How Peter Pan got his groove: Peter and the Starcatcher at the Citadel

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Peter and the Starcatcher, at the Citadel. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“To have faith is to have wings,” declares says the earnest little smarty-pants Molly (Andrea Rankin) to a gaggle of skeptical onlookers in Peter and the Starcatcher.

Faith, that is to say, in the theatre and the way it gets airlift from your imagination. And then, by golly, doesn’t our Molly float inches up off the deck of the ship? “Satisfied?!” she says smugly to the ragged onlookers. They are.

And so are we. This gravity-defying coup owes something to the transformation of a visible plank into a make-shift teeter totter thanks to human intervention. Faith and improvised wings get to the heart of this giddy, scrambling high-seas adventure, an epic with a mock-epic spirit.

The faith in cheap-theatre wit burns bright in the spirited James MacDonald’s Citadel production currently getting playful in every corner and aisle of the Maclab Theatre. A certain hectic, frantic, scrambly quality is built into this kind of physical storytelling, and this production doesn’t fall short in that department. There are stretches, though, where the “wings” seem to flapping awfully hard to get us through an adventure that tells us at the outset that “nothing lasts forever” but starts to make you wonder about that by mid-Act II.   

Not, I hasten to add, that this points to a lack of bright ideas, possibly the reverse: overload in that cargo. And not because the performances from MacDonald’s cast, which assembles some of Edmonton’s brightest comedic talents, aren’t inspiration-studded.Possibly the production hasn’t yet quite found its sea-legs, or a rhythm that is forward and adrenalized without being just a wee bit relentless.

But there’s this: At the centre is a bravura performance of riotous and riveting, not to say show-stealing, hilarity from Farren Timoteo as the pirate king Black Stache, who will lose an appendage and gain an eternal following in what we’ll call the sequel (three guesses…) More of the Stache later.

Farren Timoteo as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Rick Elice’s cleverly intricate 2011 play, fashioned from the 2004 Dave Barry/ Ridley Pearson kids book, is designed as a backstory to the famous skirmishes in Neverland set forth by J.M. Barrie. And a big part of the fun of Peter and the Starcatcher is the way we gradually spot characters we’ve known forever from Peter Pan emerging,  in their formative years, from sly hints and loops in the storytelling. So when the cast of 12, assembling on the bare stage, tell us at the outset that “everything ends,” they are starting the story that will end at the beginning of Peter Pan.

The once-upon-a-time is this: a Victorian sea voyage, two ships, a mix-up of two trunks identical “in their trunk-ness,” a cargo of orphan boys bound for slavery, a contraband treasure of life-transforming “starstuff” too dangerous to let fall into the wrong hands. Ah, and speaking of hands, did I mention the pirates? Everyone washes up on a mysterious tropical isle ruled by a size-large croc where the inhabitants speak entirely in vocabulary borrowed from Italian menus.

Oscar Derkx as Boy and Farren Timoteo as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The most despondent orphan, Boy (Oscar Derkx), who “hates, hates HATES grownups,” will reclaim his lost boyhood and get a proper name and a home in the course of events. But before that, he’ll rise to an occasion that includes a mighty sea battle, a shipwreck, two high-contrast sea captains (Clinton Carew, Ryan Parker), a number of eccentric island cannibals, and (did I mention?) pirates. Ah yes, and the discovery of the opposite sex, bedtime stories, and the notion of family.

Peter and the Starcatcher is an enjoyable jumble of theatrical forms, and MacDonald’s production savours that. It’s part-musical comedy, with a live score and sound effects provided by musical director Erik Mortimer and Nich Davies. It’s part-pantomime, with all the shameless punning, mouldy  jokes, double-entendres, and blithe insertion of topical anachronisms that designation implies. You’ll hear a wispy reference to Crazy For You float by; there’s a cameo from another Citadel hit.

Garett Ross is droll as the panto Dame, Molly’s exasperated, tart-tongued nanny Mrs. Bumbrake. Addicted to alliteration, she’s been around the poop deck a few times, as they say, and she isn’t above a little slap-and-tickle on the side from a romantic old salt Alf (Glenn Nelson). “If you touch a hair on her legs …” the latter valiantly warns their pirate captors.  

It’s part-music hall and part-fantasy epic. The Act II opener, a chorus line of fish-turned mermaids, with fantastical bosom support from costume designer Megan Koshka, is a bit of both. And so is Koshka’s set, framed as an old-fashioned Victorian theatre, slightly askew, as if it’s lost its moorings and might end up slipping off a pier into the sea. It gets exactly the right kind of period melodrama lighting from Narda McCarroll. 

It’s part coming-of-age comedy, witness wistful scenes between Peter and Molly, as one captures a childhood he never had, and the other starts to grow out of hers and move on. And the show even makes fun of its own storyteller theatre roots when Molly objects to the orphan boys’ improvised version of Sleeping Beauty. They have, she notes briskly, “abused the concept of the theatre collective.” Everyone’s a critic, eh?

Anyhow, some scenes are more fun than others. I loved Molly’s expedition through the depths of the ship, chamber after chamber, created entirely by human agency: ensemble members hold up slatted all-purpose planks as doors, which open on a variety of amusing tableaux vivant and slam shut. The Act II encounter with the Mollusks and their leader, Fighting Prawn (Stephanie Wolfe), and the fun of their language (“cannelloni! lasagne!”), on the other hand, doesn’t get much comic traction.

As the Boy, a naif made sullen by privation, Derkx turns in a performance that charts, delightfully, the birth and tentative growth of amazement about the world and its wonders. As the wiseacre of his two orphan companions — the one obsessed by being The Leader — Richard Lee Hsi is particularly amusing in his adult tone. 

Rankin captures Molly’s competitive streak — “it isn’t a contest, but if it was I’d win” — and the way her certainties about her superior skills and knowledge are always getting undermined by the human factor. Molly has a slightly preposterous upper-class accent, and an air of noblesse oblige that will make you smile, in a performance smartly created from the friction between pompous, and rueful.

