Lion in the streets play review

A detailed Summary of Lion in the streets play review

In playwright Judith Thompson's LION IN THE STREETS, the world is seen

through the eyes of a young girl who has been murdered. Isobel (Alexandria

Sage) wanders amidst the lives of family members and neighborhood people

discovering death all around her - literally, spiritually, and morally.

Sage does a marvelous job as the lost soul looking for a home. Enhanced

by a splendid cast comprised of Elizabeth Elkins, Lisa Pierotti, Charles

Willey, Tim Corcoran, Leo Farley, and Paula Ewin, LION IN THE STREETS

is a powerful play about the difficulties of living and dying. Thompson

presents a series of scenarios about infidelity and betrayal, illness, deception,

and other daily dilemmas. Throughout, the cast don different personas and

occasionally cavort in modern dance expressions against a background of

theatre class offers an entirely professional, way-above-average rendition of Lion In The Streets, Judith Thompson's rich and challenging 1990 drama.

The actors' controlled, complex performances are further enhanced by Jeannette Lambermont's hip, dynamic direction, and are played out against a flawless technical backdrop of set, lighting and costume.

The play, enacted by a cast of 28, is a series of dreamlike vignett

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There is certainly a place for overtly socially active theatre in Calgary, and Sage's program/ newsletter, which, for this production includes a social worker's perspective on violence and power issues, is a unique twist. On stage, however, you need a compelling story and a sympathetic (rather than simply pathetic) character or two in order to qualify as good theatre. Lion in the Streets doesn't do the job.

But this is one failing in an otherwise riveting script. With performance and production values well beyond the common lot, and an admittedly fascinating text by one of the country's celebrated playwrights, this George Brown production is not to be missed.

Each scene is an intense vignette, and there are a few that continue to haunt the mind days later: a working-class preschool teacher forced to defend her way of life before a hostile room of her wealthy clients; a woman dying of cancer, whose wish to end her life like Ophelia in Millais' painting is cavalierly mocked by her best friend--the preschool teacher. There's a scene of a man freshly humiliated by his boss, who returns to a more searing moment in his life when his first kiss condemned him to shame, while his boss is driven to frightening excess in her dealings with a handicapped woman.

Meyers' direction is taut and impressively restrained. In the midst of the piece's frenetic drive, he allows moments of stillness of the type that Saul Bellow said characterized the eyes of storms and prayers. Catherine Egan created the piece's stunning movement. Matching her radical aesthetic to Meyers' intellectual vigor, the two have created one of the most demanding and honest pieces of theater seen in some time. See this.

The performances here are almost uniformly excellent, however, with all of the actors, apart from Purves-Smith, playing multiple roles. Each actor has a dud or two in their repertoire - an over-the-top rampage or a flat, uninspired portrayal. But each one scores big at least once, creating in a few broad strokes a complex, exciting character that transcends the playwright's heavy touch. Douglas MacLeod's tortured Father Hayes and Darcy Dunlop's dying cancer victim, who longs for an Ophelia-like death, are two of the best, but Susan Bristow also creates a stable of strikingly unique characters, enc

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Approximate Word count = 1592
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

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