David Gagnon Walker, This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear. Photo by Henry Chan/

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“What is this theatre thing?” asks the innovative theatre experimentalist David Gagnon Walker. “This strange thing we do, getting 50 or 50 people in a room together to tell a story together … What’s unique about theatre? What can it do that other art forms can’t do as effectively?”

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This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear, the Gagnon Walker play that opens a short run Wednesday in the Workshop West season is an immersive theatre experiment on that very subject. It’s a personal invitation from one of the country’s most exciting and adventurous young theatre artists to join him in reading aloud a story together. It’s a story “in the register of fable or a Grimm’s fairy tale,” he says, of the rise and fall of an imaginary civilization in an imaginary land. “Dark, fantastical, and full of monsters and magical occurrences….. More like the real Grimm, darker than the stories we usually tell children at bedtime.”

“It’s the kind of story that, culturally, we know how to tell out loud…. Reading a story is something anyone who’s spent any time hanging out with children knows how to do.”

Gagnon Walker started writing it just before the pandemic, and the experience it offers resonates with our moment, heavy and getting heavier all the time. And, he thinks, it brings the specialness of theatre to bear on “the anxiety, the dread, the panic, the loneliness we all feel privately…. It’s the special thing the theatre situation can do with those feelings, feelings that are dark and isolating, and turn them into an opportunity to connect with other people.”

“I didn’t write a show about depression, anxiety, loneliness because I’m not familiar with them.”

“This show is all about that, trying to create some kind of communal experience from feelings that are not normally communal.… It’s a bit of a paradox I guess: I like writing about isolation for the theatre. I’m interested in that! ” And there is, he thinks, a kind of catharsis in that gathering, the sharing, the laughing and breathing together. “It’s recognition … the thought that I’m not the only person who feels that way.”

Audience participation, two words that tend to fling some of us back cowering into our seats, eyes to the floor. This is different. There’s no yanking or coaxing. The experience is all to your own comfort level; “people can determine how involved they want to be.” As the playwright/performer explains, seven volunteers join him onstage, at seven tables, each with a script and highlighted lines — “just like actors do on the first day of rehearsal.” That first day of rehearsal, says Gagnon Walker feelingly, “has always been lightning in a bottle for me. There’s just something that happens the first time a group of people read a play together.”

Everyone else can sit back and watch, and if they choose get in on moments — “there’s a big video event in the show” — “of choral group chanting of lines.”

David Gagnon Walker in This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear, Strange Victory Performance. Photo by Gergo Koroknay

“It’s a big ask,” Gagnon Walker acknowledges. “We’ve done a lot of thinking about how to make it gentle and friendly, as fun and funny as possible, as un-intimidating as we can. But once we actually start, the audience always knows how to do it; everybody just automatically remembers that we already know how to do this.”

Since its 2020 development in Halifax — Gagnon Walker, fresh out of the National Theatre School at the time, was 2b theatre’s ‘emerging playwright-in-residence’ — This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear has travelled the country. Eight cities later, the production by Gagnon Walker’s own Strange Victory Performance returns the playwright to his home town, and the play to the place where it was born.

The idea came to Gagnon Walker in 2017 in an experiment at Edmonton’s Found Festival, a celebration of unexpected encounters between artists and audiences.  For Productive Time, the festival sourced him an apartment, “and I locked myself in for 72 hours, live-streaming myself writing a new solo play.” When the time was up, “I invited an audience into the apartment and I performed it for them.”

“During the performance I printed out script pages for audience members and handed them out to the audience. We read aloud a 10-minute section…. For me it was a real lightbulb moment…. It was my favourite part of the project, reading aloud with other people and telling the story together.”

It planted the irresistible idea of “making a whole show like that,” Gagnon Walker says of the interactive theatre for which he’s become known. And at Found in 2021, This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear premiered here before it set forth across the country.

Paradoxes, the kind that theatre revels in, attract Gagnon Walker. “Trying to write about loneliness for groups of people” is one. And there’s this:  The Child Ruled By Fear “is such an analogue experience in so many way, real people breathing together and telling a story together. And it’s also a fairly high-tech show,” as multiple live video cameras attest.

The projections are the work of the multi-talented sound and video designer Tori Morrison, Gagnon Walker’s partner and the co-producer of Strange Victory Performance (as well as the artistic producer of Tiny Bear Jaws and the production manager of Outside The March). “She’s the one making all the magic happen,” says Gagnon Walker. “She has a very deep bag of technical tricks, but also a sharp dramaturgical mind. The tech stuff is never for its own sake, always in service of the story, and what the show is trying to do.” Their collaborations happen at the moment of conception, the “question of what’s the situation we’re inviting people into.”

Gagnon Walker himself was an actor at the outset, or more precisely (he laughs) “an acting school drop-out.” After the first two years of the U of A’s acting program, “I had an epiphany. I need to be writing. I felt urgently that auditioning for Shakespeare for the rest of my life wasn’t going to work for me. And that was a really hard decision, a big thing to walk away from.”

At the time he was convinced he was “leaving theatre behind to go and be a poet.” A degree in creative writing in Montreal followed. “Two years later I’d written three plays and done Fringe shows…. I ended up a playwright by quitting acting and thinking I was quitting theatre.”

It was the energy and sparkle of collaboration he found he missed, “figuring things out with other people. And it’s still my favourite thing…. I’ve tried. But you can’t get that sitting alone in your apartment.”

That’s why he values so highly the sense, “surprising and interesting,” of offering people a glimpse into the artistic process, the particular creative energy of a first day of rehearsal. “In my own life it has been the best thing I have going for me.”

And it’s why, after three or four years of touring, “I never get tired of doing the show,” he says of This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear.” There’s a new cast every night. And, especially, the seven volunteers witting with me onstage are completely different, with different energies. Some are nervous, some are totally rock stars…. They’re equally appealing to me.”

But maybe the most special nights, he thinks, happen when “somebody volunteers who clearly doesn’t do this kind of thing very often, or ever, and is taking a chance on us and our show, hoping to have a nice time, then having an experience that’s joyful for them … the arc of going from being nervous to feeling relieved, happy, and part of a community.”

“It feels really good.”

(Playwright/ performer/ producer David Gagnon Walker is also, as Bigfin Squid, a singer-songwriter. Catch him at the Aviary Feb. 5).

PREVIEW

This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear

Theatre: Strange Victory Performance at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Created and performed by: David Gagnon Walker 

Directed by: Christian Barry and Judy Wensel

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: workshopwest.org