On the Boards This Week: Oct 25-31

Good news, everyone...Bioboxes are back! Get 'em while they're hot! What's that, you say you've never been Bioboxed? Well, you've got one night and one night only to rectify that; on October 26 from 8 to midnight Theatre Replacement offers up their newest serving of tasty plays-for-an-audience-of-one during FUSE at the VAG. They're wicked good fun, six mini-plays that take place on a tiny stage-in-a-box (with full production values) placed around each actor's head, who perform stories culled from interviews with recent Canadian immigrants. Bioboxes: Artifacting Human Experience is as intimate a theatrical experience as you're likely to have.

Ooh! Hallowe'en theatre! This looks wicked (literally), Spectral Theatre has a play up at the Beaumont called Dead Ends, which pays homage to the old EC horror comics (they of Tales From the Crypt and Mad Magazine), and late-night chiller cinema. Billed as a trio of "twisted, lowbrow, and occasionally terrifying" stories, it sounds like a fun way to get in the Trick-or-Treat mood.

Urban Ink Productions is a First-Nations theatre company devoted to the creation of new multi-disciplinary work that discusses the relationship of Aboriginal and minoritized individuals to each other and to our community. Their newest work, Gravity, has opened its world premier run at the Chapel Arts Theatre in the DTES. It's a combined theatre and video installation that connects the stories of four women together across "time, water, and worlds...and their love for life and one another."

Damfino Theatre presents Vancouver playwright Sherry MacDonald's The Stone Face, which tells the story of an actual collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton on a weird and wonderful yet little-known film called Film, filmed in 1965. How much of a head-trip must this play be to do justice to the imaginations of these two? As an added bonus, you can watch the entire Film here.

Kee-ripes, this looks good, too. Who says there's no theatre in Vancouver? Ruby Slippers Theatre and the Firehall theatre are co-presenting Living Shadows: A Story of Mary Pickford., about the luminous Canadian actress who went on to become Hollywood's first major star and the original "America's Sweetheart". This one-woman show written and performed by Tracey Power looks at the true price of movie adulation through the icon that invented it.

Photo courtesy of Theatre Replacement