Author Archives: Katherine Belyea

For the latest updates, please visit our website at http://www.plspls.ca.

Along with our co-sponsors and the project producers, we’re delighted to offer our PLS friends free tickets to this weekend’s live Zoom performances of director Jenna McKellips’ Mary Magdalene Project. 

The Mary Magdalene Project is a modernized version of the Digby play of the same name. The production will take place this weekend with performances on January 9 & 10. While the Digby Mary Magdalene is meant to be site-specific, the pandemic has made onsite, live performance impossible. This production, therefore, has been reimagined as “community-specific,” in that it is a play by and for a specific community.

“Medieval theater was often written and performed by cis men—or at least, this is how many historians report it. I, with many others, argue that this was not always the case,” says McKellips.

“The goal of this production is to give a voice to some of those whose voices were underrepresented in medieval drama, using a translation of the Digby Mary Magdalene interspersed with monologues taken from interviews with modern folks,” she adds.

This digital project is being produced to coincide with the MLA Queerness in Medieval Plays panel, organized by Fordham University’s Andrew Albin and the University of Toronto’s Matthew Sergi. Both performances will be followed by a talkback session with the director and actors.

Join us this weekend for one of the live performances of this innovative production by clicking the link below. 

Book Your Free Tickets

PLS is still here! It’s been an unusual nine months, to say the least. We are now having our Annual General Meeting at long last. All members, donors, production participants or other people interested in PLS are invited to attend.

Date: Thursday, December 17 at 2pm

Location: Online using the Zoom videoconferencing platform

Here is the agenda. Please RSVP to receive Zoom log-in details and other meeting paperwork.

Welcome to the twelfth century, where everyone is noble, wise and good. Except these guys…

Poculi Ludique Societas & Pneuma Ensemble present:

Problematic Men

Babio, an elegiac comedy

Samson dux fortissime, a lai/sequence/planctus

 

About

In this performance Pneuma Ensemble takes the moral high ground and introduces two twelfth century “negative exemplars”—characters who showed audiences how not to behave. We will meet Babio, a vile old priest in hot pursuit of his stepdaughter and Samson, the original strong-but-dumb hero. Performed in the original Latin, with supertitles, mime, mask, and period-appropriate instruments.

When

• Saturday, November 16 at 8pm
• Sunday, November 17 at 2pm

Where

Luella Massey Studio Theatre, 4 Glen Morris St, Toronto

Tickets

• $20 / $15 seniors / $10 students
• At the door. Cash only.
• Online at Brown Paper Tickets

More Information

About Pneuma Ensemble

You—yes, you!—are invited to PLS’s Annual General Meeting. We will be discussing our 2018–2019 season and planning for the future.

When: Sunday, September 29, 2019 at 2pm
Where: Rm 103, Lillian Massey Building, 125 Queen’s Park
(across from the ROM)

See you there!

We are seeking diverse actors for a production of

The Dutch Courtesan
by John Marston

Produced by Poculi Ludique Societas and Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto

Non-Union, Paid Honorarium

Performance Dates:

March 22-24 (preview March 19)

Rehearsals:

Through January, February, March, mostly evenings and weekends

Audition dates/times (by appointment only):

• Thursday, January 10 4:30 pm – 8:00 pm
• Friday, January 11 2:00 pm – 7:00 pm
• Saturday, January 12 11:00 am – 4:00 pm

Location:

The CDTPS Rehearsal Room (320), Koffler Centre, 214 College St. (Enter
from St George St and take the elevator or stairs to the 3rd floor)

To book an audition:

Please e-mail with subject line ‘Dutch Courtesan Audition’ to director@plspls.ca. Please come prepared with a classical monologue.

About the play:

The Dutch Courtesan (c. 1604) is being presented in conjunction with an academic conference, so there will be some audience talk-backs and workshops as well as the performance.

The urban landscape of the play presents London as a city that simultaneously applauds itself for being a multicultural cosmopolitan metropolis and feels deeply anxious about the place of ‘strangers’ within its urban landscape. The main plot deals with the treatment of a foreign sex worker whose otherness is partly established through her accent; the sub-plot follows two members of a distrusted religious minority as they are tricked and abused.

