Jane Eyre steps off the page and onto the Citadel stage, in a new Erin Shields adaptation

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” — Jane Eyre

In the new play getting its world premiere at the Citadel Thursday after two years of COVID-ian delays, one of literature’s most compelling characters steps off the 19th century page and onto the contemporary stage.

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She’s Jane Eyre, the spirited heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s masterly 1847 novel. And the strong-willed orphan girl is at the centre of the theatrical adaptation commissioned by the Citadel from the acclaimed Canadian playwright Erin Shields. 

Re-imagining classics for modern theatre audiences — through a contemporary feminist lens — is something of a specialty of Shields, a Governor General’s Award winner for If We Were Birds (spun from the Greek myths of Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Ibsen’s The Lady From The Sea, The Epic of Gilgamesh, even Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, have caught her playwright’s eye before now. Queen Goneril, her prequel to Shakespeare’s King Lear, premieres at Toronto’s Soulpepper this summer. Jane Eyre is the first time Shields has adapted a novel. 

The idea of capturing for theatre this much-loved novel — a tumultuous story of an orphan girl who against the odds transcends neglect and cruelty, poverty, betrayal and manipulation to take charge of her own fortunes — was floated by Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran. It was music to her ears, says Shields, a bright, funny, and very articulate voice on the phone from her Montreal home base. 

playwright Erin Shields

“I love that novel! Many of us discovered it in our teenage years; somehow it really spoke to us! And I was curious: what is it about Jane Eyre that makes us all fall in love with it? I did when I was 16; why do I still think of it as a really compelling text? That was the real starting point for me.”

In her adaptations Shields’ muse seems to have a double-optic, whether it’s Milton or Shakespeare she takes in hand. Jane Eyre retains its period setting (and a glorious array of 19th century costumes). But, she says, “part of my compulsion to revisit, to question the authority of these foundational texts, is ‘where am I in that time? How does it resonate for me as a contemporary Canadian woman now’?” 

Cloran echoes that thought when he’s talked about Shields’ particular gift for adaptation.“Erin really gets it,” he’s said, “how to take a classic story, look at it from her contemporary viewpoint, make it resonate for a contemporary audience.”

With Jane Eyre, there’s the added lustre of its female authorship, says Shields. Most of her adaptations have been from texts written by men. “It’s a different glimpse…. You really get an insight into this young female character that you don’t get in novels of that time,” not least because it’s written from the first-person perspective.

So what makes the plain Jane governess such an evergreen character, memorable and appealing? “I just love that she is uncompromising,” says Shields. “She has her own moral compass. And she just refuses to compromise her self,” even when the price tag on refusal is high.

“She has an extraordinary self-knowledge for someone who’e been so abused — by her aunt, her cousins, that awful school. She’s manipulated by Rochester (the mysterious master of haunted Thornfield manor) in many ways. But she’s just so grounded.”

“Physically it seems like she’d have no power in the world; she’s constantly described as ‘plain’ and ‘little’. And in some ways that’s what young women like about it too: you don’t have to be a super-model to have power over your own circumstances and be loved…. I think Rochester does see her and love her uncompromising direct soul. By the end we’re rooting for them; we want them to be together.”

Novels and theatre work their storytelling magic in different ways, of course, “especially in the case of a novel as internalized, as introspective as Jane Eyre,” as Shields points out. “You get a really interesting look at the inside of the character. But when you’re putting people onstage, you have to do it all through talking.”

So, how to capture the novel’s inner voice: that was the playwright’s challenge. “For me, theatrically, I had an image of all the action swirling around Jane and propelling her from, one situation to the next,” says Shields. “And I imagined a real physicality to it.” Much of that narrative flow and the conjuring of Jane’s inner voices from her turbulent past are the work of movement director Ainsley Hillyard of Good Women Dance. 

“What I love about theatre,” Shields sighs happily, “what I’ve missed so much, is that it’s a team sport. I have the first pass at making the blueprint for the thing, but I purposely leave a lot of space in there for other collaborators to come in with, say, beautiful, interesting costumes that will serve the piece, or for actors to find their way through it, or a director to bring their imagination to it…. That’s when the play becomes three-dimensional.”  

An ensemble of nine actors play more than four dozen characters in the course of Shields’s adaptation. “I’m hoping people will be surprised and enchanted by how these amazing actors conjure all these different characters,” she says.

“Conjure” is the operative word for the kind of imaginative theatricality toward which Shields and director Cloran, theatre friends of long standing, gravitate. This isn’t the kind of theatre where tons of furniture get pushed onto the stage for a scene, to duplicate a novel, or photograph “reality,”  then shoved off again 15 minutes later. “What’s the point of that?” She laughs. “Go read the novel!”

In Jane, a feminist playwright  has a feminist heroine to work with, for once. Shields has a bone to pick with Shakespeare on those grounds, hence her Queen Goneril. “When Shakespeare was writing women weren’t even allowed to perform on a stage…” The consequence, in the canon of the most performed playwright in the English language, is that “there are maybe three females and 15 guys in every play. There are exceptional women characters, of course, but for me many are shortchanged.” For Shields, Goneril, one of Lear’s “bad” daughters, is one of those. “In King Lear she’s a stock villain. What if she had her own existential crisis?” Ophelia is another. “What if she had five big soliloquies?” like her moody boyfriend.  

“I need to see myself in the main character,” says Shields of her adaptations. That’s why in Paradise Lost, “Satan is a middle-aged woman who’s had it up to here with the patriarchy.”

Shields’ theatrical roots are in low-budget fringe productions, and acting. She grew up in Hamilton, went to theatre school at Rose Bruford in London, England, then moved to Toronto to start an acting career. Auditioning was a series of frustrations, she remembers. “All the parts I went up for were brutal: dumb and ditsy girls or girlfriends or wives.… That was what was available and I wasn’t even particularly good at getting them.” 

“I needed to perform, so that’s when I started writing. OK if no one will hire me, I’ll hire myself!” She took her first play, Hot Dog (“a one-woman play about a vegetarian who eats a hot dog” and thereby alienates her dietary community) on the Fringe circuit. “Then I realized a lot of other people are doing this too; I had found my cohorts!” 

For Shields, who’s moving from Montreal to Toronto this summer with her husband Gideon Arthurs (currently the CEO of the National Theatre School) and their two daughters, writing was “a way of making (theatre) happen for yourself instead of writing for the gatekeepers.” And from the start she had her own mandate, “a personal vendetta against the canon of plays that are normally presented on Canadian stages.” She vowed that “every single play I write will at least have more women than men. And very good parts for women. That’s just what I’m gonna do!” 