Back to the Stache and his “one for all and all for me!” piratical mantra. A production that can sometimes seem cluttered finds its comic starstuff treasure in Timoteo’s hysterical performance, well worth the price of admission. Vainglorious but craven, a self-dramatizing, self-enchanted Mrs. Malaprop of the high seas, Black Stache ignites the stage whenever he’s on it (matches provided by Peter Fernandes’s helpful Smee). 

Instantly exasperated whenever anyone else gets a stage Moment — “enough of this non-versation!” — Black Stache pursues the  treasure with flamboyant showbiz charm and a daffy but elegant store of contemporary references. Alas, it is “as elusive as a Philip Glass opera.”

The hand-severing scene in which Black Stache assures his eternal future as Peter Pan’s eternal arch-enemy Captain Hook is a riot. “I have a whole armada of possibilities at my former fingertips.” Timoteo doesn’t just negotiate the role, he embraces it and catapults off it.  And the whole enterprise springs forward.

“You sound older already,” says the eternal boy formerly known as Boy, accusingly, to Molly near the end. The rest of us, though, feel younger when Black Stache assures us he’ll be back, “just when you least expect it, there’ll I’ll be, The Stache, right under yer nose.”

REVIEW

Peter and the Starcatcher

Theatre: Citadel

Directed by: James MacDonald

Starring: Oscar Derkx, Andrea Rankin, Farren Timoteo, Peter Fernandes, Doug Mertz, Garett Ross, Glenn Nelson, Richard Lee Hsi, Ryan Parker, Clinton Carew, Stephanie Wolfe, Morgan Yamada

Running: through April 23

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.ca

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La Raccourcie: a father/son confrontation at L’UniThéâtre

Posted on April 6, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

André Roy, Steve Jodoin in La Raccourcie, L’UniThéâtre. Photo by db photographics

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There are mysteries at the heart of La Raccourcie, the 1991 two-hander by Quebec writer Jean-Rock Gaudreault that opens at L’UniThéâtre this week, in French with English surtitles.

It’s a father-son confrontation in the woods that comes with intriguing questions for the audience. Jean-Joseph has been leading a solitary, hermetic existence in the northern Quebec woods for five years. Hmmm, that’s one “why?.” And here’s another: his son Victor arrives, in shirt and tie, having scrambled through the bush for days to find him. What is he fleeing? Is it a “heart of darkness” type quest?

And here’s a third “why?”: “le raccourci” means “shortcut” in English. But La Raccourcie? It’s a river, possibly fictional, possibly mythical.

“You find out the answers,” says director Brian Dooley. “That’s what the play is for!”

For his production director Dooley has paired veteran francophone actor and former broadcaster André Roy with L’UniThéâtre’s Steve Jodoin. Roy, says Dooley, “has quite a following for his work in comedies…. This one has its funny elements, for sure, but it’s a serious relationship between a father and son — funny but not a rib-tickler…. André has been so committed! He and Steve have a great chemistry.”

In the course of the play, as Dooley describes it (with deliberate vagueness), “a young man confronts an existential choice.” And, as a parallel, not entirely welcome to either character, emerges, the son discovers that his dad did exactly that at an earlier time.

You wouldn’t call the encounter in the woods amicable, Dooley hints. “Barbed” is the word he uses. “The son is there to catch his father up; dad has a few things to learn about what he left behind when he left wife and home, all the things he’s buried…. At first the father is resentful. Slowly, persistently, the son wears him down; he’s like his dad that way.”

“There’s a real meat and potatoes feel to this,” says Dooley of the visceral encounter. “You need two actors who can wrestle!”

PREVIEW

La Raccourcie

Written by: Jean-Rock Gaudreault

Directed by: Brian Dooley

Starring: André Roy, Steve Jodoin

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91 St.

Running: April 5 to 8 and 12 to 15. Note: all but the April 8 evening and the April 15 matinée performances have English subtitles

Tickets: lunithéâtre.ca

 

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Players De Novo replaces Belke play as annual fundraiser

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Five weeks before opening night Players de Novo and Workshop West Playwrights Theatre announced their decision Wednesday to replace David Belke’s Forsooth My Lovely as their upcoming fundraising production. 

This is their statement: “After careful consideration, Players De Novo and Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre have decided to replace our upcoming fundraising show of Forsooth My Lovely by David Belke with Village of Idiots by John Lazarus. With only 5 weeks to go, we are proceeding full steam ahead on our new play which will be presented as planned at Victoria School of the Arts on May 5.”

The much-produced Village of Idiots, a charming and humorous Jewish folk tale from the pen of Canadian playwright Lazarus, chronicles the fictional town of Chelm through eyes of a deserter from the Russian army, who arrives on the eve of a Cossack incursion.

Players De Novo is a troupe comprised of members of the legal community, who stage an annual production to benefit an Edmonton theatre company, which provides the director for the show. This year’s recipient is Workshop West Playwrights Theatre; the director is WW artistic director Vern Thiessen.

The replacement comes on the heels of the March 21 news that Forsooth My Lovely playwright Belke was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography. He is scheduled to appear in court April 6.     

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Catching ‘starstuff’ onstage: Peter and the Starcatcher at the Citadel

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andrea Rankin as Molly in Peter and the Starcatcher. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Use your thoughts to hoist the sails,” advises the stalwart Victorian captain of a British frigate in the prologue to Peter and the Starcatcher, opening on the Citadel’s Maclab stage Thursday.

Which is exactly what director James MacDonald and his cast of 12 Edmonton actors have been up to as they rehearse this madcap prequel to Peter Pan’s adventures in Neverland with the Darling family.    

The 2011 play, spun by Rick Elice (Jersey Boys) from a 2004 Dave Barry/Ridley Pearson kids’ novel, isn’t a high-tech extravaganza. The fun, as Broadway audiences improbably discovered in 2012, is that it’s not. No, this kind of low-budget magic is a test of ingenuity, and a certain willingness to give your imagination a play-date with simple props, costume pieces, and physical ingenuity.

