PuSh 2018: King Arthur's Night at the Freddy Wood

Niall McNeil is a Vancouver-based actor with a distinguished professional pedigree, acting and making theatre as a child with the storied Caravan Farm Theatre, and appearing in several shows created by Leaky Heaven Circus. He also just happens to have Down's Syndrome. In 2011 Niall's first play, Peter Panties, co-written by Neworld Theatre's Marcus Youssef, and co-produced by Neworld and Leaky Heaven, premiered at the PuSh Festival. It was a boldly inventive and visually stunning reimagining of the Peter Pan story that was directed by my colleague Steven Hill (I blogged about it here). Now Niall and Marcus have collaborated on their follow-up work, King Arthur's Night, which opened last night at UBC's Frederic Wood Theatre as part of the 2018 PuSh Festival. A commission of Toronto's Luminato Festival, where it received it's premiere last summer. the piece has also toured to the National Arts Centre. But there's nothing like a hometown audience to bring the best out in a production. On that front, Niall and his team did not disappoint.

Many of the core collaborators on Peter Panties are back for King Arthur's Night, including composer and music director Veda Hille, this time not only leading the on-stage band (herself, drummer Skye Brooks, and the occasional additional accompanist), but also a 20-person choir. Theatre Replacement's James Long, who played the lead in Peter Panties (although Niall might dispute that), takes the helm as director this time. In addition to Niall, the cast includes three other Down's actors, including Tiffany King as Guinevere, Andrew Gordon as an axe-wielding Saxon warrior, and Matthew Tom-Wing as a goatherd. That the production very quickly moves from asking us to celebrate the presence and on-stage accomplishments of these differently abled performers to having us fall under the dramatic spell of the world they and the rest of the cast (Amber Funk-Barton, Nathan Kay, Billy Marchenski, Lucy McNulty, Kerry Sandomirsky, and Youssef) have collectively created is just one of many remarkable things about this show).

As with Peter Panties, the development process for King Arthur's Night involved Niall speaking the broad outlines of the story as he conceived it into an audio recorder, and then Marcus shaping and editing Niall's words into a loose narrative. An opening framing conversation and slide-show presentation by the two men contextualizes their working process, important aspects related to the development of this particular show, and the broad outlines of Arthurian legend. If in this prologue, Marcus-as-Merlin serves as amanuensis to the story of Niall-as-Arthur, the latter never lets the former forget who is star of this show. That said, one of the more interesting things about this telling of the Arthur story is how much stage time Niall cedes to the hero's rivals. In this respect, the play is loosely divided into two intersecting plot-lines. The first details the forbidden romance between Guinevere and Lancelot (Marchenski), which is beguiling both for the tenderness the lovers bestow upon each other, and for the tenderness they cannot help but still feel for the husband and best friend they are betraying. King is especially moving in the dancing she displays, which helps to convey both the excess of emotion she feels, and also how trapped she is as a woman in Camelot. Arthur's injunction to Lancelot early in the play not to overstep his station with Guinevere is also a subtle encoding of the dynamics of consent into the larger themes of the play--something that additionally resonates with our current #MeToo moment.

The second plot-line concerns Arthur's usurping son, Mordred (Kay), born of Arthur's incestuous relationship with his sister Morgana (Sandomirsky), who from her perch in Lothia is very much Merlin's equal in string-pulling: a slyly hilarious bit of downstage verbal jousting between the two telegraphs this perfectly. I don't know this part of the Arthur story well, but I gather that the siblings' forbidden coupling in a goat pen resulted in a cursed progeny who was born with horns. Whatever the exact details, spurred on by his mother's hatred for her brother, Mordred's destiny is to join Albion's sworn enemies, the Saxons, and attack the Knights of the Roundtable. The lead-up to this climax is punctuated by some wonderful additional movement sequences, first involving Funk-Barton leading Marchenski and McNulty in some bucking goat moves, and then this trio taking their cues from Gordon in how to wield their weapons in battle (the choreography is by Company 605's Josh Martin). All of this culminates in a coup-de-theatre that sees the choir descend from their upstage perch behind a scrim to become strewn corpses on the battlefield, McNulty's Sir Galahad and Tom-Wing's goatherd the only apparent survivors.

Indeed, Freddy Wood's large proscenium stage is the perfect venue for the imaginative scale of this production. That includes Long and his design team (including lighting designer Kyla Gardiner, sound designer Nancy Tam, and video designer Parjad Sharifi) matching Niall's interior dreamscape with equally vivid on-stage effects. But it also involves letting a sense of emotional intimacy pierce through all the spectacle. Hille's score is key to this; it manages to feel both rocking and whispered, and that after the battle scene we're left with Hille and the choir performing vocal murmurations as King's Guinevere flutters her hand above her heart reminds us that how ever dark this story gets, at its core there is love.

P

Next Week at The Cultch: Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be

I'm bummed that I am going to miss the full-length version of Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre next week. I have been following the development of this work over the past few years (read past posts here, here and here) and was excited to see this latest iteration, not least because it unites on stage all the previous performer-collaborators, including Justine A. Chambers, Susan Elliott, Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef.

Thankfully I was able to get a sneak peek of the work earlier today as choreographer and TCP AD Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg invited me to stop by the studio to take in a run-through. In deference to Tara and the performers--and also because the piece is still being refined in sections--I will not divulge what's in store for viewers. But I can say that there will be surprises--including from the costumes!

