by David Ives

Four of Tony Award-winning playwright David Ives's smart, silly and delightful short plays: "Sure Thing", "Variations on the Death of Trotsky", "Words Words Words", and "English Made Simple". Theatre that “aerobicizes the brain and tickles the heart." - Time Magazine.

Director: Keltie Brown Forsyth

Featuring: Ntara Curry, Alexander Forsyth, Kevin Ouellet.

Produced at the 2014 Edmonton Fringe Festival at La Cite Francophone 

Review: All in the Timing

 EDMONTON JOURNAL AUGUST 20, 2014

4 stars out of 5

Stage 46 — La Cité francophone, L’UniThéâtre

All in the Timing is a series of very smart, very funny one-act plays by Tony-winning American playwright David Ives. So we know the writing is going to be sensational. But how will this Edmonton production fare?

Fabulously, it turns out. All three actors — Ntara Curry, Alexander Forsyth and Kevin Ouellet — do a splendid job playing a plethora of characters, from typing, smoking chimpanzees in a research lab to pissed-off ex-lovers at a party and William Faulkner junkies flirting in a coffee shop, with a helluva lot of lines that must be delivered at lightning pace. Bang, bang, bang — the momentum of the show is key to its success, and our trio pulls it off.

The show, a highly absurd series of sketches, is directed by Keltie Forsyth (a.k.a. Keltie Brown, daughter of Edmonton’s Kenneth Brown, at the same venue with his one-man show Love and Death). I particularly love Ouellet as the chimpanzee, and Curry as Leon Trotsky’s wife (especially the mocking bit). Forsyth does a solid job playing Trotsky, which requires him to perform an entire scene (and die, again and again) with a mountain climber’s axe smashed (NOT buried) in his skull. “Sometime, for everyone, there’s a room you go into that you never leave,” Trotsky observes. Such brilliant little lines are sprinkled in among all the nonsense.

There might have been a moment or two on Tuesday night where I thought to myself, “oh, that sounded like someone ‘acting’,” where I’d snap out of the show because some longer lines felt a bit too memorized and unnatural. But on the whole, All in the Timing nails it.

— Elizabeth Withey