12thNight.ca

multi-instrumentalist Brett Miles

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It started with a lack, and a need.

“I needed it to be a festival that I would be excited to go to!” says the excited curator of Black Arts Matter (BAM!), a new  multidisciplinary celebration of Edmonton’s large and growing talent pool of black artists. And if you don’t know who they are — yet — well, that’s the point.   

BAM!, opening Thursday under the Chinook Series umbrella, is the brainchild of Nasra Adem, a 22-year-old activist dynamo who’s Edmonton’s Youth Poet Laureate, a multidisciplinary artist herself, and a repository of bright ideas for nurturing talent, encouraging  cultural diversity, and inspiring community participation.   

When Workshop West’s Vern Thiessen decided that this year’s edition of the annual Canoe Festival would be devoted to international black artists, he reached out to Adem to create a local black showcase to run in parallel. “He recognized that there was a local of visibility, of people of colour, in our artistic spaces.… He left it up to me, so we dreamt up BAM!” says Adem, a MacEwan University theatre grad who grew up in Ontario and spent her summers in New York, “checking out the poetry scene, hanging out, soaking up the vibe….”

“I wanted to bring back that high energy to Edmonton; I knew we were craving it!” says the effervescent Adem, who talks in exclamation marks, fast!.

Nextfest audiences know Adem, now an associate artist at Workshop West, from her contributions to the “night clubs,” performance parties assembled by Catch The Keys Productions. She still considers Catch the Keys’ Megan and Beth Dart “my alt-theatre moms!”

Adem’s ideas tend to operate on the centifugal principle. Sister 2 Sister, the expansible monthly showcase for and by women artists of colour she launched a couple of years ago, started with poetry, music and dance; now it has workshops, a book club, a DJ collective, with more to come. “It’s all about community-building,” Adem says. 

So it is with BAM! Adem wants it to be “a hub for the community of black artists to see each other, to feel the excitement of being in the same room with people who look like them! I want to help them know what it feels like to belong, to stoke that up!”

It’s a contagious idea. When the word went out, applications came flooding in, she reports, more submissions than she could accommodate. Calgary artists applied, but Adem kept BAM! local. “I knew this would happen, she says happily of the response. “All we needed was an avenue.”

“I knew that Canoe had the theatre side covered”; that festival has solo shows, from Toronto, New York, and Senegal. “So I was thinking music and dance; I knew poetry, spoken word, would be a big part,” says Adem who started out as a dancer (“hip hop predominantly, and jazz in high school”) before she went into musical theatre or took up spoken word performance.

Musical theatre has fallen off her radar, at least for now, the result, she thinks of “me not seeing musicals that have my story in mind. More artists of colour!”

BAM! didn’t start small or tentative. The cast list includes dozens of artists, and each event “is centred around a theme or an idea,” explains its creator. 

Mustafa Rafiq, experimental artist and promoter

Poemcees Cipher, Friday night’s show, for example, is dedicated to poets who are also MCs and hip hop artists, and features Brett Miles. Saturday’s Young Lungs: Speak The Word is devoted to spoken word. Adem herself is part of Black Girl Magic Feb. 16, a large-cast all-female showcase of diverse talents.

spoken word poet Timiro Mohamed

Monday is devoted to workshops and panel discussions on everything from marketing to anti-oppression to media relations. Adem describes them as “the back story of the art, the ‘life part’.”

spoken word poet Althea Cunningham

“It’s why we celebrate…. We get to the root of things; we look at the core issues, the conditions under which our art is created and our voices are heard; the social and political conditions we’ve grown up in.” There’s even a playwriting masterclass with Canadian award-winner Cheryl Foggo.

BAM! opens Thursday, with a showcase that combines hip hop and West African dance, drumming, hip hop artist Selassie. And, of course, there’s a closing night party Feb. 19! Bring your own exclamation points. 

The full BAM! schedule of events is at chinookseries.ca.

PREVIEW

Black Arts Matter (BAM!)

Where: ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 19

Tickets: chinookseries.ca or in person at the Arts Barns box office where pay-what-you-will tickets are available two hours before each show, first come first served

Louise Lambert and Lora Brovold in Bust by Matthew MacKenzie, at Theatre Network. Photo by: Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

OK, you’re at a gathering in Vancouver or Toronto, somewhere in Canada that isn’t Alberta. Inevitably there’s the moment when you get asked where you’re from. 

