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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The house of the rising son: The Fall of the House of Atreus, a review

Posted on March 26, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Morgan Grau, Sarah Feutl, Graham Mothersill in The Fall of the House of Atreus. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Selfie opp: “I Survived The Fall Of The House Of Atreus” says the hand-lettered sign in the lobby of the Backstage Theatre. “Yee Haw!” And there’s helpful signage, too, for the confused, the bemused, the congenitally tentative: One arrow points to Old West; the other to Ancient Greece.

Yes, my philosophical friends, grab a drink and follow the arc of western civilization into the theatre. The opening image, the slow progress of a light-up cowboy hat across the stage, is probably the calmest moment in The Fall of the House of Atreus. Breathe, people, and hold the thought of that hat for later.

Catharsis can be yours, in slightly less than an hour. Impossible Mongoose’s madcap cavort, by Jessy Ardern, flings you (and its participants) at top speed through five generations of creative assassinations, murderous plots, instant betrayals, sex and violence, treacherous and/or vengeful relatives, near-relatives, and second cousins twice removed.

Did I mention the sex? Nothing like a fling with a god to make your love life more, like, mythic. Did I mention the curses, regularly recurring, signalled by a blast from a party horn? Did I mention … well, let the cannibalism be your own special discovery (note to self: verify all mystery meat). 

As Ardern and director Kushneryk have gleaned, Greek tragedy, with its loops of bad behaviour and unfortunate choices, has everything you need for comedy and its meaner party-animal sibling, farce. The key is speed. As John Mortimer has said, farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.  And Kushneryk’s riotously inventive production, which brought hilarity to its Fringe audiences last summer, takes that idea to heart, in this new edition of the show.

On an all-white set, with its own all-white clouds, a white-faced cast of three — Morgan Grau, Graham Mothersill, Sarah Feutl, all excellent — enter and exit at a burn-out pace, flinging cheap-theatre props, puppets, and puns as they go. The design is by director Kushneryk.

The show’s inspiration is to combine Greek-style declamation, in all its stylized solemnity, with pop culture in all its cheesy extensions — to uncover the recurring pattern of dysfunction. “We are the Furies; we are the kindly ones,” declare the three, appointing themselves the Greek chorus. They know a good riff when they hear it. “We are the mothers of vengeance and the fathers of blood.”

Amusingly Ardern has recognized that Greek style of promotional self-introduction as modern currency. “Hi, I’m Pelops; I like naming peninsulas after myself.” When Pelops unexpectedly gets raised from the dead — his dad had him cooked and served to the gods at a feast — he falls big-time for Princess Hippodamia, their compatibility exploration has a certain ring to it. “What’s your favourite pizza topping?” Olive? Wow, me too! This little show is one of the contemporary theatre’s most comprehensive repositories of olive jokes (Ariel Levine gets the credit for this supply in the program).

At high speeds, there’s undeniably a daffy side to the heaping of terrible events. The time-strapped (and Classics drop-outs) should note that you get the entire Trojan War, years of it, including build-up and aftermath, in a matter of minutes. There is a brief pause, as announced, “for character development,” before the shameless punning and cheap-theatre joking resumes.

The fun is in direct proportion to the smallness of the cast and the budget. Ingenuity gets the nod over pity and terror. And ingenuity is exactly what Kushneryk’s production delivers as the monumental gets cut down to recognizable human scale. The House of Atreus is the ultimate fixer-upper in that way.  

It’s a clever kind of zaniness, from a company to keep your eye on. If you missed the show last summer, you’ve had a reprieve. And as The Fall of the House of Atreus will reveal, take reprieves when they’re offered; the gods don’t offer twice.

REVIEW

The Fall of the House of Atreus

Theatre: Impossible Mongoose Productions partnering with Blarney Productions

Written by: Jessy Ardern

Directed by: Corben Kushneryk

Starring: Morgan Grau, Graham Mothersill, Sarah Feutl

Where: Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through April 2

Tickets: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca 

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The Fall of the House of Atreus: fun and games with Greek tragedy

Posted on March 22, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Morgan Grau, Sarah Feutl, Graham Mothersill as the Furies in The Fall of the House of Atreus. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Three actors, 300 prop gags!”

