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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

We are, none of us, dread-resistant, times being what they are. That sense of being alone and untethered in a universe that’s a chaos of crises and emergencies is a feeling lots of us know.

It’s no way to live, you could argue. The show that’s arrived at Workshop West (for a short run till Sunday) wonders about that. This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear, which premiered at Common Ground’s Found Fest in 2021, is David Gagnon Walker’s bold experiment in theatrical collaboration.

In this it takes theatre, always mouthy, at its word. A communal experience, live engagement between artists, and between artists and their audiences, is at the heart of things, fuelled by stories, as theatre is fond of saying, of itself. All true, of course. The explicit proposition on offer here, which ups the ante by lowering the stakes and whisking the fourth wall away, is that theatre creation contains a chemistry in community-building for an evening, one that can produce energy and joy.

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In The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear, a homecoming for the Edmonton ex-pat artist after multiple cross-country successes, Gagnon Walker and the audience share a story by actually telling it together, reading it out loud. Led by the playwright as the narrator and a projection-scape by designer Tori Morrison, seven audience volunteers, seated at tables with a lamp and a script, take on characters (the title character is divvied among them). The rest of us, sitting in the usual theatre seats, are a Greek chorus who can join in on group delivery of projected lines. Or not. The intersection between art and life, a spiritual and aesthetic tenet of the live theatre, is explicit: “We’re real. We’re real. We’re real.”

I know what you’re thinking, and so, evidently, does Gagnon Walker, who arrives onstage in unique fashion. “My name is David. Right now I have a bucket on my head.” Yup, audience participation, very often an exercise in group alienation (speaking as we are of universal dread), makes it work. But this participation is so chill, so easy-going and unforced, that joining in is pretty much irresistible. There is, quite literally, no reason not to.

The story that unfolds in a series of scenes is a fable about an imaginary child in an imaginary world, where an imaginary civilization magically rises around them, and falls. The poetic text has a simple incantatory quality about it, with humorous, sometimes jarring,  interpolations, some of them from Gagnon Walker’s own life in Edmonton and all of them inconclusive. And Morrison’s video- and soundscape mingle, in an intriguing an oftn amusing way, a wash of imagery and specific storybook detail.

I don’t want to tell you more, because the “discovery” of the story, in the shared telling, is crucial to the whole experience. There is the unexpected pleasure that we’ve been invited to participate in the process of artistic creation, not usually available to non-artists (like me). Suffice it to say that there was much laughter, and something easeful too, in the impulse to share — and the proposal that there is a way, if not to conceal or obliterate, to negotiate the terrors of the world and the rule of fear.  Communally.

The truism that we’re all in this together has been at crucial moments in our history, to be sure, a sort of universal excuse for passivity (the disastrous escalation of environmental destruction, for example, under the ‘it is what it is’ mantra). But in This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear, the demonstration of human connectivity and an invitation into the world of theatre creation aren’t just a consolation, or a flotation device.

I left the theatre, and a discussable and pleasurable evening, with a renewed appreciation that theatre, the art form of real people together in the same room sharing an experience, is on the right track. We’ve always known it: it’s validating to have a demo from an artist, a true original, that it’s meaningful, even cathartic, to tell stories together about what haunts us, scares us, weighs us down. There’s wonder in it. And wonder is enlivening.

REVIEW

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