Notes from the Fringe

Island Fringe Festival 2024
Various venues, August 1–4, 2024
Review by Sean McQuaid 

The Island Fringe Festival (IFF) had a jampacked line-up of ten shows this year in four downtown venues: Creative PEI (CPEI), PEERS Alliance (PA), the Haviland Club (HC), and the Beaconsfield Carriage House (BCH). It’s almost too much theatre for any one critic to see, let alone review; but after binging my way through all ten productions, I’ve got just enough last, lingering wisps of acuity left to pen a countdown summary of my 2024 favourites in about 100 words apiece: 

10. How to Be a Vase (comedy from PEI at HC)

Written and directed by Dana Doucette and starring Jay Gallant, Kari Kruse, Baylee Peters, Katie Isobel Pride, Mackay Rix & Lindsay Schieck (full disclosure: my cousin), this intermittently amusing 45-minute rambler set in 2006 features a teacher (Gallant) buying drugs from several former students. There are smart observations, a few funny gags and some good acting from a convincingly awkward and frustrated Gallant, but some of the actors’ lines are rushed or unclearly articulated or both, and the cluttered, meandering script feels like it has at least two characters too many. 

9. Short Circuits (solo show from PEI at PA)

Written and performed by Julie Bull and directed by Mariève MacGregor with audio “soundscapes” by Bull, Siddhu Sachidananda and The Umbrella Collective, this wry, alternately contemplative and playful meditation on the meaning of humanity is mostly dreamily low-key stuff, though its occasional profanity can feel incongruous or gratuitous, and the transitions are a bit choppy at times. It’s a mostly mellow, audience-interactive mix of thoughtful poetry, philosophy, humour and music, and Bull hands out handsome little keepsake pocket poems. Mine was SELF: “a helix in the galaxy/a labyrinth/to be realized/not conquered” 

8. Ink Addicted (solo comedy from Florida at PA)

Written and performed by Chris Trovador and directed by Frank Caeti, this heartfelt, cheerfully boisterous show stars tattoo artist and comedian Trovador talking about his two unique careers. He employs anecdotes, history, comedy, drama, improv, rap, singing, video content, audience interaction, on-the-spot drawings and even a “dance” duet with a rolling desk chair to the tune of Swan Lake. Technical difficulties don’t faze him—“Pretend there’s music” was a recurring laugh line on opening night—and his charming, funny knack for audience rapport makes the hour fly by. 

7. Cornflake (comedy/drama from Québec at BCH)

Written by Ian McCormack and directed by Abi Sanie with vividly artful movement direction by Elly Pond (you will believe a rat can fly), this unsettling absurdist satire features Bird (played by Corbeau Sandoval) and Rat (Masha Bashmakova), human-like animals who room together while working in standup comedy and door-to-door sales, respectively. Often darkly funny, Staff Pick of the Fringe award winner Cornflake is skillfully crafted—Sandoval and Bashmakova are intense, compelling performers, the latter a potent natural clown, and it’s a technically polished production—but it’s also a dauntingly oft-opaque play undermined by its off-putting sexual preoccupations. 

6. Thinking About a Dog (comedy/drama from PEI at HC)

Written by Lauren Jean Lawlor and directed by Rebecca Parent, this bite-size play features sexual trauma survivor Mia (Emily Anne Fullerton) seeking romance. John MacCormac & Marli Trecartin play multiple roles. Fullerton is likeably genuine and funny, Trecartin has good chemistry with her as a potential love interest and MacCormac is goofy fun as a TV therapist, but the play’s brevity and disjointed stylistic whiplash—scene one is narrated like a nature documentary, scene two is a TV therapy show and scene three is standup comedy—feel like three tiny plays smooshed together. Winner of IFF’s PARC award. 

