Angels in America at the Arts Club's Stanley Theatre

Among the many ideas being explored in Tony Kushner's epic play Angels in America is a dialectics of scale. On the one hand there are, as Louis says to Belize late in the first part of the play, Millennium Approaches, monolithic concepts like freedom and democracy, even the "idea of America" itself, that seem so huge and abstract as to be unimaginable--except when they are organized into specific structures, like government and religion, that bear down upon and circumscribe our daily lives. And then there's the "small problem" of living those lives in the face of such monoliths: the intimate acts of care or betrayal, obligation or disconnection, that one performs with or on those closest to you.

I was put in mind of this framework by the Arts Club's current production of Millennium, which I saw in preview last night at the Stanley Theatre on Granville Street. Directed by the Electric Company's Kim Collier, the production is dominated by Ken MacKenzie's monolithic set design, a giant faux-marble pedimented structure with steps ascending upstage that puts one in mind of the facade of a courthouse (where Louis and Joe both work), or the Lincoln Memorial, or any of those other giant mausoleum-like structures that Harper suggests dominates the architecture of Washington, DC. The set is so overwhelming that no matter how inventively Collier distributes her actors about it, or through what myriad portals within it they (and their furniture) appear and disappear, the performers inevitably look puny on stage (even from where I was sitting in the sixth row of the centre orchestra section). Perhaps this is the point, with the neo-classicism of American colonial architecture here standing in (quite literally) for the symbolic nation-state that does not so much absorb one within its warm embrace (the US being "a melting pit where nothing has melted," as Rabbi Chemelwitz tells us at the top of the show) as threaten to obliterate one with its surveilling shadow.

I would have no problem with this if Collier remembered, dialectically, what the theatre--and this play especially (Kushner being a good Brechtian)--proposes as an antidote to such spectacularized separations: the proximate and material connection between bodies on stage. Instead, she embraces the scaling up of spectacle, in part by inserting a rotating chorus of figures in scenes normally featuring just one or two characters. I didn't mind this in the opening prologue by the Rabbi (Gabrielle Rose), when other members of the ensemble join Louis (Ryan Beil) and Prior (Damien Atkins) as members of Louis's extended family mourning the death of his grandmother. However, I thought the effect an unnecessary and distracting caprice in two other places: in the already split scene when Prior is being examined by the nurse Emily (Lois Anderson) and Louis is talking with Belize (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff), the rest of the company parades on stage in hospital gowns and trailing IV drips, the presumed nod to the scale and complexity of the AIDS pandemic here only managing to pull focus from Prior; and in the scene when Hannah (Rose again) is asking her friend Ella (also played by Anderson) to sell her house in Salt Lake City following her phone call with Joe (Craig Erickson), Collier mysteriously sends out a chorus of Mormon parishioners to moon for a few seconds before retreating.

Even more questionable for me was the use of live camera feeds and video projection. The conceit first appears with Mr. Lies's entrance, the physically nimble and charismatic Jackman-Torkoff entering the stage trailing a camera, which he then proceeds to train on Harper (Celine Stubel) as she chases him around the stage and declares her desire to visit Antartica to see the hole in the ozone layer. Thereafter cameras recur in all of the subsequent dream or fantasy scenes: when Prior and Harper share the "threshold of revelation"; when Prior is visited by the ghosts of his two similarly named ancestors (played by Craig Erickson and Brian Markinson); and when Ethel Rosenberg (Rose) haunts the brownstone of Roy Cohn (Markinson). I get that Collier is using technology to suggest that these scenes are taking place in another realm or medium; however, especially with the scene between Prior and Harper, each on separate beds with a mini-digital camera pointed at them, and with their respective images projected side by side on cloth panels that have descended between the pillars of the set, it felt like I was watching a Skype conversation. The whole point of these two shattered characters sharing the threshold of revelation is that we see and accept that in the theatre different temporal and spatial realms can touch and that bodies can cross over into those realms to speak certain truths to each other--and to us. I don't see the point of added technological embellishment, especially when the performances--as, in this case, by Atkins and Stubel--are already so strong. In its final use, in the scene between Roy and Ethel, I actually think the camera gets in the way of the acting, with Markinson--whose performance I was only really starting to warm to--and Rose--who doesn't really get a chance to establish a definitive take on her character--often struggling to make sure they stay in the frame. (Interestingly, Beil, who doesn't have to operate or appear before a camera, ends up giving the finest performance, and Erickson's Joe is also very compelling.)

Indeed, in terms of its embrace of scale and technological spectacle, this production bears an interesting contrast to the excellent and very low-tech staging of Millennium at Studio 58 last fall (which I reviewed here). I realize that the Stanley as venue in some senses calls for a scaled up and more spectacular production, complete with the full-on Spielbergian descent of the Angel at the end. That said, bigger isn't always better.

P.

Helen Lawrence at the Stanley

Richard and I weren't planning to go to the Arts Club production of Helen Lawrence, on at the Stanley through mid-April. However, a pair of free tickets came our way and so we made a night of it. The experience confirmed my initial misgivings.

