It is overcast but warm on the middle stretch of St. Laurent boulevard. Boutiques and bars have spilled out onto the sidewalks with temptations, a mango cut into a flower and topped with tajín blooms in one hand, a half-empty water bottle warms up in the other. The Mainline Theatre hardly attracts any attention from its modest new digs as a street-level merch table. Parc des Ameriques on the corner of Rachel is where the heart of the Fringe Festival beats.
Summer is a metaphor for bounty, rest, reconnection, and recreation. It feels less apt when the reality of summer in our current era brings orange smoke-veiled sun and moon, heat waves and flooding rains. But now is indeed the winter of our festival’s beer and cider tent.
Perhaps a sunset is the better estivalesque comparison for the Fringe Festival and its home in the now-gone Mainline Theatre. There is no question that the festival will endure, but it has always been headquartered and hosted hospitably from the Mainline Theatre, so this year seems like the end of a chapter, but not the story’s completion.
Festival chief and Artistic Director of Mainline Amy Blackmore programmed this edition of the Fringe Festival with an eye to which shows would grace the Mainline stage for the final days of its operation. An Uncomfortable Dinner Party, written by Alice Siregar and directed by Keith Fernandez, was an audience favourite, and a cast of illustrious members of Montreal’s homegrown performing arts leaders kept every show of A Love Unbecoming sold out throughout its run.
The spirit of the Fringe, however, endured best in the studios — the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal and Aux Angles Ronds. The range from found performance spaces to hold outs of traditional black box theatres indicates that the Fringe Festival will see a beautiful sunrise come Summer 2026.
Regarding Antigone written & performed by Banafsheh Hassani
The Montreal Fringe emphasizes fun hand in hand with creativity and risk in its favourite shows. Earnest works of theatre do take their share of stages at the Montreal Fringe, but they sometimes feel incongruent among the carnivalesque presentations of the rest of the fest. So, when an unflinching and realist work of theatre asks an audience into a dark studio on a sunny afternoon for an uneasy and challenging experience, it must deliver.
In Regarding Antigone, Iranian Canadian playwright and lone performer Banafsheh Hassani brims with playful laughter and absurd subversions of delivery, smiling uncannily at her audience. Inspired by both true events and the ancient Greek tragedy of the ill-fated Theban princess Antigone, the three characters she plays, Hassani says, are inspired as much by the fallibility of war photography, by revolutions, and state propaganda.
“I was pushed by a desire to be known to make art about the politics of where I came from and who I was. I had to build an understanding with my audience from the ground up. It was only by defining myself as the Other that I could be known,” Hassani reveals.
Still, there is dark humour in Regarding Antigone, and the play offers a geographic and historical context without narrowing specifics, allowing the audience the space to imagine tragedy’s universality.
Countercurrents written and performed by Alice Shuang Wu
Alice Wu’s Countercurrents casts the playwright as Veronica, a Chinese Canadian journalist, against the backdrop of our not-soon-forgotten Trucker Convoy in Ottawa. Laura Donohue plays Veronica’s editor, a conspiracy theorist influencer and shadowy figure of Alt Right extremism who sympathizes with the protesters’ cause. Wu’s ambitious piece attempts to fold themes of what it means to be a Canadian, an ally of truth, and a loving family member while navigating disinformation, cultural politics, internet brain poisoning, and the distrust of one government following the abuses of another.
Contemporary theatre is tasked with inventing new and innovative ways to stage our engagement with the internet, conveying the feeling of being online rather than the potentially uninteresting real-world mechanics of using technology. Countercurrents adeptly deploys the actors and successfully utilizes the studio space on the shoestring budgets of a Fringe show. The eerie, increasingly menacing modes we see the internet manifest onstage is a credit to Dana Prather’s direction.
I am pleased to see that this piece is written, directed, and performed without recourse to cynicism. “My hope with this work is to build bridges instead of barriers, offer hard questions instead of simple answers, and go beyond just amplifying my voice to uplifting my community,” Wu tells me. What remains by the end of the show is a convincing depiction of the online world encroaching into the domestic space while railing against its inherently malevolent forces.
Hive Mind
Theatre in its most innovative and experimental form is a collaborative medium. Perhaps it is the Canadian cultural instinct to cut down our tall poppies, but Montreal theatre generally does not make individual stars. We do, however, get very excited about performing arts collectives.
A festival like ours has had its heroes, its community leaders, and its perennial darlings of summers past. But it is a festival that endures with a spirit that moves through the community of volunteers, technicians, publicists, producers, and performers, each activated by the shows themselves and the sheer energy of live entertainment.
The Fringe’s indomitable spirit is symbolized by the bee on its branding, a nod to their use of the #FringeBuzz hashtag. As we know, bee populations are struggling. But I have no doubt they will outlast us all for their teamwork bordering on the mystical. The Fringe Festival is more than just the sum of its hive.◼︎
Cover image: Tei Wei Foo in Alice Wu’s Countercurrents. Photographed by Alexia Maldonado Juárez.
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