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