The 2017 Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival offers an especially bountiful harvest of home-grown theatre. We caught up with three Victoria shows that sound especially intriguing.
The Taxi Driver Is Always Listening, Victoria Event Centre, Aug. 24, 26, 27, 30, Sept. 1, 3.
Sean Proudlove is a 49-year-old stand-up comedian who has driven the night cab shift in this city for a decade. His first self-penned foray into fringe theatre, The Taxi Driver Is Always Listening, is a comic look at his behind-the-wheel experiences.
He premièred The Taxi Driver Is Always Listening last year at the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival. In the 55-minute show, some of Proudlove’s stories are about clients who want to buy drugs.
His first such experience was “The Rock.”
“I see this sad sack sitting like this on the curb. I’m like: ‘Are you the Rock?’ He said, ‘I’m Ross.’ ”
Ross then asked if it would be “cool” if they went to seek out a crack-cocaine dealer.
“I said to him what I’d say to anyone. ‘Sure, I don’t care. If I get paid and you don’t do it in the back [of the car], OK.’ So we went on the adventure of him buying crack. It did not go well.”
Ross encountered several dealers who took his money, but failed to provide drugs. Immediately afterward, Proudlove picked up another customer. This man also wanted to buy crack.
“They are honestly some of the best fares. For one thing, they know what they’re doing. And they pay upfront. That’s appealing to me,” he said. Some of Proudlove’s other misadventures include encounters with inebriated clients who become physically ill en route. Curiously, the anticipation is worse than the actual event, he says.
“I feel like I’m in a Japanese game show. It’s ‘Explodo.’ ”
Proudlove has become skilled at doing a “CSI cleanup” so no one can tell his cab was recently used as a vomitorium. To explain a still-wet seat, he’ll sometimes say a previous customer spilled some water. For extra verisimilitude, he places an empty water bottle on the floor.
His favourite was the polite vomiter. This was a woman who asked Proudlove to pull over at his “earliest convenience” once the light turned green. After making a deposit near a Subway restaurant, she placed a handkerchief “on top, like a memorial.”
“On the other hand,” added Proudlove, “I’ve also had three people with the cab doors open, all simultaneously puking.”
Other remarkable clients include a woman needing a ride to a Prince concert. The fare, who said she hadn’t had a night out in years, told Proudlove she’d run out of makeup.
“So she had to use her kid’s clown makeup to finish,” he said. “It was very purple.”
At least one of his anecdotes is rather touching. Proudlove once picked up a late-night fare who asked him if it’d be OK if they stopped at a grocery store so he could buy a sandwich. What piqued Proudlove’s curiosity was how servile and thankful the man was. It turned out he’d recently been released from prison, where midnight sandwich requests were verboten.
“When he told me that, I said: ‘Heck, I’m going to come in and get a ----ing sandwich with ya.’ ”
Interstellar Elder, Metro Studio, Aug. 30, 31, Sept 1, 2, 3.
While Proudlove is a relative newcomer, Ingrid Hansen has performed on the fringe circuit for a decade. Her greatest hit might be Little Orange Man, which sold out almost all its performance at the Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival last year.
A graduate of the University of Victoria’s theatre program, this 31-year-old fringer created her new show Interstellar Elder with a team that includes Victoria’s Britt Small and Kathleen Greenfield.
It features Hansen as an elderly astronaut who orbits alone in a spaceship carrying cryogenically frozen humans. Meanwhile, North American Prime Minister Justin Bieber has endeavoured to end world hunger by planting crops of genetically modified Swiss chard.
Hansen, who has performed Interstellar Elder in Montreal, Toronto and Saskatoon, says her greatest challenge has been wearing an uncomfortable rain-suit costume.
“Oh my God, yeah. It’s like a slush suit. It does not breathe at all. And I sweat more than I’ve ever sweated before,” she says.
Hansen says the 96-year-old heroine of Interstellar Elder is inspired by her real-life grandmother. This relative, who spoke mostly Danish, found herself rather lonely in a seniors’ home late in life. The combination of age and isolation intrigued her granddaughter.
As part of the creative process, Hansen and Greenfield started riffing on words for old women such as “crones” or “elders.”
“And then Kathleen said: ‘Oh, maybe she really should be in outer space.’ It snowballed from there,” Hansen says.
A Woman’s Guide to Peeing Outside and Other Adventures … , Victoria Event Centre, Aug. 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, Sept. 2.
Like Proudlove, Holly Brinkman is novice when it comes performing in fringe theatre. In fact, the 31-year-old Victorian — who studied history and English at McGill University — is new to the world of professional theatre, period.
Her previous stage experience includes high-school shows — she played Sandy in the musical Grease and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew. In recent years, Brinkman has joined Victoria’s community of public story-tellers.
Before writing and performing her first show, A Woman’s Guide to Peeing Outside and Other Adventures …, Brinkman’s fringe festival experience was off-stage. She has been a volunteer co-ordinator and worked front-of-house for the Victoria and Montreal fringes.
One of the perks for helping out was receiving a free super-pass that allowed her to “fringe my face off.” Brinkman became increasingly curious about what it would be like to perform her own show.
A Woman’s Guide to Peeing Outside and Other Adventures … is a series of autobiographical tales about a young woman coming of age and discovering her true self. Just as the title promises, there is some discussion of urination in the great outdoors.
“It’s an integral part of the show, for sure. I have a lot of funny pee stories, just from growing up rurally,” said Brinkman, who was raised in the tiny community of Meadow Creek near Kaslo.
One of her “pee stories” is culled from her time working at a ski lodge in the Selkirk Mountains. Outdoor urination called for a complicated routine including the removal of bibbed snow-pants, coat and a transceiver while keeping her skis on (lest she disappear into the deep snow).
“I did learn that ski boots make great footwear for peeing, “ Brinkman said. “You can squat really far back without tipping over.”