5. After the Chorus Line (musical comedy from PEI at BCH)

Written by and starring Gabrielle Roddy & Gregory Ellard with music by the show’s pianist Sue Stanger, this amiably funny two-hander features Roddy & Ellard as a pair of older actors in a seemingly endless string of auditions, doggedly seeking success in a business that prizes youth. Stanger’s music often echoes other works like A Chorus Line and Sonny & Cher songs (the duo auditions to play “Cherie & Son”) but has its own energy, and Stanger’s sprightly piano plus the play’s visual comedy equals a fun silent movie feel in spots. 

4. So an Autistic Priest and a Service Dog Walk Into a Bar… (solo comedy/storytelling from Québec at CPEI)

Winner of Patrons’ Pick of the Fringe, Artists’ Pick of the Fringe and the Oscar Wilde Award, SAPSDWIB was the popular kid in this year’s IFF class, written and performed by autistic priest Jean-Daniel O’Donncada (accompanied by his Montgomery-inspired service dog Rilla Blythe). JDO plays a fictionalized, fouler-mouthed version of himself who’s running a church youth group while talking about his autism, his faith, his love life, his Anne of Green Gables fandom, being weird and preaching acceptance. Funny, fierce, smart, moving and packed with positive messages. 

3. Enchantment (dance from Nova Scotia at BCH)

This beguiling contemporary dance trilogy ran in the scenic Beaconsfield yard, except when rain forced the troupe indoors. “Washboard Blues” (choreographed by Marrin Jessome) features comedic dueling washerwomen (Sarah Hopkin & Meredith Kalaman) cavorting like a charmingly terpsichorean Laurel & Hardy, though the segment works best when it lets the dance do the talking. After a pensively vulnerable solo danced and choreographed by Rosie Halpin, the show concludes with the striking “Enchantress”, choreographed by Jessica Lowe, tracing the stages of a woman’s life as danced with artfully intense emotion by Hopkin, Kalaman & Lowe, all skillfully using a customized parachute as an impressively versatile and spectacular prop. 

2. How it Happened (comedy/drama from PEI at CPEI)

Written by Candace Hagen and Benton Hartley and directed by Hartley (with Hagan as associate director), this smart, wickedly funny two-hander stars John MacCormac & Hannah McGaughey as platonic best friends: underconfident, tightly-wound, heterosexual baseball enthusiast Mitchell, and overconfident, free-spirited lesbian drama queen Prudence. The oft-vulgar Hartley/Hagan script impresses with its well-drawn characters (most of whom remain offstage), entertains with its playfully inventive dialogue and imagery (Pru derides Mitch as a “hay bale of narcissism”) and hits surprisingly hard as it time-jumps across several decades to show us the life and tragic death of a friendship. The CPEI sight lines are brutal, but a strong script, solid direction and the robust chemistry and acting chops of the MacCormac/McGaughey duo make this show look and sound great. 

How it Happened was so good, I spent much of my IFF binge sure it would be my 2024 favorite. Then a nice lady hit me with a chair—figuratively, that is … 

1. Furniture Boys (solo comedy from New York at HC)

I went in with low expectations. The show’s promo blurb about a woman sexually obsessed with furniture sounds like a concept that could easily go drastically wrong. But this bizarre absurdist comedy, written and performed by Emily Weitzman and directed by Rachel Resnik, is so imaginative, thoughtful, playful, hilarious and relentlessly, infectiously joyous that it won me over entirely. Yes, the play’s version of Emily is a super-freaky furniture fancier—her past and present boyfriends include chairs, couches, clocks, lamps and more—but the play toys with the notion that all this “furnication” may be metaphorical; and even if it’s not, Weitzman is so loopily, luminously charming you can’t help but root for her. A unique mix of scripted wackiness, improv, audience interaction, prop comedy, puppetry, music and video content that earns big laughs while expressing deep thoughts about identity, mortality and impermanence, Furniture Boys is a weirdly poignant, one-of-a-kind mix of surreal philosophy, sexual innuendo and dad jokes. Furniture has never been more moving.