In telling the backstory of how a morose orphan became Peter Pan, a dozen actors play more than a hundred characters — narrators, sailors, pirates, dancing mermaids, dancing mollusks — and the odd inanimate object. The adventure begins on the high seas: the SS Neverland is bound for Rundoon, with a cargo of something magical and life-changing called “starstuff.” And after an epic maritime battle it arrives on a mysterious tropical island where the inhabitants have their own lingo.

 “It’s a case of ‘happy surprises’,” grins MacDonald, on the subject of making magic the playful way. “A prop that’s supposed to be one thing turns into something else when you pick it up. That could be this! This could be that!”

Garett Ross and Glenn Nelson, Peter and the Starcatcher, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

It’s a mantra of playful theatricality that appeals mightily to MacDonald. “It’s a really hard show to plan for and design,” he grins. “You don’t want to over-design it, but you want to make sure you have all the stuff you’re going to want.” Like ladders, maybe. Or a pineapple. Or something to make outsized jungle leaves out of. 

“Rope is big,” smiles Andrea Rankin. Yup, you can make doorways and docks and ships from rope.

Among the multitude of characters Rankin plays in the course of Peter and the Starcatcher, there’s Molly, a brisk, bossy little upper-class girl with a repertoire of bedtime stories (ring a bell?). There are pirates, including a particularly flamboyant one with an impressive moustache (hint hint). There’s a crocodile (another hint).

Oscar Derkx as Boy and Farren Timoteo as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

There are orphan boys, including a particularly glum one called simply Boy, who’s always lived in the dark, hates grown-ups, and never never wants to be one. “I love the theatricality of it,” says Oscar Derkx. He plays Boy, who will acquire a more memorable name in the play. “It’s not just massive fireworks; I feel like we’re inviting the audience to imagine along with us, to inhabit this world with us.”

“It’s actors’ theatre, it’s storyteller theatre,” says Derkx, like Rankin a U of A theatre school grad. Derkx is called upon to transform from Boy to bloodthirsty pirate in a split second. “We’re creating with fabric, lights, soundscape. And our bodies too! At one point I jump into a shimmering pool of golden water, and I ‘make’ the pool with my own physicality….”

Peter and the Starcatcher, Citadel Theatre. Photo Ian Jackson, by Epic Photography.

For Montreal-born MacDonald, recently appointed to the helm of Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops, the production is a homecoming to the city where he went to theatre school (the U of A), launched his theatre career as an actor and then a director, and co-founded a summer Shakespeare festival (Freewill). And it’s a return, as well, to the theatre where he’s directed close to two dozen productions. “It’s pretty great, pretty emotional, for me to come back and work with actors I know!” he says feelingly. Having Edmonton talent in the show was important to him. 

Peter and the Starcatcher isn’t MacDonald’s first encounter with that Neverland brouhaha. He was Captain Hook in a 1994 musical version of Peter Pan at the long-gone kids’ theatre Stage Polaris. Glenn Nelson was in that cast; so were Garett Ross and Clinton Carew. Nelson and Carew, incidentally, were in the production of Peter Pan that opened the Maclab Theatre in 1984. And now they’re reunited in the prequel.  

Rankin and Derkx played Scrooge’s beloved sister Fannie and his younger self, when MacDonald starred as Scrooge in the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol.

Along with MacDonald, they love the way the Maclab’s thrust stage locates the actors amidst the audience. As MacDonald points out, the logistics of staging a scene for audiences on three sides may be tricky; ditto magical transformations. But when you’re after “a conversation, a relationship, with the audience,” nothing beats a thrust.

Garett Ross and Glenn Nelson, in Peter and the Starcatcher, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

“For me, the show is all about the joy of being a child,” says Derkx of the story. “It’s about childhood and what it is to grow up….” Rankin points to the wistfulness the original Peter Pan story generates, “the moment Peter realizes the world is going to grow up without him….”

“Molly is going to grow up.  And there’s a certain sadness to that. But, as she says, just because something ends doesn’t mean it hasn’t mattered…. It’s the dark that makes the light possible.” That’s the thing about playing a kid, she says: “you feel everything! And things can change in a second, the high-highs and the low-lows.”

Playing a kid isn’t about a squeaky kid voice or a funny kid walk. “It’s more about ‘how can I believe fully, in a fully committed way, to this moment and then switch instantly (to another),” says Rankin. “Adults brood.”

MacDonald laughs. “Can you think of anything more completely opposite to the last show I did here?” That would be last season’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where every utterance has ominous nuances, and every scene is coloured by the tensions of the past. 

In rehearsal MacDonald tells his actors “you have to be goldfish,” he laughs, demonstrating the quick zigzags with his hand. “That’s what kids do. You’re completely committed to something, then something happens and you instantly completely change direction!…. All the characters behave that way.”

MacDonald, who’s on the faculty of the Citadel/Banff Professional Program, uses the famous Abbott and Costello “who’s on first?” routine to teach actors the difference between “playing the comedy and playing the lack of comprehension.” The latter, he says, “is basically what theatre is about, people figuring out things.”

Molly is both a little girl and the woman she’ll become, Rankin is finding. “You can see she’s going to be an amazing woman. There’s a kind of grace and strength to her. She’s grown up with adults; she’s strong, smart…. The next moment she’s having a tantrum; she doesn’t know how to talk to boys; she has no friends.”  Rankin smiles. “She’s growing up and we see the beginning of that.”

As for the eternal boy, Derkx feels that Boy is in a constant state of wonder in the play. Being a kid is wonder…. Every scene’s a massive new experience for him, seeing a girl, hearing her talk about all the magic in the world, seeing the sun, being in a jungle.”

“Girls grow up faster,” MacDonald grins. “Some boys never grow up!”