The range of reactions? Pick one: the eye squint? the nuanced flinch? the pained smile of ironic sympathy? the expression that looks a lot like the person has just eaten a bad cashew? “Alberta” is never the good answer for this brand of sniffy encounter. Worse is “Fort McMurray.”

Playwright Matthew MacKenzie, who grew up here, knows a lot about those moments, thanks to his double theatre life in Edmonton and Toronto. He’s a veritable connoisseur of negative reactions — which is one of the inspirations of Bust, his new “dark comedy” Bust, premiering Thursday at Theatre Network.

“Alberta gets talked about a lot,” he sighs. “Stephen Harper’s from here. And the oil industry, well….”

The playwright, a thoughtful, engagingly boyish sort with a history of mining personal experience for his theatre, remembers being in Toronto last winter for a production of The Other, the third of his third-person plays about outsiders, the people who watch themselves watching themselves. “I was talking to someone working on a Fort Mac play, so she seemed like a safe person for me to say ‘hey, I’m from Alberta too!’” 

The reaction? “Euwww.” MacKenzie grins his rueful grin.  

And that was before the terrible Fort McMurray fire of last May. MacKenzie was back in the east, noting both the fund-raising initiatives for the fire victims who lost so much, and “the boiling hatred for oil and Fort Mac.”

There was a discernible motif of moral retribution (social media eats that stuff up): “You heard ‘Fort McMurray had it coming’,” sighs MacKenzie, who has friends and relatives who work in the oil patch. “‘Karma’ was a common sentiment; ‘Fort Mac and the evil oil companies deserved to burn’.”

This scenario finds its way into Bust, whose four characters, says MacKenzie, “are the most like me of any characters I’ve ever written.” Which is why he eschewed his usual method of interviews and research: “I was wanting to write a story in the realm of fiction, to relate on an Alberta culture level.”

A scant three months after the devastating fire, two Fort Mac couples are struggling with terrible loss and upheaval in their lives.  And, just to up the ante, they’ve been at a Peewee hockey championship game to cheer on their kids, and a bad call has robbed them of victory. 

Bust is one of the few plays in the repertoire to actually be set in Fort McMurray (the plays I’ve seen are peopled by the arrivals on the scene from elsewhere). Not only that, but it’s the immediately post-fire Fort Mac of this past August, when the ground has barely cooled.   

MacKenzie appreciates the unusual bravery of the theatre company where Bust is getting its world premiere. In its own way, Theatre Network knows something about fire and loss; their vintage theatre burned to the ground in the winter of 2015.

“Brad (Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss) signed on, right away, to something that could very easily have blown up in his face,” says MacKenzie, impressed. “Fort McMurray, fire, and ‘comedy’?!” He smiles.

The first day of rehearsal, he reports, the first question from the actors and the production team was whether MacKenzie was planning a sequel. “A sequel! You’ve gotta do a sequel!”

“The opportunity to write about something so current! It’s very now, not even a year!” The playwright sighs, “Theatre has the ability to be current and then … it mostly isn’t.”

Currency equals risk. And Mackenzie isn’t a playwright who’s shied away from that equation. Take his 2015 Bears, for example. It’s  a highly imaginative “multi-disciplinary comedy about the Northern Gateway Pipeline” in which a Métis protagonist in flight from the city through the mountains to the sea, gradually, magically, turns into a bear. SIA, his award-winning child soldier/hostage drama, was inspired by his own experiences as a naive Canuck student on a helping mission in Liberia.

In a double-header MacKenzie season, The Bone Wars, a multi-disciplinary extravaganza (premiering at Punctuate! Theatre in April) set on a fossil quest in the Badlands, investigates our fatally insatiable appetite for fossil fuels.”

By contrast Bust, says MacKenzie, is about “the people who call Fort McMurray home, the families…. I focus on the people, not the public policy.”

Christopher Schulz and Brandon Coffey in Bust, at Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The assumption that Bust will be an anti-oil manifesto is something he’s encountered before, most recently at his brother’s birthday party. MacKenzie remains skeptical about “the Naomi Klein-type declarations of the latte left…. You want to say ‘wonderful!, but what are your plans for the working people?’.”