And she’s done it. In the case of Beautiful Man, a gender-reversal play which Shields wrote “out of my disgust with big-budget film and television” — their saturation with “violence against women, the negation of the female characters, the male gaze plastered all over women’s bodies” — the sole man is eye candy, with maybe half a dozen lines in the whole play as three women discuss shows they’ve seen.

Rage has often motivated Shields’ work, as she says cheerfully. With Jane Eyre, it’s love. “I could have given it a contemporary setting. But what I love about having distance between now and the Victorian period is that the mind has to work to say ‘how is that like my life now?’…. What’s fun is to find the elastic between the then and the now.”  

“Besides, I find the Victorian gothic period so juicy,” says Shields of  “the contrast between the restraints and the boiling tumult within very passional people trying to live within those constraints…. The language of the play lives somewhere between the formal 19th century register and our own contemporary colloquial language.”

“You’re inventing a new language in a way. And you’re inviting, provoking, the audience to go along with it.” 

PREVIEW

Jane Eyre

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Erin Shields, adapted from the Charlotte Brontë novel

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Hailey Gillis, Helen Belay, Nadien Chu, Ivy DeGagné, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Garett Ross, Maralyn Ryan, John Ullyatt, Gianna Vacirca

Running: March 19 through April 10

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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What? A land claim comedy? The surprising geniality of Cottagers and Indians at Shadow Theatre. A review

Posted on March 12, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Davina Stewart and Trevor Duplessis in Cottagers and Indians, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s no accident that the first sound you hear in Cottagers and Indians is laughter (with some accompaniment from amused birds).   

The Drew Hayden Taylor play with the cheeky title that’s running in the Shadow Theatre season is something rare. When push comes to shove (as pushes so often do, times being what they are), you could call it a land claim comedy: a category of Canadian theatre in which Cottagers and Indians, named for the kids’ good guy/bad guy game, might well be the sole occupant. 

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It is surprisingly genial in tone, given the implications. And its insights into the collision of cultures at a lake in Ontario cottage country come generously wrapped in a raucous sense of humour. The stakes in John Hudson’s production are referenced visually: the evocation of Nature of Daniel vanHeyst’s beautiful design, its wood, its banks of wild rice reeds, its lighting.

The story is inspired by a real-life conflict that happened near the Curve Lake First Nation (home of Ojibwa playwright Taylor). An enterprising Indigenous man set about reviving an Indigenous tradition by seeding lakes with manoomin (wild rice), with a view to improving his community’s diet, and sustaining himself economically. And the upscale, needless to say white, cottager owners, who claimed the lake for recreation, objected. 

As set forth by Taylor, the combatants at fictional Otter Lake do battle under the flag of tradition, both claim their Nature bona fides, and both accuse each other of entitlement. There is weight on both sides. But of course we do know who the good guy is. And it’s not complacent, well-heeled Maureen Poole (Davina Stewart), waving her glass of “chilled Chardonnay, superbly oaked” for emphasis from her deck. Airing the grievances she groups under “the Cottager’s Burden,” she’s got one eye on the “infestation of weeds” cluttering her hitherto pristine shoreline and the other on her property values. 

Trevor Duplessis in Cottagers and Indians, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Arthur Copper (Trevor Duplessis), the Anishinaabe man from two lakes over who’s been planting and harvesting manoomin — with a loud machine he calls Gertie — is what Maureen calls “an Aboriginal horticulturalist gone mad.” Arthur is smart, quick-witted, mischievously charming, and armed with most of the playwright’s funniest barbs. You hear them pinging off the well-fortified but tinny self-delusions of white privilege . 

Maureen waves the “tradition” flag from the deck of “a cottage a family built.” When Arthur talks about tradition, recent history on his family’s traditional trapping ground is “just before Time Immemorial became the 20th century,” as he puts it in his witty fashion. 

Davina Stewart in Cottagers and Indians, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Maureen might have an ear — both ears — on the racket of Gertie scooping up the plants that have in her view turned lakes into marshes, and screwed up boating and swimming. But she’s tone deaf to her own condescension. When she says “we are all this lake,” you’re hearing a whole historical soundtrack, not to mention an echo of the old NIMBY chorus. Arthur, quick on the uptake, renames it NIMBL, not in my back lake. And he makes sharp satirical use of the land acknowledgment (with which theatres invariably begin performances) with his own re-worked version.

Racist? Of course not, Maureen objects. “In principle, we support Native issues.” She’s seen Dances With Wolves; she has not one but three dreamcatchers. When she objects to the constant revisions of political correctness that have made “Indian” obsolete, in favour of Native, or Indigenous, or “whatever you people are calling yourselves these days,” Arthur cheerfully counters with his own. “settler, people of pallor …. Some of my best friends are white,” he says. “Or white-ish.” 

The play is an intricate weave of monologues (occasionally overheard by the two characters separately onstage, in canoe and on deck) and direct addresses to the audiences. Duplessis negotiates the ironies in a bold and appealing comic performance. Maureen, armed variously by sarcasm, exasperation or rage, is by no means a dimbulb in either the play or Stewart’s performance.

Her condescension is coloured (so to speak) by occasional moments of knowingness when the character seems to understand that at some level she’s becoming a telling white caricature and making herself look bad. Referencing Dancing With Wolves is, after all, quite a glaring misstep for a white upper middle-class small-l liberal, Taylor’s point being how fast small-l white liberals lose their small-l liberality when property is at stake.  Stewart’s performance captures a teeny crack in her complacency.

Still, even though the play in the end offers another layer of understanding, a touching undercurrent of tragic life experience, to each of the characters in their lakeside confrontation, they don’t cede their ground. Or rather, the water. 

Resolution isn’t within the compass or aim of Cottagers and Indians. Understanding is a start, enhanced and sharpened by humour. Further negotiation is invited. 

 REVIEW

Cottagers and Indians

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Drew Hayden Taylor

Starring: Trevor Duplessis, Davina Stewart

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave. 

Running: Thursday through March 27

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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Raising funds for Ukraine: theatre steps up. A play, a playwright, Pyretic Productions, and the Blyth Festival

Posted on March 9, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Barvinok, Pyretic Productions. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It started with the discovery of a hand-written diary, the journal in which Lianna Makuch’s grandmother recorded her flight, on foot, from war-ravaged Ukraine in 1944. 

That wrenching chronicle, and an anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, inspired actor/playwright Makuch to write a play. In Barvinok, which premiered in Edmonton in 2018 as Blood of Our Soil (then ran at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto), Hania, like her creator Makuch a Ukrainian Canadian, returns to her beautiful but blood-soaked ancestral homeland on a quest, a journey of discovery.   

War has never stopped. It may have slipped off the world radar for a time, but it has never ended; it continues, ever more brutal, an escalating invasion that targets civilians. And now, Barvinok, researched on location in 2017 by the Pyretic Productions trio of Makuch, director Patrick Lundeen and dramaturge Matthew MacKenzie, is the vehicle of a fund-raising initiative on behalf of Ukraine launched by the Blyth Festival in southern Ontario. 

