Sitting around the table with five of the six players of Vision Theatre’s “4Play: One-Acts by David Ives,” there’s that feeling of infectious excitement. It’s the eve of opening night, and in two hours the cast will be presenting their first performance of there show, as the title suggests, a collection of one-act plays written by playwright David Ives. Vision took away the Best Comedy award from the 2007 Ottawa Fringe Festival for their previous one-act collection, “Crazy Eights,” with plays written by David Lindsay-Abaire. Interviewd were Marsha Awwad (MA), Chantale Plante (CP), Jennifer Scrivens (JS), Sam Awwad (SA), and Riley Stewart (RS). Not present was Shaun Toohey, who was still on the road back from Montreal…

SA We were looking to do something similar to what we did last year, last year we did David Lindsay-Abaire, three one-acts by him, which fit within the hour. We went with a different playwright, David Ives, who has quite a few good, fun plays that we felt would entertain audiences again.

How do you sell the show?
SA “Do you want to enjoy foreplay with Vision Theatre?”
CP It’s pretty easy to sell, the shows last year did so well. Vision won best comedy. I wasn’t in them, but I wished I had been - they were so funny to watch. The formula works, so why break the formula? So it’s basically, “It’s back again, last year they did three, this year we’re doing four - more fun - come and see it.”
MA And there’s something for everyone, right? Four twelve-minute shows, there’s something for everyone in there.
CP Most of the shows bend time in some way, they bend reality.
MA The last show is a send-up to David Mamet; it’s basically a boiled-down version of four of his shows. It takes place in a ‘roast’ atmosphere, with an MC, and the rest of the characters onstage do four of his shows in seven minutes. And it makes fun of him, alot.
JS And the audience members don’t have to be familiar with David Mamet to get it, it’s pared down so well and keeps the humour really strong that everybody is going to enjoy it whether or not they know his work.

Who’s in which scenes with who?
JS Shaun and I start off the show, with Sam and Marsha joining us in ‘English Made Simple.’ Shaun and I just discovered this week once we’ve put the shows together, he and I never actually leave the stage. Other people come in; in the second show, ‘Philedelphia,’ Sam, Marsha and Shaun are the main players, and Chantale and I just sit around looking pretty. We’re in ‘The Chicken.’
SA It’ll make sense when they see the show.
JS In ‘Sure Thing’ Riley and Chantale are the two featured players, and Shaun and I are sitting as spies. And then the last piece is an ensemble piece we all come together. The entire night definitely has the atmosphere of just having fun, and playing with each other. We have become a strong group of people outside of rehearsals, and the fun that we have outside definitely is reflected in what we wind up putting onstage. Because if it looks like it’s a chore, then what’s the point.

How was the feeling during the development of this production?
RS We just have a really good chemistry; the whole bottom line is we just wanted to get together and try to have fun, and just forget about the formality of theatre, and all the seriousness that we have to deal with throughout the year. It’s the fringe, right? It’s time to have fun, to be with friends, and just have a good time and spread your wings a bit.
CP There’s always a moment in rehearsals where we just start giggling.
RS Sam is a champion paper airplane maker during high school. While we were rehearsing he was demonstrating his skill by making about eighteen different models, lining them up and then throwing them at us.
SA They didn’t need too much attention from me. Working with good actors, they got their thing going. Even at the end of the day, working nine to five and then going to rehearsal, these guys keep the energy up. I’m not as professional as that, so I have to keep my energy up somehow.
JS He’s really just testing us to see how well we can stay focused when cell phones go off or candy wrappers happen in the audience.
SA I giggle quite a bit. I get set off quite a bit, so we can’t have anything that will set me off onstage or I’ll be laughing.
JS When you get the six of us together to rehearse, you can’t not have funny moments.
RS Marsha did wear farting shoes to dress rehearsal yesterday. Shoes that made very convincing farting noises.
MA You know, when you have high-top Chuck Taylors, at the end of the day and your feet are sweating, so they move around in the Chucks. And it’s my first freaking entrance, and I have to go from backstage all the way downstage diagonally, and everytime it’s like *fart, fart, fart, fart, fart*. And this was supposed to be our one run before opening.

What do you want the audience to take away from your show?
RS A smile.
MA Come out happy, having had a good night at the theatre. What’s better than that?

4Play: One Acts by David Ives plays at the Arts Court theatre until June 29.

Previous interviews:
Interview with Weeping Spoon productions (Greed)
Interview with Brigette DePape (She Rules With Iron Stix)
Amy Salloway (Circumference)
The Absinthe Collective (A Leave of Absinthe)
Peter Hayes (The Tricky Part) and Greg Landucci (Mr. Fox)
Penny Ashton (MC Hot Pink / Busty Rhymes)
Keir Cutler (Teaching the Fringe)
Celeste Sansregret (Wonderbar!)
Jem Rolls (How I learned to stop worrying and love the mall)

As we set up for our interview, Brigette is helping to figure out the finishing touches on her set. Behind her on the stage of the SAW Gallery is an intricate art installation on its back wall: a mural of the logo for the band ‘Motorhead’, done up with 8,000 silver push-pins. It’s not particularly relevant to Brigette’s show, “She Rules With Iron Stix,” an exploration of the curious world of baton twirling. A plan is in motion to cover it up with a black sheet.

