Press

Review

Everything is Super Wow At The Winnipeg Fringe Festival

“If you’re looking for something funny and weird (bonus points if you’re into cycling) then this is a perfect show for you! A one man show by ira cooper about a cyclist who has been biking for hundreds of days with some rather curious companions, filled with puns and bike jokes and relatable stories. It’s silly, strange and very endearing. I enjoyed the creative storytelling, and unexpected moments of clarity and wisdom written into the dialogue. Lots of fun!”

Review

Everything is Super Wow At The Winnipeg Fringe Festival

“British Columbia playwright/performer Ira Cooper returns to the role of Stancyzk, a 30-something who flees his “very Polish, very Jewish” lifepath of taking over the family deli in favour of a 1,000-day wilderness bike trip. His only companions are his tent, helmet, bike bag and bicycle, all of whom talk to him — and may be plotting against him.

This 55-minute contemporary clown show, based on Cooper’s 2022 fringe entry Mr. Coffeehead, retells the original story incorporating changes suggested by audience feedback.

It’s a solid showcase for Cooper’s talent for physical theatre, from very convincingly pantomiming pedaling a bicycle to shadow puppetry depicting giant mosquitos.

At the end of the journey, it’s up to the audience to decipher if Stanczyk is facing the future ahead — or really facedown dead.

Wacky, trippy and surreal, this one deserves larger crowds than it drew on opening night.”

Review

Everything is Super Wow At The Montreal Fringe Festival

“The first time I witnessed cross-country biker and travel blogger Stanvic was at their Mission Santa Cruz performance, which 2022 Montreal Fringers will remember as Mr. Coffeehead. The same play, created and performed by BC based performer ira cooper of Spec Theatre, has returned to the 2023 Festival as Everything Is Super Wow.

Removed from a width of ceramic tiles, the tent of Stanvic is placed in the Free Standing Room: close, DIY-styled confines, which can’t ignore the bringing together of materials at hand. In my experience of being in FSR audiences, these materials are oftentimes incredibly well-used, and here, ira cooper is no exception. They emerge at their campsite on day #999 of their bike tour, having abandoned the legacy of their father’s family’s butcher shop, to bike the highest mountains and film what is “Wow! …Super Wow!” The acoustics compress and concentrate this opening of Stanvic’s contemporary clown work, preceding a demonstration of a singular kind of existential crisis. Over-the-top and zany, this fully choreographed, expressive, and puppet-wielding performance piece is grounded in the exact places it needs to be to never be unsafe in its intentions.

The show begins with the promise that spectators can get up, move around, and leave however they’d like; “you do uniquely you.” In their manner and approach to their show, it’s clear that you’re never not being considered in space. ira navigates the potential overwhelm of blink-and-you-miss-it trains of physical and cognitive thought with assured and practised skill. They’re an excellent person to have a conversation with about their material, if only through their stage presence. I’ll say that Stanvic’s calf-flexing, peddling their high peaks, instantaneously opens a dialogue with anyone who’s ever contemplated anything on a BIXI. The moments created via Stanvic’s vlog seem as niche to an appreciation of clowning, object work, movement and storytelling, as they are recognizable.

ira cooper employs their virtuosity to admit insecurities in the direction of their travels – it becomes a focus of the hapless vlogger plot – bringing to mind universal hesitations on how and why anyone makes performance in the larger context of their life. Cataloguing yourself for disparate audiences to witness you “grounding yourself in nature” is a standout analog for the commitment we appreciate works at the Fringe for. To sit at the site of ira’s sense-of-humour in the company of a small audience, realising their commitment to very real and equitable parameters for the demonstration of work and craft, is a gift to the Fringe that Spec Theatre keeps giving. Everything Is Super Wow is unmissable for this. It will teach you about the merits of an exact dimension of stage work through an unmatchable form of clarity in inclarity.”

