After work yesterday, I headed out to the OC Transpo Lost and Found depot to look for my stray glove and after scouring through a garbage pail (one of the large ones) full of stray mittens, I could not find it. I suppose I shall go again next week in hopes of finding it. I also dropped some money in the donation box as I didn’t have any change the last time I went there to get my lost bus pass.
I then headed towards Milestone’s with Mike while picking up some Tragically Hip albums at CD Exchange which is YET ANOTHER record store shutting its doors in Ottawa. Gak! When will it stop!?
Milestone’s was fun times with Maren and Krista. Although I must admit that our service was pretty horrible (having an empty drink on my table for five minutes irks me). In the end, I enjoyed the Shanghai Noodle Stir Fry once again but we may opt to try out a new place in the future.
I then headed over to La Nouvelle Scene to see a play with Vero – a play in which our friend Steve was acting in. The play was called Duel and it was written by Michel Ouelette. What was interesting about tonight’s spectacle is that it was performed in a laboratory environment, where two different groups chose the same scene to act out and you get to see what the Director has as a vision for the scene.
Thing is, in theatre, there’s always reinterpretation going on. You don’t always see the exact same play. The director puts some thought into how they envision the play ~ the visuals, the mannerisms, the characters, but the dialogue remains the same.
So the first scene had Steve and someone else do a very stylized interpretation and I thought Steve’s performance was probably one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. He played a transvestite who had a mean streak…I thought of the Joker when seeing him perform and I thoroughly enjoyed his actions throughout the scene as well as his speech pattern. Very cool.
The next group that came up were actually doing the scene in the Romanian language. Now, after a few beers at Milestone’s, the french was hard enough to comprehend, but there’s no chance in Hell that I would understand the Romanian one! The funny part was that I didn’t catch that they were doing the same exact scene because it was definitely different in style and I only caught the characters names in the Romanian language which tipped me off that it was supposed to be the same exact scene.
They had an interesting Q&A session at the end where the two groups came together and talked about how different it was to see the scene they did reinterpreted in such a vast way (for example, the transvestite makes no appearance in the Romanian version).
All in all, I enjoyed it purely for Steve’s performance and the manner that the laboratory works (as in, seeing two different takes on a scene). It would be like giving Troy and I a lyric sheet and asking us to write a song.