True Love Lies by Brad Fraser
September 20 - October 8, 2011
Spotlight on the kids of True Love Lies
True Love Lies proves to be real bonding experience for actors
"Throughout it all – the challenges and frustrations of rehearsals and adjusting to working with more experienced actors – Plouffe and Koury have had each other. There's an obvious ease and comfort between them, evident in their casual banter."
Read more at the Calgary Journal.
"Thought provoking, emotional, funny, and with many twists and turns, True Love Lies is a fantastic start to the season, and the first must-see production of the year."
- Jason Clevett, GayCalgary
"It’s about a larger discussion than just sexuality. It’s probing our definition of love, and the components of sexual love over romantic love or family love. We dissect the need to be loved, and break it down into the fears of not being desirable, relevant, attractive, respected, and even noticed."
- Wil Knoll, Avenue Magazine
Relationship set stage for True Love Lies
Photograph by: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald
Rating: 4 out of 5
"The ATP show is a pleasure, too, for the eyes as much as for the heart and head. This reviewer can't recall when ATP featured so many costume changes (except, fittingly enough, for Cornoyer's David), nor a set design that recapitulates or facilitates the mood or ethos of a play so well. So kudos to designer Roger Schultz for his imaginative, modern kitchen/resto bar set, flanked here by towers of bare scaffolding - a kind of unfleshedout structure representing perhaps the empty lives of people who have tried to live their lies."
- Bob Clark, Calgary Herald
"It’s [Sarah] Koury and [Alexander] Plouffe who find the truth in the pain, bewilderment and frustration of their characters and there’s no shortage of it."
- Louis Hobson, Calgary Sun
"What worked best is the characters and their interaction with one another — and the fact that it wasn't a fairytale ending as much as reality."
- Krista Sylvester, FFWD Weekly
"If you’re looking for in your face comedic drama, it doesn’t get more in your face then Alberta Theatre Projects True Love Lies... True Love Liesis a hard hitting, quick, witty play with complex characters."
- Jenna Shummoogum, GetDown.ca
"There is no question that the kids stole the show. Sarah Koury as Madison and Alexander Plouffe as Royce were outstanding and a total joy to watch. With both performances the acting just disappeared and they fully morphed into the characters."
- Jessica Goldman, Applause Meter
Lies; damned lies — FFWD Weekly preview
Fraser tales gentle approach with Lies — Calgary Herald preview
Getting down with Dave Kelly — Downtown Calgary interview
"Fraser's play is a brilliantly cutting dissection of a supposedly ideal nuclear family founded on a tissue of deceit." — Alfred Hickling, The Guardian (London, UK)
“The world premiere of Brad Fraser’s break out play, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, at ATP in 1989, exploded like a bomb into the Canadian consciousness. He blasted open boundaries of what we could talk about in the theatre, and wrenched open our ideas about what it meant to be modern people. Well, he’s back with characters that are more appealing, flawed and passionate than ever.” — Vanessa Porteous, Artistic Director
"It’s [Sarah] Koury and [Alexander] Plouffe who find the truth in the pain, bewilderment and frustration of their characters and there’s no shortage of it."
- Louis Hobson, Calgary Sun