By AJ Kalsi
For those who consider a night out to be more than just a colt 45, a cheap hotel room and a hooker, the Calgary theatre scene is worth considering. Not that you would with Nicole Mion’s I Looked At The Ceiling and Then I Saw The Sky. To anyone who had to sit through that awful show: my deepest sympathies.
The unbearable hour begins with the two actors warming up on stage, waving to family and friends and making conversation with the audience. Eventually this leads into ‘interesting facts about airplanes’ which then leads into boring. A stage assistant comes onto the stage and cleans up, forgetting a water bottle and coming back to retrieve it upon being reminded by someone in the audience. And there you have it; you’ve just witnessed the most interesting part of the entire play.
There are the oft-few glimmers of genuine enjoyment, where you think the play is actually going somewhere, but the terrible script and crappy transitions are quick to put you back in your place. In fact, the entire play seems as if a junior high drama class wrote it. One second, they’re talking about bugs and the next, they’re talking about airplanes or pilots. It all never really coalesces into anything coherent, coming off as completely irrelevant and a waste of time. The entire play may run for an hour, but could have been well over and finished in about half the time.
My only regret was that I hadn’t had more to drink before the show. It’s a show to pass on; you’d be better off just looking up at the stucco ceiling of your own home.