“It’s either the highest of the lowbrow or the lowest of the highbrow. One or the other!” declares playwright Jessy Arden cheerily of The Fall of the House of Atreus, the high-speed, gleefully murderous 60-minute comic extravaganza she’s fashioned from Greek mythology.

Poisoning, strangling, backstabbing, usurpation, incest, cannibalism.… The gore-spattered five-generation epic cycle of the family that has pretty much nailed down dysfunction for all time is a generous vein of possibilities. And, lord, what these House of Atreus people can do with a grudge! You don’t have to be a Greek scholar to be impressed by the sheer creative permutations.

The Impossible Mongoose production directed by Corben Kushneryk dazzled small but enthusiastic audiences who ventured into a slightly off-centre Fringe venue in an ex-church last summer. There was lots of repeat business. It’s back this week, in collaboration with Blarney Productions, re-tuned for a run in a real theatre (The Backstage).

Arden and Kushneryk have added a scene or two (“the judgment of Paris is in!”), subtracted others. And Kushneryk has ramped up his striking chalky white-on-white design and reassembled the same agile trio of actors and rowdy ensemble of sock-puppets. “It’s not your great great great great grandmother’s Greek theatre,” grins Kushneryk. “A lot of murder in 60 minutes!” And not, I need hardly add, a lot of sitting around being mopey.

“People always ask me what part’s from Greek tragedy and what I made up,” laughs Ardern. “The most bizarre, the most outlandish (plot developments) are the truest to mythology.”

There are touchstones for us in the lurid tale of vengeful relatives and step-relatives. Clytemnestra stabbing her hubby Agamemnon to death in the bathtub: that rings a bell with everyone. Ditto Helen of Troy or the Trojan Horse. But How many of you (hands up! know about Princess Hippodamia? “She’s not one who got passed down by movies,” shrugs Kushneryk.

“What makes it so appealing,” thinks Ardern, “is the way it loops: we don’t learn from history. This is the story of five generations who continue to make the same mistakes.”

Morgan Grau, Graham Mothersill, Sarah Feutl as the Furies in The Fall of the House of Atreus. Photo supplied.

As the writer and director explain, the show we’ll see at the Backstage is the third iteration of a production that began life in 35-minute form at the Thousand Faces Festival, devoted to the mythic in theatre, a couple of years ago. “The visual language of the play has evolved since that first workshop,” says Kushneryk. “We were throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what stuck…. We’ve let it grow as it needs to.”

He and Arden met as student actors at the University of Alberta theatre school. In one way, they’re a study in contrasts. He’s steeped in musical theatre; he arrived at the U of A with a MacEwan degree and a history of directing “weird little boutique musicals,” like Coraline which played the Fringe. She arrived in Edmonton from seven years with a Winnipeg indie theatre, The Struts and Frets Players, devoted to productions based on mythology. “And this is our horrible Greek baby!” smiles Kushneryk.

Even before they graduated with fine arts degrees from the U of A last spring, they had hatched theatre together three times as a writer/director team. Kushneryk directed Arden’s “living room satire” Harold and Vivien Entertain Guests, which he describes as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as if it were written by Christopher Durang.”

“We share an odd sense of humour,” smiles Kushneryk. “Demented!” says Arden, who amends to “small-a absurdist… We have a very collaborative relationship; the play is just a blueprint!”

“Some moments are script moments; some are director moments,” she says. “And a lot of credit goes to the actors.”

Kushneryk says he started with signature features of Greek theatre, the masks, the declamatory style of speech, and the chorus. “The fun is to see the deviations!” he says. The chorus here consists of the Furies, back from hell to educate humanity …. The three are trying to put on what they think we want, a Greek play.”  And, hey, they get a song, thanks to Kushneryk’s musical theatre bent. 

