feminism

I mistakenly thought that The Lion, The Bitch and The Wardrobe would be some kind of C.S. Lewis parody, but things are not what they seem at The Vancouver Fringe Festival. The lion in this story is not some omnipotent God-like figure, but Sharon Mahoney’s crippling anxiety. Mahoney shares her own battles with anxiety and panic attacks in her hilarious and deeply personal show The Lion, The Bitch and The Wardrobe. She honestly discusses the stigma around mental health and that no matter how creatively talented, no one is immune to mental illness.

I do not usually enjoy street...

There’s an obvious choice of word that comes to mind when you hear “the F word”.

It’s the polite stand-in for an expression of profanity, although the full range of this word’s meanings and uses are substantially more diverse. As far as connotations of the word go, it’s very useful. But it’s far from being the most expressive, exciting, or meaningful "F" word in the English vocabulary. Through well-integrated and interspersed PowerPoint slides, playwright and performer Yvette Dudley-Neuman introduces and unravels the definitions of some of the more overlooked "F" words, exploring their significance through the life of...

Two sisters, Morgan (played by Alexandra Lainfesta) and Maura (Baraka Rahmani) explore their tensions, traumas, and failures in an atmospheric and heart-wrenching performance with a very strong presence of cheesecake. Maura is a university dropout using kickboxing to find her way through a difficult recovery from an eating disorder. Morgan is a successful academic writing a thesis on the Salem witch trials. Exploring their unresolved tensions between one another and with their parents, Lainfesta and Rahmani give a very convincing and touching portrayal of the way that siblings love and hate as only siblings can.

The production makes very strong...

Rich insights into the power of love, courage and ritual in the face of great trauma are at the heart of this drama. Its message of compassion resonates both with classical tragedies and with our own contemporary anxieties about terrorism. It is timelessly relevant.

The play is set in the Scottish countryside, beside a stream, seven years after the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 in which 270 people died. Grieving the loss of their own family members, and suffering from the trauma of witnessing body parts, metal fragments, and bodies still strapped to their seats falling from...