“It’s all under control, you have to go to rehearsal,” calls out Brigette to the person helping figure out the solution. She turns back to me as I ask her where she was born. “Winnipeg. I just moved to Ottawa this year to study at U of O, because they have a really good international development program. Theatre is more of a hobby, I guess, but I’m very passionate about it. I hope to mix social justice and international development with theatre. That would be really cool.”

An interesting mix, and I ask Brigette to give me an example of how that might take shape. “I was in a play with a social message this year, called Lysistrata, where women bind together to stop a war. Next summer I might go to Israel to help teach drama to kids, to Arabs and Jews, as a way of helping them to work together, to create something together, and hopefully to help them stop their prejudices against one another.”

Brigette has been involved in the theatre for quite some time. Baton twirling is got her started performing in front of people. “I was eight when I started baton twirling. I was a competitive baton-twirlier for five years. In baton twirling, it’s really about performing, pleasing the crowd and smiling and doing different moves, to make them laugh and enjoy themselves. I think that’s where performing started for me. I got into acting, took some lessons… I did my first fringe when I was fifteen. I wrote a one-woman show and performed it at the Winnipeg Fringe.”

“I stopped baton-twirling when I was thirteen; you had to practice way too much, and it was really competitive and a bit dorky. And then I was baton-twirling at this random art party, and someone from a local magazine saw me and said, ‘hey, would you like to perform at one of our events?’ I hadn’t baton-twirled for a very long time in front of people. But that started me back into baton-twirling, and I thought that maybe I could make a show about a baton-twirler. Because whenever I say I was a baton-twirler, I get some varied reactions: ‘Baton-twirling still exists?’ and are shocked, but there is a whole baton-twirling world that is going on as we speak. Even in Ottawa, there are about fifty of them in Gatineau. And I even got some help from them for some choreography in the show.”

So what are baton-twirlers like? “I talk about them in the show. You actually have to be quite strong, I mean arm strength, to be a baton-twirler. Because you have to throw the baton high in order to do any real cool tricks. Yeah, it’s kind of dorky. They’re all kind of different, I guess. Whenever anyone thinks of a baton twirler they think of a majorette. Which is the one who marches in a parade, wears the hat… weird sort of costume. But baton-twirling does have a world championship. China always wins, but one year Canada won and it was this huge deal.”

Brigette DePape’s show, She Rules with Iron Stix, plays daily (except Monday) at the SAW Gallery venue in the Arts Court.

Previous interviews:
Amy Salloway (Circumference)
The Absinthe Collective (A Leave of Absinthe)
Peter Hayes (The Tricky Part) and Greg Landucci (Mr. Fox)
Penny Ashton (MC Hot Pink / Busty Rhymes)
Keir Cutler (Teaching the Fringe)
Celeste Sansregret (Wonderbar!)
Jem Rolls (How I learned to stop worrying and love the mall)

We have a very short window to talk with Amy Salloway, whose performance of Does this Monologue Make Me Look Fat? at last year’s fringe yielded an excellent response.

“I live in Minneapolis, I was born in Boston, I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and then moved to Columbus Ohio, and then Seattle for seven years. Then in a fit of bad decision-making, I moved back to Minneapolis. The entire time I’ve lived there I’ve sworn I would move away any minute, but I’ve been there for nine years. Any minute now. I like the bustle of New York city, or the edgy busy-ness of Seattle. Minneapolis is warm and cozy, and the parks are so pretty, and that’s great and lovely. Theatrically I feel like I’m getting away with too much. I want someone to kick my ass and force me to create in different modes and styles and with different tools than I am, and those people don’t seem to be in Minneapolis.”

Amy tells us about her latest show, Circumference. “This is the third show I’ve created. All of my shows have had, to a greater or lesser degree, themes of being a misfit, body image, fat and size acceptance… the way that our external selves shape the rest of our lives. Circumference is the most direct take on that, that I’ve written so far. It’s the story of the year that I spent trying to get approved for gastro-bypass surgery. And I didn’t get approved. It’s the story of everything that happened over the course of that process, of having gotten to the last-ditch place of having to change my appearance… of “I cannot live with this body any more.” The show includes flashbacks to seventh-grade gym class, so it’s really about how body image was shaped, what happens to it in the future, and what happens when you reach that point of no return and needing things to change.”