After The Fall of the House of Atreus, Impossible Mongoose’s first collaboration with Blarney, Kushneryk goes into rehearsal at the Mayfield; he’s in Jesus Christ, Superstar. And Arden is in a university production of the brainiac Michael Frayn play Copenhagen.

But Impossible Mongoose, the indie founded by Kushneryk and Arden with Kristen Papayas, will be back. “We’re keeping our eyes out for the little weird things,” says Kushneryk. “We also love to create and get our hands dirty.”

“Zeus-ical the Musical?” laughs Arden. “The show no one asked for?”

PREVIEW

The Fall of the House of Atreus

Theatre: Impossible Mongoose and Blarney Productions

Written by: Jessy Ardern

Directed by: Corben Kushneryk

Starring: Graham Mothersill, Sarah Feutl, Morgan Grau

Where: The Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Friday (opening night) through April 2

Tickets: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca

   

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Edmonton theatre veteran arrested on the charge of possessing child pornography

Posted on March 21, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Edmonton theatre community has been shocked by sad bad news today. Playwright/designer/sometime comic improviser David Belke was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.

Belke “has resigned from Shadow Theatre,” where he was a company member and playwright-in-residence. says board president Donal O’Beirne. “The charges have nothing to with his work at Shadow or the Varscona.”

Belke is a longtime fixture in the Edmonton theatre scene, where his contributions have been unusually varied. The dual entry points of his theatre career, in the 1980s, were design and comic improv.

But it’s as a playwright, the award-winning Belke has mostly made his mark. He made his debut as a playwright at the 1990 Fringe with Swordplay. And there have been dozens of Belke premieres at the festival since then, many of them genre spoofs or romantic comedies. His plays have often found their way into Shadow Theatre seasons; a revival of his comedy The Red King’s Dream launched Shadow’s 25th anniversary season this past October.

This year’s upcoming production (May 5) by Players de Novo  — a troupe of public-spirited members of Edmonton’s legal community who devote the proceeds to a different theatre company annually — is Belke’s Forsooth, My Lovely, directed by Workshop West’s Vern Thiessen.

In the last few years, Belke has become the playwright-in-residence and curator of the programming at Strathcona’s arts-friendly Holy Trinity Anglican Church. He was one of the founders of Script Salon, a monthly series of staged readings of new scripts, co-sponsored by the Alberta Playwrights Network and the Playwrights Guild of Canada. and improv actor.

His non-theatre between-engagements work was as a substitute teacher.

Belke is scheduled to appear in court April 6.

 

 

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Panache: the Ponce is back for Pt. Deux of Firefly’s circus satire

Posted on March 21, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Ross Travis as Ponce de Ponce de Panache, in Firefly Theatre’s Panache. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There never would have been a sequel if the unthinkable hadn’t happened.

When last we met Ponce de Ponce de Panache, 12 months ago,  it was at a pep rally for the self-glorifying blusterer and king of hyperbolic claims, preposterous entitlement, and alternative facts. As Firefly Theatre and Circus Arts artistic director Annie Dugan put it at the time, the high-flying Ponce was a cross between a certain presidential candidate and Louis XIV. And the Firefly satire and circus fusion, Panache, was a cross-hatching of “Versailles, The Hunger Games, and the current political climate in the U.S.”

Then came November.

“Who could have guessed he would win!” declares Dugan. “We never thought we’d be doing a Part Deux; it was never part of the plan…. We’d already started planning a show around a Christmas Carol skeleton,” she says of early brainstorming meetings with collaborators John Ullyatt and Belinda Cornish.

“But after one week in office, what Trump was doing was too horrible!” In that thought was born the sequel, Panache Part Deux, opening Friday at — which is to say on and above the stage at — La Cité francophone.