On Thursday a staged reading of Barvinok, by actors across the country including Makuch, goes up on Blyth’s YouTube channel for a month. And the Pyretic production, directed by Lundeen, is accompanied by full information on all humanitarian options for sharing resources and contributing to support for Ukraine, among them the Canadian Red Cross, the Canadian-Ukrainian Foundation, LGBTQ groups like OutRight Action and Kyiv Pride. 

Lianna Makuch, creator of Barvinok (Blood of Our Soil). Photo by Mat Simpson. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Barvinok, which returns to Edmonton and tours Alberta in the fall, “is about a time and a place. But I’m not re-writing,” says Makuch, who made time for a call after a day in rehearsal for the Citadel’s upcoming production of Jane Eyre (she’s the assistant director). She explains Barvinok’s name change. The title is Ukrainian for periwinkle, “and a cultural symbol of eternity since it’s a flower that can withstand the harshest conditions. It reflects the Ukrainian resilience of spirit.” At her grandparents’ cottage in Ukraine, the garden was full of periwinkles. 

Makuch spends her evenings online in fund-raising meetings and contacting friends and family in Ukraine. “You can hear bombs are going off in Kyiv. But everyone I speak to in Ukraine is always so hopeful,” she says. “And I have hope too. I don’t see an end to Ukraine. But the high price of it…. ”

In the course of connecting with veterans in her 2017 research trip to Ukraine, and repeated trips thereafter interviewing veterans and displaced people, Makuch met a medic who shared her “very inspiring” story. “Alina was just 19 years old when she made her way to the front line, during one of its fiercest times, the battle for Donetsk Airport.

Now a close friend, Alina has inspired another Makuch play, Kitka (Ukrainian for cat), currently in progress. Makuch, unsurprisingly, hasn’t finalized the ending. It premieres in May in a Pyretic/ Punctuate! co-production at Fringe Theatre’s Studio Theatre in the TransAlta Arts Barn. 

The playwright assisted Alina and her mom in a dramatic exit from Kyiv, by connecting them with Canadian theatre artist Michael Rubenfeld, who’s currently living in Krakow, Poland. He’s invited them to stay. Makuch’s “grassroots initiative” to raise funds for Alina has resulted in donations from around the world. 

“Art has a place to tell a different kind of story,” says Makuch. “It connects through empathy, compassion, humanity.” The news is all about geo-politics. Art “tells a human story; it explores the full scope of human-ness.” 

Check the Blyth Festival website for Barvinok details. 

 

 

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Meet the Mischief-makers, creators of comic havoc (witness Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Citadel)

Posted on March 8, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields, Henry Lewis of Mischief Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The three creators of Mischief Theatre‘s Peter Pan Goes Wrong were in town last week to watch the North American debut of their 2013 play unleash theatrical chaos on the Citadel mainstage.

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The trio of Londoners are by now connoisseurs of screw-ups … and irony. “We’ve taken four flights in the last four days — and had issues with every single one,” says Henry Shields, with a certain bemused exasperation.  Baggage gone missing, two-hour delays on the tarmac, and even worse (“we landed, I woke up, and I found I’d slept through the meal!”). “It’s the curse of calling a show … Goes Wrong,” says Jonathan Sayer. “We’ve angered the gods,” says Henry Lewis.

The live theatre — fertile ground for the glitch, the risky choice, the rampaging ego — is their playground. Chief Mischief-makers, the founders of the theatre company, have gathered around a phone speaker to chat about their hit brand of hilarity. Which is to say comedy in which the near-miss, the collision, the lost line, the misplaced cue, the stuck door, the missing prop have reached a dizzying virtuosity. That, and global reach.

The Play That Goes Wrong, Mischief’s breakthrough hit of 2012 in which the earnest members of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society bring a 1920s Agatha Christie-like murder mystery to its knees, has visited some 20 countries. It’s about to start another U.K. Tour; its New York run Off-Broadway continues. And a nine-week holdover in Chicago continues into April. 

You can see Mischief being made on Broadway HD. In addition to Peter Pan Goes Wrong, there are two live-television seasons of The Goes Wrong Show where, in the hands of the Cornley forces, weighty dramas — like The Nativity, A Christmas Carol, “a Downton-esque family saga,” a “lamentable tragedy”… by Shakespeare (Simon Shakespeare that is, Colin Shakespeare’s lesser-known cousin), a “rarely performed” World War II tale — go wrong. Way wrong. 

As they explain, Shields, Sayer and Lewis met at LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) as classical actors in training. “We were there to study Shakespeare, Chekhov — and we came out doing silly slapstick,” says Shields. “Adam (Adam Meggido, the director of Peter Goes Wrong at the Citadel) was our improv teacher,” says Sayer. “And we loved his lessons and found them very inspiring…. We bonded over the love of comedy.” 

They’ve taken improv shows to the mighty Edinburgh Fringe eight or nine times, he says. And improv is why they, like Meggido and unlike a vast majority of their fellow citizens, know the name Edmonton (and are prepared to be charmed, briefly, by snow). “Dana Andersen (the Edmonton improv veteran who was a Die-Nasty founder) “even came to teach us once.”

The transition to scripted shows had a practical side, says Lewis. “In the U.K. improv is a tougher sell. We were looking to grow the company. And that’s when we got our first big hit, The Play That Goes Wrong.”

One inspiration was Michael Green’s The Art of Coarse Acting, a memoir of his time working in amateur companies. “We started writing short ‘coarse acting’ plays,” says Lewis. 

“The little moments that stay in people’s minds are often the moments that things go wrong,” as Sayer puts it, “in the same way that improv feels really dangerous. You feel you’re part of this really special moment, this unique thing that will never happen again…. In the creation, the writing, we wanted to re-create that feeling.” 

And as Peter Pan Goes Wrong vividly demonstrates, going wrong in theatre has a domino effect. “When something goes wrong, everybody starts to panic, and more things go wrong.”

What sorts of genres or styles catch the Mischievous eye? “We look for things that are quite serious,” says Shields. “It’s easier and funnier to something very serious subverted, turned on its head. Shakespeare, Chekhovian drama, Tennessee Williams…. Even with Peter Pan, the production they’re trying do isn’t a silly, frothy panto(-type) Peter Pan. They’re trying to do something really artistic and magical. You always want to have a genre or style you can undercut.” 

“It’s more fun to break a valuable vase.” 