Marston’s play is a reflection of the London his audience inhabited, a cynical, often vicious portrayal of a ‘here-and-now’. Our production aims to evoke that audience-actor dynamic, and so we are looking to approximate some original conditions, but with a largely modern aesthetic. The aim is to use performance choices, costumes, accents, and casting that link Marston’s London to our Toronto.

About PLS:

Our mission is to rediscover the theatrical traditions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance through textual research and dramatic experimentation, and to bring those traditions to life for contemporary audiences of all ages. See plspls.ca for more information.

Conference:

Strangers and Aliens in London and Toronto: Sex, Religion, and Xenophobia in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan

Dates:

22-24 March 2019

Length of abstract:

250 words

Place:

University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies

Final date for submitting abstracts:

31 January 2019

Please e-mail submissions to Helen Ostovich at ostovich@mcmaster.ca

Date of announcing accepted papers:

15 February 2019, or earlier

Targeted scholars:

Senior doctoral students, recent doctoral graduates, and early career scholars

Object:

To fill two panels of speakers for the March conference which follows RSA in Toronto, and includes performances of The Dutch Courtesan. Accepted papers will be peer-reviewed, copyedited, and published online on the Toronto Dutch Courtesan website, along with the other papers at the conference and reviews coming out of the performances. Not all accepted papers will be read at the conference, but all accepted papers will be published. Performances of the play begin March 19 and end with a matinee on March 24.

Papers (15-20 minutes) are requested on Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605), on very specific topics of your choice. We are especially interested in pedagogy, rehearsal, and the modern connection between Marston’s play and current events now; also, theatrical connections with French and Italian comedy (commédia), ideas of masculinity and femininity; the working woman; geographical, religious, economic, social, political, and gendered landscapes of the play; Marston’s sharing of current concerns with Middleton (e.g., A Mad World, My Masters), Barry (e.g., The Family of Love), Jonson, or other playwrights fascinated by city comedy and the London of 1600-1610.

Congratulations to the cast and crew of Dame Sirith, which opened today at the New Chaucer Society banquet! Public performances–with Pneuma Ensemble’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”–are next weekend. Have a look at photos from the dress rehearsal below. (The performances will be at Majlis Garden, a different venue that is outdoors.)

Poculi Ludique Societas and Pneuma Ensemble Present

Two Medieval Fabliaux

Dame Sirith  –  Poculi Ludique Societas

Fabliaux are short comic verse tales popular in France in the 12th and 13th centuries. Dame Sirith is the earliest known fabliau in English, and the only one not written by Chaucer. Dame Sirith tells the story of a love-lorn clerk, the married woman he yearns after, and the clever old woman who helps him get what he wants. PLS Artistic Director Linda Phillips directs this silly, bawdy tale using a “lightly modernized” version of the 13th century text.

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale  –  Pneuma Ensemble

The earliest surviving “Rooster and Fox” fable is a short but ornate poem by Alcuin of York, court Latinist for Charlemagne. Centuries later, Marie de France wrote her own version, in anglo-norman, possibly for the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Centuries after that, Chaucer took the simple plot and spun it into the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”, the most flamboyantly rhetorical and allusive of all his Canterbury Tales, a “merry tale.” Pneuma Ensemble, known for their interpretations of medieval performance works, present their “director’s cut” of Chaucer’s tale, a dramatic interpretation of all three, in original languages, with period musical accompaniment.

Dates:

• Friday, July 20:  8 pm
• Saturday July 21:  2 pm and 8 pm

Venue:

Majlis Art Garden, 163 Walnut Avenue

Tickets:

$15 / $10 senior & student. Cash only at the gate.

Please note: the performance date for Dame Sirith at the New Chaucer Society banquet has changed to July 14. It will take place at Metro Library Epic Hall.

Public performances will take place July 20-22 at Majlis Art Garden. Show times will be announced shortly.