PREVIEW

Peter and the Starcatcher

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Rick Elise

Directed by: James MacDonald

Starring: Oscar Derkx, Andrea Rankin, Farren Timoteo, Garett Ross, Doug Mertz, Ryan Parker, Stephanie Wolfe

Running: through April 23

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Lighting a (bon)fire under improv

Posted on April 4, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Photo by Andrew Paul

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Wrap your mind around this terrifying idea for an improv show: 

What if an improviser found himself onstage in a fully rehearsed, costumed, blocked 30-minute play he knows nothing about — without a script, as a character he hasn’t met?   

The idea for Improvisers Worst Nightmare, the brainchild of Joe Vanderhelm, is either brilliant or insane. It’s impossible to know in advance. Which is the whole point of Rapid Fire Theatre’s annual Bonfire Festival.

Bonfire, which ignites its flammable 20 experiments in long-form improv comedy Tuesday, for the sixth annual edition of the festivities, is what happens when you say YES! instead of ‘You’ve GOT to be kidding!.’

Bonfire Festival 2016. Photo by Andrew Paul.

“Who knows? We say Yes, and see what happens,” says Rapid Fire artistic director Matt Schuurman calmly. “Unhinged? Exactly!” Unhinged from the standard, the usual, the reasonable: of Bonfire’s 20 experiments in improv comedy this year, 20 have never been tried by the company before.

They could go either way. “Some of these experiments become our Next Big Thing. Some we’ll never hear from again. It’s our comedy laboratory.” 

As for Improvisers Worst Nightmare, says Schuurman, “it’s the inverse of Rapid Fire’s Christmas special, where the actor who plays Scrooge (in the Citadel production of A Christmas Carol) appears on the show, and says all the lines he always says, and we improvise a show around him.”

Saturday’s grand finale show, Burlesqueprov!, sounds equally terrifying. “It’s a blend of burlesque and improv,” says Schuurman, amused. “Theatresports and striptease…. A few of our performers and a few of the Send In The Girls (burlesque troupe).”

Bonfire is fed by what-if? ideas pitched by members of the Rapid Fire ensemble, about 50 strong. “We have a pitch session for everyone,” explains Schuurman. “Directors come forward with an idea, and there are sign-up sheets. It’s so exciting!”

Bonfire Festival 2016. Photo by Andrew Paul.

It’s a measure of the improvisers’ love of risk — “or possibly that we’re suckers for punishment,” laughs Schuurman — that the first  sign-up sheet to fill up was Punish Prov, opening the festival tonight. Joey Lucius’s idea, which came from a university science course, is based on behaviour modification principles, explains Schuurman. “Can we make someone a better improviser using that?

This involves “a small electrical shock” applied to improvisers on audience command after an improv scene. After this, “they will  attempt the scene again.”

Punish Prov, incidentally, isn’t Bonfire’s first dalliance with science. In last year’s edition scientist Kory Mathewson improvised with an artificial intelligence, in the festival’s highest-tech show.

As always, some of the Bonfire experiments are about sustaining quickie improv games into a full 30- or 45-minute show. Genre Rollercoaster, a Vincent Forcier initiative, is an escalating high-speed thrill ride through movie genres, for example. Jessie McPhee’s 4Square confines four participants and four storylines in a box.

Bonfire Festival 2016. Photo by Andrew Paul.

Some experiments are responses to the peculiar nooks and crannies of pop culture that intrigue members of the ensemble. Rapid Fire Walk With Me is inspired by the surrealist adventure of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The Navidson Improv (House of Leaves) is spun from an obscure, hard-to-read cult novel. Karaoke Bar, well, I’m just going to leave that idea with you; it has a gruesome hilarity all its own.

“It’s all comedy research,” says Schuurman. “We have to be students of, well, everything: pop culture, literature, science, math…. Our audience is all those things, so we have to be too.”

“There’s a family show on opening night, there’s burlesque, there are immigrant stories that connect real-life to improv…. Bonfire reinvigorates our ensemble. They come out so thrilled, so pumped!”

  Like the man said, unhinged.

PREVIEW

Sixth Annual Bonfire Festival

Theatre: Rapid Fire Theatre

Where: Citadel Theatre, 9828 101 A Avenue

Running: Tuesday through Saturday

Tickets and full schedule: rapidfiretheatre.com/festival/bonfire

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The Maggie Tree presents 9 Parts of Desire: the women of Iraq

Posted on April 3, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

9 Parts of Desire, a production by The Maggie Tree. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Survival: Life and love in a time of war and occupation.   

There is nothing simple about the lives of the nine Iraqi women we meet in the 2003 play cum theatrical documentary that opens Thursday in a Maggie Tree production.

In 9 Parts of Desire by the Iraqi-American actor Heather Raffo,  characters step forward into the light from a dark canvas of oppression and brutality. And while they are a study in contrast — in age, education, economic class, religious and political attitude — they all know something profound about suffering and violence, compliance and resistance. 

Among the women who own the nine monologues we meet a doctor, a kid enamoured of American culture, a Bedouin matron, an artist who both prospers in the Saddam Hussein regime and records its savagery. In fact, as Raffo has explained, in her playwright’s notes to the script, it was a painting called Savagery in the Saddam Art Centre that inspired her artist character, Layla, in 9 Parts of Desire.

Amid the official portraits of Saddam, there it was, a portrait of a naked woman, clinging to a tree. That mysterious sighting happened during Raffo’s family visit to Baghdad in 1993, not long after the First Gulf War. After that came the decade of interviews, strangers and family friends and acquaintances, that formed the fabric of her play, named for an Imam Ali saying: “God created sexual desire in 10 parts; then he gave nine parts to women, and one to men.”   

.The Maggie Tree, an award-winning Edmonton collective devoted to providing opportunities for female artists, and enhancing their profile, has long been intrigued by 9 Parts of Desire. But, a half a world away from its characters, and many years away from its creation, the play came with daunting challenges, says director Vanessa Sabourin, a co-founder (with Kristi Hansen) of The Maggie Tree.

Relevance wasn’t one of them, says Sabourin. “It seemed to be more and more relevant as we thought about it. The refugee crisis, the bombings in Syria, Trump was running…. And it resonated in Canada. We are still an occupied country; we still haven’t resolved basic stuff like access to drinking water for Indigenous people.”