“The other layer,” as Sayer says, “is you get to know the characters,” paid-up members of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society. There are continuing rivalries: in the Goes Wrong plays, including Peter Pan Goes Wrong, for example, Chris and Robert constantly jockey for the upper hand; they both want to be the director. There are glimpses of backstage love stories. The show is “less about them being amateurs and more about them biting off more than they can chew and being at the same very unlucky.”

Since the sense of risk and live-ness are crucial to their shows, Mischief’s translation to the screen would seem to be a tricky proposition. “In theatre you want to have big surprises, wow’s for the audience. Television as a medium jumps on more intimate, smaller jokes,” Sayer thinks.

He argues, though, that there’s a certain continuity between TV and Mischief’s origins in small fringe venues, 60- to 90-seaters where the close-up is possible. “The audience can really see what’s going on your eyes, and you can get laughs from a look or a little body movement… There’s almost a televisual quality to that kind of venue. In a way we’re going back to that, back to our roots.”

It has appealed to their audiences. During The Great Pause, Mischief has done livestream movie nights “from our emergency comedy bunker in central London,” as Lewis puts it. “We’d get 8 or 9,000 households (watching) every evening.” 

As for Peter Pan Goes Wrong, after the Northern American premiere here, Mischief has hopes for touring to more Canadian cities or across into the U.S. — and maybe New York. “The only certainty at the moment is Vancouver,” where it’s slated to play at the Arts Club in the summer, says Sayer. “But we’re hopeful!” 

Peter Pan Goes Wrong is at the Citadel through March 20. Read the 12thnight interview with Adam Meggido here, and the review here. 

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‘Who were we before life got hold of us?’ Thoughts on Ayita at the SkirtsAfire festival

Posted on March 5, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Ayita by Teneil Whiskeyjack (centre). Photo by Noelle Steinhauer.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

To walk into the Westbury Theatre these days is to find yourself in a world that’s mysterious but familiar, calm but in perpetual motion.

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 Whittyn Jason’s captivating design puts us in the centre of a wave or lost in a galaxy of stars. We’re splashed by an incoming tide or travelling through infinite space, as projections ripple across seven round cosmic bubbles. 

Are they portholes into the great beyond? Are they microscopic atoms of tiny droplets of water? The strange and contradictory sense of being up close to Nature and a tiny speck in a vast universe, seems crucial to the experience of Teneil Whiskeyjack’s Ayita. 

At the heart of this year’s 10th anniversary edition of SkirtsAfire is a production, directed jointly by Lebogang Disele and Sandra Lamouche, that speaks directly to the life purpose of a multi-disciplinary theatre festival designed to amplify the voices of women and non-binary artists — in this case Indigenous voices. And it will be fascinating to read what Indigenous commentators have to say about the piece. 

In Danielle LaRose’s sound design, sometimes those voices seem to echo from the inside out; sometimes they speak directly from the three characters and the dancer chorus onstage. And their cultural sound track of Indigenous drumming and singing is provided by Mackenzie Brown. 

Ayita by Teneil Whiskeyjack, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Noella Steinhauer.

“Who were we before life got hold of us?” That’s the question that ebbs and flows, and frames the dance theatre conceived by Whiskeyjack, a Plains Cree artist from the Saddle Lake First Nation. The arc of her story, which plays out mostly in movement, is the rediscovery of that “who” amid the struggles, trauma, and the wrenching losses that life deals out. There are universal resonances, to be sure,  but it’s an Indigenous journey that’s being chronicled. And it begins in violence: “the man that came from the land of the red went back to the stars.” 

Three generations of Cree women intersect in the piece: Ayita (Whiskeyjack), an older woman (Christine Sokaymoh Frederick) and a younger (Janira Moncayo). And the self —  star of the question “who were we before life got hold of us?” — is connected to Nature, moving beyond rage and grief, the dark night of the soul, to a place of healing. “Grief has a way of breathing life back into you….” It’s not so much a creation story as a re-creation story.

Ayita by Teneil Whiskeyjack (centre), SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Noella Steinhauer.

Lamouche’s choreography, which charts this course in scenes with the four expert dancers, makes strikingly original, poetic use of hoops, traditional in Indigenous dance. The performers move gracefully with them, emerge from them, focus through them, let them rise like speech bubbles. And in one memorable image, a dancer fashions them into angel’s wings. 

The climax is a dramatic birthing scene, bathed in red, in which Ayita herself is reborn as an artist, from agony into joy. “Our wombs hold knowledge of the land and connect us to the stars…. On the other side is who you were always meant to be.” 

That sense of possibility is what SkirtsAfire is all about. 

REVIEW

Ayita

SkirtsAfire Festival 2022

Created by: Teneil Whiskeyjack

Directed by: Lebogang Disele and Sandra Lamouche

Starring: Teneil Whiskeyjack, Janira Moncayo, Christine Sokaymoh Frederick, Rebecca Sadowski, Skye Demas, Shammy Belmore, Deviani Bonilla, Mackenzie Brown

Where: Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns

Running: through March 13

 

 

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Shoring up the world against cosmic chaos: the fun of Peter Pan Goes Wrong, a review

Posted on March 4, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Peter Pan Goes Wrong, by arrangement with Mischief Theatre Worldwide in association with Citadel Theatre. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“All the world is made of faith and trust and pixie dust.” 

True, J.M. Barrie, the creator of the boy who wouldn’t grow up, was not actually alluding to the world of live theatre in this inspirational declaration from Peter Pan. But, heck, he might have been. As you’ll see in Peter Pan Goes Wrong, the very funny production currently exploring the extreme flimsiness of faith, trust, pixie dust, and a lot of other theatrical staples — like the suspension of disbelief or, well, the suspension of anything — on the Citadel mainstage. 

Peter Pan Goes Wrong is the inspiration of the English comedy company Mischief Theatre, experts at mining the disaster potential of any live theatre venture for comic gold. And with J.M. Barrie’s indelible fantasy adventure, creators Henry Lewis, Henry Shields and Jonathan Sayer have a lot to work with, as this North American premiere production (a Citadel/ Vancouver Arts Club collaboration) directed by Mischief’s Adam Meggido, vividly attests. Multiple locations including an exotic one only accessible by air, a lagoon with mermaids and a crocodile, a boat, kid characters, period costumes, sword-fighting, A DOG … what could possibly go wrong?   

You’ll watch, in something like awe, as such old theatrical truisms as “it’ll be there on the night,” or “break a leg” get dismantled. And you’ll listen to the sweet sound of a live audience laughing out loud through their masks. It hasn’t been heard much across the land of late. And it’ll warm your heart. It did mine.

You’ve got to feel for the earnest theatre-loving amateurs of the Cornley University Drama Society, who are putting on Peter Pan. Even when you arrive in the theatre, the stage management team is already getting panicky. They’re scrambling back and forth, to and fro off the stage and into the house, to shore up last-minute malfunctions — flickering lights, an actor late for his call, a problem with one of the house seats, a missing hammer. Which brings us to the eternal question: can live theatre be brought to its knees by a short-circuit? I leave this with you, dangling in the air like the eternal boy with the jaunty green cap. 