“And these are thinking, feeling, critically aware people. You’re not telling them something they’re oblivious to,” says MacKenzie.“This is a look at the people. Not a sympathetic look or a hostile look. Just a look.”

Louise Lambert in Bust. Photo by Aaron Pedersen

MacKenzie’s grandma thinks there’s too much swearing in Bust. Brandon Coffey, one of Moss’s quartet of actors, who grew up in Fort Mac, advised ramping it up. 

Which brings us to the always operatically fraught question of hockey. Getting your hockey references wrong in Edmonton would be a form of self-immolation no one sane would advise, even on the grounds of creativity.

MacKenzie and hockey have a close personal relationship. “I’m a massive Oilers fan, definitely,” he says. “My first little play, Bench Banter, at the very first Playwrights Garage with Ron Jenkins and Vern Thiessen, was two hockey dads burying a dead referee.”

PREVIEW

Bust

Theatre: Theatre Network

Written by: Matthew MacKenzie

Directed by: Bradley Moss

Starring: Brandon Coffey, Lora Brovold, Louise Lambert, Christopher Schulz

Where: The Roxy on Gateway, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 26

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca or 780-453-2440.

Nilaja Sun in Pike St., at Canoe 2017. Photo supplied by Chinook Series

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Forecast: Breezy. An adventuresome wind — full of diverse sounds, sights, cultural ideas, challenges — is set to blow through the winter theatre season again this week. 

Yes, Chinook is on its way to becoming an Edmonton verb (it’s like “fringe” that way), with the return of last year’s debut bright idea. The Chinook Series, Feb. 9 to 19, combines the offerings of three snow-melting performing arts companies — Workshop West and its Canoe Festival, Azimuth Theatre and its innovative Expanse Movement Arts Festival, and Fringe Theatre Adventures whose ever-breezy summer festivities entered the common parlance as a verb decades ago.

Nicolas Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman in Countries Shaped Like Stars. Photo supplied by Chinook Series.

The latter is returning to us an irresistible charmer of a show that enchanted audiences in its 2013 run at the Fringe. Countries Shaped Like Stars is a once-upon-a-time musical love story fairy tale — there’s an under-represented category of theatrical experience — by Nicolas Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman of Ottawa’s Mi Casa Theatre.

It’s an imaginative gambit not to be missed, utterly unclassifiable. “Once upon a time words were understood by the spaces between them, and anticipation grew on trees….”

“What are we not seeing here?” As Workshop West’s Vern Thiessen puts it, that’s the question that inspires Canoe’s annual adventure into experimental performance theatre. This year’s edition of Canoe is devoted entirely to black artists, as he explains, introducing the trio of acclaimed visiting solo shows from the big wide world that arrive by Canoe, so to speak.

That leading “what are we missing here?” question has inspired, as well, a partnership with a new multidisciplinary festival, designed to showcase Edmonton’s black artists: BAM! (Black Arts Matter).

And it’s inspired another Chinook collaboration, a groundbreaking Canadian first. Sound Off, created and curated by Edmonton’ deaf artist Chris Dodd, is the first deaf theatre festival in the country’s history. It presents work from work from Regina, Toronto, Montreal, as well as an improv night with Rapid Fire Theatre.

First up, Tuesday, two days before the rest of Canoe paddles into view, the Senegalese artist Patricia Gomis arrives with her acclaimed and globally-travelled solo show Moi, Monsieur, Moi. The Dakar/Paris/Brussels co-production is jointly presented by Canoe and L’UniThéâtre. “A friend of mine saw the show in Mali, and was so impressed!” says Brian Dooley, the ebullient artistic director of Edmonton’s francophone theatre. “And the franco-African community here is huge, and growing. So I seized on the idea. Let’s do this!”

Moi, Monsieur, Moi, which unfolds in a variety of theatrical techniques, chronicles the trials and tribulations of a young Senegalese girl growing up, shunted from household to household, chore to chore. “It’s about the challenge of being a woman in West Africa,” says Dooley. “But it’s done with a great smile…. There’s a real openness to the artist.”

That’s the light touch which the title captures, with its eager gust of “pick me, sir! pick me!”

“It’s important to display diversity,” says Dooley of theatre’s responsibility to engage its community, in all its variety including “the wave of new immigrants.” He’s currently planning an upcoming L’UniThéätre season that includes a Congolese writer.

