DJ’s Reviews - FringeMTL 2025
A PAISLEY MIND
While lost and looking for a Fringe venue, I met someone who was in the same position. As we ventured around the Fringe campus looking for our stage, he asked which shows I was seeing. When I said A Paisley Mind, he replied that the show had been extremely well-received and it would most likely end up being at the top of my list. A bold statement from a stranger.
The stage at the Studio Valcourt of the Montreal Musical Conservatory was certainly less of a fly-by-night Fringe set up and the return to theatrical standards suited the work itself. The set was a sparse bedroom, the mood and temporal displacement created through lighting. Cool blue illuminated the present of Marie-Claire’s old age, in a nursing home, while a warm yellow recalled her life as an adult woman dealing with a troubled marriage, and another as early adolescence where she met her “different friend,” the Anglo Florence. Gabrielle Banville’s character of Marie-Claire shrank or grew dependent on the memory she was recalling between her elderly self slipping into dementia, as a young mother and wife, and as a girl growing up in Saint-Boniface, the daughter of summer resort owners.
Gabrielle Banville, writer and artist behind Half Twin Theatre’s A Paisley Mind was deeply evocative of a twentieth century Québecoise woman, trying her best throughout her life to find joy, do as she should, and take care of those closest to her despite their poor reception of her actions and intentions. At the heart of this work is the Half Twin Theatre’s mandate to tell the stories of “forgotten” women: that long-lost queer love story of mid-century before the protections for (at least lesbian and gay) people in Quebec came into effect in the late seventies. Although the law may have banned discrimination, we know social parameters of acceptability aren’t so quick to shift.
The play was recently reworked after its first run in 2022, and the polish on the show was clear. Banville’s work as Marie-Claire is exceptional, and I could hear notable sniffles in the audience throughout the piece, with myself included. The writing shifted between Marie-Claire’s selves, gracefully responsive to cultural and personal changes in its bilingualism, a great example of what the surface of our province’s language tension can look like without having to go too deeply into the origins. This pointed remark about Québec’s unique position in the world also had me imagining the homophobia still present in rural areas of the province, far away from the Village, and especially the Fringe. For stronger impact, the writing could deliver the exposition about the "friend" being her true love with more subtlety, allowing it to unfold as a whisper in the narrative rather than an explicit shout in the beginning. A tearjerker to be sure, I cannot resist the lost love of those not understood by the mainstream, and this was a window into a world that as an Anglo, I have rarely glimpsed.
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COLONIAL CIRCUS
A length of vermillion fabric stretches out between two clowns on stage as low -register chants intensify. Two clowns move, wrapped and contained in the fabric, concealed in red. They halt at the front of the stage before raising a Ken doll at the midpoint of the fabric, poking their own heads up, establishing the supremacy of Christianity as they cajole the audience to make animal noises, and immediately respond to it with a call of “SAVAGES!”
Clowns Sachin Sharma and Shreya Parashar shake up history with their impudent, explosive, and synchronous work in titanium whiteface, with the rouged cheeks of old aristocracy, their tall bonnets making an excellent substitute for towering wigs. Watching the two on stage, the development of this show is apparent in their trusting bodies, and facial exchanges between them and the audience: a deep understanding of each other and a willingness to revise and reproduce memories and experiences of a Eurocentric history. The pastiche claimed British experience, but pulled from all Early Modern history. The set was sparse, but poignant artifacts are pulled out with aplomb. The clowns sip tea with spit takes provided by a spray bottle, too visible to the audience to contribute to a willing suspension of disbelief.
The reversals in the show stack atop each other in a knowing, if not somewhat dizzying, display of sharp wit that doesn’t rely on virtue signalling or painfully self-aware revisionisms.
I respect the tradition of clowning but something makes me want to see those overly sentimental creatures suffer for their innocence, call it cynicism. But the naïveté of the clown Pierrot is only one of the many characters that populate the centuries of commedia dell’arte. This Italianate art form was spun on its ear in Colonial Circus. The origins are all important, and at the same time they don’t fucking matter. While commedia dell’arte may be a clowning performance tradition from Italy, the show reverses Columbus' journey. The white-faced clowns, travelling from an imaginary British cultural space, mean to travel to America in search of spices, and instead finding themselves in India, where the spice is too strong and the perfect cuppa is ruined. While the historicity is at times a mélange that could be clarified, this opacity is intentional, pointed to the imperialism of multiple European nations.
Colonial Circus has already won awards at Toronto and Orlando Fringes and it makes sense: through the easy fun on stage, historical heaviness is transformed through silly and pertinent points that allow for growth while posing questions about ongoing colonialisms. The last moment on stage, the two pose to hold an oversized watermelon slice in silence as the final spot lights them up. Clowns getting serious can still play, and sometimes seriousness needs a spit take or two to push its point all the way home.
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Plan V: The Rise of Reverence
Set in 2035, Plan V: The Rise of Reverence is immediately the most tech-forward of the Fringe shows that I’ve seen. Eleanor O’Brien’s use of multimedia in her work is impressive, and Plan V is prepped to go global. O’Brien uses projection, as well as a vinyl backdrop that is Insta-ready to set the stage. Clever and cunt-forward from the start, Plan V is a techno-feminist paean to what could be possible with the embrace of the “full sensory fold” of irl connection between humans cumming together in reverence of divine pussy.
The show skillfully avoids pitfalls of full biological essentialism by using pussy as an umbrella term, cheekily turning the old universal masculine (like mankind, for example) inside out to include the “penis people” in divinity as well.
Plan V rolls out as half infomercial, half support group with the one-woman cast playing an impressive array of characters, in the double digits, both “online” and onstage. Mama V introduces the show in a pink velour tracksuit and a conspicuous cameltoe as she goes through the “Fecundamentals” and slogans like “Pleasure Shared is Pleasure Squared.”