Satire is tricky, and outrage is barely sustainable in an age when reality trumps it every time, as Alex Baldwin has admitted on the subject of his sensationally grotesque Saturday Night Live alter-ego. “It’s too awful to parody what Trump is doing, so we’re doing how,” says Dugan.

The Ponce has triumphed. He’s now Supreme Leader of La Cité. Last year, at the pep rally edition of Panache, “the audience was complicit,” as she says of our applause, cued by signs held up by a trio of “minions.”

This year, our complicity continues, since we’re cast as Congress. “This is a day in the life,” Dugan explains. “We’ve turned the how-to of governing into a game show.”  All the circus performers are the Ponce’s cabinet ministers, “his smoke screen, his diversionary tactics,” she says. “A politician surrounds himself with his friends. The ‘former Miss South Africa’, for example, is the Secretary of Mining and Resources…. All the women are ‘former Miss Somethings’.”

Ross Travis as the Ponce, in Firefly Theatre’s Panache. Photo supplied.

Since Part Deux is a game show, the lavish world of circus is juxtaposed to the contestants, “three normal people with normal needs, petitioners in the Ponce’s court: a gentleman who needs a hip replacement for his grandmother, a women looking for a bus pass, a guy who’s been arrested for jaywalking and wants a get-out-of-jail pass.”

Director Dugan has enlisted a trio of Edmonton heavy-hitter actors: Dave Horak, Shannon Blanchet, and Mat Busby to be the supplicants. Cornish is the dramaturge on the project.  

For the rest, the core group of Panache performers is returning for the sequel, led by San Francisco’s Ross Travis, an acrobat/actor who specializes in the most punishing of aerial arts, the Chinese pole. Dugan has one word for it: “painful!” This year the pole isn’t planted on the stage; it flies, which sounds impossible.

Lyne Gosselin (trapeze with silks) and Mackenzie Baert (rhythmic contortion) are back. So is the ever-inventive musician Jason Kodie, who plays keyboards live. And the magician/illusionist Billy Kidd (Gia Felicitas) returns from her home base in the U.K. Last year, she concocted an act especially for Panache. And it was a showstopper. As a  set-up for Marie Antoinette’s famous line “let ‘em eat cake” she actually baked a cake in someone’s hat.

The finale of Firefly Theatre’s Panache. Photo supplied.

Calgary’s Patrick Chan (aerial straps) is the Ponce’s Secretary of Defence. And the cast includes Lisa Feehan (aerial cargo), Caitlin Mader (corde lisse), and the acrobatic Quebec City duo Les Vitaminés. 

The latter’s act “involves a plastic bubble,” laughs Dugan. “Plastic bubbles for all are how Ponce plans to combat climate change he doesn’t believe in.” 

“I don’t usually do political satire,” says Dugan. “ I like stupid comedy. I’m happy to do things with chickens. And peanut butter.”

“This year the whole show is a little bit darker. And it needs to be.”

PREVIEW

Panache Pt. Deux: The Triumph of the Ponce

Theatre: Firefly

Directed by: Annie Dugan

Starring: Ross Travis, Billy Kidd, Jason Kodie, Lyne Gosselin, Mackenzie Baert, Lisa Feehan, Caitlin Mader, Dave Horak, Shannon Blanchet, Mat Busby

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91 St.

Running: Friday through Sunday

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

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Raising $ for theatre, the entertaining way

Posted on March 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Mark Meer, aka Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect trilogy.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The seductions of entertainment to call your own: Edmonton’s theatres have to be creative in their unceasing efforts to generate funds to do what they were born to do … put on shows. 

This spring you could find yourself on a private tour of Bioware, the unceasingly innovative Edmonton digital creation outfit, in the company of master improviser Mark Meer, the voice-over star who’s Commander Shepard in Bioware’s  international hit trilogy Mass Effect (he has his own action figure).

It’s one of the entertainment prospects offered in the Varscona Theatre’s silent auction, designed to help that theatre, home to some eight companies, pay for their $8 million newly rebuilt venue. Fully 11 of the 25 alluring offerings fall into the entertainment category, in the online auction that ends Friday at 11:59 p.m. 

