Love and Information at UBC

This semester I'm teaching Caryl Churchill's 2012 play Love and Information as part of a course on contemporary epic theatre at SFU. So I was pleased to discover that UBC Theatre was staging the work at the Frederic Wood Theatre this month. Helmed by MFA Directing candidate Lauren Taylor, the production is an ambitious and highly theatrical take on Churchill's elliptically dialectical staging of the relationship between knowledge and desire in the twenty-first century.

As with most of Churchill's work, Love and Information is a radical experiment in theatrical form. The play is made up of seven sections, each with seven scenes, plus a "last scene" called "Facts," which takes the form of a quiz, and which Taylor cleverly stages as a surreal game show that, with its eye-popping colour palette and fantastical costumes, looks like a diversion straight out of Panem in The Hunger Games. The scenes range in length from a few lines to several pages of dialogue. However, we are given no clues to setting, few stage directions, and the characters are not named or described in any way. But we are told that the characters must be different in each scene, which without the necessary strategy of actors (in this case an 18-strong team of very talented UBC BFA acting students) taking on five or six or more roles, would require a cast of more than 100. Additionally, Churchill instructs that the scenes in each section can be staged in any order. Finally, at the end of the playtext she includes several "random" scenes. Most of these (someone sneezing, someone reading bits of gossip from a magazine, multiplication tables or gene sequences, a display of sign language or morse code) are optional. However, the scenes she labels "Depression" are, in Churchill's words, an "essential part of the play," requiring one character to remain unresponsive as a succession of incomplete and banally offered non-sequiturs are articulated by someone else. Taylor's very smart choice for these scenes is to have each of the lines spoken in voice-over as a succession of cast members sit slumped on a chair downstage left, their morose and impassive faces projected in turn on a scrim behind them via a live video feed (the projection designer was Stefan Zubovic, who also did the lighting).

Because all of the "information" we get in each of the scenes in the play comes via the dialogue, a creative team is afforded much liberty in its interpretation of the different conversations and interactions. Taylor exploits this to maximum effect, playing with gender and setting and costuming and sound design to create fully-realized and often surprising mini-worlds, opening up a window onto these characters' domestic or professional or social lives, sometimes in the space of less than a minute. For example, "Lab," in which one character is explaining to another what he does with the baby chickens' brains which he injects with radioactive liquid and then dissects, is set in what I took to be the waiting area of a fancy restaurant, with the lab technician clearly oblivious to the fact that he is failing abysmally at seducing his date with the description of his work. "Spies," which unfolds as a conversation about the misinformation fed to the media and the public about the reasons for invading Iraq in 2003 (something that Churchill has allegorized before in Drunk Enough to Say I Love You), was staged as a debate between two spectators at a hockey game. And it was an inspired choice to have the dialogue in the super short "Decision," from section 6, delivered while the characters, ballroom dance partners, are engaged in a tango. And yet as much as I admired the deep thought that clearly went into constructing a back story for each of the play's scenes, and the relationship between the characters within them, I couldn't help feel that many of them were over-produced, with costume and prop and sound design choices often detracting from what I read as some of Churchill's more instrumental and frankly transactional exchanges of information between characters. For example, in Section 5, I'm not sure that anything fruitful was gained by having the "Children" scene (in which one character quizzes another about his infertility) preceded by a long live karaoke sequence. (While this production runs a compact and intermissionless 90 minutes, it still felt that the pacing could have been tighter, especially in the scene changes.)

There is a reason, I think, that the characters in Love and Information are presented as ciphers, bits of interchangeable binary code that, in the larger montage of scenes, form part of an algorithmic equation that suggests that everything, including people and feelings, is now data, and that it's not a question any longer of what we know but how we know--and maybe even more importantly who knows and who we know. This comes out in the one optional random scene that Taylor chooses to include, "Genes," in which a sequence of DNA codons unspools on a downstage scrim as the cast walks back and forth across the stage behind it. In this regard, I wonder what it might have meant for this production if a more uniformly coherent and, dare I say, clinical design aesthetic had been chosen for each of the scenes? Then, too, what additional discoveries might have transpired had Taylor taken up Churchill's invitation to mix up the order of the scenes in each section? The choices this play affords are on one level understandably overwhelming. At the same time, as Taylor states in her director's notes, being overloaded with choice is part of what Churchill is exploring in this play. Sifting through the structural rubik's cube that is this play to find its emotional core means not trying to resolve the contradictory pull between love and information, but rather isolating the feeling or epiphanic sensation or experience of the former amid all the memes that comprise the latter.