Authenticity of voice was a crucial question for the Edmonton theatre. In its Off-Broadway run, 9 Parts of Desire came to the stage as a solo show: Raffo herself played all the parts. “She could do it, (a) she wrote it, (b) she’s Iraqi and American,” says Sabourin.

But that wouldn’t work for an Edmonton theatre company. So “other conversations followed,” Sabourin says. “Conversations about diversity in theatre, voice appropriation. Who can tell whose story?” The play was written for Western audiences, as she points out. “But do our communities mingle enough?”

The Maggie Tree considered a three-actor production, and then decided on a cast of nine for the monologues. When the first audition calls didn’t produce much age range, they auditioned again. “Not many aboriginal artists came,” says Sabourin. “I felt it was important to have at least one…”

“We need to put a piece of ourselves in this. What is relevant to us?”

For The Maggie Tree, it’s become not just a production, but a whole project in mind-expansion and “learning about somebody else,” Sabourin says. “With nine people, there are more smart brains in the room.”

“What does Canada look like? It’s important for us to be asking because of the divisive conversations now. It raises questions like how complacent should we be? How can we make positive choices?”

“Our nine actors are all Canadians but represent different heritages and life experiences,” says Sabourin. “They connect to the script from different backgrounds, different perspectives.”

“Occupation is highly complicated. Motivation is complicated too; it’s so often about power, money, oil…. Always innocent civilians pay the price.”

To help them approach the complexities of Iraqi culture, Sabourin and Kristen found themselves two Iraq consultants, Jalal Barzanji and Mona Esmjaeel. The lobby artist Fordos Lateef is Iraqi. The production team, including the musicians, have diverse ethnic backgrounds.

“For us, it’s been a huge thought bomb!” declares Sabourin. “Huge!” 

“It’s about surviving. It’s about the human spirit. And it’s also about love.. There’s no Us or Them. There’s only Us. That’s why we wanted to do this piece.” 

PREVIEW

9 Parts of Desire

Theatre: The Maggie Tree

Written by: Heather Raffo

Directed by: Vanessa Sabourin

Starring: Nadien Chu, Alison Wells, Christine Frederick, Patricia Darbasie, Rebecca John, Amena Shehab, Nicole St. Martin, Natasha Prasad, Nimet Kanji

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through April 15

Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)

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Bright Burning: a conflagration in the class divide. A review

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Bright Burning by Colleen Murphy, Studio Theatre production. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A sense of absurdity hangs over the group portrait in constant motion in Colleen Murphy’s Bright Burning, currently trashing a beautiful set on the Timms Centre stage.

A kid (Jake Tkaczyk) comes down a marble staircase lugging a grandfather clock.“Can’t take that on the LRT,” another kid notes. “We’ll get a taxi,” says a third. They aren’t kidding — well, not exactly.

Later, amid the jumble of 24-carat vibrators, TV monitors, candelabra and cases of vintage wine that the awestruck looters score, they will actually consider the possibility of dismantling a Bosendorfer grand piano. 

Any gang invasion in which the participants arrive on the bus and play dress-up feels somehow doomed in advance. Which is exactly what the new play — commissioned from the award-winning playwright specially for the 12 actors of the U of A’s graduating BFA actors — explores: the futility of upward mobility for the working poor.

They are foul-mouthed and dangerous, the six hopped-up kids who arrive at a suburban Edmonton mansion to score enough stuff to pay a drug debt. For Jan Selman’s production, designer Robert Shannon, Lee Livingstone and LLARS Design create and light a classic double-staircase architecture, opulently finished and topped by an abstract chandelier, which figures in the action and is not a reference to a certain well-known musical.

Beyond paying off Fleur (Jaimi Reese), the hard-ass dealer who shows up with the stoned-out girlfriend she pimps out (Chayla Day), their dreams are modest. Lou (Alex Dawkins), who works as a shlepper in a vet clinic, wants to buy a dog. Ari (Jordan Buhat) thinks of buying a guitar case “with my new wealth portfolio” and buying his sick mom jewellery from the shopping channel. Emily (Sarah Ormandy), a chatterbox savant with a photographic memory for arcane information and no self-editing mechanism, wants to create art cards.

But the insight of Murphy’s play is that, modesty notwithstanding, their dreams are outlandish, absurd, unattainable, lost in the vast unbridgeable gulf between the rich and the poor. They are scrambling outsiders. And they’re looking in with a combination of wonder, and mounting rage.

As Selman’s mesmerizingly hyperactive, hard-driving, sensory-overload production discloses, their exclusion isn’t a discovery for the characters. It’s re-discovery of something they knew all along, a sort of sinking feeling about invisibility speeded up into a frantic high. Bright Burning, incidentally, is a rarity, a play that contains meth, but isn’t really about drugs.

Selman’s actors attack, and convincingly, Murphy’s staccato bursts of overlapping dialogue, non sequiturs, tangents, and furious fragments. It’s often very funny: Philip Geller gets (and deserves) big laughs as a deadpan pizza delivery guy with anxiety issues, who arrives in the midst of the chaos. “I can’t stay here it’s too stressful,” he says. With bleak hilarity, the most menacing of the characters, J the dealer’s enforcer (Jacob Holloway), offers advice from his “suicide prevention group.”

Bright Burning has the feel of a black comedy teetering on the edge of something tragic. The only pause, for example, isn’t really a pause at all; it’s fast and furious playtime in the boat — really! — they’ve dragged from the garage into the mansion. It’s an absurd, and somehow touching, image. Where would you like to sail? the landlocked ask each other to imagine, abandoning hostilities temporarily to play, like kids, with the idea of possibility.

The arrival of the owner’s daughters, Ruby (Emily Howard) and her kid sister Sam (Emma Houghton) ups the stakes. The former will argue that entitlement cuts both ways, that being rich isn’t a choice and that, in any case, wealth doesn’t cause poverty. The American playwright Wallace Shawn, in The Fever, would beg to differ; his protagonist is shaken to the core by the thought that his own privilege is actually underwritten by poverty.