Heck, you could buy you and 199 of your closest friends an entire performance of the Teatro La Quindicina season-opening revival of Stewart Lemoine’s The Salon of the Talking Turk, in which Meer reclaims the title role he originated in the 2005  premiere production. 

Mark Meer in 2005 premiere production of The Salon of the Talking Turk.

Similarly, at Northern Light Theatre , which is throwing a Tiki Night bash April 1, with live music and cocktails to match, you could claim an entire performance of their upcoming season finale:  Bonnie and Clyde: the two-person six-gun musical. (northernlighttheatre.com).

In the spirit of collaboration, NLT has contributed a pair of tickets to that production to the Varscona’s auction, as part of the “theatre tasting trio” that includes tickets to Theatre Network’s upcoming Irma Voth (Chris Craddock’s much-awaited stage adaptation of the Miriam Toews’s novel), April 20 to May 2, and the Citadel’s Sense and Sensibility ( a Tom Wood adaptation created for the Citadel/Banff Professional Program), April 22 to May 14.

In Shadow Theatre’s personalized sponsorship venture “Adopt An Artist,” you could even “have an artist to call your own.” Every level of one-on-one sponsorship, of a director, an actor, or a designer, comes with ramped-up perqs, including signed posters and tickets. Shadow’s season finale Art, the Yasmin Reza provocation about the nature of art (April 26 to May 14), starring Glenn Nelson, Frank Zotter, and John Sproule, is another adoption opportunity.

The Varscona auction samples widely in the theatre scene for its silent auction offerings. Atomic Improv’s deluxe improvisers Donovan Workun and Mark Meer, for example, will create spontaneous comedy for you, wherever you like, possibly your living room. The Edmonton Fringe, Metro Cinema, the Mayfield Dinner Theatre are among the contributors. Check it out at www.32Auctions.com/VarsconaAuction.

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Serca: celebrating the Irish in us

Posted on March 17, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Waiting for Godot by One World Theatre. Photo by Truman Buffet.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For poetic impulses and vivid characters, and a certain raucous soulfulness and way with words, you can’t beat the Irish. And Serca (the Gaelic word for “love story) is the festival that celebrates that multi-faceted contribution.

For this year’s edition of the eight-year-old festival — it’s spent the last three on The Ave, 118th that is — artistic director Liz Hobbs has assembled a series of Canadian-Irish plays, in staged readings, to encircle the headline production this weekend. All three are by women and, as Hobbs points out, “try and find an Irish play in the mainstream Irish repertoire by a female playwright with a female cast! It’s hard!”

Bevin Dooley’s Slack Tide happened Thursday. Saturday’s offering (4:45 p.m.) is Beating Heart Cadaver by the Governor-General’s Award-winning Colleen Murphy. Amy DeFelice directs a cast of five top Edmonton actors in the 1998 play — “beautiful and heartbreaking” as Hobbs describes it — in which “a couple who have lost their eight-year-old daughter in a car accident try to find their way back to each other.” Sunday at 6 p.m., it’s Cat Walsh’s Fetch, named for the Gaelic word for doppelganger, in which two versions of the same girl proceed through two different scenarios, by way of different choices. 

ELSEWHERE AT SERCA

  • St. Patrick’s Day Irish Ceilidh on the Ave (starting at 5 p.m.): a celebration featuring an Irish stew dinner with Knock Irish dancers, followed by a variety cabaret and, at 8 p.m. live music by the Edmonton Ceilidh Band featuring Jeremiah McDade.
  • Saturday (1 to 4 p.m.), a Family Irish Ceilidh, including Maralyn Ryan’s puppet version of The Ugly Duckling, dancing, cookie decorating and crafts, refreshments. After the 4:45 p.m. staged reading of Beating Heart Cadaver, a 7 p.m. performance of Waiting For Godot, followed (9:30 p.m.) an Irish cabaret for adults.
  • Sunday’s 2 p.m. Waiting For Godot matinee is followed by Fetch (6 p.m.) and then an 8 p.m. performance of Godot.
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Waiting for Godot at the Serca Festival: a review

Posted on March 17, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

K. Brian Neel and Jeff Page in Waiting For Godot, from One World Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“It’s too much for one man,” says Vladimir gloomily of the perpetual stalemate that gets to the heart of the matter in Waiting For Godot. “On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.”

