Jesse Roper playing at the IBC Canadian Showcase

As far as week’s go, this past week has been pretty damn fantastic ~ enjoying my first music pilgrimage into the history of Rock & Roll and the Blues in Memphis, discovering some bloody fantastic Blues talent at the International Blues Challenge, cheering Canadian Ross Neilsen on in the Semi-Finals of the International Blues Challenge, and coming home to discover some simply beautiful music that Chris Blake has written for Roamancing.  Now to top it all off, I went to pull the name of a winner for Studio 58‘s Julius Caesar tickets and was thrilled to pull Kelly Lui’s name, who interned with Ahimsa Media this past summer.  To make this especially fantastic, I went to congratulate Kelly and discovered it was her birthday!  Happy Birthday Kelly!

For those that entered, but didn’t win, we are entering you for a second chance at the tickets on Roamancing’s site.  For anyone unaware of the contest, that wishes they’d entered, you can still do that on Roamancing’s site until midnight.  Just drop us a comment with which Shakespeare play you would most love to see as a gender bender (ie. with men and women playing opposite gender role). Here’s a little of what you can expect from the play:

Catch this gender bender of a Julius Caesar at Studio 58 in Vancouver, February 2nd – 26th, Tuesdays – Saturdays at 8 pm and Saturdays & Sundays at 3 pm. Tickets can be purchased here.

The upswing of Alyzee and I missing out is that Langara College’s Studio 58 has decided to extend our two tickets to you delightful people in a little theater giveaway for their latest play.  I’ll get to that in a minute, as first I’ll fill you in on the play.

Photographer: David Cooper

The play is Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but Julius Caesar with a twist, a Julius Caesar gender bender.  You see, when casting for the play, Director Scott Bellis decided to break with tradition and offer the parts of Caesar, Brutus, Cassius and Octavius to women.  I must say this very much tickles my fancies, as traditionally the parts of women in Shakespeare’s play would have been played by men.

For those of you not familiar with Julius Caesar, it is Shakespeare’s masterpiece of political power-play and manipulation, examining the conflict between one person’s ambition and the good of the state, all set in a life-and-death struggle for control of Rome. As Director Scott Bellis puts it, this is very much a tale involving traditional male roles and a story of ‘honourable men’. “In this alternate telling, we are discovering what it means for a male Mark Antony to avenge a female Caesar; what a same-sex marriage looks like in the house of Brutus;  and how being a ‘man’ can say more about your social status than your gender in this very different vision of Rome.”  Sounds fascinating!  Would love to see how all of this unfolds.

And if you are curious about Studio 58, you can read of Alyzee Lakhani’s most recent experience there with The 13th Chair.

So the Giveaway.  We have a pair of tickets to giveaway here and a pair to giveaway on Roamancing (stay tuned for that giveaway in a day or two) with your choice of Wednesday February 8th at 8 pm, Thursday February 9th at 8 pm or Saturday February 11th at 3 pm.  For the giveaway here, to enter:

• Comment below with which Shakespeare character, of the opposite sex from you, you would love to play;
• Deadline Thursday February 2nd at midnight PST.

To be entered a second, third and fourth time:

• Tweet this post with me, @EmmeRogers and #VancouverTheatre somewhere in the tweet, so I see the tweet;
• Share this post on facebook and include @Roamancing in the text when you post it (this should link Roamancing’s facebook page, so I’ll see the post); and/or
• Share this post on G+ and include @Emme Rogers in the text when you post it (this should alert me on G+ of your post).

I shall pull the name of one lucky winner from commenters, tweeters, facebookers and G+ers, and announce the winner on Friday February 3rd.  Very much looking forward to making somebody happy!

Oh, and if sadly you don’t win, the play is running at Studio 58 February 2nd – 26th, Tuesdays – Saturdays at 8 pm and Saturdays & Sundays at 3 pm, and tickets can be purchased here.

Kisses,

Emme xoxo

Joel Stephanson‘s Corridors: A Podplay, is among other things, an artistic response to that very experience: of being alone in a crowd, occupying the space of a million different people and stories, many of which are never brought to light.

Photo by Sera Katie

Quiet Hum Theatre Company‘s experimental offering uses the very same ‘isolating’ technology create a certain intimacy: through the iPod, we hear the stories of others, while a narrator guides us through the spaces they occurred in, many years ago. In Corridors we gather personal histories through our headsets, by way of overheard conversations and confessions between certain Vancouver residents long ago, while at the same time wandering the ancient Chalmers Heritage Building — also home to Pacific Theatre and The Holy Trinity Anglican Church.