Anyhow, as the show opens, “co-director” Robert (Chris Cochrane) is already stalling for time, explaining that the budgetary limitations of last year’s festive production, Jack and the Bean, have been eradicated by an infusion of cash from a cast member’s uncle. The production we’re about to see will be lavish, he assures. According to director Chris, played with actor-ly loft by Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Robert isn’t co-, he’s only assistant-director. And besides, this isn’t some sort of panto, god forbid, it’s a serious play. 

Under the energetic ministrations of the Cornley University Dramatic Society, the much-loved tale of the Darling children who hive off to Neverland with a strangely ageless boy is at risk from every possible angle. Thanks to set designer Simon Scullion, doors stick and then open too suddenly, windows get unhinged, furniture collapses, fuses blow, the forest of Neverland gets unhinged, the Narrator’s chair has a mind of its own, props go missing and reappear too late, the sound feed from backstage (designed by Ella Wahström) doesn’t get turned off and reveals way too much. It’s a running gag that never stops running (and feels a little long, in truth).  

The trap door? Captain Hook’s hook? I’ll leave the sense of infinite possibility with you, my friends. Ditto frantic costume changes (designer: Roberto Surace) whereby the regally charming Mrs. Darling — Annie, played by Belinda Cornish — re-enters mere seconds later as the maid.

Peter Pan Goes Wrong, by arrangement with Mischief Theatre Worldwide in association with Citadel Theatre. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography.

And that’s before the flying starts. Peter Pan (cocksure Jonathan, played by Jamie Cavanagh) makes a memorable entrance chez Darling. The secrets of his arrival are safe with me, but it’s hilarious.  

The ensemble is a veritable hotbed of mismatched talents and upstagers, colliding egos, and romantic entanglements. Sandra (Alexandra Brynn) plays Wendy, apparently a veteran of too many physical theatre workshops, as if she’s in a music video, all cheerleader pelvic thrusts, bouncing on her white runners (choreographer: Christine Bandelow). Since Dennis (Alexander Ariate) can’t remember any of his lines as John, he’s been fitted with outsized headphones so he can be prompted from backstage. He cheerfully bellows everything he hears, including the stage directions. And little Michael, played by Max played by Oscar Derkx, is dazed by the thrill of charming an audience, infatuated with his own newly discovered skills as an improviser. They’re all very funny. And Meggido’s Canadian cast has the extra tickle of layering English accents of varying degrees of absurdity on to the Cornley thesps.  

Peter Pan Goes Wrong, by arrangement with Mischief Theatre WorldWide, in association with Citadel theatre. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography.

As the self-important Mr. Darling and then Captain Hook, MacDonald-Smith is riotous playing the pompous actor who feels certain he’s the only really serious performer in the show. And naturally, a lion’s share of pratfalls and diverse comeuppances are his to recover from. Cornish, too, turns in a top-notch comic performance as Annie, whose roles, in addition to the imperturbable Mother and the Cockney maid, include the alarmingly twinkly Tinker Bell.

The Cornley actors are nothing if not game. Kudos to April Banigan as the Narrator, a person of an unrelentingly arctic glare. She flings fairy dust at everybody with increasing ferocity as things go wrong. Her opposite number in this regard is the stage manager (Sebastian Kroon), constantly distracted by his cellphone, and always a beat or two behind in damage control.  

What can go wrong (and therefore does) is a kind of comic chain reaction of collisions, near-misses, mistimed entrances, forgotten lines, sound and lighting cues gone awry, embarrassing inadvertent revelations from backstage…. In a way it makes you realize how risky live theatre is, a kind of crazy, brave, existential bulwark against cosmic chaos.

And in a climactic battle against a stage revolve that’s broken free of all control and flings the characters willy-nilly, we see what’s winning. Meggido’s production feels a little overworked at times, but it never loses the sense of cumulating disasters happening impromptu, in real time. 

See it soon. The set may not last. 

REVIEW

Peter Pan Goes Wrong

Theatre: presented by arrangement with Mischief Theatre Worldwide in association with the Citadel/ Vancouver Arts Club

Created by: Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, Jonathan Sayer

Directed by: Adam Meggido

Starring: Alexander Ariate, April Banigan, Alexandra Brynn, Jamie Cavanagh, Chris Cochrane, Belinda Cornish, Gabriel Covarrubias, Oscar Derkx, Sebastian Kroon, Rochelle Laplante, Camille Legg, Andrew MacDonald-Smith

Running: through March 20

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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The healing touch of humour: Drew Hayden Taylor’s Cottagers and Indians at Shadow Theatre

Posted on March 4, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Davina Stewart and Trevor Duplessis in Cottagers and Indians, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Humour is the WD-40 of healing.” 

That’s what an elder from the Blood Reserve in southern Alberta once told Drew Hayden Taylor. “I liked that. So cool. Almost T-shirt-worthy,” says the well-travelled Ojibwa playwright/ filmmaker/ TV scriptwriter/ storyteller/ columnist/ essayist/ novelist. “And I realized that could be my path….”

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It’s a path full of unexpected zigzags that’s taken Taylor across the country and around the world, through cultural minefields, political arguments, ethnic frictions, the nuances of political correctness, to write about the Native experience. It’s taken him on 19 lecture tours of Germany.

“They bring me in to talk about Native literature, Native culture, Native humour, Native storytelling,” he says of a German obsession with North American Indigenous culture that dates back to the 1890s. Taylor, who’d discovered the German connection during a writer’s residency at Pierre Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon, was intrigued into creating a fascinating CBC documentary (Searching for Winnetou) on the subject. It was screened at the “Indianer Festival in Stuttgart two year’s ago, Taylor’s last pre-pandemic excursion abroad.  

And in 2018 the path took Taylor to the hit play that opens Thursday on the Varscona stage in a Shadow Theatre production. Cottagers and Indians: even the title, with its nod to the old kids’ game Cowboys and Indians, is cheeky. “The I word” as Taylor has called it in an essay for the Globe and Mail, has fallen into disrepute. When the play ran in Ottawa, the box office got calls objecting to the title. Callers, all of them white as Taylor notes in some amusement, were outraged by the affront to political correctness, and taken aback to learn that the playwright was Indigenous. 

“It’s an outdated term,” says Taylor. “But when I look back at my earlier work, wow, I used it quite frequently…. In many communities, including mine, we still use it amongst ourselves.”  

