Variations on the theme of old hotels and the people that frequent them
By Andrea Ledwell
Last year’s Fringe festival success, The Gladstone Variations, has remounted for a brief run that finishes up in a week and a bit. If you haven’t heard about the inventive interweaving plays that take place throughout the halls and rooms and alleyways of the reinvigorated venerable hotel/performance piece that graces the gateway to Parkdale, you must not really be living in Toronto.
The company presenting the Variations, Convergence Theatre, has brought together some of the city’s finest talent with four plays that take place concurrently and interactively in 90 minutes of back to back performances where the small audiences (around 20 per play) are led around the maze of the hotel to be voyeurs of the action happening in the stories told.
Attendees to the performance will see two of the four plays in the Gladstone Variations which include: The Tearful Bride by Rick Roberts, Requiem For A Hotel by Mike McPhaden, The Card Trick by Brendan Gall and I Grow Old by Julie Tepperman. The plays are written in a way that characters cross over each other or the action crisscrosses and sees each other occurring (it’s pretty nifty staging!) – it takes attending two nights, in order to see all four plays, to completely see how they all fit together.
The Gladstone is a unique space with a unique history – including its latest reinvention as performance space and key participant in the city’s cultural sector. So the plays are unique to the space and perhaps aren’t something that could be thought of happening anywhere else in the city. The Gladstone has enough earnestness in its recreation that it escapes the sort of contrivance that would probably occur in another location. Could you imagine something like this happening at The Drake? I think not.
Its coloured past provides the back-story for the plays – all which involve the ghosts of Gladstoners past. The action happening in real time often creates some hilarious situations of reality and fiction blurring – customers at the nearby Price Chopper stand in shocked silence as the Concierge (Sanjay Talwar!) in The Card Trick, tosses out a heartbroken drunk looking for his lost daughter. Guests at events happening at the hotel often intermingle with the action. Though the actors never break down the fourth wall – the audience and other innocent bystanders come very damn near part of the action. It’s playing at its very best.
Check out the Gadfly for information on purchasing tickets for The Gladstone Variations.