Holly’s Reviews - FringeMTL 2026
Becoming Psychic
The night I attended Becoming Psychic, Montréal was in the middle of a 31-degree heatwave, though thankfully the 8:45 p.m. start time meant things had cooled off a little. St. Laurent was in full street fair mode, lined with vendor tables and packed with people, so finding Ctrllab took a moment. The trick is to look for the ticket table. Once you've found that, you've found the venue: an almost-hidden doorway leading up a flight of stairs to the second-floor theatre. Unfortunately, the space is not accessible.
By the time I made it upstairs, the house was nearly full.
The staging is a spotlight and a chair. Gada Jane is alone with projected light and cutouts standing in for traditional visuals. It's a strong concept, though I think it could be pushed further. It only really clicked into place near the end, when the audience was asked to breathe along with her and church-style light poured through the cutouts. I'd love to see that idea built out more across the whole piece, because there's a surreal quality to what she's doing underneath the comedy and self deprecation, and the visuals could carry a lot more of that weight.
On vacation in Europe with her pregnant sister, Gada finds herself confronted by experiences that don't fit neatly into the skeptical worldview she was raised with. Figures in paintings and religious statues begin moving and speaking to her, including St. Romaine, who shares details that seem entirely outside Gada's own knowledge and interests. When she later researches him, the pieces fall into place in ways she can't easily dismiss. Vacation, as Gada describes it, leaves you with nowhere to hide. No grades, no accomplishments, no right words for recreation. Just yourself and whatever is happening.
From there, Becoming Psychic follows Gada's attempts to make sense of it all. A psychic gets something uncomfortably right. Friends, family, and dates react with varying degrees of concern. A schizophrenic friend suggests she could probably get a diagnosis if she wanted one. Her mother, having witnessed psychosis firsthand, struggles with her daughter's growing interest in psychic work. Yet through it all, Gada remains funny, self-aware, and remarkably grounded.
The show spends time in the uncomfortable space between spiritual experiences and mental health without trying to force a conclusion. Instead, Gada offers stories, observations, and questions, often finding humour in places where many performers would reach for certainty.
The fans in the venue did distract a little, and I'd love to see this one in a cooler room, but credit to Gada, I still felt pulled in, and so did everyone around me. For an hour, in that heat, there was a feeling of curiosity and unity. People stuck around after to share their own experiences and make more of a connection with Gada, and I was one of them. She's real. Her experiences are real. We're all real, all stumbling through the world with different maps, and that's beautiful.
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MORALITY BITES!
I arrived right as the temperature hit 31 degrees, a tough ask for someone who generally vetoes anything over 25, but this play was worth it. The venue is just up Henri-Julien, a few minutes from Mont Royal, and walking there meant cutting through the heat past the closed off street in full Friday night swing, that lovely feeling of being part of the creative fabric of the city for a few blocks.
The Studio Multimédia inside the Conservatoire de musique et d'art dramatique de Montréal is fully accessible, with rooftop gardens upstairs that looked like a nice spot to wait, but with the heat I took cover inside, where it was blessedly cool.
The production’s format is simple: a scenario is laid out, you get a couple of minutes to deliberate with the people around you, then the floor opens if you want to share with the room, with prompts to help things along. Due to Fringe constraints, the show ran with less discussion time than usual, and one of the team handed out snacks on the way out instead.
The first piece, Okay, Boomer by Ann Lambert, centres on a formal complaint filed against Dr. Joan Corbett (Laura Mitchell), a professor whose lecture on Angels in America keeps circling back through history: the AIDS crisis, Reagan, World War II. Her reasoning is blunt: how do you teach a generation with no use for history?
Across from her sits Morgan (Samantha Bitonti), an ombudsperson radiating the kind of self-possession that made me want to reach through the stage and shake her. Rounding out the trio is the long-suffering Ryan (Brian Dooley). What follows is a tug of war between generations, the older one insisting on being heard after decades of lived experience, the younger one frustrated by a curriculum that feels disconnected from their reality.
Underneath both positions is the same plea: "I have to matter."
The second piece, Secret Santa by Alice Abracen, is lighter in tone but no less weighty. Jamie (Samantha Bitonti, doing double duty) has been laid off, "sacrificed on the altar of mass capitalism" as she puts it, and is supported by her partner Casey (Ryan Bommarito), a lawyer. He buys her a small Christmas gift, and in the process discovers 50, no, FIFTY TWO, Amazon packages under the bed (her side, to be clear).
Casey understands the impulse behind what Jamie's doing even as he points out the legal reality of it, and by the end, the audience is left wondering whether he'll help her cause, or help her find a therapist.
Both plays come from writers of different generations, and that pairing gave the discussion segments real texture. My seating section had four of us roughly the same age, with a couple of "boomers" behind us eager to weigh in. Healthy debate like this is rare these days, and Ouest End deserves credit for creating a space where it happens naturally. I'd happily go back for the other mini plays in this series.