Conceived and created by Vancouver-based conceptual artist Stan Douglas, in collaboration with television writer Chris Haddock (Da Vinci's Inquest), the work combines live theatrical performance with real-time video projection and pre-recorded 3D imaging. Whereas the earlier Arts Club co-production at the Stanley, the Electric Company's Tear the Curtain!, had mostly cut between its live and mediated mise-en-scènes, Helen Lawrence attempts to superimpose them. On a mostly bare stage, behind a floor-to-ceiling scrim stretching across the proscenium, the actors perform a series of live action scenes. These are captured by three cameras we see being operated downstage, with the images simultaneously projected on the scrim, which via those pre-recorded 3D sequences fills in the details of the missing set. It's a neat trick, to be sure, but what's on the scrim so commands our attention--because so often in close-up--I don't know why Douglas and Haddock didn't just make a film. Indeed, liveness and the theatre seem completely ancillary to the whole ethos of the project. There isn't even a debate about the complementarity or the competition between the two media (as in Tear the Curtain!): not least because we are so insistently drawn to both the images on the scrim and the apparatus of their projection behind it, film completely dominates theatre in this equation.

To the point where the piece's film noir conceit seems completely foreign to the stage. Haddock squeezes virtually every cliché of the genre into his script and the hard-boiled dialogue, while handled deftly by the entire company, often sounds tinny and recycled. More problematic are the larger structural problems with the story. The ostensible main plot, about the eponymous wronged femme fatale (Lisa Ryder) traveling from LA to Vancouver to track down her no-good lover, Percy Wallace/Walker (The X-Files' Nicholas Lea), feels (thematically and politically) secondary to the sub-plot about brothers Buddy Black (Allan Louis) and Henry Williams (Sterling Jarvis) battling each other and the corrupt Vancouver constabulary in Hogan's Alley. Neither story is satisfactorily resolved, to say nothing of the confusing narrative MacGuffin we are thrown in the form of small-time grifter Edward Banks (Adam Kenneth Wilson), who holds up with apparent impunity Chief of Police James Muldoon (Gerard Plunkett) near the end of the play; meanwhile Banks' long-suffering German wife Eva (Ava Markus) may or may not be on her way to Hogan's Alley to have an abortion.

A noticeable hiccup in Helen Lawrence's development was the departure of original director Kim Collier (ex of The Electric Company). In press leading up to the premiere last week, she cited concerns with the story as one of the reasons for her parting ways with Haddock and Douglas, who assumed directing duties (assisted by the National Arts Centre's Sarah Stanley). I now understand what she means.

However, an even more serious concern for me is the aesthetic ideology behind the piece. The performance theorist Patrice Pavis has written that intermedial interdisciplinarity doesn't just mean taking the technologies of one medium and plunking them down in another (e.g. screens in the theatre); rather, it means remediating those technologies within an aesthetic idiom specific to the mode of presentation of the work (e.g. finding a way to represent montage on stage through blackouts, or within the body of a performer). I think, in this regard, of how "cinematic" Crystal Pite's choreography often seems to me; now, she is not one to stint on additional technological effects (including projections). But in a work like Grace Engine, for example, she also gives one the kinesthetic "feel" of film noir with nary a camera in sight.

There is a lot of creative and financial muscle behind this production of Helen Lawrence, and it is on its way to some pretty prestigious presentation venues. It remains to be seen what kind of critical reception it will receive from national and international theatre audiences. For now, I remain convinced that the project would have been much more successful--and easier to make--as a narrative film. Given Stan Douglas' career to date (Suspiria, Journey into Fear, etc.), one would have thought that to be the logical next step (though, to be fair, in works like Monodramas, he has also shown previous interest in the theatre--particularly the work of Samuel Beckett). One wonders if the likely comparisons to Steve McQueen are an impediment.

P.

Sublime Bard on the Beach (and Butoh)

In Kim Collier's digital-age Hamlet, part of this year's Bard on the Beach season, Jonathon Young gives a towering performance (deeply intelligent, refreshingly physical, intensely feeling) as the young prince interrupted, a rich West Van postgrad genuinely flummoxed by his father's sudden death and perhaps even more unmoored by his mother's quick remarriage. This is telegraphed in a wordless opening scene Collier inserts even before the curtain speech, with a tousled, barefoot Hamlet alone in the sleekly modern, all-white reception room of the royal compound (the stunning set is by Pam Johnson), staring past the ghostly sheeted furniture and out the sliding glass doors that yield onto the sublime vista that is the Bard mainstage's signature but that in this case truly does overwhelm and undo our focalizing subject (although the fact that for a moment at yesterday's matinee Young had to share the stage with a patron eager to capture the view on his iPhone somewhat marred the effect). Just as the lights dim and Torquil Campbell and Chris Dumont's original music fills the theatre, a scantily clad Ophelia (a wonderfully open and vulnerable Rachel Cairns) enters stage left and joins Hamlet in a post-coital embrace downstage; the move neatly establishes that the couple has a romantic past, thus making all the more powerful and shocking Hamlet's subsequent sacrificing of his girlfriend as part of the collateral damage of his revenge plot.