Interview

Global TV Interviews ira cooper About mr.coffeehead

Review

mr.coffeehead At The Montreal Fringe Festival

“I was entranced by Ira’s performance, an existential journey about motivation and finding meaning. I loved the . . . whimsical touches in a lighthearted show about the big things in life.”

Interview

Upstage On CKUT Radio 90.3 Interviews ira cooper About mr.coffeehead

Review

Artisanal Intelligence At The Edmonton Fringe Festival

“Ira J. Cooper’s rich, jam-packed script is a wondrous thing to hear, a veritable glossary of the Here and Now, with some serious things re: A.I., labour issues etc. to ponder among all the laughs, which are many.

The performances are very good indeed, and director Bronwen Marsden keeps things moving along expertly. Strong, entertaining work courtesy of Vancouver’s Spec Theatre, which is welcome back any time.”

Review

Artisanal Intelligence At The Edmonton Fringe Festival

“You could hire a millennial who repeatedly shows up late because he was busy oiling his beard.

Or, you could staff your organic, plant-based, ethically sourced samosa restaurant with Barry, a certifiably hip automaton who loves wearing uniforms. She has a remarkably long battery life and workers’ rights don’t apply to machines.

Despite her engineer’s best attempts at programming perfection that influencers and entrepreneurs can depend upon, Barry has glitches. Sometimes she repeats herself. Sometimes she has ethical crises.

There’s plenty of ideas to unpack in this hour-long social commentary penned by Ira Cooper and produced by Spec Theatre of Vancouver. First, it mocks the generation that’s perpetually seeking to consume whatever happens to be trendy this week (then post about it on Instagram). It highlights the seemingly insatiable and fickle market for anything that seems exclusive and how tapping into demand becomes a temporary licence to print money. Are humans just sheep with Paypal accounts?

Like many have before, Cooper questions the limits of artificial intelligence and the origin of self-consciousness. The play also queries the agency of an artificial intelligence creator. Is Barry’s creator, Jane, her parent, a technician, her boss or something else?

Philosophy lesson aside, see Artisanal Intelligence for Drew Carlson’s masterful performance as Barry — a role that requires perpetual micro movements and unnatural speech patterns, as well as an incredible amount of memorization. This dense script is heavy with unusually specific strings of words (including a few Edmonton references for crowd appeal) that cannot be easy to spit out on command in a semi-robotic manner.

Plus, they sing three funny songs, including one where they harmonize with a coffee grinder. A coffee grinder.”

Review

Artisanal Intelligence At The Edmonton Fringe Festival

“In Artisanal Intelligence we’re introduced to Barry, a robot played with uncanny physical prowess by Drew Carlson from Vancouver’s Spec Theatre as her inventor, played by Hannah Everett, touts the benefits of Barry as a replacement for chronically undependable employees. The dialogue is inventive and fast-paced as Barry becomes self aware and distracted by a growing affection for a coffee grinder in this comedy with social commentary punctuated by songs.”

Review

Artisanal Intelligence At The Island Fringe Festival

“… Remember all the things in the first paragraph I said the [other show] wasn’t? My favourite show of the festival was all of that stuff, plus whip-smart, charming and riotously funny besides. I’m talking about Artisanal Intelligence, the story of a girl and her robot, written by Ira Cooper, directed by Bronwen Marsden and produced by Spec Theatre of Vancouver, BC.

The sheer imaginative weirdness of the concept is pretty great: Jane (played by Hannah Everett) of Artisanal Intelligence, Inc. has invented the robotic hipster customer service agent Barry (played by Drew Carlson), programmed to serve niche businesses with her ever-expanding knowledge of specialized topics ranging from the coffee sciences to bicycle mechanics to obscure arts and culture references.

The play has Jane making a sales pitch to potential buyers (the audience). One could build a fun play entirely out of showcasing Barry’s ridiculously arcane trivia database, her superhuman barista proficiency and her many other esoteric skills, and we do get all that, and it’s a hoot; but Cooper’s script also mocks and celebrates hipster culture, explores artificial intelligence, and raises uneasy questions regarding the nature of life and free will. This segues into oddly touching emotional drama, forbidden romance and even a sci-fi battle for the fate of humanity, and it’s all resolved through the power of love and a musical number.

