What: Uno Fest
Where: Metro Studio Theatre, Intrepid Theatre Club, McPherson Playhouse, Baumann Centre
When: May 12 to 28
Tickets: $18 to $34.75 (five-show passes are $85) at intrepidtheatre.com or ticketrocket.com (250-590-6291). Tickets for La Voix Humaine are at Pacific Opera Victoria (250-385-0222). Tickets for Circus Incognitus at McPherson box office (250-385-6121)
Talk about eclectic. This year’s Uno Fest offers fruit-tossing, telephone opera, Shakespearean reinventions … and a tale about a kindergartener caught with a porno mag.
Mounted by Intrepid Theatre — the same folk who stage the Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival — Uno Fest is the longest running festival of solo theatre in North America. Well run and well established, it’s risen from humble beginnings (shows in a hotel basement) to attracting some of the world’s top performers.
The Times Colonist spoke to three of the 14 solo artists coming to Uno Fest:
James Gangl, In Search of Cruise Control (May 22 to 25, Intrepid Theatre Club): Victoria theatregoers may remember Toronto’s Gangl from his autobiographical fringe show Sex, Religion and Other Hang-Ups, in which he recalls losing his virginity at age 28.
In Search of Cruise Control catches up with Gangl during the hedonistic lapsed-Catholic period that followed his chaste phase. The 37-year-old recalls party days working on a cruise ship, during which “I would literally just get hammered and try to have sex with everybody I could.”
In this latest show, Gangl — a one-time brand manager for Hershey’s chocolate — aspires to more than mere American Pie frat-boy laughs. He finds himself in a moral quandary when he realizes his cruise-ship paramour, a white South African, is terribly racist. Elsewhere, Gangl recalls the “sex talk” his uber-religious parents gave after discovering him with his brother’s Hustler magazine. Gangl, just five years old at the time, proudly showed his mother his find.
“She said: ‘James, those women may look like angels but they’re not. They’re devils.’ My brother and I had to go outside and we doused it in gasoline and lit it on fire. That was like the first sex talk, I guess,” Gangl said.
In Search of Cruise Control won the Best of Fest award at the Edmonton Fringe Festival.
Emily Piggford, Ana (May 26 to 29, Intrepid Theatre Club): Saudi-American television preacher Fayhan al-Ghamdi, attracted international notoriety in 2013 after he raped and tortured his five-year-old daughter Lama. He agreed to pay a fine and served only a few months in jail.
This, in part, is the inspiration for Ana, having its world première at Uno Fest. An artistic response to how femininity is regarded in society, it stars Piggford, a University of Victoria acting grad who appeared in the Netflix TV series Hemlock Grove. Created by Piggford, with fellow UVic graduates Andrew Barrett and Sarah Sabo, the multi-disciplinary show melds movement, music and dialogue.
“The [rape/murder] was the incident that motivated Andrew to create this piece. But it’s an abstract reflection,” said Piggford, who was raised in East Sooke and now lives in Toronto.
Ana deliberately avoids depicting violence in any literal way. Piggford said the work is an examination of prejudices surrounding the notion of femininity as it affects not just women, but all genders.
“We’re pulling it through the lens of our own experience. We want to be careful not to speak for the experiences of others,” Piggford said.
Jamie Adkins, Circus Incognitus (May 21, McPherson Playhouse): For years, Uno Fest artistic director Janet Munsil has tried to lure Adkins, an internationally acclaimed clown, to her festival. She first saw Circus Incognitus in Montreal a few years ago.
“It’s just a really wonderful all-ages show. What I loved about it was how strong the character he has created is,” Munsil said.
An American now based in Gatineau, Que., Adkins plays a silent, Buster Keaton-style funnyman who performs circus stunts with ordinary objects: ladders, chairs, forks and ropes.
Adkins said he deliberately uses household items in his show, revelling in their low-tech mundanity.
“For me, a grape and a fork can become a circus routine,” he said.
“I find the more high-tech everything [else] gets, the more people are enjoying circus. A guy on stage trying to do the best he can with his body, trying to push it to the limit.”
A favourite routine in Circus Incognitus is when Adkins invites audience members to fling fruit — either a lemon or an orange — at him. He spears it with a fork clenched between his teeth, a trick that took a long time to master.
“Little boys, like 13 years old, I give it to them. And I can see it in their eyes, they’re thinking: ‘I’m going to kill the clown with this orange!’ But I’m never afraid,” said Adkins.
He was himself just 13 when he become enamoured with clowning after watching a street busker in his native San Diego. Three years later, Adkins was a street performer, juggling and riding a unicycle.
Over seven years, he’s done Circus Incognitus more than 800 times in 25 countries. Adkins just finished a run at New York’s Lincoln Centre. “Everything’s still in my suitcase. So I have to unpack and pack,” he said with a laugh.
This year’s Uno Fest also includes the première of Rzeka Czasu: River of Time, the story of Polish refugees who immigrated to Canada after the Second World War. The Victoria show is written by Grace Salez, performed by Barbara Poggemiller and directed by Lina de Guevara.
Also notable is a rare solo opera work, Poulenc’s La voix humaine, based on the play by Jean Cocteau. Starring soprano Kathleen Brett, the work provides a one-sided view on the final phone conversation between a woman and her erstwhile lover.
“The biggest challenge is making the one side of the conversation believable as a two-way conversation,” director Diana Leblanc said. “And using the music to sometimes enhance what she is saying, underscore it. And at other times, letting us imagine what [her lover] might be saying.”
The show is staged by Pacific Opera Victoria at the Baumann Centre, and Brett will be accompanied by pianist Robert Holliston.
Other festival highlights: Patrick Keating’s prison memoir Inside/Out, The Unfortunate Ruth with Tara Travis (about identical twins with a psychic connection), Jon Lachlan Stewart’s Lavinia featuring a gaggle of Shakespeare’s ill-used female characters, and another Bard-inspired piece, Mark Leiren-Young’s Shylock, starring John D. Huston.
For the full schedule, see intrepidtheatre.com.