If that rumination gets a special laugh in the Godot that comes to the Serca Festival from Seattle’s One World Theatre, it’s because Samuel Beckett’s existentialist tramps did think of it in the nineties — the 1990s that is. That’s when Shawn Belyea’s production came to Edmonton and instantly became a hit draw.

In a palpable demonstration that time has stopped, as one of them observes, Vladimir and Estragon have returned to the same country road, the same tree, the same evening. And with the same actors: Jeff Page and K. Brian Neel as the raffish pair who wait, and wait, and wait some more for the mysterious Mr. Godot to show up and give meaning to … waiting. Which is the crux of the tragicomic masterpiece that has haunted, intrigued, bewildered, provoked the world ever since its premiere, in a tiny Left Bank Paris theatre in 1953.

“Nothing to be done,” says Estragon (Neel) at the outset, an opening line at least as memorable as the stage direction: “

A country road. A tree. Evening.” But they can’t leave: “let’s wait till we know exactly how we stand.” And certainty eludes them; for that they’ll have to wait for Godot, and he’s a no-show day after day. So they pass the time arguing and bickering, telling jokes, singing old music hall ditties, telling jokes, doing vaudeville routines with hats, and pratfalls

Page, in a welcome return to the Edmonton stage, and the agile Neel are an amusing double act, trapped in a human comedy with no beginning and no ending. They’re not an intellectual construct; they’re baffled people, stuck at an mystifying impasse. Neel is a rubber-faced round-eyed clown in a tattered red fez. He’s the more distractable, self-centred of the two, playing against Page’s more solemn, exasperated and philosophical Vladimir, striding purposefully around the stage, with its single “tree” (one of those outdoor umbrella clothes racks)  before he remembers he has nowhere to go.

No production of Waiting For Godot is ever definitive. But the way Vladimir, fiddling with his bowler near the outset, declares he’s “appalled, AP-PALLED,” you know that this will be a performance to reckon with. The chemistry of the pair is easy, believable, and fun to watch: funny and inventive. If dreaming of happiness is as close as you’ll get and the human condition is, as Vladimir says, “too much for one man,” two is at least a consolation.

Amusingly, Tim Moore creates the sadistic master Pozzo with a carnivorous tooth-clenching smile, and the plummy imperious, self-dramatizing tones of an old-style Shakespearean. And Mark Fullerton’s tall, drooling, skeletal slave, the ill-named Lucky, on his rope leash, is strikingly apocalyptic.

“Habit is a great deadener.” And you could be waiting a long time for Godot. Don’t miss this chance to catch the play.

It’s running tonight through Sunday at the Alberta Avenue Community Centre, 9210 118 Ave. Tickets and scheduling info: sercafest.com

    

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“Together again at last!” Waiting For Godot arrives for the Serca Festival

Posted on March 16, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

K. Brian Neel and Jeff Page in Waiting For Godot, One World Theatre’s production at the Serca Festival. Photo by Truman Buffet.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One of the most delicious true-life stories ever to come out of the Edmonton Fringe, a great natural repository of theatrical absurdities, can be traced, in a direct line of descent, to the One World Theatre production of Waiting For Godot that opens tonight, to launch this year’s edition of the Serca Festival of Irish Theatre.

Jeff Page is on the phone from Seattle to revisit. It’s 1993. And  the production, by then three years old and with a lot of sold-out western Fringe performances (and one state penitentiary) in its archive, had arrived from Seattle to test its mettle at the biggest festival of them all.