I’d never experienced a podplay before Corridors, and so was slightly taken aback by its unconventional format. After being given an iPod, a prodigious pair of headphones,  and shown which the Pause/Play button was, I was left to wander Chalmers Heritage Building only loosely supervised, with the narrator gently guiding me to various nooks and crannies in and around the building. It was surreal to experience a play in which the only “special effects” were auditory, and where I was imagining the invisible characters at the very spot I was standing, many years previous, having the conversation I was hearing.

Photo by slworking2

While I was listening, it was business as usual in the Pacific Theatre lobby, as Box Office attendants and other staff were getting ready for other performances. Just like in the real world among iPod listeners, they paid me no mind, and the general, unobtrusive bustle in the lobby added a whole other dimension to my experience of the play. Although most of the play takes place in more solitary parts of the building, there is a constant reminder that the present is continuing in Chalmers Heritage Building, even as we are trying to consolidate the snippets of the building’s past as we hear them in Corridors. It is almost as if the present is jostling with the past for our attention, washing over it, and making it blurry, more distant and harder to picture.

Photo by Chris D 2006.

Many characters in the play are aged, and struggling to recall their past, as they are having trouble finding their bearings in the modern — and changed — Chalmers building.  Being surrounded by both the stories from the past and the present in Corridors, we can understand their struggle to organize the information surrounding them as we listen to the play.

My favourite part of this play was that I was able to explore Chalmers Heritage Building in what is probably the most curious and imaginative way possible — Corridors is like a dramatic tour within a play. The narrator leads the listener outside the building, up stairs, into a chapel,  a sanctuary, a defunct gym, an elevator, a parkade and several other spots in the building — many of which are nicely furnished with comfy couches for easy listening.

Installation by Alex MetCalf (click to read more). Photo by abrinsky (http://www.flickr.com/people/abrinsky/).

A couple of times I thought I made a wrong turn, so rewound and replayed the instructions, marveling that I could do that — stop the play and listen again that is — until I was sure I got it. Not something actors would take kindly to, I‘m sure. Corridors is in many ways the opposite of what you’d expect at a traditional evening at the theatre: instead of a stage and an audience, all the world’s a stage (or at least the ancient building is), and instead of a numbered seat in among many, there is only you, mobile audience of one.

Corridors offers the strangely haunting experience of being able to occupy many different times at once. It also provides us with little- known histories (and fictions) that evoke a Vancouver very different from the one we know now. And being a solitary, but interactive play, makes me think about the many forms of solitary-but-social media that fill our world now, and wonder what that means in terms of the forms that theatre, history, learning, and interaction can take. Big questions I know, but that’s a credit to the play — it is a bold experiment that raises many questions, specific to our present historical moment.

 Corridors: A Podplay is written & directed by Joel Stephanson, and presented by Quiet Hum Theatre Co. You can see it in the Chalmers Heritage Building — the same place as Pacific Theatre and the Holy Trinity Anglican Church. The remaining shows run on Dec 16, 23 and 30. Since Corridors ends before Pacific Theatre‘s evening show commences, you must arrive sometime between 4-6 pm to see it. See Quiet Hum’s website for details.

Rob Monk, Robert Sidley, Devin Pihlainen and Brian Hinson in FCP's The Tempermentals. Not Pictured: David Nicks. Photo by Devin Karringten.

The play shows us just how hostile the McCarthy era was towards homosexuals, suspected leftists, or anyone thought of as threatening to the fabric of “good, clean American society”. The danger of the times is especially strident in the crackly recordings of General McCarthy‘s outrageous speeches that intersperse the performance. I couldn’t help but laugh at his warnings about how to spot a communist, because they were delivered in dead seriousness, but sound like the ravings of one who has taken leave of his senses entirely. Of course, nothing is funny about his opinions, or the laws and policies they supported. We see their oppression and cruelty that hurt, bully and punish the people in the play, whose only crime is being who they are.

And in this dark and hostile climate, there is a beautiful, hopeful thing: the love between Harry and Rudi. It is a sweet, mischievous, witty love, between two unlikely mates. Rudi is an up-and-coming LA fashion designer, who moves easily through the glamour crowd, charming everyone in his wake. Harry on the other hand, is political science teacher, with a background in law, who is terribly passionate, but easily incensed and uncompromising in his vision of a safe society for homosexuals.

Rob Monk, Robert Sidley, Devin Pihlainen and Brian Hinson in FCP's The Tempermentals. Not Pictured: David Nicks. Photo by Devin Karringten.

Neither belongs in the other’s world — especially because Harry is married — but the two are like a refuge for each other, a space away from the world where they don’t have to fight or hide. It is really touching to see how their love for each other emboldened the movement that led to the founding of the Mattachine Society — the first specifically homophile society in the United States. Watching the play, you really get a sense of how terrifying it was to take the stand that Harry, Rudi and their allies did. But while also seeing how doing anything other than taking a stand involved living with the tremendous amount of shame and loneliness that comes from living like a fugitive while having done nothing wrong.

