(Due to a calamitous computer meltdown, these mini reviews are the missing posts.)
Coal Mine Theatre/Fulfillment Centre, written by Abe Koogler, directed by Ted Dykstra, Coal Mine Theatre, closed Dec. 7.
Fulfillment Center
Photo: Elana Elmer
Sometimes you see a play and you wonder why it was written, and Fulfillment Center is one of those plays because it really has nothing new to say.
We meet Suzie (Kristen Thomson) an older woman whose car has broken down; she needs money to fix it and applies for a warehouse job she is truly incapable of doing in an Amazon‑style facility near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Out of kindness, she is given the job by Alex, (Emilia Vieira) the manager, who has come from New York. His partner Madeleine (Gita Miller) has followed him there, abandoning her life in New York. She is working remotely while behaving badly: she cheats on Alex through online dating, where she meets John (Evan Buliung). John is a druggie, menacing, misogynistic figure who has been kicked out by his girlfriend and is living out of his car at the same campground where Suzie resides in her tent. A liaison forms between John and Madeleine, while Alex—innocent, unhappy, and unsuited to his managerial role—tries to hold things together.
These four people—the older woman unfit for the job, the unhappy New Yorker, the reluctant manager, and the frightening misfit—circle one another in a landscape of discomfort and bleakness.
You watch this play and wonder what the author is trying to say that hasn’t been said in a million other plays, because although the setting is a fulfillment center, no one is remotely fulfilled.
The ending only deepens the question: Alex fires Susie and feels empowered, finally like a team leader, but what does that mean for anything larger?
There is some spectacular acting, particularly from Thomson and Buliung, and directing from Dykstra, and the set by Nick Blais—constructed entirely from cardboard boxes—is genuinely brilliant, a perfect visual metaphor for a warehouse world, but what the play itself is saying beyond the obvious remains elusive. At the end, I was not convinced it had very much to say at all.
Factory Theatre presents Lester Trips (Theatre)/Public Consumption, written, performed, directed, produced and designed by Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton, Factory Theatre Studio, closed Dec. 7.
Public Consupmtion
Photo: Eden Graham
Lester Trips (Theatre) has a shared goal of making people feel uncomfortable and continues to produce work unlike anything else in the city. Their latest piece, Public Consumption, is no exception.
Created and performed by the remarkable duo of Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton, who also direct and design every element, (but credit able assists), the piece digs into material that is as provocative as it is troubling.
Inspired by the American actor Armie Hammer scandal, the play follows Navy Caine (Hutton), a disgraced actor who is accused of sexual assault and sending cannibalistic texts and is sentenced to one hundred and twenty days of house arrest.
Seeking a way to shorten his sentence, he enrolls in a series of experimental programs that only plunge him deeper into degradation.
First, he must help train an AI called Ducky (Gillis) to identify obscene fan fiction, which becomes unbearable when the content turns to stories about himself. Then he is assigned to moderate horrific videos, one involving a child that stops him cold. Finally, he becomes the object of paid humiliation tasks, performing whatever strangers request for pay
We never see the obscenities he encounters, but through sound, suggestion, Hutton’s unnervingly performance, and Gillis as Ducky, the AI trainee, we are drawn into a world of pornography and exploitation that is horrifying precisely because we cannot look away.
Intercut with these scenes are video vignettes of a couple, played by Peter Demas and Kerrie Hutton, producing increasingly disturbing sexual content that echoes Caine’s descent. A red herring on the part of Lester Trips? Vignettes from Caine’s life?
The final image, in which Ducky announces that Caine has finally met his public while two medieval maidens, badly sing the “Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé eat a corpse, leaves us wondering whether the play is accusing us of devouring celebrities or suggesting that Caine receives his just desserts – just another vintage Lester Trips Image.
As always with Lester Trips, the work forces us into places we do not want to go and makes us think deeply about matters we would rather ignore.
Gillis and Hutton are a remarkable duo, and their theatre stays with you, unfortunately, long after the lights come up.
Tarragon Theatre & Obsidian Theatre Company/a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun), written by debbie tucker green, directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu, closed Dec. 7.
a profoundly affectionate, devotion to someone (-noun)
photo: Jae Yang
In the North American premiere of a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (‑noun), I experienced my first debbie tucker green play, and I now understand what all the acclaim is about.
The first thing that struck me was her language, so often described as elliptical, fragmented, rhythmic, overlapping and interruptive; I found it deeply repetitious in the best sense, because with every recurrence the meaning pushed further and further inward. I do not know how the actors even managed to learn it.
Rather than offering a linear plot, the play is built from flashes of moments, half‑sentences, repeated phrases, interruptive thoughts, sudden jumps and circular dialogue patterns. It is a play of moments—non‑linear, shifting, and constantly revealing new emotional terrain.
The three relationships we witness—a man (Dwain Murphy) and a woman (Virgilia Griffith) in an up and down scenes from a marriage, an older man (Andrew Moodie) and a woman (Warona Setshwaelo) in a bickering relationship, and then the man from that middle pairing with a younger woman, the daughter of the first pair—show us that intimacy is always troubled, always unfinished, always shifting.
Through this astonishing dialogue of moments, tucker green dissects intimacy with a precision that feels almost surgical, exposing not just the bare bones of each relationship but the emotional interplay pulsing at its centre. These flashes, these emotional beats, these power shifts reveal character in ways that feel startlingly honest. While there may be a coolness in her process, the emotion is ferociously strong at the heart of it.
If I were transported from Mars into the middle of a debbie tucker green play, I would recognize her writing immediately: that signature dialogue, that iconic method of excavating the inner workings of a relationship, and that fierce exposure of human intimacy.
The acting, directing, set design, lighting – everything about this production was a class act,