Veteran writer/director Daniel Brooks wasn’t particularly worried about his introductory speech. “You’re all thinking about yourselves, anyway. It doesn’t really matter what I say.” A smattering of slightly shocked laughter passed through the crowd—but this display of confident individuality is exactly what the patrons of Monday night’s “One Day: Three Plays” fundraiser have come to expect and appreciate about Brooks, the outspoken artistic director who has turned Necessary Angel into one of the most successful and highly-regarded Canadian theatre companies.
Held at the revamped Capitol Event Theatre and hosted by a charismatic Rick Miller, the gala aimed to raise money for the company and throw a damn good party at the same time. The program included a silent and live auction, a gourmet dinner, and three short plays created by some of the hottest theatre talent in town.
Globe and Mail food columnist Lucy Waverman set the menu, consisting of swanky treats like forest mushroom soup with truffle cream, braised beef short ribs, and scalded black bean rubbed sable fish in a soy ginger drizzle. Soy ginger drizzle! Of course, there was plenty of wine flowing between courses—and this was before the first play had hit the stage.
Here’s the drill: three top Canadian playwrights were provided, on Monday morning, with an opening line written by none other than British theatre icon Tom Stoppard. Each playwright was paired with an equally prominent director and a swell group of actors to create a 20-minute play in only four hours. The line that Sir Tom drummed up? “Don’t anybody move—there was an asp in that basket of figs and the little bastard is somewhere in this room!”
The first company to take on the line was playwright Morwyn Brebner’s team with Monkey Fights Snake—a hilarious hypothetical scenario featuring Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel the night before Conrad is set to hit the big house. Not quite as topical, but equally amusing, was Daniel MacIvor’s American Zombie, a meta-theatrical piece about actors in a classic British farce angling for spots in a zombie movie.
Dessert was being served by the time Claudia Dey’s Tom Stoppard Told Me To, a surreal love story between quirky characters named Finch and Mustang, took the stage. Patrons were happily shuffling out by midnight, some bearing auction items like a weekend at Stratford or a David Blackwood print. Daniel Brooks might not be too concerned about saying the right thing, but he sure knows how to bring public support to his company—and there’s nothing more necessary than that
