NEWS

Forest Hill playwright ‘on the edge’ in Next Stage festival debut

DINK cast
GOING INDIE: Castmates, from left, Andrea Brown, Lise Cormier and Caroline Azar during recent rehearsal for DINK. The Azar-directed play is part of this month’s Next Stage Theatre Festival.

Caroline Azar figures playwrighting and punk rock performance have a lot in common.

In recent years the Forest Hill native has become well-known in the theatre world as a director, writer and dramaturge, but for many Torontonians she’s best known as the lead singer of the all-female post-punk band Fifth Column.

Both roles give Azar an opportunity to explore what she calls “things that are not necessarily topical, but on the edge of peoples’ tongues.” Themes include feminism, queerness, anarchy, sex, humour and ridicule.

Azar will be giving fans from both worlds something new to remember this month, when her 90-minute political play DINK bows at the Factory Theatre on Bathurst Street as part of the Next Stage Theatre Festival.

The seven-person show, written and directed by Azar, centres around Bill and Deborah, a double-income-no-kids couple as blissfully married to their careers as to each other. The sudden exposure of a heinous lie that crosses borders — the story takes place in both Ottawa and Afghanistan — ultimately claims six victims.

Azar says the lie to be revealed is hidden by the same “culture of complicity” that led to the Russell Williams, Robert Pickton and Shafia family murders that were in the news in 2009. And just as in real life, identifying how the criminal got away with it for so long can be difficult.

With six victims and one villain, some might find the information confusing and have trouble figuring out just who the villain is, a scenario Azar finds “really good.”

Fellow midtown resident Lise Cormier, who plays one of the victims, says Azar’s attention to both the oppressed and the people who enable their oppression is what attracted her to the role.

“The play is waking us up, examining how we let people in power get away with horrible things because we think we can’t do anything,” Cormier said. “I think that people will be able to recognize themselves in those characters, but not in a way that blames them, because we’ve all missed things.”

DINK, which features David Keeley, Sharon Heldt, Christy Bruce, Kris Siddiqi, Cormier, Andrea Brown and Jasmine Chen, will have nine shows during the 12-day Next Stage Theatre Festival.

The juried January counterpart to the Toronto Fringe Festival, Next Stage showcases indie Canadian theatre.

It runs Jan. 7–18.