“Storytelling is such a big part of African culture,” he says of the show’s appeal. And as its protagonist overcomes a series of challenges, “it empowers the woman’s voice in African storytelling!” Like Thiessen, Dooley is keen to bring Edmonton audiences at large experiences they wouldn’t otherwise have, he says.

Moi, Monsieur, Moi, starring Patricia Gomis. Photo supplied

Moi, Monsieur, Moi is in French. But never fear if your tenses aren’t up to scratch; there are English subtitles for every performance in the Tuesday through Saturday run at La Cité francophone (8627 91 St.).

Not only does Pike St. bring to town Nilaji Sun, a well-known New York artist, star of stage and small screen, but the show is a reunion for Thiessen with an old friend. In his six years making theatre in New York before he got his Workshop West job, Thiessen and Sun both worked for Epic Theatre.

“She’s acted in some of my plays,” says Thiessen happily. And her director Ron Russell has directed three Thiessens, Einstein’s Gift and The Parables (in which Sun appeared) and A More Perfect Union, which had an Off-Broadway run.

“And she’s never been to Canada before! We’re her Canadian debut!”

Thiessen describes Pike St., culled from Sun’s memories of growing up in the Lower East Side, as “really funny, very moving…. It’s the story of a community, and what happens to it when a hurricane is coming. It’s the story of a struggling family, a mother, a father, the people in the ‘hood,” all played by Sun.

Sébastien Heins in Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera. Photo supplied by Chinook Series.

Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera (Feb. 17 to 19, Backstage Theatre), a solo show created by and starring Toronto’s Sébastien Heins, is “a kind of live hip hop concert, geared especially for the 16 to 30 crowd,” says Thiessen. “And Heins is such a great performer!”

As Thiessen explains, the story, which unfolds in music, movement, and rap (the show is entirely rhymed) tells of two twin brother hip hop artists, both played by Heins amongst a gallery of 11 characters. “There’s a great underlying story of family kinship and tension, backed up by the music,” says Thiessen.   

“All three soloists are “magnificent performers, world-class,” says Thiessen of his Canoe trio. “These shows are clinics on how to a one-person show!”

Chinook is testing the breeze of audience expansion with a new ticketing venture: 25 per cent of tickets for every show are pay-what-you-can (available in person two hours before at the ATB Financial Arts Barns box office). “It’s a big financial risk for us,” says Thiessen. “But we’re just trying to make Chinook more accessible, …. We’re flinging open the doors. Money should be no object for you!”  

PREVIEW

Chinook Series, Feb. 9 to 19, various theatres at ATB Financial Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.) plus La Cité francophone (8627 91 St.).

 Canoe

Moi, Monsieur, Moi created by Patricia Gomis and Marcia de Castro, starring Patricia Gomis: Tuesday through Saturday, La Cité francophone.

Pike St. created by and starring Nilaja Sun. Feb. 14 and 15,  Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns.

Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera created by and starring Sébastien Heins, Feb. 17 to 19, The Backstage Theatre

Black Arts Matter (BAM!), Thursday through Feb. 19, ATB Financial Arts Barns locations (Backstage Theatre, Westbury Theatre, Westbury lobby)

Sound Off, Feb. 13 to 19, ATB Financial Arts Barns

Fringe Theatre Adventures: Countries Shaped Like Stars, by and starring Nicolas Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman. Thursday through Feb. 19, Studio C, ATB Financial Arts Barns

Azimuth Theatre: Expanse Movement Festival, Thursday through Feb. 19, ATB Financial Arts Barns.

Tickets: chinookseries.ca or in person at Fringe Theatre Adventures box office, ATB Financial Arts Barns.

playwright Collin Doyle

By Liz Nicholls, 12night.ca

He’s back. Theatres (and audiences) take note. 

If you saw Collin Doyle’s wonderful Let The Light Of Day Through, in Theatre Network’s top-drawer 2013 premiere production, you already know something important about the work of this award-winning playwright. It’s funny. And it’s moving. At the same time, and in a complex and startling way.

“People look at dark stuff more easily through comedy,” Doyle has said.