Harry Hay and Rudi Gernreich were stunning human beings who showed incredible courage in hard times, and their actions shaped history. I know this now thanks to The Tempermentals, playwright John Marans, Fighting Chance Productions and director Ryan Mooney for bringing this play to the Canadian stage for the first time.

The actors did an great job transporting the audience, and so did the unusual set design. It is stark and intimate with few props, and with four different platforms that light up at different times. This set up with the minimal lighting gives the impression that we are overhearing whispers, secret rendezvous, and dangerous truths. Congratulations to actors Brian Hinson (Harry Hay), Devin Pihlanien (Rudi Gernreich), James Gill, David Nicks and Rob Monk (all three of whom played a variety of characters wonderfully and in quick succession).

You can (and must) see The Tempermentals at the PAL Theatre in Vancouver until December 3rd.  Showtimes are 8 pm from  Tuesday — Saturday, 2 pm matinees on Saturday and two shows on Sunday at 2 pm & 7 pm.

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Stephanie Moroz as Helen O'Neill in Studio 58's production of The Thirteenth Chair by Bayard Veiller.

I’d never been to Studio 58 before last night, and I have to say I have fallen in love with the place. Sure I had to navigate my way down a few winding staircases to get there, but for me that provided added charm — when you’re going to see a murder mystery on the rainiest of November nights, it only makes sense that the path to the theatre would have its perils. Cue thunder and all that. But fun aside, I was really impressed by how small and secluded the Studio 58 theatre is.  Draped with heavy purple fabric all around, with strict rules about exits and entrances, the audience and actors really are in a little world of their own for the duration of the play. It seems like the perfect set up for the audience to be drawn right into the story happening only a few feet away. With actors as talented as the ones in this cast, that’s exactly what happened.

Now a bit about the story — we enter it on the eve of an engagement between the son of the wealthy host and his sweetling (pictured above). Just when before their engagement is announced, a family friend (Edward Wales) objects strongly, begging the boy’s parents to wait 24 hours before they allow the engagement. His misgivings cast a shadow of suspicion upon the innocent looking Ms. O’Neill.

Lindsay Winch as Mary Eastwood in Studio 58's production of The 13th Chair by Bayard Veilles.

Much to everyone’s frustration, Wales can’t say anything about why he is suspicious, and only begs them to wait and see what the evening brings.

Later that evening a vivacious medium arrives at the party. The medium is to hold a seance that will reveal who murdered Wales’s friend, Spencer Lee — we can gather than one of the party guests is guilty. After much skepticism, laughter and magical demonstration, the group sits down to their seance. When the light’s come back on. . . can you guess? Here’s a hint: the services of one Inspector Donahue are required, and he is summoned immediately.

Kazz Leskard as Inspector Donohue in Studio 58's production of The 13th Chair by Bayard Veiller.

Don’t let the Inspector’s expression there fool you, he’s a hard-boiled detective, he is. With evidence and everything.

But don’t worry about the story ever getting too dark. When things threaten to get too serious, the two entertainers (who’s clever stage names have slipped my mind) accompanied by live piano music (composer Matt Grinke) take the stage with silly, feel-good numbers that you’ll be humming on your way home.

Thanks to director Sarah Rodgers for this wonderful play! And a warm congratulations to the whole cast and crew — there are so many talents that have contributed to this play — including an Irish Dialect Coach (Ashley O’ Connell) — that I can’t possibly name them all. Notable faces of the cast include: Cheyenne Mabberley as the medium Rosalie Le Grange, Kazz Leskard as Inspector Donahue, Stephanie Moroz as Helen O’Neill, Katey Hoffman as Grace Standish (whose character I am certain draws from Popeye’s Olive Oyl) and Joel Baillard as Edward Wales.

The costume and lighting crews are magicians, and their talent and hard work is hard to ignore in this performance.

You can see The 13th Chair at Studio 58 until December 4. Showtimes are at 8 pm from Tuesday through Saturday, with matinees at 3 pm on Saturday & Sunday.

P.S. Outside, during intermission, I found a flyer entitled “Do the Charleston like a pro!”, containing steps to the popular dance whose name I hitherto had not known. Thank you Studio 58  for educating me, about the dance and the name. While waiting for the bus in the shelter of the Canada Line station later that evening, I practiced the steps as I remembered them from the flyer. It seemed like the only thing there was to do, since it was still pouring rain and the bus was certainly taking its time.  I’m sure I provided entertainment for my fellow stranded travelers. And soon I am sure I will dance it like a pro. After all now I have inspiration.