The play was inspired by a real-life conflict in Ontario cottage country, and a central player (James Whetung) from the Curve Lake First Nation where Taylor is from and where he lives. The heart of the dispute is water. More precisely it’s wild rice, and the attempts of an Indigenous local to revive an Indigenous tradition (and improve the local Indigenous diet) by seeding it in a lake surrounded by upscale white cottage-owners who’ve been there, boating and fishing, for decades.

On opposite sides of the stage, two characters, the entrepreneurial Anishinaabe man Arthur (Trevor Duplessis) and the Toronto cottager Maureen (Davina Stewart) argue their cases. From the start, it was popular, “bizarrely popular,” says Taylor, laughing. “I was surprised that a play about wild rice would have such an appeal to a general audience, Native and non-Native.” 

After a premiere at on the Curve Lake Reserve, three of the four weeks of the run at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre sold out. And it’s been much produced across the country since. In 2020, he turned Cottagers and Indians into a CBC documentary of the same name, “exploring Native/ Non-Native land and water issues across the country. It was quite eye-opening,” he says. He adds, in passing, “a lakefront cottage within three hours of Toronto is as expensive as a house in downtown Toronto.” 

As for the play, “I didn’t try to make it funny; it just sort of came out that way,” Taylor says. Do Indigenous audiences react differently to the play’s sense of humour? He uses the example of Arthur’s wry observation that he likes his wine the way he like his women, “warm and red, not cold and white.” Native women, he says, “just burst out laughing. White women don’t know if they should or not.” Indigenous productions with largely Indigenous audiences are apt to run three to six minutes longer “from sheer laughter,” and leave actors waiting onstage for a lull.  

Drew Hayden Taylor

A prolific and witty writer in many forms, Taylor didn’t start out in theatre. “I’d always wanted to be a writer, but was actively discouraged by my English teachers and my mother,” he says cheerfully. “Accidentally” is the word he uses for his entry point, TV and film, into the world of the writer. In his mid-teens Taylor got a gig as a production/casting assistant for Spirit Bay, a series getting shot in northwest Ontario. And in the course of that, he “inadvertently” learned the structure of a half-hour TV show. After that “I got an opportunity to adapt Native stories into television,” and he wrote a magazine article about that. “I talked to all the story editors and producers I could find in Canada.” 

 And then, at 25, came his first professional TV writing credit: an episode of The Beachcombers. Episodes of Street Legal and North of 60 start popping up on the Taylor resumé. In the Taylor vernacular, “opportunity knocked and I answered.”

“I never liked live theatre then. I thought theatre artists were pretentious. I didn’t really understand it,” he says. It was during a writer’s residency at Native Earth, the country’s premier Indigenous theatre (Taylor was artistic director there in the ’90s) , that he came to realize that theatre is “the next logical progression from the oral storytelling of my culture…. It’s taking the audience on a journey using your mind, your body, your imagination. Once I realized that, it really opened up theatre for me.” He hit that theatrical ground running: six plays in two years. His break-through first? Toronto At Dreamer’s Rock in 1989. It was tough-minded, touching, and funny, a signature Taylor combo. 

“One thing I realized working at Native Earth was that the vast majority of contemporary Indigenous theatre, novels, poetry etc. was dark, depressing, bleak, sad and angry,” says Taylor. ‘When an oppressed people get their voice back they’e going to write about being oppressed. What is it (playwright/novelist) Tomson Highway says? ‘Before the healing takes place, the poison must be exposed’, the poison of colonization.” 

The young Taylor was, he admits, a bit daunted by this. “In order to be an Indigenous writer am I going to have to write stories about people who are oppressed, depressed, and suppressed? I wasn’t that delighted with the idea.” Enter the Blood Reserve elder, with his wisdom about the importance of humour. Says Taylor, “I’ve travelled to over 150 First Nations across Canada and the U.S. And everywhere I went I’ve been greeted with a small, with a laugh, with a joke.”

“I wanted to celebrate, highlight that Indigenous sense of humour. And I didn’t just want to write Native humour, I wanted to write about Native humour. He co-directed an NFB documentary, Redskins, Trickster and Puppy Stew, “exploring and deconstructing Indigenous humour.” The essay collection he compiled, Me Funny, addresses the same subject. It contains, he notes, Tomson Highway’s essay arguing that Cree is “the funniest language ever created.”  

Taylor’s theatre is never without humour. A seriously entertaining (or is that entertainingly serious?) conversationalist, he says he writes four types of plays: “plays for young audiences, dramas with a lot of humour in them, full-fledged comedies that are just celebrations of the Indigenous sense of humour, and what I refer to as intellectual satires that deal with specific areas of Indigenous culture … wrapped in humour and parody.” 

The pandemic has stalled many a project, of course. But Taylor has been far from idle. Going Native, his APTN documentary series that’s a deep dive into the Indigenous past and contemporary Indigenous culture, has taken him across the continent on location, to talk to architects, artists, pop musicians, traditional craftspersons, sash-makers…. Season 2, which has several stops in Alberta including the Badlands, is nearly ready to go.  He’s starting work on a CBC doc “about people who claim to be Indigenous but can’t back it up.” 

He’s been writing wry and insightful essays for the Globe and Mail on everything from Indigenous identity to whether only Indigenous directors should direct Indigenous plays and only Indigenous critics should review them.  

“I’ve been dabbling in dramatic television more: several nibbles at the hook but nothing birthed yet.” Oh, and Cold, his “Indigenous horror novel,” is coming out (McClelland and Stewart) next winter. And did I mention Taylor’s first short story collection, “Indigenous sci-fi”? His play The Berlin Blues is becoming a movie, likely shot in Alberta this summer. And theatre audiences will be happy to know there are two new Taylor plays looking for a home. “I was in Banff two months ago working on them.”

The path of humour never ends.

PREVIEW

Cottagers and Indians

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Drew Hayden Taylor

Starring: Trevor Duplessis, Davina Stewart

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave. 

Running: Thursday through March 27

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org 

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Theatre rooted in the land: Ayita, premiering at SkirtsAfire. Meet creator Teneil Whiskeyjack

Posted on March 3, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Teneil Whiskeyjack, Ayita, SkirtsAfire Festival 2022. Photo by Noella Steinhauer.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The mainstage centrepiece of the 10th anniversary edition of SkirtsAfire — the multidisciplinary arts festival devoted to celebrating and showcasing women and non-binary artists — is a new play.

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Distinctively Indigenous in its inspiration, creation, and performance, Ayita is the work of Teneil Whiskeyjack. For the Plains Cree artist from Saddle Lake First Nation, a TV and film actor since childhood, it is a debut venture out of that world and into the world of live theatre.  

Teneil Whiskeyjack, Ayita, SkirtsAfire Festival 2022. Photo by Noella Steinhauer

We caught up with Whiskeyjack this week to find out something about her path towards the production, a fusion of theatre and contemporary Indigenous dance that tells a complex, multi-generational story of transcending trauma and creative healing. Ayita premieres on the Westbury stage through March 13. 