“I worry that people think a couple things: that they think that it’s this horrible self-indulgence festival, where we all will take out our violins and cry for me. And it’s not, I swear it’s not, even though in describing it, it might sound that way. And two, I worry that they’ll think “oh, it’s a woman’s show.” It’s so not a woman’s show. There are no high-heels, there is no lipstick, there is nothing pink, there are no songs - Bonnie Tyler (oh, wait, there is) - no Indigo girls, no “I’ve been to paradise,” no “Sex and the City,”…. So men, be not afraid.”

In college, Amy realized her love for issue-oriented theatre, for shows about things that were happening right now. “I had a much greater desire to be part of a grassroots company that would tour from one coast to the other doing shows in communities along the way, rather than on Broadway in a pretty costume. I did a lot of improv and educational theatre. I played a lot of forest animals… a salmon, a dying mosquito…”

How do you prepare for the role of a dying mosquito?
“The show was about mosquitoes, and we all made our own proboscises. We had a little workshop session and we practiced flying, it was fun. I’m still not sure I’d call a mosquito my friend, but they do have a whole culture, that’s for sure. In this play the elder mosquitoes raised the younger mosquitoes; they trained them in etiquette and decorum.”

Amy’s experience in one-woman performance pieces began in Seattle. “When I moved to Seattle I found wonderful amazing people that were doing the kind of work I loved so much, and a lot of them were multi-talented and started doing solo performances. They were using their own lives as theatre material. They blew me away, their ability to share their own lives on stage. I thought, “God, it would be so amazing to do that, and I should never do that.” I thought it would be torture for the audience to look at me for an hour. I thought I could mount a tv on me so if they got bored, they could watch the tv. I thought that for a really long time. When I moved back to Minneapolis, I didn’t have those same inspiring people around me, I didn’t have those people to look up to. The apex of incredible talent was taken away, so I didn’t feel it looming like an anvil. Instead there was this void in which I could create without the same degree of comparison and judgment. I started writing short pieces to perform, and I finally tried out a piece; the first performance had to be the greatest terror I have ever felt. I’m going to walk out there all alone, and no one is going to save me, no one else knows these lines. But it was incredible.”

As most fringe festivals are run with the lottery system, Amy unfortunately didn’t get in to the fringe festival in her hometown, the Minnesota Fringe Festival. “It was like I got divorced or something. My friends were saying “Amy, why aren’t you in the fringe? It looks like you’re not in the fringe? What’s wrong?” … “Well, the fringe and I have been having some problems for a while, and we thought it was better to try a separation…” but no, I did apply. I didn’t get drawn. I knew it was going to happen eventually.”

Circumference, by Amy Salloway, can be seen at Studio Leonard Beaulne (venue 3), from June 20-29. For more information on Amy Salloway, you can visit her website.

If you glance at a festival program, you’ll notice that Wonderbar! is meant to be featuring Alex Dallas, a veteran fringe performer. Show up to a performance however, and you’ll see Celeste Sansregret gracing the stage. “I wrote and produced Wonderbar! and Alex Dallas was going to come on the tour and do it,” said Celeste when we caught up to her at the Montreal Fringe. “Alex has done the fringe for a very long time and is a very dynamic and well-respected one-woman show performer. Ten days ago she decided she just couldn’t go on the road for four months this summer. So as the producer the fringe slot on the tour is mine, and I had the choice of losing my shirt or doing the show.”

Tough choice, but the show must go on. “I couldn’t find a replacement - I’m doing the national tour: opening in Montreal, doing Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto and Edmonton.” Stepping in at the last minute, Celeste has had to quickly get up to speed not just as the producer of the show, but as the principal actor. “I premier in Montreal on Saturday night. I think for the first two nights in Montreal I’ll be doing a heavily-staged reading of it; I’m close, I won’t have my face in the book, I’ll have a music stand, and a set, and it’ll be blocked, costumes, changes, music… by the time I get to Ottawa, there will be no book.”

Like many fringe veterans, Celeste has a high opinion of fringe festival. “I think this is a very pure experience of theatre, it’s incredibly democratic, I really like the uncensored aspect of it. When you go to do a film project, by the time the lawyers, the producers, the sponsers and the advertisers and everybody’s finished, the show looks nothing like what it started as. You’re re-written to death by committee. But here, you write it, you go, you do it.”

The fringe also has a special meaning for Celeste, as she met her fiance, fellow veteran fringe performer John D. Huston, on the fringe in 2006. “The fringe changed my life. The fringe was the place I did the first play I ever wrote, the fringe introduced me to my fiance, the fringe took me back to working in theatre after ten years of largely working as a writer and story editor for film and television.”

What does she enjoy most about the fringe? “It’s all on you, for better or worse. It’s very challenging, but it’s incredibly gratifying. Whether my show’s good, or whether it sucks, at least it’ll be the show I wrote as opposed to a show that was re-written by committee.”

Wonderbar! by Celeste Sansregret, opens in Ottawa on June 22 with performances through to June 29. More information on the show can be found on Celeste’s website.