Craig shares an inside the theatre look at Greg MacArthur's Snowman. Oct. 25, 2011

As you read the interview below, the lines in bold are my questions and the chunks of elegant prose are Craig’s answers.

What was the inspiration to get the actors of Snowman to rehearse in Stanley Park?

To be honest with you it was kind of circumstance. Besides their being a lack of theatres in this town — especially theaters that are artist run — there’s a lack of rehearsal space, a lack of places to actually create your plays. Part of the idea behind Progress Lab 1422 was we all got tired of not having a rehearsal space so we built our sets in the rehearsal hall, and rehearsed on the sets that we’re going to be performing on. It was kind of unheard of, in a weird way — it seems strange that it is kind of unheard of, for actors to be rehearsing on their sets from day 1 of rehearsal, but it is. The challenge with the Progress Lab is that there are four companies in there and occasionally, of course, there are conflicts.

A solitary path in Stanley Park. Photo by Stephen Downes.

That must be a challenge for actors to have to rehearse in a completely new space just days before their opening.

Yeah, it is. And it’s always been a challenge. That was the reason for this rehearsal space, but when there are conflicts, one company of the two has to go somewhere else, and that ended up being us just through the luck of the draw this time. The nice thing is we have a scenario where the venue actually pays for us to go rent somewhere else. In terms of rehearsing in Stanley Park we just needed a place that was of exclusive use where there’s not going to be a yoga class in there after we leave, where there’s not a bunch of Ukrainian women coming into to make perogies halfway through our rehearsal. I like the idea of being able to go out once in a while too, because a lot of Snowman takes place in the outdoors, either in a forest or on a glacier. A lot of it is quite intimate in its nature so it’s kind of got a feeling of two people walking on a path and telling each other a story. We’ve been using it as an opportunity to get out of the room once in a while, wander through the trees to practice our lines and get a sense of what it means to actually look someone in the eye and tell them a story.

Do you think these outdoor rehearsals will influence the way the play is performed?

Oh, absolutely. The first day of rehearsal, we actually left the room. I said “Okay everybody, get your stuff on,” and we went out. And I asked them each to tell a personal story, something that they felt strongly about and a story that they were good at telling, that they really wanted to tell. We did that, we just wandered through the trees and told stories. What I was trying to do was highlight to them that even though they’re telling a story that happened in the past, that all of that emotion, and all of the poignancy of the moments inside these stories are still there and come rushing back when you’re telling them. Because Snowman often has the tone of hindsight, it would be easy to say “Oh it all happened before, so there is no emotion to the story, so I could just tell it.” Well, when I asked these guys to tell their personal stories, especially the two men in the cast, both of them burst into tears, one of them was talking about this life-threatening situation he had with his heart, and the other one was talking about the birth of his son. . . All the emotions were just so on the surface. It was a nice way of showing them that even though this story is told in hindsight it has to be in the moment and real in its telling. It doesn’t matter how much distance there is if it’s an important personal experience, it will have resonance.

Photo by Jarek Zdziech

How do you interpret the creative vision behind Snowman? What do you think is driving that play?

It’s a play that’s about isolation, in a way. These four people are in this very isolated place in northern Alberta or the Yukon– that’s where we think of it as — they come to what you could see as the edge of the world, because they are living at the edge of a glacial shield. They’re all living there together, and theoretically they all love and know each other, and yet they’ve stopped communicating years and years ago. So everything that they’re saying on stage, they’re telling the audience what they were feeling, but they’re not telling each other, and they’re very isolated. . . and kind of frozen. They’ve been going on the same track for so long, they’re not really sure why they’re going down that road any more, and they’ve literally just being traveling north. Because they didn’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do, and as they’ve done that they’ve forgotten why they’re doing what they’re doing, they’ve stopped communicating with each other as couples sometimes do, and they’re stuck in a rut — they’re frozen in time, in a way, just going through their routine without any heat or passion in what their doing. . .

Greg‘s funny because he’s from Montreal and is very much a city kinda guy, a transient guy that goes wherever the work is and so on. But all his plays for some reason are set in the North, and he’s not from there. But I think there’s something in the North the speaks to him in terms of alienation and isolation.

Photo by Jos van Wunnik

What does your creative process involve? Is it like talking to yourself, walking around the city?