Where did her artist’s life begin? “I started in the film and television industry at the age of nine, with a role in an animation series (Stories From The Seventh Fire) told in both Cree and English, that continued well into my teen and young adult years.” Whiskeyjack calls herself the family’s “the first-generation performance artist”(her 18-year-old daughter Miika, also an actor, is “the second generation artist”). She remembers being drawn to old Hollywood films and artist biographies. 

Why theatre? What was the appeal? “It wasn’t until 2014 that I was introduced to the world of theatre. That was it for me. I loved the rush and immediacy of live theatre, and the energetic exchange between yourself, the audience, and your fellow performers. I was interested in the intricacies of weaving together stories and creatively building them for a stage. For people of all backgrounds to gather and be taken on a journey…. I’ve come to appreciate the art that is theatre and want to continue creating for the stage and land-based productions.”

What was the seed that grew into Ayita? It sprouted, as Whiskeyjack says, during her last year as a drama major working towards a B.A. at Concordia University. “I wanted to create a story that was completely organic and connected me closer to who I am as a Cree woman. The original inspiration came from my late grandmother Bernice. She was a fierce, strong, and wise woman. I remember doing ceremonies with her growing up. Many would come to see her for healing; she was a herbalist. I wanted to create a piece that showed the Indigenous woman as empowered, embodied and connected to her roots…. I had never written a play before.” 

After she graduated, Whiskeyjack presented a short staged reading of Ayita at the 2019 Nextfest. And that’s where SkirtsAfire artistic director Annette Loiselle caught sight of it, and was intrigued. 

SkirtsAfire’s Loiselle has talked about what she’s learned of the striking differences between theatre creation that’s Indigenous in spirit and practice, and more hierarchical Euro-centric models (see the 12thnight interview here). How does playwright Whiskeyjack describe that difference? “In Indigenous creation, we observe the nature world — the land, plants, animals, cosmic intelligence and its patterns in relation to our own bodies — to tell stories,” she says. “This relationship is rooted in reciprocity, gifting, and held in ceremony, being out on the land, harvesting, oral teachings…. We are not separate from the natural world but a part of creation, so we are guided by principles that derive from Indigenous ways of know and doing. They call on you to find the spirit and essence of the story, and work collectively.”

A multi-faceted career just got more expansive. What’s next? “These past couple of years have been exciting,” says Whiskeyjack, who founded and runs Spirit Flame Consulting (cultural practice through a Cree lens). “The television series I play a part in, Tribal: Season 2 aired this past fall and is currently airing again on APTN and LUMI. After Ayita wraps at SkirtsAfire, I will be travelling the U.S. on tour with Bear Grease, a musical comedic parody based on the classic film Grease (it sold out every performance last summer at the Fringe). I also will be focusing on learning more about land-based Indigenous creations through movement, facilitating wellness workshops, and enjoying being a mom to my two children…. There are times when I would like to create, just to feed my own curiosities, and explore new ways of expressing myself.” 

PREVIEW

Ayita

SkirtsAfire Festival 2022

Created by: Teneil Whiskeyjack

Directed by: Lebogang Disele and Sandra Lamouche

Starring: Teneil Whiskeyjack, Janira Moncayo, Christine Sokaymoh Frederick, Rebecca Sadowski, Skye Demas, Shammy Belmore, Deviani Bonilla, Mackenzie Brown

Where: Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns

Running: March 3 to 13

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca, skirtsafire.com  

 

          

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Making Mischief (and laughter) en route to Neverland: Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Citadel

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Peter Pan Goes Wrong, presented by arrangement with Mischief Theatre Worldwide in association with Citadel Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Funny how people laugh out loud (and maybe wince a little) when you casually mention the title of the production that arrives on and above the Citadel mainstage starting  Thursday.

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Peter Pan Goes Wrong, after all, enhances exponentially the risk factor built into live theatre, where lines, cues, lights, entrances, props, doors, windows, even zippers, can seem to have a free-floating drift toward anarchy. Then you add wires, and air traffic control en route to Neverland… 

So, Peter Pan. Live. What could go wrong? 

Peter Pan Goes Wrong is the creation of the well-named Brit comedy outfit Mischief Theatre, whose impeccable credentials in the tricky, high-precision hilarity of the near-miss have been recognized world-wide. Their Broadway and West End hit The Play That Goes Wrong, that’s tickled audiences in 20 countries or more, is still ensconced in New York and London.  

With this 2013 comedy, the earnest amateur thespians of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, fresh from their ill-fated production of The Murder at Haversham Manor in The Play The Goes Wrong, are back in action. And they’re hoping for vindication, redemption with a festive production of Peter Pan.  

Peter Pan Goes Wrong director Adam Meggido

In this, they’re up against “a complex one,” says London-based director/ performer/ writer Adam Meggido, who directs an all-Canadian cast of 12 in the much-delayed Citadel/ Vancouver Arts Club co-production (presented by arrangement with Mischief Theatre Worldwide) first announced two years ago. “But that’s the Mischief vision,” he says. “As many things as can go wrong DO go wrong…. They’re pretty relentless in their pursuit of laughs.” Peter Pan ups the ante on disaster potential, of course; the sky’s the limit, literally, since there’s no footpath to Neverland. “There’s literally an extra dimension to go wrong in.”

The production we’ll see is the North American premiere, “a testing ground,” as Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran has said, “for expansion into U.S. markets, including New York.” And the international collaboration renews a surprising Edmonton connection, forged in improv. Meggido, a co-creator, director and star of the first-ever improv show to be nominated for, and win, a major theatre award — Showstopper! The Improvised Musical, a continuing hit across the pond, pocketed the Olivier in 2015— has been here before, and more than once. He has history here; he even ‘bought’ a seat at the Varscona for their fund-raiser. 

He’s joined Die-Nasty for their Soap-A-Thon marathons of yore. In Rhapsodes, which has played Rapid Fire Theatre’s Improvaganza, he and improv partner Sean McCann think nothing of creating on the spot a perfect sonnet, or an entire Shakespeare play, custom-made from personal stories of audience members. 

This time Meggido, a thoughtful and (as you might expect) formidably articulate sort in conversation, has crossed the Atlantic to create mayhem — or, to be precise, to do show that goes wrong, in every possible way.

Its trio of creators (Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, Jonathan Sayer), friends of his from his days teaching at LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), brought Meggido the original script to direct. He traces its inspirations, for one, to a hysterical clip that made YouTube stars of the cast and crew of a 2010 American high school production of Peter Pan. The flying fiascos are, well, mesmerizing. Have a peek here. 

