On Repression: Fun Home and Bat Boy

Sarah Bockel and Nick Duckart in Fun Home. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

It’s not the Huntington Theatre Company’s fault that the opening night performance of Fun Home occasioned repeated displays of virtue signaling on the part of the audience; that’s what you get these days when you produce a play that wears its liberal heart on its sleeve. (The cheering began with the pre-show announcement, for God’s sake.) But Logan Ellis’s production of the musical, adapted by Lisa Kron from Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel, makes it easy for an audience to declare their allegiance. The show, which premiered at the Public Theatre twelve years ago under Sam Gold’s direction, is already didactic. It’s a memory play narrated by a character based on Bechdel, who grew up in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 70s, in a museum-like Victorian house that doubled as the small town’s funeral parlor (hence fun home, the family’s nickname for it), with a father who divided his time between undertaking and teaching high school English. Though Alison’s reminiscences permit her to revisit her eleven-year-old self, they focus on her coming out as an Oberlin freshman and, in the wake of that announcement, her mother Helen’s revelation that Alison’s father Bruce was a closeted gay man with a taste for young, sometimes underage men. Bechdel’s trajectory ends happily: she grows up to become a famous cartoonist. Bruce, on the other hand, ends up a suicide.

Fouettés, Flutters and Fun: The Trocks at 50

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. (Photo: Zoran Jelenic.)

On Sunday, Oct. 19, at the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatres, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo — the Trocks — closed their 50th-anniversary tour in Toronto with an evening in which exacting technique and theatrical excess sharpened one another — and the laughter felt earned. From the first moment, it was clear the Trocks were performing with both intelligence and irreverence.

Vertiginous Vortex: Our Little Gang / The Lives of the Vorticists

Reaktion Books/Univeristy of Chicago Press

“Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did and said, during a certain period.” 

Wyndham Lewis

“Vorticism . . . what does this word mean? I do not know.”

Wyndham Lewis

Even art historians with a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of advanced visual art trends such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism are often somewhat at a loss to grasp, let alone to cogently explain, the obscure art and literary movement that arose in the second decade of the 20th century in English avant-garde circles known as Vorticism, mostly by the Vorticists themselves. After the opening salvo of radical thinking that exploded in the new years of that newest of all new centuries, with a shared intellectual bomb contained in both Sigmund Freud’s 1899 theories of the unconscious, and Einstein’s 1905 relativity theory, tradition was turned on its head. Among other recent discoveries that seemed to call into question the sanctity of classical values, the domains of art and literature were also about to begin actively reflecting the dominant prevailing mindset of drastic and hyper-accelerated change.

How To Live and Die at the Canadian Opera Company: Roméo et Juliette and Orfeo ed Euridice in Toronto

Stephen Costello and Kseniia Proshina in Roméo et Juliette. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

The Canadian Opera Company’s 2025–26 season opens with a stylistically mismatched pairing: Roméo et Juliette, Charles Gounod’s 1867 Shakespeare-inspired opera in director Amy Lane’s over-extravagant Malmö Opera rental, and the revival of Canadian director Robert Carsen’s minimalist 2011 staging of Orfeo ed Euridice, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1762 rendering of the Greek myth. The two productions run in rotation at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre through to the end of this month.

Killers: Rope and Punch

Ephraim Birney and Daniel Neale in Rope. (Photo: Hartford Stage.)

The English playwright Patrick Hamilton – best known for Angel Street, the thriller that became the classic 1945 film Gaslight – wrote Rope in 1929, five years after the celebrated Chicago murder case that inspired it. Two well-heeled University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who were lovers, kidnapped and murdered Loeb’s fourteen-year-old cousin Bobby Franks to prove that they could commit the perfect crime – and that, as superior intellectual specimens, they had the right to operate outside the realm of accepted morality. (The irony was how badly these self-proclaimed Nietzschean Übermenschen bungled it.) The case, which their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, used as his most famous argument against capital punishment – he succeeded in getting his clients life sentences rather than the gallows they seemed fated for – has never entirely disappeared from popular culture: it has generated plays, films, a musical and one famous novelization, Meyer Levin’s Compulsion. In a 2018 review in this publication of the book The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most Infamous Crimes, Devin McKinney conveys with poetic eloquence the enduring power of this murder, which has moved so many interpreters to theorize on the motivation of the killers but has remained an unsolvable mystery.

When A Film Lab Cancels an AI Show, Who Gets to Define a Cultural Commons?

Works by the artist Rick Valicenti from the exhibit Playbot Companions.

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Jason Wang, to Critics at Large.

In the first week of October, Toronto hosted a small but telling cultural collision. On Oct. 1, artist and designer Rick Valicenti opened Playbot Companions at 99 Frames Parliament Street: a two-week presentation of framed, AI-generated hairstyles linked by QR code to tiny “playbot” faces and backstories. The conceit is simple and unnerving — show the hair, hide the face, and force the viewer to complete the “playbot” as a person. But the sharper question is: what happens when intimacy becomes a design choice and companionship a consumable commodity?

Wild at Heart: Surviving Pynchon and Bolaño

(Bloomsbury.)

“We know that hyperbole is first of all a rhetorical figure of exaggeration but it is more fundamentally a moment of hubris. Hyperbole implies a risk that is in fact fantastic and fictional: that if I push it too far, I will become mad.”

--Marc Richir, 2015

In some very tangible ways, this new book by Samir Sellami, Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon’s and Bolaño’s Late Maximalist Fiction. is unavoidably elegiac, and rightly so, given that Robert Bolano was taken from us far too soon by a liver ailment in 2003 at only 50 years of age. But it’s also rather celebratory, since the erstwhile Thomas Pynchon has just released his ninth novel Shadow Ticket, and his first in a decade, at 88 years of age, on October 7 of this year. He thus carries the torch of challenging literature forward in a way that illustrates, as Sellami’s critical study shows so well, how important his labours and those of Bolaño have been down in the mines of innovation fiction. I readily admit that I prefer reading supposedly difficult books by supposedly difficult authors. Of course I concurrently acknowledge the skillful means of such masters as Dickens, Chekhov, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, as well as the rest of the canon of pared-down-to-essentials normalcy. However, I just feel that somehow it’s a better use of my limited time and energy to forgo the dining and laundry lists of quotidian narratives and instead plunge headlong into the intense dreamtime of Joyce, Stein, Faulkner and Burroughs.