It’s exactly that! You make doodles, you talk to yourself, there’s a Shakespearean thing where he talks about “Your eyes in fine frenzy rolling” which is basically that creative moment where your eyes are rolling in the back of your head and you’re just imagining it. I’m a big walker, I think best when I’m just walking around, and you just kind of start picturing it. That’s how I do it anyways, I just start to imagine the world, the rules of the world and then I start to bring other people in to what I’m envisioning and we build from there and it becomes a much more collaborative process. And sometimes I search images online, like for this play I found a picture of this white birch forest. There was something about the stark, monolithic nature of these trees that spoke to me with this play. You just start building a world in your mind. Sometimes it’s an easy thing and sometimes it’s not.

Craig Hall’s last production in Vancouver for the time-being, Greg MacArthur’s Snowman, opens tonight and runs from November 4th – 19th, 2011 at the Art’s Club Revue Stage on Granville Island.

I wasn't the only one interested in talking to Craig Hall. This blackbird flew by for a chat too. Oct 25 2011.

Hive for those of you not familiar with it was a collaboration between 12 theatre companies with 12 distinct performance and a whole lot of social thrown in. Think party, theatre-style. The Fourth Wall in the Theatre is the imaginary wall at the front of the stage.  In Hive this wall is removed by the audience becoming more of a participant within the performance.

As you read the interview below, the lines in bold are my questions and the chunks of elegant prose are Craig’s answers.

I notice that after your becoming Artistic Producer of Rumble, the theatrical phenomenon of Hive began. What was the inspiration behind this project?

Hive was an event, but the predecessor of the event was a thing called Progress Lab, which was the brainchild of Kim Collier, the woman who runs The Electric Company. Kim had this idea that there was no conversation happening, that we were all stuck in our little companies, doing our thing and toiling away. She got tired of not being able to have a conversation about the problems she was having or sharing her successes and so on, so she started Progress Lab. It was a very informal thing: it was just an opportunity of every once in a while, getting together and quite honestly, drinking a bit and eating a bit and in a semi-structured kind of way we’d talk about what everybody was doing.

Well, you do that and inevitably, it leads to some ideas. So Hive was an idea that bubbled to the surface one night out of this collection of (at that time) eleven companies’ artistic directors, artistic personnel and even administrators and managers. Everyone was so inspired and inspiring. I could not tell you the gist of where the seed of the idea came from, I don’t think any of us could tell you that. And like Progress Lab it was an opportunity for us all to do something together. To give ourselves the opportunity to just do something outrageous or completely wrong, with no pressure of extended runs and everything else. We just had the chance to make these beautiful little tidbits where we could do something outrageous and see what happens. And one thing we didn’t realize was that each of these companies had a limited reach for their audiences . . . well, you put eleven companies together and that reach is massive.

Kunaka Marimba band plays at Hive 2. Image from buzzbuzzbuzz.ca.

We didn’t even advertise the event and it just sold out, because the buzz was out there. . . “What are they doing? Why are they doing this? Where are they doing this?” The buzz swept across the country, in the theatre communities at least. The second Hive we did at Magnetic North. They caught wind of it and asked us if we could do that again. For them it was a way for them to come to town and actually profile the work of eleven companies when they generally would only do two or three. That was another big success that sold out. Then with the Cultural Olympiad, they came back and asked us to do it a third time.

It seems that Hive dissolved the fourth wall a little bit, because it made the process of going to the theatre more participatory, drop-in and mingly.  Was the goal of Hive to make theatre that was more like that?

Yeah, I say I don’t know where the seed for Hive came from, but in a way it sort of came from the desire to have a big party, and to have theatre be a part of that party.  Like you went in and you got a menu of what you’d get to see and as an audience member you had to actively work to make sure you could see the one that you wanted to see, and had to figure out how to get in. So it was very participatory, and some of the little shows were more participatory than others, but generally the feel of the whole event was very participatory and social … hugely social in fact, in a way that theatre generally isn’t. You’re usually stuck into this cold room, they turn the lights out and you sit there by yourself, anonymously. And in this event, there was no being anonymous. Partly because of the intimate nature of the work and partly because you had to interact with other audience members to figure out how they got to see this or that show.

Linda Quibell of Felix Culpa performs at Hive. Photo from buzzbuzzbuzz.ca.

What do you think the audience was receiving from Hive that made it so attractive to them and popular? Do you think there was some intimacy in the theatre offered with Hive?

I think there’s that, and because of the nature of the theatre in Vancouver — Vancouver’s always had really site-specific theatre where you have to go to this strange place [to see a show]– we don’t have a lot of venues. I think that because of that the audiences here are used to participating a little bit and being thrown a bit of a curveball. I think the possibilities that Hive offered of a) being able to have a drink b) the fact that each of these shows is about ten minutes long c) if they didn’t like it, they could go find the next one. They got this sort of taster menu, and people love taster menus at restaurants, because they get to try a little bit of everything. And I think in some ways these people could come to this event and try out the work of twelve different theatre companies, and then from there decide which companies they liked. Our hope always was that they would follow up with the companies that they did like and go to their other shows. I think the social aspect of it was what people really got off on.