Sam, the little rich kid in this crowd, has a certain amusing clarity: self-interest. “Yeah, steal anything you want but leave us with our lives and our futures because I’m going to camp today for two weeks.”

The texture of the production, and its performances, feel full. And Murphy expertly structures the play so that characters gradually emerge from the group portrait to be dimensional individuals, each with slight variations in speediness. 

Cast of Bright Burning by Colleen Murphy, a Studio Theatre production. Photo by Ed Ellis.

It’s one of those plays that tests the inevitability of its storytelling with a horrifying ending that would seem outlandish — if there hadn’t been the play first. It’s a structure, an escalation, that requires duration, and repetition. And both begin to seem a little over-extended and relentless late in the production — which is to say you start to notice them. The performances, though, anchored by Dawkins as Lou and Ormandy as the fatally visionary Emily, remain fierce, committed, and fresh.  

And a play custom-made for its youthful actors, that began with entrances in the dark, ends with exits in the dark.

REVIEW

Bright Burning

Theatre: Studio Theatre

Written by: Colleen Murphy

Directed by: Jan Selman

Starring: Alex Dawkins, Marc Ludwig, Sarah J. Culkin, Sarah Ormandy Jake Tkaczyk, Jordan Buhat, Jaimi Reese, Jacob Holloway, Chayla Day, Philip Geller, Emily Howard, Emma Houghton

Where: Timms Centre for the Arts, U of A, 112th St. and 87th Ave.

Running: through April 8

Tickets: 780-492-2495, ualberta.ca/artshows

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Art and politics mix it up at Gravity cabaret

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Todd Houseman and Ben Gorodetsky in Folk Lordz. Photo by Curtis Comeau.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The situation is … grave. And getting graver.

Yup, Gravity, “the cabaret of art and politics” that made its debut 18 months ago, has a lot to work with this time out. 

We’re at a moment in history, when time seems to be unspooling backwards into the 1950s at a great rate and chaos seems nigh. Monday night at Metro Cinema, Edmonton’s merry band of theatre, dance, comic improvisers, visual and spoken word artists, filmmakers step up to create new work that explores the situation. The “Trump Edition” of the cabaret is created jointly by Theatre Yes artistic producer Heather Inglis and Mike Hudema of Greenpeace Canada.

“We thought it might be a colossal disaster,” says Inglis cheerfully of Gravity’s debut edition, poised between the 2015 NDP Alberta win in the spring of 2015 and the Liberals’ federal win that fall.  “But 300 people showed up. It was an exciting evening!”

“How different everything feels, since that exceedingly optimistic fall,” she says. “The last few months have been quite devastating for people. We’re providing a platform for artists to express their reactions….”

“A great diversity of artists,” as Inglis puts it, stepped up to the call for “unabashedly opinionated responses.” So the political discussion will be far-ranging: immigration bans, disability access, gender fascism, the environment….

There are poets: the Somalian spoken word poet Ahmed Knowmadic, a winner in the recent Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, and Edmonton Youth Poet Laureate Nasra Adem, among them. There are theatre artists: Nicole Schafenaker and Kate Stashko have fashioned a dance piece about over-consumption. There’s an Adam Bentley film about Inuit culture, and a Danielle Peers film about disability and access. 

The Gravity lineup also includes dance/performance artist Julie Ferguson, burlesque queen Violette Coquette; Doctor Professor Lavernius Cumquat, a clown satirist of the commedia tradition; the all-female improv comedy troupe The Sphinxes.

Dustin Allen as Dr. Professor Lavernius Cumquat. Photo supplied.

The multi-instrumentalist aboriginal hip-hop artist Mitchmatic leads a dance party finale.

Returning is the highly original Folk Lordz duo of Todd Houseman and Ben Gorodetsy, Rapid Fire Theatre improv stars both, who specialize in pairing the Indigenous oral tradition of storytelling with Russian literary character drama.

“There’s a lot of fertile material at the moment,” says Gorodetsky drily. He and Houseman, who take cues from the audience for their unique Folk Lordz improv, are also the joint mc’s of the evening’s entertainment.  “We’ll be increasing tension, or releasing it — as necessary!”

PREVIEW

Gravity: A Cabaret of Art and Politics (Trump Edition)

Where: Metro Cinema at the Garneau Theatre, 8712 109 St.

Running: Monday 6:30 p.m.

Tickets: metrocinema.org or at the door

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Colleen Murphy: burning brightly at Studio Theatre

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Bright Burning by Colleen Murphy, Studio Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Our big fat myth,” declares Colleen Murphy (whose declarations tend to have a combustible edge to them) “is that we’re a classless society.”

“The tremendous gap between the wealthy and the working poor, and the rage beneath”: there’s the tinder for Bright Burning, the new Murphy play that ignites Thursday at Studio Theatre. It was commissioned, and custom-made, for the U of A’s graduating actors, all 12 of them, the grand finale of Murphy’s three-year Lee Playwright-in-Residence appointment.

Playing with fire isn’t a wild departure in the career of the Toronto-based star Canadian playwright/filmmaker. Murphy won the second of her Governor General’s Awards this past year for the fearless and disturbing Pig Girl, provoked by the grisly career of serial killer Robert Pickton.  The first, in 2006, was for December Man, which explored the fall-out of another horrific burst of violence, the 1989 shooting massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.

Bright Burning, which arrives on the Timms Centre stage trailing warnings for “strong language, violence, sex, substance abuse,” has a similarly inflammatory sense of danger about it. “What planted the seed,” says Murphy over pre-rehearsal lunch this week, “is an article about so-called ‘ghost parties’: a bunch of young disenfranchised, marginalized kids who broke into a mansion, trashed the place and left… The police found them; the kids had taken selfies there.”