P

Sleepless in Vancouver

Around this time of year it is customary for many of us to gather with friends and family at each others homes to share some food, maybe exchange gifts, sing songs, and/or play some goofy party games, and almost certainly raise a glass of holiday cheer. And, just as assuredly, witness at least one spectacular scene of relationship discord or breakdown. If you're looking to steel yourself for the latter event, or simply prefer to experience such things vicariously, I recommend checking out the inspired production of Caryl Churchill's Three More Sleepless Nights that's playing in different neighbourhoods around the city through this Friday.

Churchill's play was first produced in 1980, between Cloud Nine and Top Girls. Unlike these more famous works, Three More does not range boldly across great swathes of history, and contains little of their (at least at the time) radically experimental dramaturgy. Instead, it is a quiet domestic roundelay, sharply and accessibly written, involving two couples whose relationships, in the wee hours of the morning, have reached a crisis point. The innovation of this particular production, by a group of very talented SFU Contemporary Arts students and recent grads, is that the audience gets to witness the proceedings up close and personal, with the play being staged in a different borrowed apartment every evening--one which the actors, like us, are encountering for the first time.

This results in a most intriguing, and theatrically reinforcing, dynamic: that is, the audience's initial timidity and discomfort about following the actors around an unfamiliar space and observing them at their most intimate and vulnerable (ie, semi-clothed and in bed) is played off of the actors' equally improvisatory negotiation of a space that is likewise new to them, but which they must nevertheless move through and, indeed, command as if it were their own. No doubt this places just as much stress on the director (Conor Wylie) and the stage/production manager (Chelsea MacDonald): how to ensure your actors hit, night after night, both the comic and achingly anguished grace notes of Churchill's script while also giving them individual latitude on where--and when--to hit them?; how to find seven different workable spaces in the first place, and then to ensure that the few key props that are needed are where the actors would logically expect to find them? That both these questions are answered in this production is a credit to Wylie and MacDonald, respectively.

After we are all settled in the designated space, after we have been offered wine or beer, and after--most importantly--we have been encouraged to make a donation towards the evening's entertainment, the proceedings begin when Frank (Sean Marshall Jr.) arrives. He's drunk and his wife, Margaret (Tara Gallagher Harris), has been waiting up for him. Recrimination, in this instance, is less about how much he's had to drink at the pub than whether or not he was there with his mistress. Frank doesn't confirm or deny Margaret's suspicions; instead he taunts her by suggesting it's her fault for his infidelity, that her constant nagging, her poor housekeeping, and, perhaps most tellingly, her own ongoing flirtation with a man named Pete at the same pub has essentially driven him into another woman's arms. Marshall and Gallagher Harris, trailing each other back and forth between the kitchen and the bedroom, telegraph expertly in their overlapping dialogue, their tightly coiled movements, and especially in the weariness of their barely raised voices the complex mix of hurt and desire and regret of a couple who clearly still love each other, but who can no longer live together. That they find it impossible to move beyond this impasse is made clear at one point when we hear the offstage voice of a child being kept awake by their arguing (well, okay, it was Chelsea, kneeling beside me in the bedroom doorway).

The scene between Frank and Margaret ends when she goes to cool off--literally--in the shower. Two different actors--who until that point had just been fellow members of the audience--then strip to their underwear and hop into the bed just vacated by Frank. We are immediately plunged into the insomniac world of Dawn (Jamie Taylor) and Pete (Dan Borzillo). For the first few minutes it's just the two of them exchanging an occasional foggy grunt, communicating to each other and to us a clearly recurring pattern of sleeplessness. Then Pete starts to recount the plot of the movie Alien (Churchill doing pop culture--who knew?), his childlike delight in its thrills likely doing nothing to calm the panic of his wife, who repeats more than once that she is frightened--of what exactly (her husband? unnamed forces in the world? merely the dark?) we're never sure. Taylor and Borzillo have to act most of this scene lying prone on a bed, and they do a marvelous job physically conveying the void at the heart of their marriage, with Taylor scrunched all the way to the edge of her side of the bed and Borzillo gathering the covers under his armpits like the grown-up kid Pete clearly is. Borzillo gets most of the dialogue and it is a testament to his gifts as an actor that he not only managed to make a movie I have seen many times new to me again, but that he was able to convey through his well-timed pauses and heavy swallows (each of which echoed like a clarion in that tiny room) that he has retreated to the fantasy world of action thrillers in part because his own relationship has become alien to him. Taylor, by contrast, must communicate her distress mostly through gesture, and just by the way she cuts and eats a piece of watermelon we get a clear sense of someone disquieted by even the most routine tasks--including sleeping.

