Tremors Festival
No more performances
From The Last Days of Judas Iscariot to Endgame, Rumble Productions Tremors Festival rattled the theatre scene with four very different theatre pieces over 18 days.
Included on the playbill were Giant Invisible Robot, a 2011 Fringe remount, and A Last Resort, a newly minted, multi-media bio-travelogue created by Camille Gingras and Candelario Andrade.
Gingras and Andrade were first platonic (floating separately willy-nilly around the world) then loversalthough Gingras was really looking for a settling down kind of man. Andrade, a hot Latino lover was clearly not that back then.
It appeared that Andrade and Gingras ran the whole show from two laptops with a wall-sized screen behind them but as director Lois Anderson confessed, A Last Resort was designed to make us think the performers were totally controlling the projections and soundscape. In fact, there really were folks doing some of the work from the booth. Had me fooled.
It was a sweet, sweet show with a finale that was so charming it made me smile out loud. Was this Rough House production romantic? Oh, yes.
Not romantic at all was Main Street Theatres Endgame with elderly, ashen-faced couple Nagg (Daryl King) and Nell (Sasa Brown) imprisoned in garbage cans by their blind son, Hamm (Josh Drebit). At his beck and call is Clov (Ryan Beil) although the power shifts back and forth when Clov denies wheelchair-bound Hamm, his painkillers.
One of Becketts most famous lines comes from Endgame, and Drebit made it resonate right down to my toenails: Youre on earth, theres no cure for that.
This scrappy, seat-of-its-pants company has made its name doing the plays of David Mamet, but in Endgame, directed by Stephen Malloy, they prove every bit as capable of handling Beckett who cleared the way for Mamet, Pinter and all the most exciting contemporary playwrights. Best of all, the director and cast found the humour in all of that end-of-the-world futility.