Bright Burning by Colleen Murphy, at Studio Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

In Bright Burning, a gang of six break into a posh suburban mansion with the idea of looting stuff to pay off a drug debt. Simmering resentment escalates into crazy violence that’s not without its black comedy. A meth dealer and her girlfriend arrive. A pizza delivery guy shows up. So do the daughters of the owners. “And the shit hits the   fan,” as Murphy says succinctly. “I took the idea and played it to its emotionally logical extreme….”

“I don’t know what people will do with that,” she shrugs cheerfully. That thought appeals to her. “For the first 10 minutes, the lights are off. We’re in the dark. There aren’t even any (stage) marks…. This is a show with a lot of physical challenges.”

“How would I break into a house? Well, I wouldn’t turn on the lights till I knew no one was there,” grins Murphy, noting mildly that “it’s not the most politically correct sort of play.” 

Which brings us to the chandelier. Murphy laughs. “If you’ve a got a chandelier, you’ve gotta swing on it!” And people do.

Murphy has particular praise for the dramaturgical expertise of director Jan Selman. The U of A’s department of drama “has thrown everything they have on this project: designers, staff, actors, a fight director! Amazing! I’m so lucky to be that playwright! (Laughs). So I just went whole hog!”  

Who doesn’t arrive? “Nobody plays ‘adults’, nobody plays cops,” says Murphy. The cast of 12, four times the size of the Canadian theatre average in this age of shrinkage, are all in the 10 to 25 age range. So are the individual characters Murphy has created for them. So “the challenge for the actors isn’t age,” she points out. It’s class. “It’s a challenge for theatre school actors to portray a different class.”

Bright Burning, Studio Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

“I know this world, and it’s not a polite world. The possibility of violence, drugs…. Like all people, in life and in drama, (the characters) are searching for meaning.”

playwright Colleen Murphy

She had her own challenges with Bright Burning, says a playwright for whom “challenge” has a come-hither allure. For one thing, in an era of small-cast theatre, it’s a rare opportunity for a playwright to populate the stage. “Twelve people, and you want each one to have a character to play who has an arc, a life in this story.”

“We should be peopling our stages!” says Murphy, who “loves conflict, action, tension” in theatre. And this is the season she demonstrates. In The Breathing Hole, premiering this summer at Stratford (directed, incidentally, by U of A grad Renata Arluk), a cast of 19 plays 48 characters — in a story Murphy describes as “the life and death of a 500-year-old polar bear.”

In her opera Oksana G, (with Edmonton-born composer Aaron Gervais) — which debuts in May at Toronto’s Tapestry Opera  — a cast of 16, singing in Russian, Ukrainian and English, brings to life the world of sex trafficking.

For Bright Burning  Murphy “set myself the challenge of writing a play in one scene, in real time, in the same location…. It was hard, in an exciting way, to keep track of where the hell everyone is at any moment.”

“Also, the story demanded it,” as Murphy points out. “Intermission wouldn’t make sense.”

If Murphy’s plays all have striking differences in form, it’s because of the particular demands of the particular story, she says. “The idea dictates the structure; I really pay attention to that! I have to be able to tell the story in a ruthless formal container; that’s part of the storytelling.” She assesses her new phrase, “ruthless formality,” and likes it. 

In Pig Girl, for example, time operates in two different configurations, both onstage simultaneously. Dying Girl’s fatal and heroic confrontation with Killer happens in real time; meanwhile, Sister and Police Officer experience time over nine years, a damning indictment of the official indifference to a horrifying accumulation of evidence.  “It came to me in that form,” says Murphy simply.

In December Man, time spools in reverse. When actors tried reading the play in forward chronology, as an experiment, “it didn’t allow the same insights,” says the playwright, who has a sturdy resistance to sentimentality.

In The Breathing Hole, set in the Far North, time is as epically expansive as the setting is compressed. As Murphy describes it, The whole play happens at the same breathing hole. In three acts, a “magical bear” takes the audience through a story that begins in 1534, with the arrival on these shores of Jacques Cartier, and ends on New Year’s Eve 2034, when ice has vanished from the earth. “A vast tragic arc,” as Murphy puts it, of our wilful inattention to climate change.

With its single scene, in real time, and the occupation of the stage by at least half the 12 characters at any given moment, Bright Burning offers a different kind of formal challenge.

If you saw Murphy’s Armstrong’s War at Theatre Network, where two characters develop a friendship without ever agreeing, you’ll know that her plays don’t stack the deck by presenting thoughts you already agree with. In Bright Burning, with its insights into the rage of the working poor, “there’s a fulsome argument, both sides,” says Murphy. “You watch the trains collide, head on….”

In her acceptance speech at the Governor General’s Award gala earlier this winter, Murphy cited the British playwright Edward Bond. “ ‘If you can’t face Hiroshima in the theatre, you eventually end up in Hiroshima itself’. I take that to mean if we cannot face our own catastrophes in the theatre to gain some insight into why they happened then we risk repeating them.”

It will be for the audience to react in “whatever way they react,” says Murphy of the new play. “Love it, be outraged by it…. All those reactions are valid. The audience can feel whatever they wish. It’s an experience.”

“It may not entirely surprise you that the Shakespeare tragedy Murphy has taken in hand to adapt as satire, for an upcoming production commissioned by Vancouver’s edgy Rumble Theatre, is his goriest, Titus Andronicus. In The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, five outcasts scramble to perform their own version of the Shakespeare play, and the audience is encourage to hurl buns at the stage at moments of high offence.

“I write theatre I’d like to see, and I’m not interested in theatre that just upholds whatever I already think…. Theatre isn’t about pleasing people; it’s about exciting people.”

PREVIEW

Bright Burning (I Hope My Heart Burns First)

Theatre: Studio Theatre

Written by: Colleen Murphy

Directed by: Jan Selman

Starring: the 2017 graduating class of BFA actors

Where: Timms Centre for the Arts, 112th St. and 87th Ave.

Running: through April 8

Tickets: 780-492-2495, ualberta.ca/artshows

  

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MacEwan’s new downtown arts centre: a peek inside

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

MacEwan University’s Centre for Arts and Culture. Photo by MacEwan University.