It’s a matinee, after intermission (ah, intermission, a now-mythical concept at the Fringe). “So, it’s the top of Act 2,” says Page, .  “Suddenly, a woman stands up in the audience; suddenly she has a bag of carrots. She starts hurling carrots at the stage, shouting ‘You’re absurd! I’m not absurd! You’re absurd!’.” Then she storms out of the old Bus Barns theatre.   

A moment of stunned silence in the theatre. Page, who was playing Vladimir, one of Samuel Beckett’s pair of existentialist vaudevillian tramps — a role he resumes at Serca — remembers his partner Estragon (K. Brian Neel) went into improv brilliance mode. “Was that him?” he asked the audience.

“Perfectly Fringe, perfectly Beckett,” as Page puts it. In the single most influential and resonant play of the 20th century, the tramps are, after all, onstage waiting for HIM, this mysterious and mystifying authority figure Godot, to shed some light, to give some meaning to the absurdities of their existence.

The choice of veg is so weird but so uncannily apt — carrots are in the play — that for more than two decades, Page has been wondering about the identity of the woman. “For 20 years Mark Meer has been promising to introduce me to her,” sighs Page, who suspects a ruse from that master improviser.

That show incidentally was a turning point in Page’s life. He moved to Edmonton, where he’s been based ever since.

It’s been 27 years since Page and his One World Theatre cohorts got the bright idea of taking Beckett’s masterwork to the rural parks of eastern Washington state. He’d just moved to Seattle from his home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico with his “experimental improv theatre” buddies in King’s Elephant Theatre.

The early performances were something less than a smash. “We’d sit on a park hill at intermission and and watch people gradually fold up their lawn chairs and leave.” 

They re-evaluated. The consensus? “Let’s not be as precious to the Beckett as to the funny. And we went to our campsite and re-rehearsed the whole thing.”

“After that, the people stayed. And by the time we got to the last show, in Oroville, Wash., we were really rolling,” says Page. Their excursion to the Vancouver Fringe was the first time they’d played the show indoors. “And it’s still one of the best acting experiences I’ve ever had.” 

He still remembers the performance at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary — “there’s a history of playing Beckett in prisons,” he says. In the gymnasium for maximum security convicts “they were busy lifting weights, and little by little they came over and sat down. That’s the power of the play!”

One World moved on from Godot after that. They did Fringe tours of Aristophanes comedies; they went to Russia and collaborated with mad genius Slavic auteurs. They collaborated far and wide.

And then came Edmonton, with Beckett in tow. Page remembers being at a late-night Fringe bar and getting asked by a media type “how does it feel to have a Fringe hit?” He grinned and said “I wouldn’t know.” Next morning he did, though. “It was a big splash. A hit. Great reviews. Line-ups.”

In 1990, the Seattle Weekly had praised the actors as always believable, even though they were 20 years too young. Twenty-seven years later, with Page and Neel back in their roles as the time-killing vagabonds, time has solved that little chronology glitch for the company.

Waiting for Godot by One World Theatre. Photo by Truman Buffet.

Waiting For Godot “has a different resonance for me, now” thinks Page, who was in a One World revival of the show four years ago in Seattle. “It feels all about the past, being with someone. The idea that life is unbearable but better with someone to share it with. Something about that act of living…. I’m not fabricating anything. This is experience.”

Time means something different when you’re 20 than when you’re 50, muses Page. “There are memories that are gems….. Everything else is blurry,”  he laughs.

“And I’m a better actor now. I’ve done a lot of acting in those 27 years!”

PREVIEW

Waiting For Godot

Theatre: One World Theatre at the Serca Festival

Directed by: Shawn Belyea

Starring: Jeff Page, K. Brian Neel, Tim Moore, Mark Fullerton

Where: Alberta Avenue Community Centre, 9210 118 Ave. (Serca headquarters)

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Tickets: sercafest.com

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The Believers: testing the limits of belief

Posted on March 16, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Nathan Cuckow, Nadien Chu, Patrick Howarth in The Believers, a MadFandango production. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s one of those evenings of theatre when you emerge, rattled and intrigued, asking yourself and whoever’s outside smoking “what just happened there?”.