And he considers Buster Keaton’s madcap short film One Week (1920) — “he builds a house, and eventually he’s running through it as it rotates” —  another big influence. 

Peter Pan Goes Wrong. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography.

Unlike, say, the Michael Frayn farce Noises Off, in which you see an onstage view of a terrible touring farce then cut away from the onstage view to the backstage chaos, “everything you see in (Mischief’s) ‘…Goes Wrong’ shows is actually the show. The agendas behind the characters spill out, yes, but you’re still there to watch the The Murder at Haversham Manor or Peter Pan.” Or, in the case of Magic Goes Wrong, the Mischief show Meggido has just directed in the West End, a charity fund-raiser for magicians. “We’re in the world of the play all the time.”

“It’s very easy to push the gags too far, and allow them to comment on what’s going on,” says Meggido. “We’re just letting the audience see the disasters, and watch the actors recover.”

Peter Pan Goes Wrong, by arrangement with Mischief Theatre Worldwide in association with Citadel Theatre. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography.

What does our attraction to the near-miss or the mid-air collision say about us, anyhow? “The reason we go to theatre is because it’s live,” says Meggido. “It’s a live, communal experience. We share the same space, the same light, the same time…. Backstage the actors might be panicking. But the audience loves it when something goes wrong, the set falls down, or someone forgets their lines.” 

It’s proof of live-ness. “And live is dangerous!” Mischief  “takes those moments of pure live-ness. And creates an entire brand because of them…. The audience goes away happy: ‘it was great!’ they’ll say. ‘And you’ll never guess what happened!’”

That same idea, the excitement of live-ness, is built into improv, of course, as Meggido says. “I just love that it’s being done on the spot … the exhilaration and excitement when we the actors are discovering things at exactly the same time as the audience.”

“I just don’t see that as a reason to lower the bar on the quality of it,” he says, with an educator’s zeal. “When improv really started to kick off again in the U.K. 10 or 15 years ago, there was an attitude among certain improvisers that ‘hey, don’t judge us; we’re making this up as we going along’.” Meggido vehemently disagrees. “No no no! If you’re going to charge money to make something up as you go along I want it to be high quality.… I don’t want improv to be an excuse for anything. I want it to be a a springboard for exploration.” 

“Let’s take away all the apology, but keep all of the aspirations.” 

A lot of Mischief’s  ‘goes wrong’ shows were developed through improvisation, Peter Pan Goes Wrong among them, Meggido says. And they retain elements of improv he compares to ‘lazzi’ in commedia dell’arte shows, moments of clowning when the action of the play stops “and the player plays the crowd for a while.” The production we’ll see has some of those.

Meggido, who writes, performs, directs (“I’m obsessed with variety”) argues that it’s actually not hard to turn out, on the spot, a perfect, impromptu Shakespearean sonnet, a scene or an entire play that the Bard somehow forgot to write. “If you’re a person into words in any way, a person who loves rhythm and language, it’s really not all that difficult to hold in your head where the beats and the rhymes are….”  

He advises taking a cue from the way we tell stories or jokes. “You think of the end first, and think how to get there, rather than one beat to the next…. Improvising something like a sonnet, based on a person’s life story, very quickly I’m thinking what’s the final line? What is this leading toward? So I can finish strongly and the last revelation sounds very satisfying.” 

“So actually we’re just using the same channels of communication we’d usually use.”

Similarly, with magic — as Meggido discovered working with top magicians for Magic Goes Wrong — “when you learn that certain skills and tricks are involved, it’s less impressive,” less magical. The art of the magician, as he puts it, “is to keep you safeguarded from that (reductive knowledge). He quotes Houdini: “a magician is an actor pretending to be a magician.” 

The route to Neverland is paved in a sense of wonder. “Magic is very important in Peter Pan,” says Meggido. “And as much as everything is going wrong in our show, we also want you to get the magic, the wonder of Peter Pan.” 

What looks dangerous is genuinely dangerous, Meggido points out. “Actors suspended in the sky, completely controlled by the operators…. And backstage there’s a whole other show to keep things running. You don’t see what they’re doing but it’s high-speed. Technically, it’s very very demanding! A lot of hard, precise speedy work, both in front of and behind the curtain is happening in this production.” He plans to have the entire technical team share the curtain call.  

“It’s very exciting to be putting a show together after two years,” says Meggido of the suspension of Peter Pan Goes Wrong in 2020 after three days rehearsal on the cusp of the pandemic. “This one is so funny, one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen. And it has a lot of heart. You’ll feel you’ve watched the magic of Peter Pan as much as you’ve watched (hapless) amateur actors. You’ll want them to be triumphant.”

“So much of comedy has its roots in pain. If there’s something the characters really care about, it’s got to hurt them when it goes wrong…. They’re invested in the outcome: if they aren’t why would we be?” says Meggido. And if they do make it to the end, there should be a feeling of triumph. The question is will they get there?”

PREVIEW

Peter Pan Goes Wrong

Theatre: presented by arrangement with Mischief Theatre Worldwide in association with the Citadel/ Vancouver Arts Club

Created by: Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, Jonathan Sayer

Directed by: Adam Meggido

Starring: Alexander Ariate, April Banigan, Alexandra Brynn, Jamie Cavanagh, Chris Cochrane, Belinda Cornish, Gabriel Covarrubias, Oscar Derkx, Sebastian Kroon, Rochelle Laplante, Camille Legg, Andrew MacDonald-Smith

Running: through March 20

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com  

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What we inherit, what we imagine: Makram Ayache’s audioplay The Hooves That Belonged To The Deer

Posted on February 26, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

The Hooves Belonged To The Deer by Makram Ayache. Poster image supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You have until Wednesday to catch a startlingly ambitious audioplay by Makram Ayache. And you shouldn’t miss the chance.

The Hooves That Belonged To The Deer is on a grand, not to say epic, scale. Cultures, ethnicities, religions, mythologies compete and collide, as we’re flung past the contemporary prairie horizon into an ancient world. The play was part of the Alberta Queer Calendar Project a years ago. And the Peter Hinton production, with the playwright leading the cast, is now available, streamed as part of the Queer, Far, Wherever You Are series at Toronto’s Buddies In Bad Times.  

The protagonist is the quintessential outsider, a Arab Muslim boy in a white fundamentalist-Christian prairie town, where the pastor offers the temptation of belonging. The price tag is high. And it gets higher as Izzy discovers his own queerness. 

There’s a love story tainted, maybe inevitably, by the inheritance of white colonialism. Inheritance, hmm. The conflict between what is inherited and what can be imagined, in a landscape blighted by white colonialism, is the engine of the play, I thought as I listened again. 

But you’ll have your own ideas; this is a provocative play. Register at buddiesinbadtimes.com to stream. 

   

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