[NEohioPAL] Another Great Review for the Cesear’s Forum Production of “Canadian Gothic, American Modern” Running at Playhouse Square Oct. 18-25

[Bestic, Patricia]

Two Plays on Canadian and American Prairies: Cesear’s Forum’s “Canadian Gothic” and “American Modern OCTOBER 14, 2025<https://theatrereviewskurahashi.wordpress.com/2025/10/14/two-plays-on-canadian-and-american-prairies-cesears-forums-canadian-gothic-and-american-modern/>

Cesear’s Forum is currently staging Joanna McClelland Glass’s Canadian Gothic (1972) and American Modern (1973), two one-act plays at Kennedy’s Down Under under the direction of Greg Cesear. As the program note states, the two plays frame an intersection of American and Canadian perspectives from 1910 to 1976 with nods to current events.

 Canadian Gothic concerns family life on the prairie in Saskatchewan (the playwright’s home province), filled with quiet racism, prejudice, and a sense of unfulfillment and dissatisfaction.  “Current events” might be the isolation of people, the increasing absence of communications, and undiagnosed and untreated mental illnesses.

In both plays, McClelland Glass gives the audience a glimpse of the lives of small, remote townspeople, filled with mundane chores and repetition. Canadian Gothic, set in a town in Saskatchewan, McClelland Glass’s home province, depicts the couple’s apathy, followed by the wife’s death and their daughter’s interracial dating. These events lead to a violent incident that determines the characters’ future, contrary to their expectations or wishes. In American Modern, the wife copes with her depression by consuming herself with super-busy, mundane tasks.  Her additional coping mechanism includes scavenging and holding what she discovers in her neighborhood. In both plays, the husband character is quite passive and unfeeling (or he tries to suppress his feelings), as many of us do—“do nothing.”

Director Greg Cesear added another “Father” (portrayed by the same person as the character) in Canadian Gothic to make the staging more interactive, abstract, absurd, and metaphorical.  The beginning scene resonates with familiar scenes from Ionesco’s works (Greg Cesear’s favorites).  Cesear adds “silent characters” to American Modern, a play with two performers; two actors appear—Graceyn Cecelia Dowd as Cindy Lou, Mike’s secretary, with whom Mike has an affair.  Jonathan Duran, as an Indigenous man, also comes on stage while Pat (the wife in American Modern) shares her personal anecdote with her husband Mike, the therapist, and the audience.  Cesear’s directorial approach is to blur the separation between the characters, performers, and the audience, bringing them all into the metaphysical world where everything is melded and possible.

Daniel Telford packed Kennedy’s Down Under stage with many objects, including chairs, a door-opening, curtains, and triangle prisms, to reflect what the characters and their ancestors have accumulated. This material abundance paradoxically and tragically demonstrates the absence of spiritual fulfillment and satisfaction that the characters are suffering.

Andrew Kaletta’s lighting adds changes in dramatic and dramaturgical textures as subtly indicated in McClelland Glass’s scripts.

Sound designer Lisa Wiley prepared music for Pre-show and Intermission, using music from different decades and genres, including Joni Mitchell’s “Paprika Plains” and “A Case of You,” and “You Turn Me On I’m a Radio,”  Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,”  Sarah Vaughan’s  “In a Sentimental Mood,” Bette Midler’s “Skylark” Carly Simon’s “Mockingbird,” James Taylor’s “Her Town Too,” and Alexandro Querevalú’s “The Last of the Mohicans.”  The show itself is done without music; thus, these music pieces become a great oasis for the audience to ponder the ambience and the shows, heightening the “Americana” landscape with a variety of instruments from piano to harmonica.

Sarah Russell’s costumes incorporate colors and designs that reflect how the characters have lived up to that point. Bestic, as the wife, wears different but similar white one-piece dresses—one is a sundress, and the other has a slightly more formal shape, reflecting the character’s semi-consciousness, which is cloudy and blurry while differentiating the difference in circumstance and location.

Tricia Bestic, as the wife for both plays, is magnetic, delicately and overtly spilling out different levels of the characters’ emotions. By talking to the other characters (on or off stage) or to the audience, Bestic’s superb on-stage communication reveals the core of the characters’ traumas, captivating the audience. Graceyn Cecelia Dowd illustrates the daughter’s doomed trajectory in Canadian Gothic, while Mike’s paramour aspires to marry and settle in American Modern.  Gilgamesh Taggett, as Mike, portrays this character as a “passive” husband with no intention to engage with other people actively. Joseph Milan, as the father in Canadian Gothic, is portrayed as a blinded man who continues to depend on his daughter, perhaps fulfilling his ultimate revenge and punishment against her. Jonathan Duran’s Ben, an Indigenous man in Canadian Gothic, offers a refreshing perspective on the character as the cultural and racial “other” on the prairie.

These short plays, which possess Joyce Carol Oates-ian colors, textures, and moods, are an excellent addition to Cesar’s Forum’s work by McClelland Glass’s canon. Cesear’s Forum produced McClelland Glass’s autobiographical play Trying (2004) at Kennedy’s Down Under in 2011, featuring Tricia Bestic and Glenn Colerider. In Trying, Colerider’s character, Judge Francis Biddle, and his secretary, Sarah Schorr, whom Bestic portrayed, acknowledge their complete ignorance of “black people” and see it (ignorance) as “the root of the problem.” Canadian Gothic and American Modern are McClelland Glass’s earlier works that examine people’s lack of connections—as actual human beings—with those outside their small cocoon.

CANADIAN GOTHIC & AMERICAN MODERN, two one-act plays by Joanna McClelland Glass: September 26th through October 25th, Friday and Saturday at 8pm. Two Sunday Matinees at 3 pm on October 12th and 19th, Kennedy’s Down Under, Playhouse Square, 1501 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio. Call 216-241-6000 or visit http://www.playhousesquare.org<http://www.playhousesquare.org/>. Ticket price is: $28 for adults, $15.00 for students. Visit Cesear’s Forum<https://cesearsforum.com/> for details.

Sponsored in part by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Bonne Belle Family Foundation




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