to spread the word.