By Liz Nicholls 12thnight.ca

There’s a surprise waiting for Edmonton downtown. It’s in an elegant glinting glass-wrapped box that catches the light on all sides. And it’s tied up with lime green ribbons.

Here’s impossible magic for you: what’s contained inside seems bigger than what’s outside. When you enter, the building unfolds and expands in a mysterious way, a sort of light-up architectural origami. That’s what I discovered last week touring MacEwan University’s striking new $181 million Centre for Arts and Culture, currently in progress on 104th Avenue and set to open in September.

Not that the building — the new home for MacEwan’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications and its programs in theatre, visual arts, design, music, and more — is secretive. As befits a place for both fine arts training and performance/exhibition, for students and for public audiences, it opens both inward and outward.

MacEwan University’s Centre for Arts and Culture. Photo by MacEwan University

The design is by the late great Vancouver-based architect Bing Thom — partnering with the Edmonton firm Manasc Isaac — whose stunningly diverse archive of fine arts buildings includes the Arena Theatre in Washington D.C., Hong Kong’s Xiqu Chinese opera house, and the Chan Centre in Vancouver.   

We’re on the fourth floor of five, looking up a little and down a lot in the grand but gracefully airy central atrium. It’s a light-drenched hall, occupying the full height of the 428,000-foot structure and encircled at the very top by a clerestory, a continuous strip of skylight. The space is criss-crossed with an unusual geometry of angled staircases. At either end are angled galleries of “nesting spaces” for students to read scripts, learn their lines, debrief their minds, check their mail.

Central atrium, MacEwan University Centre for Arts and Culture. Photo by MacEwan University

Manasc Isaac’s Shafraaz Kaba, the project architect, explains that the atrium, like the whole building, and not just its performance spaces, “is designed with acoustics in mind.” He imagines art openings, installations, gala events in that atrium. The walls, treated with acoustic plaster, are “gallery white”: “we anticipate all the walls covered with student art.”

In the course of the tour with Kaba and Clark Builders project manager Charles Tolley, we’ll venture from the atrium into three dance studios with blonde wood floors and floor-to-ceiling windows either one or two storeys high. Since the MacEwan theatre specialty is musical theatre, the vigorous art of tap dance gets a studio to call its own, where the floor stands ready to take a relentless pounding from student hoofers.

MacEwan University’s Centre for Arts and Culture: a dance studio. Photo by MacEwan University

We’ll see engineered sound labs, some 20 sound isolation booths, a percussion lab, music practice studios, photography studios with curved white walls, dark rooms, video editing studios, painting studios, two state-of-the-art recording studios in the basement. We’ll wander by classrooms, conference rooms, gallery spaces waiting for the new generation of creators and their mentors.

And on to matters theatrical: we’ll see the spacious woodworking, painting, set-, prop- and costume-building shops and studios where theatre artisans learn their craft, and theatre production careers are launched.

Which brings us to the centrepiece of MacEwan’s new performance spaces: an elegant, slightly curvaceous, galleried 430-seat proscenium theatre, complete with fly tower, a catwalk system on all four sides. Ah yes, and an orchestra pit: MacEwan is well known for its full-bodied musicals.

MacEwan University’s Centre for Arts and Culture: the largest theatre

The seats are divided among the main floor and two single wrap-around balcony tiers of swivelled seats. Under each main floor seat is an air vent. The idea of “displacement ventilation,” as Tolley explains, is to to avoid the noise of forced air.

The acoustics are the work of New York’s Stages, an offshoot of the company that created the rarefied sound landscape of the Winspear Centre. The seats, still under their plastic wraps last week, are designed by the Quebec company Ducharme. Unlike, say, the smaller 300-seat Westbury Theatre in Strathcona, MacEwan’s new proscenium house feels intimate. 

Stage left gives directly on the set assembly shop, an arrangement that saves time and back-breaking labour, with the loading dock nearby.

MacEwan University’s Centre for Arts and Culture. Photo by MacEwan University.

“With a fly system in the large theatre, the possibilities are endless!” says Jim Guedo, the director MacEwan’s head of Theatre Arts. “While we’ve always been able to satisfy the acting needs of Theatre Arts students, the new proscenium theatre will have many more options for the Theatre Production students….” Audiences take note: “something like Guys and Dolls has never actually been done at MacEwan. That’s definitely a possibility!”

The floor was getting its finish last week, so we could only peek at the flexible two-storey black box theatre. It can be reconfigured show to show, with a 150-seat maximum, about double the capacity of the current Theatre Lab, aka Room 1-89, at MacEwan’s Jasper Place stronghold. The Faculty of Arts and Communications moves downtown in the course of the summer.

“We hope to return to a four-show season again, with plays as well,” says Guedo. “Shakespeare in the round, for example, large-cast shows like The Skin of Our Teeth, The Women, The Laramie Project, Love and Information. As well as chamber musicals.” 

MacEwan University’s Centre for Arts and Culture: the recital hall. Photo: MacEwan University

The elegant 220-seat recital hall, lighter in hue than the theatres, is lined with an undulating surface of corrugated wood slats, a millwork challenge that’s a work of art in itself. “The hall takes into account MacEwan’s music specialties in teaching, which run to jazz and rock,” says Kaba. “But it’ll be great for a string quartet too.”

To prevent sound and vibration bleed, the performance spaces are essentially designed as a building within a building.

How accessible the new theatres are to Edmonton theatre companies remains to be seen, of course. It’s a university, so student productions come first. But as for Edmonton theatre-goers, there’s something very inviting, and connected to the world, about the new Centre for Arts and Culture.

That’s the magic of living in a glass house. By day the dance studios, for example, are light-filled. By night, they’re lit from within, and passersby can glimpse jazz dance classes in progress. There’s an art gallery for student and faculty work on the main floor. The restaurant planned for the southwest corner, near one of the two main entrances, will give on the outside world of downtown Edmonton, too. “There’s a street connection,” as Tolley says.

Dinner and a show? That’s what cities are for.

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