Everett is excellent as Jane, but the cybernetic superstar of the show is Carlson’s inhumanly cheerful Barry, whose stiffly jerky movements and stilted singsong voice make her seem like the adorable love child of an old-school Disney animatronic character and Amazon’s Alexa, though she gradually evolves into something else altogether. Carlson’s surreally bravura performance helps make Artisanal Intelligence not just my Fringe fave of 2019, but one of my favourite Fringe plays of all time.”

Interview

Roundhouse Radio Interviews Bronwen Marsden and ira cooper About Hipstory

Review

Sid: The Handsome Bum at the Victoria Fringe Festival

“Sid the Handsome Bum is a sensitive, thoughtful portrayal of a variety of personalities who inhabit the DTES, all rolled into one. It’s written by Ira Cooper who mentioned, while promoting the show in another Fringe lineup, that he invested considerable time in the DTES talking to some of the characters there. He said he listened carefully and wanted us to know that his motive is to help tell their stories, not to exploit them. Sid is beautifully portrayed by actor Joanna Rannelli. Ira and Jo are members of Vancouver’s Spec Theatre.

Sid invites us to look at shopping carts, and the people who call them home, in a whole new way. In fact, it’s difficult to look at a shopping cart the same way again after meeting Sid, and the various characters who contribute to his DID – Dissociative Identity Disorder. Despite his multiple personalities, at one point Sid describes himself as a nobody. “I’m no-one.” Is it surprising to think that this is how a homeless person might feel?

Reflecting on the situation he finds himself in, accidentally on stage perceived as an opening act, Sid reflects on the traditional purpose of theatre – to reflect society back to itself. Sid tells us about the impacts of closing the institution known as Riverview and essentially being thrown to the streets – relocated to the DTES. Regardless of how you feel about institutions, Sid’s loss of a place to go, with people to talk to, raises a lot of questions about what happened there. It’s a piece of history people ought to know whenever the conversation of “what shall we do with the homeless” arises.

We’re also encouraged to think about the Pickton catastrophe in a new light. Why did the authorities ignore the now infamous pig farm for well over a decade? Homeless people are often highly suspicious, often rightly so. Sid’s suggestion that Pickton was working for the government because, as he put it, “they can’t kill prostitutes,” and “it’s easier to gentrify without those people around” may suggest a level of cruelty we don’t want to believe is possible, but Sid invites us to imagine the sort of thoughts that circulate in the brain of someone who’s been thrown out, dismissed, ignored, abandoned. And perhaps begin to ask our own questions about those missing and murdered indigenous woman, and all the others whose stories continue to be ignored by otherwise powerful and influential people. The play’s not all heavy doom and gloom, though. Sid is a complex series of characters, each of which emerge at various times throughout the play to introduce themselves and share a view of the world from their own perspective. They sing, they dance, they laugh and cry, they’re angry, happy, and not all of them agree with allowing Sid to be the dominant personality!

Sid offers us a glimpse into a world that scares us so much we prefer to ignore it, hoping someone else will take care of it and make it go away. He reminds us we’re all closer to it than we might like, (this is probably what makes it so scary), at the same time the efficient use of his shopping cart in which he carries all the necessaries of life, is somehow alluring. Sid’s life is simple.

Sid lives among us though he’s often invisible, shuffling from place to place in an attempt, as Sid explains, to “stay awake through another wet day in the city of perpetual unlove.” He’s got a ready escape route, into his own mind, whenever he needs it. He wants us to know he and all his friends, inside and out, do normal things too. They like picnics and parties, they love to fall in love, share jokes, hold hands.

Hold someone’s hand and take it to see Sid: The Handsome Bum this Saturday September 5th at 5 pm at Venue 5 – St. Andrew’s School, 1002 Pandora.”