The Doyle play that gets a staged reading Sunday at Script Salon (an Edmonton theatre success story in itself), has all the signs of that signature combination. Slumberland Motel, billed as “a road-weary comedy,” gives us two ‘70s era underachievers, a couple of vacuum salesman,  Ed and Edward, sharing a room in a seedy roadside motel on Christmas Eve. Their flat landscape of disappointment and disillusion, a world of diminishing prospects — vacuum sales can suck — is transformed by the arrival of a mysterious woman from the next room.

I think we can safely call Slumberland Motel “long-awaited,” a term that applies to many of Doyle’s plays. It won the Alberta Playwriting Competition 11 years ago. Long lead times seem to be a Doyle specialty, a test of patience that would have made other artists implode. Doyle’s The Mighty Carlins, the raucous black comedy of family dysfunction which won the Alberta Playwriting Competition in 2004, was the most famous un-produced play in Alberta, before its Workshop West premiere four years later.

For Sunday’s reading, Robert Benz and Reed McColm are Ed and Edward, with April Banigan as the mystery woman. It happens in the Upper Arts Space at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (10037 84 Avenue) at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free; donations are welcome.

The genial playwright will be on hand to answer questions. I have one: when will it get fully produced by an Edmonton theatre? A Doyle play is always an event. And that long lead time business can wear thin.

Flying Canoë Volant 2016, in Mill Creek Ravine. Photo by Flying Canoē Volant

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you go out in the woods tonight….

It’s a strange form of civic enchantment. Every year about this time, the good burghers of Edmonton, thousands of them, find themselves irresistibly drawn to follow a trail of light and music through the a snowy ravine at night. 

They sing and dance in Mill Creek Ravine by the light of cunningly wrought light sources, in a stunning series of installations. They arrive at a First Nations Camp, and learn drumming from the experts. They find themselves doing jigs and reels with the Dave Cunningham Family Band at the Métis Camp — or making bannock. They meet up with a French-Canadian storyteller/musician (Roger Dallaire) in a Trapper’s Cabin.

It’s Flying Canoë Volante, the five-year-old winter festival where our three founding cultural traditions, First Nations, Métis, and French-Canadian, meet to play in the snow. Then everyone ascends to a city of light — a.k.a. La Cité francophone, the elegant curvilinear French cultural centre — to continue the party, indoors and out-, in a mixture of languages (and beverages).

The 2016 festival. Photo by: Flying Canoë Volant

And the people love it. Daniel Cournoyer, La Cité francophone’s amiable, and supremely bilingual, executive director, reports that in the five years since Flying Canoe became the heir to the defunct Winter Light Festival, attendance has grown from 3,000 to 30,000 last time out. And Cournoyer has enhanced the festivities by partnering with other festivals, Rubaboo for example, and Native Counselling Services.

Illuminating a dark ravine without a power source is no task for conventional thinkers. Flying Canoë Volante‘s ingenious lighting whiz Dylan Toymaker, has assembled 11 artists to create light installations along the snowy way, with contributions by theatre designer Marissa Kochanski and a variety of actors.

The adventures even have a narrative, and it’s an alluringly eerie one. The flying canoe, in different variations, is part of both French-Canadian and First Nations tradition. The 19th century legend recorded by Honoré Beaugrand — “a great piece of French-Canadian literature” as Cournoyer puts it — stars voyageurs who make a deal with the Devil to fly them home to their sweethearts on New Year’s Eve. One catch: they can’t drink or swear or crash into church steeples. Ooops, they do all of the above. “They made a deal, and they suffered the consequences,” laughs Cournoyer.

The 2016 edition of the festival. Photo by Flying Canoë Volant

Cournoyer loves the festival’s “fusion of francophone and indigenous cultural traditions, a pow-wow of talent!” And Flying Canoë Volant isn’t a spectator sport. “I don’t want you to come here and just watch!” declares Cournoyer, with his usual exuberance. “I want people to partake. I’ve encouraged all our partners to engage the audience, to have interaction!”

 When you emerge from the ravine, Flying Canoë Volant turns more contemporary. The Rubaboo Festival is in charge of programming the theatre at La Cité francophone. Expect performance poetry, music, video, storytelling (Dallaire joins Elder Jerry Saddleback).

