Content Warning: This article mentions death and homophobic and transphobic violence.

As February melted into March, the annual Hart House Drama Festival launched us into spring once again. Each year, the stage hosts several one-act plays written, directed, and performed by members of the U of T community. This year, we saw 11 shows take place over the course of a few nights, leading up to an awards ceremony adjudicated by dramaturge Marjorie Chan. 

Despite the competitive nature of the festival, audience members, actors, directors, writers, and technical production members alike showcased their camaraderie, proving the festival is less about competition and more about showcasing the love of the theatre that seems alive and well at U of T. 

Night one

The first night started strong with Trinity College Dramatic Society’s The Three Merry Murderers, which was truly an instance of the doctrine that it asserts — a satirical play on the idea of authorial self-insertion and pretentious writing by way of purposefully pretentious writing. 

The show began with a band of travelling players tasked with committing regicide and ended with the tragedians throwing tomatoes at each other on stage. With its Monty Python-esque scenarios and tight dialogue written in iambic pentameter, The Three Merry Murderers successfully pulled off an absurdist Shakespearean farce. Although “Nobody speaks in iambic pentameter!” — as was exclaimed in this fourth-wall-breaking moment — the show set the tone for the next few nights. Writer-director Birch Norman’s merit award for Impressive Creation in Iambic came well deserved. 

UTSC Drama Society’s Cornelia Sheik (Née Van der Beek) came next. The play centred on the journey of a newly-expectant New York socialite in an intercultural marriage, as she set out to explore her cultural identity before the birth of her child. With a situational-comedy tone, Cornelia Sheik (Née Van der Beek) infused the production with lively humour while delving into themes of heritage and belonging. Amina Niyazov’s performance as the eponymous Cornelia echoed the brilliance of sitcom stars, doing great justice to Feroz Khan’s cohesive and resonant writing.

If there was an award for ‘most laughs’ at the festival, UofT Improv’s UofT Improv Presents: The 6th Annual McGill Drama Festival would have won by a landslide. The show kicked off with a convincing portrayal of a McGill student, setting the stage for the audience to choose between two out of six potential premises. Books & Brutalism: A Robarts Love Story and Pride and Prejudice and Projectiles were the winning selections, and the crowd eagerly followed the troupe’s off-the-rails escapades. These included a timeless love story between an aspiring student actor and the immortal “Protector of Robarts Library,” as well as courting rituals involving jettisoned hats and miscellaneous objects.

Night two

From beach castaways and bad dinner dates to asthmatic exorcisms, UTSC Improv’s (UTSCI) UTSCI Night Live kicked off night two with another impressive display of the U of T community’s comedic talent. UTSCI’s strengths lay in their ability to skillfully incorporate props and effects — elements that more spontaneous improv cannot always predict. The pre-written sketches — reminiscent of the SNL moniker they adopted for performance — allowed for voiceover, lighting cues, and even choreographed candygram dance numbers. Some of the biggest laughs of the night came from these clever staging choices. 

Worthy of the standing ovation it received, Angela Zhang’s performance in St. Michael’s College Troubadours’ Faith, written and directed by Emily Beaubien, was undeniably the highlight of Drama Fest. Taking the form of a one-sided conversation with God, Zhang skillfully expressed a wide range of emotions, delivering a nearly hour-long soliloquy with little to no downtime. Truly impressive.

Presented as a reinterpretation of Euripedes’ The Bacchae, Avi Kleinman’s Five Minutes Between Lion and Man — from the Victoria College Drama Society — won four awards, with Kleinman being awarded the Robertson Davies Playwriting Award. It even sparked a noticeable uptick in Google searches for the classic tragedy the week of the festival. The play skillfully explored society’s tendency to turn a blind eye to the ongoing violence against queer and transgender people. However, the writing occasionally veered into self-indulgence, sacrificing clarity and storytelling for odd stylistic choices and forced allusion.

Grace Elizabeth Huestis delivered a formidable performance as Agave, confidently prancing around the stage and engaging in a verbal duel with her scene-mate, Ciarán McCausland, who brought a real feline quality to his movements and vocal cadence. Huestis took home the prestigious Donald Sutherland Award for Best Performance. 

Night three

A near one-man show, Four Letter J-Name saw UTM’s Phynn Saunders explore the deep crevices of a broken heart. The play took shape as a monologue from the perspective of an ostensibly irreverent young person dealing with their partner’s death. The writing effectively honoured the serious subject matter of its premise, balancing it with crass comedy fuelled by unapologetic expletives — earning Saunders the Outstanding Accomplishment as Writer/Performer merit award. No audience-insulting bathos here.

Bringing us another exploration of death and its complexities, Lauralee Leonhardt wrote and starred in Wake Up. While Leonhardt’s performance was strong, the stiff and robotic line delivery of others on stage diminished their fluidity. Director and set designer Mads Carrick earned the Robert Gill Award for Best Direction. A simple four-sided camping tent effectively transformed each scene upon rotation, keeping the stage elegant and furthering the liminal, dream-like setting.

Winner of the President’s Award for Best Production and easily the most grounded and well-thought-out play of the festival, Emily Paterson’s Butch/Femme brought us back to mid-twentieth century Toronto with a conversation between a jilted young woman and her ex-partner, who unexpectedly shows up at her door one evening. Paterson’s writing compellingly commanded the dialogue, allowing Tessa Kramer and Annabelle Gillis to work symbiotically and tell a story much bigger than the living room where the play unfolds. While many other representations of sapphic love in the festival felt passive and seemed to take queer acceptance for granted, Butch/Femme addressed some of the realities that members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community still face.

Night four

881 Drama Club’s Exchanged Souls 错位余生 explored the inner workings of a relationship through the soul-swapping of Ji Xiaoxing and Shen Shu, examining what happens when the person you love is violently torn from you. Writer and director Yixin Duan, who earned an award of merit for Outstanding Concept & Script, kept the audience constantly guessing what would happen next for the characters’ souls.

The play also addressed a problem pointed out by adjudicator Marjorie Chan; “Why are theatres not as diverse as the city?” Exchanged Souls 错位余生 featured dialogue exclusively in Chinese, with English subtitles provided in the backdrop, offering an answer to how a multilingual city can be represented in a single production and highlighting the direction future Toronto theatre should take. 

Tying together themes of identity, self-acceptance, self-exploration and love seen throughout the festival, UC Follies’ To the Promised Land closed Drama Fest with a dystopia worthy of epic lore. With vignettes of the past interwoven with present-day interview-style narrations, the characters realize searching for ‘the promised land’ ultimately means the assimilation of language and identity. The rebellion against this assimilation confronts the conflicting realities of identity intertwined with language. The world presented on stage earned July Yanchun Hu an award of merit for Complex World Building, but its richness sometimes overshadowed the narrative and characters, making the story harder to follow.

And so concludes another memorable year at the Hart House Drama Festival. Drama Fest brings U of T’s creative community together to share meaningful stories and artistic expression. Here’s to another 80 years of drama!

Editor’s Note (March 18, 8:50 pm): This article has been updated to mention that Five Minutes Between Lion and Man director Avi Kleinman won the Robertson Davies Playwriting Award.