In an earlier interview, you express how you’re not a fan of the view of  ’theatre as medicine’, or something that’s done as a chore. I’ve read that one of the purposes of theatre is to disturb the comforted and comfort the disturbed. Do you think this is what theatre should be? What do you think theatre does?

I think there’s all sorts of kind of theatre. I mean there’s pure entertainment — I’m about to take over a company in Calgary that really sees itself as a popular theatre. In the same way that murder mystery, as a genre of fiction, is seen as the junk food of fiction, well that’s what murder mystery is in theatre as well, people like to come and have fun and be entertained and then to leave, to not have to challenge their political views necessarily — maybe subversively sometimes, but it’s primarily about the entertainment of it. There’s agitprop theatre, or theatre with a political bent and some people really like that — they like something that challenges the way they look at the world. I think theatre-makers make theatre for different reasons, sometimes to challenge the staus quo, sometimes just because it’s like they have this really funny joke that they want to tell for an hour. With Canadian English Theatre, there is no real history or culture of it in our society. People get introduced to it, but there are very few people that grow up with it as part of their regular lives, so I think very often people are dragged there by someone who does go to more theatre — very often by their girlfriend or their wife, to be honest — and they’re forced to sit there and take this thing in, and it’s generally kind of boring and they don’t necessarily understand the language and it’s not really that relevant to their lives — at least I think that’s the preconception that they go in with. But I think theatre in this town is rarely that anymore, and if it is it’s Bard on the Beach or the Playhouse. But other than that I think theatre now is a much more rigorous, fun and engaged activity in the way that music is or fashion is — but I don’t think we’ve managed to convince people of that just yet.

Craig Hall’s last production in Vancouver for the time-being, Greg MacArthur’s Snowman, opens this week and runs from November 4th – 19th, 2011 at the Arts Club Revue Stage on Granville Island.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Part 3 of the Craig Hall Interview and a look into the rehearsing of Snowman.

Craig Hall, Creative Producer for Rumble Productions. Oct 25 2011

What is it about a play that makes you want to produce it?

I think that’s a really hard thing to put a finger on.  Sometimes a play is good for a company, because it just fits perfectly with their mandate, or it’ll be a really great audience draw, but sometimes a play is just really right for you as an artist … I think you just know. You start right away with your own tastes — I don’t think I’d ever program anything that I really hate. But having said that my tastes are pretty wide, I don’t like just one particular kind of work. That’s why at Rumble over the years I’ve kept the ideas very broad, because I don’t want to do just physical-based theatre or just one type of theatre — I like all sorts of theatre.

What are some of your favourite plays?

Well actually Snowman is one of my favourite Canadian plays that I’ve come across over the last ten years, which is why I’m coming back to it again after all this time. My tastes tend to be slightly dark, tending towards the dark comedies. There was a show they just did at the Shaw Festival called When the Rain Stops Falling by the Australian writer Andrew Bovell. It was kind’ve dark and I actually really like filmic stuff like that on stage.

On that note, I’ve heard some in theatre sound slightly bitter about ours being a ‘going-to-the-movies’ culture. What are your thoughts about that attitude?

I think people say that for different reasons. I think there is a reaction to theatre that is perceived as ‘sitcoms on stage’ or movie melodrama on stage, where it’s like you could put the play up on a screen and it would be the same. But I like the challenge of having things on stage which have a really broad scope, and like a hundred locations, and where you can be really conceptual with how you approach them.

Photo by Bridget AMES.

In a show like When the Rain Stops Falling or a couple of shows of this Scottish writer David Greig, one called San Diego and another called (it’s a long one) A Cosmonaut’s Last Message to a Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, they go through time and space. One minute you’ll be in the now and then you’ll be in fifteen years from now. I love the challenge of having to take an audience on that journey in one small black box or stage, just through simple stage magic and ideas — being able to transport people that way is really exciting. I’m drawn much more to that sort of play than to a play that takes place in the drawing room of an old English country house and stays there. I think [in the former] you have much more free range of storytelling and a much fuller range in the theatricality of it.

Are there some films or filmic plays that you like?

I think the plays I just mentioned and Snowman are very filmic plays and in a different way. Greg’s writing style is very direct address, the actors on stage talk directly to the audience. There’s sort of a hindsight quality to them, almost like a documentarian has come across these people after the events and started asking them what happened. They basically start to tell the story of what happened. Very often they’re talking directly to you and then suddenly they’re in the past, actively entrenched in the story, but then they’ll pop right back out again. The layers and layers of registers is what’s really challenging about the piece.

