Reviews

ETERNAL HYDRA

Mock Modernist (interview with Anton Piatigorsky)

David Balzer, Eye Weekly (Toronto)

     “There’s no getting around the fact that Joyce set himself up to be a genius,” says playwright Anton Piatigorsky, about the now--monumental places of high modernist texts like Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities in the literary canon. “It’s so interesting to me that there’s this self-awareness, this mock-heroism and mock-genius in modernism, yet it’s ended up being taken so seriously.”

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Eternal Hydra

Catherine Kustanczy, publicbroadcasting.ca (Toronto)

    
    The tales of gods and goddesses, heroes, demons, maidens and monsters still have a power, and I've found, increase in meaning as the years pass. As noted mythologian Joseph Campbell once wrote, "myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life." Anton Piatigorsky understands this...

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I, CLAUDIA

Citadel's I, Claudia is Incredible

Eva Marie Clarke, Vue Weekly (Edmonton)

     Chris Abraham’s production is exquisitely refined, focusing on extreme character development and glowing moments of theatrical magic. Like his searing frozen two seasons ago, I, Claudia is characterized by translucent human moments frozen in a dark vista as hyper-focused beams of light pierce the blackness of the Rice Theatre. It’s a fluid sensation that renders the almost ritualized character transformations—the shedding and donning of masks—natural. He is also attuned to the rhythm of a script which simultaneously attracts and repels emotion...

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Perfection Behind the Mask

Colin MacLean, The Edmonton Sun

    Repo-Martell brings her to life in a manner that will immediately take you back to that time in your life. There is none of the stock stage adolescent here. Claudia seems awkward in her skin. She has long since accepted that the world considers her plain and she copes with that with humour. She's rebelling and yet, she longs for the love she once knew when she had a family...

Little Girl Blue

Renato Pagnani, See Magazine (Edmonton)

     Claudia herself might represent one of the most accurate portrayals of an adolescent in recent memory; this show captures all the tics and inflections of a precocious 12-year-old girl so vividly that I wouldn’t be surprised if Thomson had actually hired one to write the character for her. But that’s trying to shift the credit elsewhere, and it is Thomson’s strong writing that makes I, Claudia such a touching experience...

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