Of course, the play famously pivots on whether Hamlet is up to this task. However, in Collier's production this is something about which we are never in doubt. As soon as Hamlet joins Bernardo and Marcellus and Horatio (played here by Jennifer Lines, who again proves she is perhaps the crispest, most enunciative deliverer of Shakepeare's lines in the whole Bard company) on the heath of Elsinore and learns from the ghost of his father the truth about his murder and usurpation at the hands of Claudius, he is resolved to answer the foul deed in kind. And Young makes it clear that all of his subsequent actions--his feigned "antic disposition," for example, and his conscription of the visiting players into performing an amended version of "The Murder of Gonzago" as part of the Act 3 inset play (with the company here making the most of the stage technology and projecting in close-up the dumb show via a live video feed)--are in service of this goal. This, then, shifts the focus from psychology to ontology, with the bookish Hamlet's soliloquies collectively comprising a study in the discovery of being: and to be Hamlet in this case above all means to be his father's son, to live up to the inheritance that the young prince perhaps in his early college days wasn't so interested in acknowledging, but that now, seeing Claudius on the throne that should rightfully belong to him (and, as importantly, knowing the similarly-aged Fortinbras is on Denmark's doorstep with his army), he is belatedly reminded he might just want after all. Tellingly, in this respect, the play ends not with a blackout on the corpses that litter the stage at the end of Act 5, but with the cast exiting one by one as Hamlet picks himself up, climbs the upstage dais stairs and sits down purposefully in the the throne chair previously occupied by his uncle.

But if Hamlet is his father's son, he is equally his mother's, and another great pleasure in this production comes from soaking up the chemistry between Young and Barbara Pollard's Gertrude. Not that, as in so many stagings, they ratchet up the Oedipal business unduly. Instead, in their scenes together, Young and Pollard cannily and economically show how their former closeness has become such a gulf in part because of their misunderstandings of how each should manage their grief. For Hamlet, Gertrude's quick remarriage to Claudius is an unconscionable betrayal of what should have been her chaste honouring of her first husband's memory. But, as Gertrude's brief dance with her son to Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is" during the closet scene demonstrates, for her, part of the work of mourning is getting on with the business of living. And though it's not necessarily there in the relatively few lines that poor Getrude is given in the play, I've always felt that her marriage to Hamlet Sr. might not have been all it was cracked up to be (particularly in the bedroom), and that in the younger brother she is rediscovering her sexuality. This is something Pollard, grounded, earthy, sensual, and wearing a series of sexy outfits by costume designer Nancy Bryant, ably brings out in her terrific performance.

Other cast members also stand out: Richard Newman, who manages to find just the right note of dignity in Polonius' buffoonery; Bill Dow, who is a suitably oily and sleazy Claudius (again, Bryant's costume choices help out immeasurably here); and, once again, Cairns as an Ophelia triply undone by patriarchy (father, brother, boyfriend), and who somehow manages to turn her willow song into something contemporary and Feist-like. While I liked him as one of the gravediggers, I wasn't so taken with Duncan Fraser's channeling of the voice of doom for the ghost of Hamlet Sr. As Laertes, Todd Thomson confirmed what I didn't like about his performance as Orlando in As You Like It in 2011: he's always shouting his lines. Finally, while I appreciated the cross-gender casting of Naomi Wright as Rosencrantz, turning Hamlet's duplicitous college friends into a grasping, social-climbing couple, I thought her performance was somewhat too hopped-up (she is always rubbing her nose, like she's just done a line of coke) and Craig Erickson's Guildenstern too passive.

Finally,  a word on Collier's trademark use of new media and technology. While this certainly wasn't an Electric Company show (for that, we'll have to wait till next spring and the Arts Club premiere of Helen  Lawrence), there was an abundance of liquid crystal display monitors on stage: from the flat screen TV stage left upon which Fortinbras' mug briefly appears, and which otherwise showed CCTV images of other parts of the Elsinore compound, to the various iPads and smart phones toted around by characters. Mostly these worked, and were used in service of the action on stage. The one mildly distracting bit was Hamlet's constant turning on and off of the scene music, which, beyond establishing that almost all of the sound in this production is diegetic (as befits our constantly plugged-in generation), and that the folks in the tech booth were on their game with the cues, didn't really add anything dramatically.

These are minor quibbles, however. This is an invigorating production of a canonical play, one that makes it formally contemporary without gutting its thematic substance.

An early evening exit from the theatre at Kits Point was also a nice bookend to a day that began with an early morning visit to the tip of Point Grey for Kokoro Dance's annual "Wreck Beach Butoh." I can't believe that in all my years in Vancouver, this was the first time I'd made the trek out to our clothing optional beach to see Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi and company move between surf and sand clad only in white body paint. It was cold, but also--and quite literally--awe-inspiring.

Talk about the Vancouver sublime!

P.