Good question. One of the oddest, eeriest, most unnerving plays of the season is happening at the Roxy, in a production by the adventurous indie collective MadFandango.

There’s a sky-splitting storm, a 40 days-and-nights spectacular coming at us right out of the Old Testament. And it rages in supernatural fashion thanks to a memorable design by T. Erin Gruber. It’s the central character in Nancy McAlear’s North American premiere production of The Believers, by the English playwright Bryony Lavery (Frozen).

The weather, to use the banal term for something active and possibly malevolent, is actively flooding into human affairs.

Upstage, a fraught woman in the shadows paces and counts out steps, over and over, as she smokes.

Elsewhere on the stage: “Let’s start with what we know,” say the couple, Joff (Nathan Cuckow) and Marianne (Nadien Chu), we see up closer.

What they know is precious little. They frantically parse the meagre fragments of a terrible event at which they were both present, but not present enough. Guilt and rage, mutual recriminations, are the keynotes of their review. Marianne is physically cracked with grief; her face and body seem fractured. Off can’t stop moving; the ground seems to be burning under his feet. The performances are compelling.

The deluge, a flood of epic scale, had driven them, along with their nine-year-old daughter Grace, into the home of their neighbours Ollie (Patrick Howarth) and Maud (Gianna Vacirca), whose daughter Joyous is Grace’s age. The two couples aren’t a comfortable fit, to say the least, as the play takes us to the fateful night. The Believers seems to be an entry into the ample theatre repertoire of awkward dinner parties where everyone ends up mad, with indigestion. 

The chemistry between Joff and Marianne, set forth vividly by Cuckow and Chu, is jokey and vulgar. They’re loud, crude secularists who scoff at political correctness, especially after a couple of drinks. Their monster kid is driving them crazy with her demands, and they have no problem saying so (“she’s a walking nightmare!”).

Patrick Howarth, Gianna Vacirca in The Believers. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

The look on their faces when their smiling hosts propose saying grace before eating is a choice comic moment. Ollie and Maud are religious, in a sort of smug, white-wine pantheist way where they praise God “for exalting us above all animals.” They exude positivity; they shudder delicately when expletives issue forth from the mouths of their cloddish guests. The dynamic is beautifully set forth by Howarth and Vacirca.

The question of belief  is tossed up for perusal, with predictable dissent. “Just the bare facts!” as Joff will later say of something that proves in the end elusive. But in the course of an evening interrupted by fantastical meteorological disturbances, something curious happens. The intersection at which the couples collide gradually becomes a corner where the couples’ belief systems (or habits of disbelief) are blurred, and even seem to trade.

McAlear’s production uses dance and movement to physicalize the inexpressibly mysterious devolution of the evening. Perhaps it’s simpler to say that Ollie and Maud aren’t quite the couple they present on the surface; their faith in the power of faith, and mind expansion, gets a demonstration, a conjuring turn you might say, and goes horribly awry.

The event and its terrible consequences start with a kind of exorcism, as the heavens continue to split open and pour down. Gruber’s design, an ingeniously mobile construction of light and projection, hangs over the house like a kind of ominous supernatural thatching.

It’s watching over excellent performances, and the perplexing, nervy experience provided by the play. I’m hoping you’ll see it, and explain it further to me.

REVIEW

The Believers

Theatre: MadFandango Theatre Collective, in the Roxy Performance Series

Written by: Bryony Lavery

Directed by: Nancy McAlear

Starring: Nadien Chu, Nathan Cuckow, Patrick Howarth, Gianna Vacirca

Where: Roxy on Gateway, 8529 Gateway Boulevard

Running: through March 19

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

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