Each year, the University of Toronto Drama Coalition sponsors a festival at Hart House Theatre for students from each college to write, produce, direct, and star in original plays. Those plays are performed once each and judged by an expert in the field who will name, at the festival’s conclusion, its winners and losers. This year, blogUT will be attending and reporting on all of the plays at the 2012 U of T Drama Festival and letting you know how your college matches up to others in the dramatic arts.

February 16

University of Toronto Mississauga: Trail of Embrace by Kylah Thomson, directed by Kaitlyn Alexander

Whereas last night’s submission from UTM was bleak and dismal, tonight’s was lighter and more cheery, though not without its darker side. Trail of Embrace followed a young woman as she went out on her first date in one year, accompanied by the memories of her past boyfriends. Constant motion and a sharp sense of wit gave this piece a great flow that kept the audience interested and invested in the plot as Skye reminisced about her previous relationships while meeting with an eager, if not eccentric, coffee date. Though the emotion was a little more contained than in other shows, the actors did a good job of being figments of imagination, products of flashbacks, and present conversationalists, sometime all at once. The twist ending – that Skye’s sister, the person with whom she’s had the most meaningful relationship in her whole life, had died – came as shock to an otherwise complacent audience. Though a little out of left field, it helped end the delightful Trail of Embrace with a tinge of sadness and a powerful message of love and loss. A clever script and excellent staging and direction make Trail of Embrace a likely candidate for at least two of the five possible awards.

New College: An Extravagant Life by Jade Jessica Ng, directed by Alex Howard

Continuing on the theme of love and memory we got An Extravagant Life, a weighty drama about a young man dying of some mysterious illness who is visited by the spirit of his true love, a man who happened to have died two years prior of some other mysterious illness. The piece began as a conversation between four friends, one of whom was repressing his grief and sadness, but then three of the friends disappeared a few minutes into the show and were replaced by a lengthy monologue and conversation between our dying protaganist and his former lover. Colin Asuncion’s remarkable emotion and strength as an actor in the lead role did little to compensate for the circular script that ended up, after what felt like hours, going no where. Audience members around me were slouching down with their eyes closed and some even began to text as Cam and Darren began their second – then third, then fourth… – round of sweet nothings and reminiscing about the days before that annoyingly mysterious, unnamed illness took Darren’s life. Ultimately, the play ended where it began and nothing was accomplished, making An Extravagant Life seem more like an exercise in romantic dialogue than a fully-formed play. Asuncion’s superb performance may have warranted an award, but there was little other merit to this piece.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2012 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Arts, Contests, Entertainment, Events, On Campus, Review, theatre, Uncategorized, UT Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.