Out in the hall, it’s a cabaret, with three bands — one indigenous, one francophone, one anglo-Canadian — each night. There’s outdoor DJ-ed entertainment in the basin that the building encloses. And there’s “a big old dance party” at the end of Saturday night’s festivities, too.

“In the five years we’ve been doing it, I’ve learned so much,” says Cournoyer feelingly. “The partnerships! The knowledge I’ve gained! The cultures are so rich!”

The idea is “to create dialogue (between cultures) without imposing it. That’s what happens when you engage people…. It’s a journey of discovery.”

PREVIEW

Flying Canoë Volant

Where: Mill Creek Ravine, Rutherford School, La Cité francophone (8627 91 St.)

Running: Friday and Saturday. In the ravine, 6 to 10 p.m., at La Cité francophone, 6 p.m. to midnight.

Admission: free

Raoul Bhaneja, Karen Glave, MIchael Rubenfeld, Birgitte Solem, in Hope and Hell Theatre production of Disgraced, at the Citadel. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca 

“O my god! What’s he going to say next!?”

It’s 2012 and Raoul Bhaneja and his actor wife Birgitte Solem are in New York watching an Off-Broadway audience watch a play. Everybody is tense, alert, engrossed: no oh no, don’t let him go there. 

They’re watching a two-couple dinner party, in a chic Upper East Side apartment, fracture in scary ways they’d never expect from successful, highly intelligent, “progressive” people who might think of themselves as post-ethnic.

The play is Disgraced, by South-Asian American writer Ayad Akhtar — a novelist/screenwriter/playwright, whose name — pre-Pulitzer Prize and Tony splash — wasn’t exactly household currency in theatre circles at the time. What struck Bhaneja, the Toronto playwright/actor/blues musician whose Hope and Hell Theatre brings the play to the Citadel this week, was that “the audience doesn’t know what they’re supposed to think.”

Bhaneja was excited by that. “This is why you do plays! To engage people!”

Bhaneja, engaging himself and entirely unpretentious, had first noticed Akhtar via a blog post. The writer had talked about a South-Asian pal who’d gone to a Hamlet audition, and the improbabilities had struck him: “he’s never going to play The Man.”

“There were all kinds of connections for me!” laughs Bhaneja. For one thing, his ethnicity is mixed (his mother is Irish, his diplomat dad is from Delhi). For another, as Edmonton audiences know, he’s taken on the slings and arrows of outraged traditionalists and their casting practices himself — by doing a solo Hamlet that’s played here a couple of times, and toured the world.

So Bhaneji read Disgraced, and its unresolved (possibly unresolvable) complexities blew him away. So — this seems exactly like something Bhaneja would do, and why he’d name his company Hope and Hell — he contacted Akhtar and set up a meeting. Which is why he and Solem had figured out the “kids! parents!” situation and flown down to New York. An additional nail-biter for an evening of nail biting: “We had one night! And one of the actors was 40 minutes late for curtain.”

Acquiring the rights for Hope and Hell took a while. Disgraced moved to Broadway, and acquired a Pulitzer and Tony nominations. But finally, this past year, it happened.

The Robert Ross Parker production that brings Bhaneja back to Citadel after the 2015 run of his theatre/concert/memoir hybrid Life, Death and the Blues, arrives here after a much-applauded run produced by Mirvish in its high-profile alternative season.

Bhaneja plays Amir, a high-powered Manhattan corporate lawyer specializing in acquisitions. He’s an ex-Muslim of Pakistani descent up for promotion in a Jewish firm. His wife Emily (Solem) is an up-and-comer WASP artist inspired by the Islamic world and its design aesthetic.

Raoul Bhaneja in Disgraced. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

Their guests are Emily’s Jewish art dealer (Michael Rubenfeld) and his African-American wife (Karen Glave). Which sounds like a setup, as Bhaneja agrees. The play, he says, is “deliberately stocked with different points of view…. You agree with one person, then with another, then with another.”

He muses on the notion that intelligence “is the ability to hold two opposing points of view in your mind at the same time.” Disgraced, he says, “pushes that to the brink!”

Which may be why 80 per cent of the audience, “instead of the usual 20,” tends to stay for the talkback sessions, as Bhaneja reports. 

What Disgraced sets about “is creating engaging characters.” What it wilfully refuses to do — Bhaneja thinks this is its appeal — is “to tell you the feeling you’re supposed to have…. Two hours afterward, the audience is wondering what they think. The next day they wake up wondering. Whatever you think about it, you’re wrong by the end.”