O’Brien definitely charmed the audience with her southern purr, and talk of the “spiritual pussy, the inner pussy and the Great Cosmic Cunt” of it all, bringing the audience into a potential future.
The background to the revolution is, of course, the continual feminist hope that we can turn away from toxic patriarchal sexual consumption, but it is rooted in the very concrete emergence of Eve Ensler (now “V”) and her cultural touchstone of the Vagina Monologues in the 90s. In a world close to our own, where #MeToo exposed whole lifetimes of sexual trauma, and the turn to fascism in the United States threatens everyone, Eleanor O’Brien poses pussy worship as reverence, as resistance.
The eventual danger of the movement’s “location” becoming disclosed threatened at the door, leaving an unsuspecting Plan V acolyte to handle the trouble on her own. In the age of doxxing, swatting and general cyberterrorism, the narrative darts in and out of life, but felt forced after a long character exposition that was supposed to demonstrate the power of Plan V, but ended up relying on the charm and energy funnelled into the first thirty minutes of the show to carry it to the climax.
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SHUTTLECOCK
The bare set was illuminated by the clerestory windows high up in the La Grande Chappelle in Cité-des-Hospitaliers, little more than black fabric strung up around the corners of the elevated stage and high altar table. The chapel, in opposition, ornate in its medieval, Byzantine style, dwarfed the people sitting in the pews. The nave served as the entrance for both viewers and the artist who was about to greet us.
The development of the semi-scripted show must have been site-specific as the chapel (and the Church itself) served as both a backdrop and background subject within, providing both a basic historical background for the artist, and a space of highly creative irreverence with which she entertained the crowd. The artist, Melissa G, wove her Italian, Catholic background into her work, and references to her heritage and family members in the audience were replete within the 50-minute show. More than a few utterances of “cover your ears,” or “I warned you,” were heard.
G, the writer/director/performer powerhouse, asks some very millenial questions: In a life that is just now seeming to belong to me, how do I decide what to do in the face of looming deadlines, tick tick ticking towards the factory default setting of biological human reproduction. Do I even want children? How do I make the most of my life when I feel like it just started?
While the artist invited all members of the audience to “help” her get pregnant with an inclusive call of “You don’t have to have the sperm, you just need to know where to get it,” her stated queer coming out served as more of a weightless marker than a narrative anchor. While anyone was invited to participate, other modes of family-making or queer kinship were not addressed, with biology serving as the ultimate family defining mode (despite G’s stated openness to other possibilities). Ultimately this made sense in the structure of the one-woman show but it was perhaps a potential, unfollowed thread that would have helped to cohere the narrative.
The use of sports equipment as metaphor was prominent: badminton shuttlecocks represented remaining “eggs,” dwindling as the show went on. Strangely there was a switch to football in rules of engagement, although this was eventually abandoned. Her audience engagement and interaction proved to contain the most interesting moments of vulnerability in the show. She at first welcomed audience members, and then would switch to a complete rejection of the potential “suitor,” finding their presence lacking. Shuttlecock will find its feet, but the most interesting exchanges between G and her audience of suitors definitely needed a more robust exploration.
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THE HETEROSEXUALS
The bar, on Mont-Royal, has a lowkey sign out front, where crowds of summer drinkers and strollers on the rue piétonne mill around, lolling in the early days of a long-awaited stretch of heat. Inside O PATRO VÝŠ, the bar is packed in close in to the stage and low-lit. The crowd fell silent as a figure traipsed purposefully onstage into a classic, and clichéd, but effective single spot light. Red-headed, in a faded tangerine shirt and burnt sienna pants. Red all over.
A terminal hater of musical theatre (I tolerate it for the culture), I did not clue in to the first lines from his mouth: “I got ... steam heat!” He looks at the crowd expectantly. He does this twice more before his “other” self chimes in and prompts him to let the audience into the narrative, the somewhat obscure tune “Steam Heat” from the 1954 musical, The Pajama Game.
The Heterosexuals, from playwright and media artist Johnnie McNamara Walker, is his first solo show. It fits him, well-worn and comfortable, a departure from the often raw and new work expected at the Fringe. Easy to watch and close to a perfect length, The Heterosexuals promises release from the overwhelming presence of a boring breeder cultural quotidian and installs the audience in a “queer pocket dimension” in which we have all passed the rigorous queer vibe check at the door. This is easy to believe as a youngish queer sits next to me and begins to quietly “yasss, queen” the entire show, commenting and expressing a deep satisfaction that creates an indirect, alchemical energy between viewers and the artist on stage.
Reversing the old assumptions that everyone is straight unless proven otherwise, McNamara plays with expectations of privacy and safety from the heterosexual “culture.” In a quiet nod to the illegality of queer pasts, McNamara expertly weaves in aspects of history. His boisterous drag host energy pushes the needle into the red zone for almost the entirety of the show, before moving into a more contemplative denouement that showcases McNamara’s range in exercising his alter ego, the “straight” John.
Bridging topics of otherness, baby gay escapism, and The Mission given to him by his favourite 90s world creators to infiltrate and assimilate to the world of (compulsory) heterosexuality, the audience gets a window into the world of constant self-surveillance, the tribulations of 14.4 speed modems downloading nudes pixel by pixel, and a pantomime horse that changed his life.
If you’re straight, you might LOVE this and learn something about your queer friends. If you’re gay and forty, like Johnnie, like me, there are too many easter eggs to count. The show skips down the well-worn path of queer coming-of-age stories to dance hedonistically on the border of Drag Race catchphrases, sagely stepping back from the line clearly demarcated by “can I get an AMEN?”
