Faith Friesen
A claustrophobically secluded radio announcer, a fugitive from herself, broadcasting from an undisclosed station at the heart of nowhere, wrapped in darkness, obsessed by the notion of distant life among the stars.
Emma Pennell
Rising young Indigenous soprano, a shining, cloudless presence aglow with loving memory and never forgotten pain — nature’s offspring, a conveyer of dreams, a speaker of harsh truths.
Kimberly Dunbar
Mother, moral crusader, upholder of decency, ferociously principled, savagely committed, deft manipulator of social media, passionate, daring, dangerous doer and undoer, book burner, igniter of inevitable firestorms to come.
Three different characters. Three very different sets of narrative ambitions in play.
A three-part tale told over a campfire, a single blended portrait of isolation and displacement revealed in the mesmerizing flames.
Marking the end of a seemingly endless three-year hiatus, Toronto’s dauntless indie opera collective, Against the Grain Theatre, swung open the door to the promise of a fresh future last Friday with the premiere of the company’s newly commissioned chamber offering, Canuck Cantatas, a vibrant dramatic musical triptych expressly created and performed by and for Canadians.
Overseen by incoming Artistic Director Royce Vavrek, fluidly stage-directed by Jennifer Nichols at the East End community arts hub, Redwood Theatre, each discrete, intensely commanding mini-operatic element blazed with its own unique, custom-kindled energy, the totality of lived experience on display sweepingly affecting.
The Close Encounters of Faith Friesen
A tragicomic sketch in tone, if not overarching intention, librettist Vern Thiessen and composer/performer Danika Lorèn’s leap into the realm of mad science and atonality raised the principle of ambiguity to intergalactic heights. The central theme, Faith’s apparently authentic encounter with an intelligent extraterrestrial lifeform, is clouded with more than a cosmic speck of doubt.
I’ve been told all of my life I’m pretty “out there”, sang Lorèn’s haunted character, music underscoring a multitude of dissonant black holes in her psyche. They also say “the truth is out there” too/But I’ve been screaming into the void so long/I’ve forgotten what I’m looking for.
Fantasy has a keen edge to it here. Irrationality and hallucination born of prolonged solitude are at least as plausible, by way of explanation for Faith’s wildly extravagant behaviour, as any desperate, genuinely mindful attempt on her part to attract alien attention.
Please help me, please take me away. This world is on fire, I’ll die if I stay.
Moonwalking in her pyjamas, deciphering complex otherworldly chord progressions in best Spielberg tradition, the distance from chronic make-believe bordering on mania to epiphany is the diameter of a particle of space dust.
Red Daughters
The emotional centrepiece of the evening, poet/librettist/performer Emma Pennell’s startling, abundantly open-hearted testament to hope and survival shone with profound poignancy shadowed by a deep sense of intractable grief.
The natural world enfolds and nurtures her for a time, composer/music director Spencer Kryzanowski’s infinitely sensitive piano score a perennial, virtually organic partner throughout Pennell’s excruciatingly moving life story.
When I was a child/I sang my wishes up to the trees.
And they listened, as they continued to do on stage, scattered leafless skeletons marking the passage of time. A red dress caught in bare branches. Pennell remembers. The trees remember.
The trees remember everything./They remember the girls who never made it home./They hold the names of every girl that wished to be here —/Our initials carved into their bark like an epitaph.
One voice, soaring, ringing, screaming through every girl still walking home with keys in her fist.
Kimberly Dunbar
Concluding the proceedings on an overt, unapologetic socio-political note, librettist Royce Vavrek and composer/singer Sarah Slean plumbed the nasty depths of bigotry and intolerance with a deep dive into the mind of their failed anti-hero, a highly sociable woman possessed of great charisma and sticky honeyed charm.
Deceptively upbeat and bouncy, Slean’s Broadway-inflected piano music provided an abundance of wry counterpoint to Vavrek’s probing exploration of cultural populism run amuck — mothers as book burners.
The tyranny of the minority. The banality of evil. Kimberly Dunbar sounds all the oft-repeated sociological warnings. And yet, despite the egregious, meticulously plotted displays of contemptible chauvinism; for all its thorough shredding of fanatical lunacy, it proved all but impossible not to be swept up by the relentless tide of vivacity and pulsing narrative drive at work here, the surging satire of the piece.
Moms with matches!
A brilliantly wrought comedic banner if it were not so chilling.
Fire’s burning, fire’s burning,
Come nearer, come nearer;
In the glowing, in the glowing
Come sing, come sing.
The classic campfire song that closes the show, prop piece alight, all principals joining in, echoed with bittersweetness and irony.