Toronto Fringe Review: …and stockings for the ladies

A good one person show is easier to say then to do. You don’t get a break, the audience’s eyes are always on you and it’s up to you to create all the energy you can for them to feed off of so they can send some back to you. I think it was Ryan Paulson this weekend who told me, while we were walking down a sunny lovely street in Toronto from the Tarragon Theatre after seeing this play, that in a one person show the audience is the other player. It was either Ryan Paulson or Bruce Beaton. Both are doing one-person plays right now and I spent some great time with both of them separate and together this weekend talking about art and well, yes, sometimes it was beer o’clock, so forgive me if my memory is blurry. You get the point- the actor has no one else to turn to but the audience when it’s just them on stage, and for this to work and not flop, your dialogue can’t be with yourself it has to be with them, though they might not have any lines.
…and stockings for the ladies pulls a personal strand from the huge and hard to look at tapestry of world war 2 history and stitches together real letters into a series of vignettes about Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Amazingly it manages to be captivating, uplifting even in the trauma at what’s being witnessed and narrated, and quietly electric. A good one person show.

Brendan McMurtry-Howlett plays over 20 characters I’m sure in this 1 hour, as he tells the true story of the Canadian soldiers who avoided orders in order to bring some humanity and recovery to the ghosts and slips of humans found alive at Bergen-Belsen at the end of the war. And he does his countless changes with a slow fluid ease and a swively turn that’s not overwrought or cheezy, but feels likes a winding and setting of a clock. His performance across all the characters has a dearness and intensity that feels like it’s from another time, and when he looks around the stage he makes you see the beautiful countryside in Germany, the heather, and the children who had been hidden in the camp by the nurses and inmates playing on it during their stolen picnic hours.

He performs every character himself – everyone except for prisoners of the camp and one little girl. For these he twists behind a crate and twists back with a tiny fragile puppet. With their large eyes, bony features, papier mache skin, hanging cloth bodies and the actor’s one oversize hand in their sleeve, these puppets look hauntingly like the real and countless photographs of the survivors of genocide. McMurtry-Howlett is delicate and moving with their gestures and voices. If you hate delicate and moving, or history, or puppets, don’t go see this show.

This is a good one person show, and Canadian history gets me right here, but I don’t think it’s the perfect one person show, actually. For me, the perfect one person show has way fewer character changes. I really liked this play and how the characters were handled, but if I had to chose I prefer the intensity of getting to know one person well then many people in snipits. The ideal one person show (in my opinion) has a very clear narrator/protagonist and you see the world with them, and everyone else is a tiny bit charicaturized or at least coloured by being seen through their eyes. This is one of the most incredible things you can do in theatre, I think, because when the chemistry in the room works and you’re sharing the same air and light and sound waves I think you literally feel what that person feels in a breath-quickening jaw dropping way. Bruce Beaton did that to me for a second in the rehearsal for his upcoming Summerworks show Stalin Theory, which I had the privilege of sitting in on yesterday afternoon above the Last Temp in Toronto (another blog post, that, and coming soon). And Ryan Paulson did it when I saw him do Pentecostal Wisconsin back in the winter (blog post here).

So I guess I give …and stockings for the ladies 3.5 stars out of a possible 5, and 10 high fives out of ten for the craftspersonship of Brendan McMurtry-Howlett’s performance. Ok, I’m totally making this ranking system up on the spot. Nevertheless, he’s exceptional and the play is very very good.

But then, i like moving and poignant and puppets, so grains of salt here people, grains of salt.

…and stockings for the ladies is playing at the Tarragon theatre – for schedule see the Toronto Fringe website, because Tarragon hasn’t listed any of it’s Fringe scheduling. And to see it on the Fringe site i think you have to download the .doc, which is annoying and kind of sucks for the plays because it means they don’t have a fringe web presence that comes up in google searches. aaaanyhoo. nerdy nerdy nerd and good afternoon.