Louise Mallory

Blackground is an improv troupe from Atlanta GA, made up of four Black performers, Josh Quinn, Swift Rice, Markis Gallashaw, and Maria (sorry didn’t catch her last name!). Their setup is that they get the audience to suggest and vote on a well-loved movie, then they show us the story of what the Black people were doing in and around the parts we know. Our audience chose Titanic. The Blackground version included Jerome, a character who’s never seen the ocean but wins a ticket in a card game, a high-born woman travelling with her father, some crew members shovelling coal to fuel the steamship (and one whose goal is to make it “steamier”), a preacher and congregation condemning the hubris of the ship-owners’ claims that not even God could sink the ship, Their transitions and tap-outs were very smooth and their show was very funny! At Rapid Fire Exchange.

Playwright Gavin Bradley, director Amanda Goldberg, and performers Mark Guerrero and Susan Sneath create this lovely and credible story of a traditional Irish storyteller/oral historian, a seanchaí, meeting a TikTok content creator who adapts the same stories. Folklore and Irish-language snippets contribute to the atmosphere as the human connections build. Contemporary Canadian setting makes it more meaningful.

Fetch was a classic Cat Walsh script, full of allusion and ambiguity and excruciating tension and the hint of offstage horror. Steven Sobolewski directed with Shyanne Duquette and Abby Krushel as the two versions of Hannah Morgan. The kind of play worth seeing again to pick up on clues.

Diane Jorge is a truly entertaining performer who had the audience laughing, poking each other, and gasping with her improvised telenovela LANGUAGE CLUB OF LOVE. At least six characters were embodied with different voices, body language, and a few simple props. The audience members whose answers to a few questions inspired the story seemed to be as amused as the rest of us at the preposterous tale.