Some Reckless Abandon - Reviews

Opening around 30 shows at once is no small deal, as this Calgary's Fringe is doing, even if--by fringe standards--Calgary's is a pretty modest affair, and even if the shows are often not terribly complicated.

There are still thirty sets of props, thirty sets of sound and light cues, and thirty sets of cast, director and playwright--in other words, plenty of room for potential drama, all involving a lot of high-strung, generally broke, and oh yeah, often quite talented people all looking to make a splash.

Amazingly, considering the fact that the crews running the shows are all volunteers, things tend to run fairly smoothly at fringes. So many shows, so many time slots, but Canada has sort of got the perfect temperament for arranging these things. The volunteers are generally quite a bit of fun,and the atmosphere at a fringe festival tends to be great.

And then, just when you think you've got the recipe perfected, along comes a wind storm and knocks the lights out of the whole damn festival.

That's what happened Saturday night about 40 minutes into Leah Bailly's powerful, funny one-person show Some Reckless Abandon, which is being performed here by Cara Yeates, the talented actress and playwright who was here in 2007 with her own play Bye-Bye Bombay.

One minute, Yeates, playing Madelaine Cross, a young, willful woman from rural Alberta who has escaped rural Alberta by enrolling in something she calls Teenage Jesus Camp in Tegulcigulpa, Honduras--a place she can't even pronounce, let alone has ever heard of--has us mesmorized as Maddy has a girls'-night-out from hell at a Honduran nightclub.

And the wonder of theatre, when it's got its groove on, is that we actually are there in Honduras, with Madelaine from Alberta, and we are all having the girls' night out from hell. Yeates is perfectly cast in the role of Madelaine: she's someone Diabolo Cody might have created as a drinking buddy for Juno: smart, pretty, willful, a little bit reckless and wild but basically, the best kind of fictional character to get involved with--someone who does crazy stuff first, then tries to emotionally reconcile it all later.

Then a loud sizzling sound that might or might not be a sound cue, but which turns out to be the lights going out on Inglewood.

Blackout.

"We've got a bit of a storm going on outside!" says a volunteer, after unsuccessfully flipping all those circuit breakers to try and get the lights (and the fan) back on, and having nothing happen.

After a few minutes of collective consultation, two audience members turn into de-facto crew members, wielding flashlights that serve as the stage lights for the last 10 minutes of the show, which Yeates performs, quite convincingly, on a silent, sound-cue-less stage.

It works perfectly.

The blackout had the good taste to wait until Madelaine got through her night-from-hell in the Honduran nightclub, to get to the part where she is forced to emotionally reconcile herself with all the havoc that night out--and this crazy journey--has wreaked on her. Doing it with a couple of flashlights shining on her face and not another sound in the room makes perfect dramatic sense.

But even if the lights don't go out, Some Reckless Abandon is worth the journey. It starts out as a bit of an overly-literary, fish-out-of-water story about a rebel grrrl stuck in a camp full of evangelicals trying to convert Hondurans, but then transforms into a harrowing yarn about the hazards of  young women trying to navigate their way across cross-cultural boundaries. It's also a show about an Alberta girl who brings all of that cowgirl energy to life that Albertans--where we're a little more comfortable with reckless, wild people who do things first and think about them later--possess in abundance, but which often lands them in trouble once they leave.

By Stephen Hunt

 

Vancouver Sun

 

The best Fringe experiences are those that come at you out of left field. Cara Yeates delivers a blistering energy in her performance of Leah Bailly's one-woman show, which takes what happens when godless meets God-botherer and makes it both fascinating and funny.

 

Lest any well-meaning Christians think this is the sunny story of a small-town Alberta girl who joins a "Jesus camp" in Honduras, beware -- Bailly has much to say about how the well-scrubbed army of Bible-belters sweeping Latin America in search of souls to save are strangers in a strange land.

 

Yet she also cleverly mocks the stupidity of Madeleine, a backwoods prairie hick who thought she could get away with pretending to love JC in order to escape her dead-end life. She can't, and Yeates does great work in making Madeleine a warm, appealing fool who emerges from her experience happier and wiser.

 

The Georgia Straight

By Kathleen Oliver

Madeleine wants to escape her “pukehole prairie town”, so she signs up for Jesus camp in Honduras. “Because I have never been to church before, there is a big difference between me and the other teenage Jesus freaks,” she confides on her first day there. Playwright Leah Bailly gives Madeleine a sardonic self-awareness that Cara Yeates nails perfectly. In a full-throttle solo performance, Yeates also creates several other vivid characters, switching between them effortlessly and convincingly. Bailly’s script is, for the most part, funny, subtle, and poetic (exceptions: Madeleine’s obsession with her boyfriend back home, and the jarringly on-the-nose ending—both feel like dramaturgically motivated impositions on the story’s natural shape), and, under Lori Triolo’s direction, the production is very polished. Gorgeous original songs by honey-throated rising star Miss Emily Brown are the icing on the cake.

 

Plank Magazine

September 14th, 2009

Teenage Jesus has swept Latin America and apparently he wants pretty young girls to come down to Honduras to help convert the heathens. This is the catalyst moment for Madeleine, the protagonist in Leah Bailey’s Some Reckless Abandon.

Madeleine Cross (played by Cara Yeates) is an 18 year old from a small Prairie town in Alberta and is looking for any excuse to escape her life. (This is the second one-woman show that I saw in a row with the central theme of “escape.” Could this be this year’s Fringe Trend?)  She gets her wish when she is recruited to go to Latin America, with free plane ticket and room and board in a Catholic mission. She devises a plot to be met, rescued, and carried off into the Honduran sunset by her “Cowboy” boyfriend. All doesn’t go as planned as Madeleine is quickly overwhelmed with not only culture shock of a new country but of a religion that is completely foreign to her. The Cowboy never shows up and Madeleine is left to learn to fend for herself against her religious hosts, preppy backstabbing peers, and horny Honduran men. It’s a coming-of-age of story that comes to life nicely thanks to the talent that carries the play.
 
Cara Yeates is an engaging, refreshing actor who effortlessly shapes Leah Bailey’s tight script and  creates a Madeleine distinctly her own. Veteran Lori Triolo gives the story a confident direction that, with simple staging, and help of some excellent sound design (Miss Emily Brown composed the music), takes us into the world of Latin America.
 
In her playwright’s notes, Bailey mentions that she met and bonded with Cara at an ashram in India, thus forming a union for this story (which she says is completely fictional). While most of the play is touching and realistic, I can’t help but be a bit put off by the ending: (Spoiler Alert!) Madeleine, at her wit’s end after a series of misguided and unfortunate occurrences, decides to burn the mission down and run away to a beach. Really? It seems a bit drastic to turn your protagonist from an innocent Prairie girl to a Latin criminal. I mean, did her arson stunt kill anyone? Are we still supposed to like her, feel sorry for her after this?
 
It’s really the only flaw in this very slick production. Bailey, Yeates, and Triolo are a triumphant creative trifecta, even though things do end on a bit of a downer. I guess it all depends on what you’re into. I overheard an older couple lamenting afterward that they had seen a couple of plays so far and none of them were really funny. If you have read the Bible, though — you know, that book that “Teenage Jesus” is in? – it ends on a bit of a downer too.