“Answers?” Don’t look to the cast, Bhaneja laughs. “We don’t feel we can help you there, folks…. That’s what’s fun about it.”

Remember how your mom and dad always told you ‘don’t talk about politics and religions at the dinner table’.” Disgraced is what happens when “well-off, highly educated, privileged and successful people” ignore your mom and dad. It’s post-9-11 and combustible subjects like Islamophobia come up. Ethnic assumptions in this liberal élite are up for grabs.

“I’m not a tribal person, you think. I’m a progressive Western open-minded person who believes everyone’s equal. Right?” Disgraced “takes that assumption and pushes us against it.”

The play’s relevance hasn’t exactly leaked away. Current events have seen to that. And Canadians can’t exempt themselves, witness our own election with its divisive hijab controversy and the Conservative platform of informing on “barbaric cultural practices” into the social lexicon. Bhaneja brings up the name Kellie Leitch and her Trumpesque affinities.   

“So many elements reflect our lives here,” in a country that prides itself on multiculturalism. The fear of “the other” isn’t limited to the country south of the border. The play speaks powerfully in Germany, with its migrant crisis, for example. Bhaneja has  just been called to audition for a Singapore production of Disgraced.

Karen Glave and Michael Rubenfeld in Disgraced, Hope and Hell Theatre production at the Citadel. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

“Its resonance continues to deepen,” says Bhaneja, who thinks Disgraced is well on its way to classic status. “There’s a weight to it.” He points to Arthur Miller and A View From The Bridge. “It was really good 50 years ago; it’s really good now.”

And its great strength is “a refusal to moralize and tell you what to think,” he thinks. “It doesn’t present answers…. But there’s an edge and brashness to it that’s not very Canadian.”

He encountered the play while doing final drafts of Love, Death and the Blues, in which our “half-white” protagonist resists the prejudice that he’s not black enough to be an authentic blues musician. “I was inspired by Akhtar,” says Bhaneja, “his boldness in facing the questions.”

He remembers his playwriting teacher at the National Theatre School (Sheldon Rosen) telling his younger playwright self that  “whatever you write about now, you’ll be writing about forever.” It’s been born out. “I’m drawn to questions of culture and identity. All my stuff so far, and the TV series I’m trying to get going…. it’s central to  what I’m trying to figure out. It’s what I can contribution to the theatre conversation.”

Has traditional casting, circumscribed by ethnicity, widened its embrace? Bhaneja, whose career moves from stage to screen and back again, pauses to consider. There are “positive signs, a more diverse perspective in characters, more reflective of our society. But I’d have hoped, 20 years in TVland, that it would be farther along than it is.”

“Being half-white has given me a double-sided access,  to roles I wouldn’t have had the chance to do if I were darker.” He laughs. “It hasn’t been a bad thing. And it’s also who I am!”

The role he landed in the Jessica Chastain thriller Miss Sloane was, as written,  “a 50-year-old white-haired textbook lobbyist.” And Bhaneja had thought “I’m never going to get this.” What he especially loved about the experience was hanging out with big-name actors who made time for the scheduling-busting complications of live theatre, John Lithgow and Sam Waterston among them. 

If Edmonton has a special place in his affection, it’s partly because of Citadel’s Bob Baker stepping up to acquire the Hope and Hell Disgraced even before its Mirvish production. Partly it’s because Disgraced is the first time in more than two decades — since a Fringe tour of 1995 — that he and his wife have been onstage together; they’ve even brought their kids. “We can walk into work together! A great change of scene for us….”

Ah yes, and there’s the prospect of Die-Nasty on his nights off with a troupe of the country’s top improvisers, including Mark Meer and Belinda Cornish. The last time he was here, in Love, Death, and the Blues, “I had the best improv night of my life!”

PREVIEW

Disgraced

Theatre: Hope and Hell (originally presented by David Mirvish)

Written by: Ayad Akhtar

Directed by: Robert Ross Parker

Starring: Raoul Bhaneja, Birgitte Solem, Michael Rosenfeld, Karen Glave, Gabe Grey

Where: Citadel Theatre

Running: Thursday through Feb. 12

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com