The final scene is between Margaret and Pete, now together following what we surmise is the eventual collapse of their previous relationships. However, Frank and Dawn still haunt their former lovers, and as much time is spent talking about them as about each other. When Pete starts to tell Margaret the plot of Apocalypse Now, we can guess where this new liaison is headed.

All the principals involved in this production are to be applauded for their very fine efforts in staging this play. That I lay awake for much of the night thinking about various aspects of the performances is testament to their excellence. Tonight the cast will be performing in Yaletown, and on Friday the final performance will take place in East Van. I think both nights are technically sold out, but there might be last-minute cancelations or a waiting list. If you're interested, contact Chelsea at threemoresleeplessnights@gmail.com.

P

Cheese: Toronto/Vancouver

Last night my sister-in-law, Arline, and I sat beside each other on her basement couch in Oshawa and offered a blow-by-blow critique of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Arline teaches high school drama, and so knows a thing or three about basic dramaturgy. Both of us agreed that the pacing was too slow, the human-to-effects scale and bodily massings totally out of whack (especially in the forest dancing sequences, when the members of the Alberta Ballet were simply too few and far between), and the overall national narrative simply riddled with kitschy cliches.

That's what you get, I guess, when you have an Australian running the show. Not only is Quebec more or less left out of the picture (earlier talks with Cirque de Soleil, Robert Lepage, and other Quebecois performing arts icons to participate in the events broke down, apparently, over creative differences), but BC and Vancouver have to cede their own wealth of local talent to national and international interlopers. Oh, right, but that's what we have the Cultural Olympiad for...

I wonder how much representatives of the Four Host First Nations were involved in the actually planning of the proceedings. The welcome was crucial, I understand, but whether in that particular iconographic/spectacularized way is open to debate: totems, giant spirit bears, and dancing in ceremonial regalia as the athletes march in more or less covers things, I guess. And getting that over and done with early allows us to get on with the real westward expansionist narrative. Clearly no one explained the concept of Indian time to Jacques Rogge and members of the dignitaries box, the seats reserved for the chiefs of the FHFN being noticeably unoccupied during the early going.

Granted, those killer whales were pretty cool. And slam poet Shane Koyczan got in some pretty good oral/aural riffs. And k.d. lang still has the smoothest alto in the music biz, doing for Leonard Cohen what she'd previously done for Roy Orbison (though ditch the white suit, sister--black is always more slimming). But what was with the mechanical failure with the torch tower at the end? And the motorcade of the Great One to the outdoor torch at Coal Harbour was pretty anticlimactic (were all five of the final torch bearers chosen on the basis of their aquiline noses?).

Likely the pelting rain on top of the protesters on top of the earlier news of the tragic death of the Georgian luger during a training run at Whistler earlier in the day was enough to make John Furlong want to reach for the nearest whiskey bottle. No excuse, however, for not, over the course of the past seven years, at least learning a few more sentences and phrases in decently accented French.

Watching the Opening Ceremonies from Toronto felt entirely appropriate, so disconnected am I from the events now that they have actually descended on the city, and so mediatized a spectacle are the Olympics in general. Much better to leave the live theatre-going to decent fare like the two plays I saw in Toronto on Wednesday: a matinee of Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, in a CanStage/Obsidian Theatre co-production, and featuring a star-making performance by Raven Dauda as Esther; and an evening performance of Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 at the Panasonic Theatre on Yonge Street, in a Mirvish Theatre production directed by Alisa Palmer (who had previously directed a much lauded remount of Top Girls in the city).

Hard to believe, in particular, that Churchill's play is more than 30 years old. Palmer played things a bit too much for belly laughs for my liking, but Churchill's gender politics are still as fresh as ever, and I was especially impressed by the performance of ex-Anne Shirley herself, Megan Follows. Indeed, after seeing this production I am more convinced than ever by the recent argument (published in the Guardian, was it?) that following Harold Pinter's death, the leading UK playwright is not David Hare or Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayn or Alan Bennett, but none other than Ms. Churchill herself. What would she make of London 2012, I wonder?

P.