We were visited by a chatty black bird part way through the interview. Oct 25 2011.

It’s funny, when I first did Snowman back in 2003, there was no context for this style, this direct address style was very new. It was not to everybody’s taste, because a lot of people liked to have that veil, that fourth wall comes down and you just sit back and watch things unfold. They didn’t like to be talked to, but I loved it. But now, doing this play in 2011, we have TV shows like The Office and Modern Family where there’s this strange mockumentary thing, where characters are doing exactly that and talking to the camera. So in some ways it kind of makes our job a little more challenging, because people understand that convention now, and and in some ways it makes them complacent with it. But it also helps because the audience knows what this is now, and they are able to sit back and be okay with it.

What motivates you to do the work that you do? What does it do for you personally and what do you think that it’s doing in the world?

That’s a good question. I’ve always struggled with that question, because there are other artists out there that have a real agenda in what they’re doing. They’re out to change the way people think or change the world or at the very least to shed light on something. I’ve never been motivated that way, I just really like stories. I read a lot of stories, I write stories occasionally, I love movies, I love to be entertained. It’s not that I don’t think there are poignant things to be said, but often that stuff is secondary to just wanting to either hear or tell really great story.

Craig Hall’s last production for the time-being in Vancouver, Greg MacArthur’s Snowman, opens this week and runs from November 4th – 19th, 2011 at the Arts Club Revue Stage on Granville Island.

The play is set in Anthrax-phobic Washington D.C. around the time George Bush Jr announced the country’s invasion of Iraq — an invasion much like that of Vietnam, in that it continues despite public dissent, has been immensely costly, and has little to gain and much more to lose from what seems like a futile endeavor. In this political climate, Emily Morrison travels to the capital because she must have audience with McNamara, as  she has something important to say.

Evan Frayne as Norman Morrison in Sean Devine's Re:Union. Photo by Ron Reed.

Some history about the characters is in order. Emily Morrison is the daughter of  ethics professor Norman Morrison,  a pacifist who protested American involvement in the Vietnam war by soaking himself in kerosene and setting himself on fire outside Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office.  For reasons that historians (or the audience at the end of Re:Union) cannot entirely ascertain, Morrison took his daughter Emily with him that day in 1965, when she was not-yet a year old. Norman Morrison set himself on fire to express how strongly he felt the pain of those suffering in Vietnam — a costly, symbolic act, that did not persuade Robert McNamara to try and stop the war.

While it would be simple to conclude with resignation that Robert McNamara was a soulless, amoral warmonger with no concern for the suffering of others, Re:Union‘s portrayal of McNamara makes such a reduction impossible (though it does entertain the notion substantially). Through his interaction with the intrepid Emily Morrison, the play shows McNamara as someone underneath whose gruff, defensive demeanor is a sensitive, intelligent man who is conflicted by his past, and even present, actions. Though in the play McNamara never directly states his regrets about Vietnam, Andrew Wheeler’s subtle and powerful portrayal of this historical figure hints at the immense weight of guilt McNamara still carries with him. All the while his position remains complicated by his loyalty to the American state, or his fear of denouncing current government actions.

Andrew Wheeler as Robert McNamara in Sean Devine's play Re:Union. Photo by Ron Reed.

Errol Morris famously interviews McNamara in the documentary The Fog of War, where the retired Secretary of Defense describes himself as a war criminal, publicly acknowledging the impact of his decisions while providing fascinating insight into the historical moment of America in the 1960s. I re-watched this documentary after watching Re:Union, and I got so much more out of it than the first time I watched it. McNamara takes centre stage in this documentary, while the story of Norman Morrison appears as a tragic coda, and the story of Emily is hardly seen at all.

In refreshing contrast, Emily Morrison (played by Alexa Devine) is a strong voice in Re:Union: she takes her moral and political convictions to butt heads with McNamara’s radically different ones, and in the ensuing exchange they raise questions about political action. Most strident are the questions: what are the consequences of action? and what are the consequences of inaction? For me the play sparked an invigorating debate about Norman Morrison’s radical act of protest — while it displayed an immense level of devotion to peace, would another expression of dissent have been more effective in halting the war? Were the decision-makers in a position to be so moved? What is an effective protest? What can individuals do in the face of the mechanized war effort (the same Eisenhower warned us of in his farewell address)? How can the individual influence the state?  Could Morrison’s act in any way be construed as selfish? The Robert McNamara in the play certainly believes it was, while Emily vehemently disagrees, and follows in her father’s footsteps. . . Frequent and ghostly visitations from Norman Morrison (played by Evan Frayne), as the professor of ethics addressing his class, flesh out the philosophical background required to understand his line of thinking, while the  grief of all three morally fraught characters endures throughout the performance.

