Fall openings (Part 2): Slave Play, Tell Tale Harbour, Blackbird, The Green Line, Ride the Cyclone

It’s been a busy past few weeks, so rather than write full-length reviews for this second wave of Toronto theatre openings, I’m providing shorter capsule reviews.

(ICYMI, here’s Part 1 of my roundup of Fall openings, some of which are still playing.)

✅Slave Play

(Canadian Stage)

Rating: ✭✭✭✭

Jeremy O. Harris’ play more than lives up to its reputation as a boundary-pushing examination of race, sex and power. On a plantation, three interracial couples engage in some fantasy role-playing involving slavery — the title, it turns out, is a pun. (This isn’t quite a spoiler, since from the start we get clues that, although some costume details suggest otherwise, this isn’t the Antebellum South.)

It turns out all three couples are engaged in some sort of multi-day couples’ therapy retreat run by an interracial couple (a note-perfect Beck Lloyd and Rebecca Applebaum). The tragicomic revelations that come from this lead to a shocking finale for one pair.

While some of the psychobabble and therapy-speak in the second part of the show feels repetitive, and a couple of details in the first part don’t jibe with what we discover later, Harris has a clear eye for the subtle and not-so-subtle power dynamics underlying sexual relationships — especially in the U.S., a country still grappling with its ugly racial history.

But this is an audacious work, and director Jordan Laffrenier, aided by a fine design team, gets brave, bold and varied performances from his ensemble, with Sophia Walker and Gord Rand delivering career-best work as a middle-aged couple at an impasse.

Runs until Oct. 26 at the Berkeley Street Theatre (26 Berkeley). Ticket info here.

✅Blackbird

(Talk is Free Theatre)

Rating: ✭✭✭✭

It’s impossible to review David Harrower’s 2005 play Blackbird without giving away a minor spoiler, which comes about 10-15 minutes in. A 27-year-old woman named Una (Kirstyn Russelle) tracks down Ray (Cyrus Lane), the 55-year-old man with whom she had a three-month affair 15 years earlier. Yes, that’s right, she was 12 at the time. Ray has served prison time for his crime and since getting released has tried to move on with his life, changing his name and relocating.

But what about Una? Why has she found Ray, and what does she want? That’s the mystery propelling this taut exercise in empathy and untangling the mysteries of the heart. Director Dean Deffett’s production, performed in a small, nondescript, cluttered office/break room in the east end, is so intimate and in-your-face it’s positively claustrophobic. There’s no room to hide — fitting for a play about dredging up the past.

The nail-biting result is a cat-and-mouse thriller that’s also a twisted love story. Harrower’s writing is vivid, particularly his depiction of the neighbourhood BBQ where the two originally met, and the his-and-hers accounts of the last night they saw each other. The play is so suggestive you’ll be trying to fill in the blanks in the characters’ histories.

And the performances, complete with terrifically choreographed fighting and intimacy (by Christina Fox), feel frighteningly authentic and full of high stakes abandon.

This play isn’t for everyone, but if you like disturbing, open-ended psychological thrillers, this is for you.

Runs to Oct. 18 at Hope United Church (2550 Danforth). Seating extremely limited. Ticket info here.

✅Tell Tale Harbour

(Mirvish Productions/Confederation Centre of the Arts)

Rating: ✭✭✭✭

I went into this new East Coast musical by Adam Brazier, Alan Doyle, Bob Foster and Edward Riche without knowing much beforehand. I knew it was based on the comic film The Grand Seduction (which I thought was cute and charming), and that Doyle was the lead singer of a folk-rock band called Great Big Sea.

I was pleasantly surprised with the results. As I wrote in my review in the Star, don’t expect the next Come From Away. The tone is much different, and the comedy broader. But once I figured that out, I sat back and enjoyed myself. Doyle is a natural, and I came to enjoy the clear, efficient book and the tight acting ensemble.

Runs to Nov. 2 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre (260 King West). Ticket info here.

The Green Line

(In Arms Theatre Company + the MENA Collective in association with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Factory Theatre)

Rating: ✭✭✭

As he’s demonstrated in his plays The Hooves Belonged to the Deer and his Dora Award-winning The Tempest: A Witch of Algiers, Makram Ayache possesses one of the most poetic and distinctive voices in Canadian theatre. Following in the steps of fellow Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad, he’s unafraid of the lyrical epic. But he needed some more dramaturgy with his latest, the Governor General’s Award-nominated The Green Line.

The ambitious play, which Ayache also directs, is set in Beirut in two periods. One takes place in 1978, when the Lebanese civil war has been raging for so long that greenery has sprouted along the border separating the Christians from Sunni Muslims — hence the title. The other is 40 years later.

Although two queer stories intersect throughout — one featuring two female engineering students, the other about a Canadian tourist and a drag queen performer he meets at a gay bar — it’s initially disorienting. So is the fact that one actor (Oshen Aoun) plays different roles in both periods. And while two raised screens are set up to provide translations in English and Arabic, they draw focus from the action onstage.

Some of the characters could use deepening, and the imagery could be more artfully interwoven into the script. I don’t think the final revelations land with as much dramatic force as they might.

But Ayache’s writing and sensitive direction create a hypnotic, absorbing pull as the two stories lead to their inevitable conclusions. And Anahita Dehbonehie’s off-kilter set deserves special mention.

Ride the Cyclone

(Shifting Ground Collective)

Rating: ✭✭✭

I have fond memories of seeing the original production of Ride the Cyclone in the early 2010s. And so I was looking forward to this revival by the rising young theatre company Shifting Ground Collective, whose stagings of musicals like Ordinary Days and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee have been wonderful surprises.

Alas, much of the charm and bite of the material — about a group of high school students who died in a tragic carnival accident and are given a chance to come back to life — has been drained away in an often confusing and scattered production.

Director Steven Hao has expanded the narrator figure to include half a dozen actors — a strange decision when there are already so many characters we have yet to get to know. The uneven sound mix (at least at the show’s opening night) meant a lot of lyrics were lost. And some design elements seem odd; the mysterious figure of Jane Doe (an enchanting Shannon Murtagh) is a student whose identity is unclear because she was decapitated, and yet there’s no attempt at suggesting her grisly end.

There are some solid performances, however, from Sarah Evasiw, Claudia Adamo, Eric Martin, Alex Yoannou, Misha Sharivker (so winning in Spelling Bee) and Murtagh.

This is a chamber musical in which less — choreography, orchestration — is probably more.