Alexa Devine and Evan Frayne as Emily and Norman Morrison in Seav Devine's Re:Union. Photo by Ron Reed.

Re:Union does an exquisite job of evoking the environments of a rainy D.C., Morrison’s lonely, seedy motel, Morrison’s university lecture hall, an underground subway, the invisible crowds and sense of expectation at McNamara’s press conferences, and the  darkened courtyard outside McNamara’s office in the Pentagon. It does all this in the intimate Pacific Theatre with ingeniously few and simple props, skilled lighting and projection design, and the cleverness of many more talents which I have not yet the know-how to name, but will do my best to credit: a big congratulations production designer Jason H. Thompson, director John Langs, sound designer Noah Drew, and set and lighting designer John Webber for drawing a variety of chilling and convincing environments out of the theatre space, and with such seamless transitions between scenes. Thank you to actors Alexa Devine, Andrew Wheeler and Norman Morrison for their moving performances and to Sean Devine for writing this thought-provoking play.

You can see Sean Devine’s Re:Union at the Pacific Theatre until November 12. Showtimes are Wednesday — Saturday at 8 p.m., with Saturday matinees at 2 p.m.

On a related note, alongside Re:Union the co-production company Horseshoes & Handgrenades is offering a community outreach series about political activism, community responsibility and anti-militarism called The Activist City. Offerings include panel discussions, workshops, poetry readings, guest speakers and bloggers. Many of these discussions are by-donation, and sound pretty interesting. Check out The Activist City schedule to find what you’d like to attend!

Here’s some background on the play itself: Forum (the book) was written by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.  The musical was inspired by the farces of ancient Roman playwright Plautus, who wrote some of the earliest surviving works of Latin literature (fast facts  – courtesy Sage Wiki).

Mike Wild (Hysterium) and Ryan Mooney (Pseudolus)

That would explain the the abundance of classic comic devices that the Forum uses so dexterously.  For anyone wanting to see cases of mistaken identity and mad coincidence seamlessly taken to comical extremes, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is the play for you.

The actors’ exuberance in the cozy Jericho Arts Centre is really palpable, especially during the Forum‘s first feel-good little number, where all the actors, in a whirlwind of song and dance, directly address the audience promising “Something for Everyone . . . Comedy Tonight!”. The song and the actors transparently and eagerly declare that the Forum is meant to make you laugh (I am not ashamed to say I chortled).  I say this performance is heartwarming because the way the cast looks right into the audience’s eyes as they perform this song, with big, warm smiles on their faces — their desire to entertain and make us laugh is so genuine, you can see that it comes from way under their makeup, makeshift ancient Roman wear and glittering false eyelashes.

Peter Stainton (Sennex) and the Courtesans.

I love how the character’s names reflect their personalities too — I read somewhere this is also a feature of classical comedy. “Pseudolus” (played by Ryan Mooney) is a loveable scoundrel who can weave fabulous lies to talk himself out of any situation — a talent he uses to try and buy his freedom by arranging a love affair with his master and the girl next door; while “Hysterium” (played by Mike Wild) is a bundle of nerves who grows more and more neurotic as the events of the play threaten to blow his cover. A personal favourite name/character of mine in this play is “Miles Gloriousus” – captain, conqueror, bride-buyer, narcissist (played by Matt Ramer). I could learn a few moves from the names of the courtesans (and the talented courtesans themselves): in the above picture, (left  to right) are Gymnasia (played by Ranae Miller), Vibrata (played by Kiki Lipsett), Titinabula (played by Sable Strub), the Geminae (played by Rebecca Friesen and Jennifer Kuhl) and Panacea (played by Brittany Cairns).

Cameron Dunster (Hero) and Elyse Maloway (Philia)

The Jericho Arts Centre is perfectly small for this spirited play: much of the humour comes from the characters’ confiding in or addressing the audience like an old friend, involving them in the story — I particularly love this kind of theatre.

I recently learned that the cast throws in funny one-liners that weren’t in the script, as some friends that went after opening night notified me of new jokes in the play that I hadn’t seen. While I feel a little jealous having missed these, that also explains why the humour in the play comes across as spontaneous, and is all the more hysterical for it.

Without further spoilers, you can see Fighting Chance Productions‘ A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Jericho Arts Centre until October 22nd. Shows are at 8 p.m. from Tuesday through Saturday, with matinees at 2 p.m on Saturday and 3 p.m. on Sunday.

Bravo to the cast, crew, and band for all their hard work in putting together this play.  And a big congratulations to Cathy Wilmot for directing this wonderful show!