And also that the Prince section remains.

And, finally, that you would be a fool to miss this show.

P

Worshipping at the Altar of Tara Cheyenne

Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg is a fearless performer: in making character the centre of her unique brand of dance-theatre; in using humour to probe some of our deepest cultural taboos and human fears; and in putting herself over and over again in positions of extreme vulnerability and/or ridiculousness in order to establish a connection with her audience.

All these elements are on display in her latest work, Porno Death Cult, on through this Saturday at the Firehall in a production directed by Neworld's Marcus Youssef. Based on a 2010 pilgrimage Friedenberg took along the Camino de Santiago in Spain, the work explores the eroticism of devotion, the pornography of belief: whether that comes in the form of slick, Vegas-style Christian evangelism; new age Yoga maxims; or simply wanting to be filled up, like Friendenberg's central character Maureen, with something that incarnates, or indeed makes plainly carnal, the experience of faith.

Channeling the seductive androgyny of Jared Leto on Oscar night, as well as so many images of a crucified Christ, Friendenberg arrives on stage in a white suit, her long hair hanging over her eyes, her body twitching and gyrating convulsively as she flits about the stage, trying not to step on the red-carpeted aisle leading from the audience to the wonderful altar-cum-iconographic-shrine designed by Mickey Meads. Eventually Friendenberg puts her hands together, as if to pray, and parts her mane of hair, peeking out shyly at us, her expectant congregation. But she cannot immediately speak and so instead she repeats a sequence of meek, almost apologetic gestures: grabbing her crotch, for example, as if in shame, or slowly turning her palms toward us in search of the stigmata she would have us understand was really there. Indeed, one of the things I found so compelling about this performance was how Friendenberg, as a dancer, made an idea like the mortification of flesh--a fetish at once religious and deeply erotic--into a richly satisfying kinesthetic experience.

Then, too, whether it was through a compelling and physically exhausting sequence of kneels, or in her expert demonstration of various iconic yoga poses, Friendenberg also used movement (alongside a steady stream of words) to suggest how much of belief is merely habit. As Pascal famously said, "Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe." Which is, on one level, the lesson that Maureen learns over the course of the show. Having waited in vain for a special visitation from the Son of God--a deeply longed for embodied encounter, à la Madonna in "Like a Prayer," with that obscure object of desire on the cross--at the end of the show Maureen takes a seat among us in the audience, turning to a fellow supplicant in the daily pilgrimage that is life and asking: "How was your week?"

It is Friendenberg's uncanny ability to combine the ecstatic and the banal into such moments of collective transformation that makes me a believer.

P.

PuSh 2013: Winners and Losers

James Long, of Theatre Replacement, and Marcus Youssef, of Neworld Theatre, are frequent artistic collaborators and close friends. In Winners and Losers, on through Saturday at SFU Woodward’s as part of the PuSh Festival, they test the strength of both bonds in a concept piece where the stakes keep getting higher and higher.

The premise is simple: the men sit across from each other at a table and begin lumping different people and places and things into one of two categories, winners or losers. At times the objects of analysis (Pamela Anderson, lululemon, ping pong--which they actually play), and the tenor of the debate, are fairly benign. But soon things get personal, as Long and Youssef start adding up each other’s credits and debits, including relationships, street smarts vs. worldly wisdom, past artistic successes and failures, and especially class privilege and literal family inheritance. Indeed, the piece turns--and turns downright nasty--on the extent to which each actor can rack up points by demonstrating how the one’s wealthy background and the other’s hardscrabble working class roots are incommensurable with their present-day social realities and political sympathies. (I won’t give things away by revealing whose house costs more, although I will note I was surprised that race factored only obliquely into the men’s perorations.) Partly scripted and partly improvised, the piece’s dramatic tension accumulates in the same way that capital does: by seeing just how far, and at what cost, one person will go to beat another--even a close friend.

And we, in the audience, are not exempt from the game’s theatrical fallout. First, socialized by a similar logic governing everything from organized sport to institutionalized education to our systems of government, we can’t help but keep score. Then, too, there are those brutal shocks of abject recognition when we discover--as of course we must in a show such as this--that some aspect of ourselves (with which we may or may not identify) qualifies us, in another’s mind, as a loser. It’s Artaudian theatre of cruelty taken to a whole other metaphysical (and meta-theatrical) plane.

Expertly directed--or should I say refereed?--by Chris Abraham, of Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre (where the show travels next), this is a work that is as emotionally bracing as it is intellectually stimulating, a punch in the gut that packs deep insights into the problem of fit between people and categories. One of which is this: the problem is with the categories, not the people.

P.

Alive and Well, Thank You

A guest op-ed by Neworld Theatre Artistic Director Marcus Youssef in today's Vancouver Sun rightly attesting to the thriving arts and culture scene here in Vancouver--no thanks to, and in spite of reports otherwise. Thanks for the shout out to PuSh, Marcus.

Last night Richard and I were at SFU Harbour Centre for an event that backs up precisely what Marcus is writing about: a reading and reception celebrating Marie Clements as the 2012-13 Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at SFU. Marie read excerpts from past plays and gave us a taste of what she has in store, including a remounting of The Edward Curtis Project at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and a new multi-media musical work, The Road Forward, that will (hurray, again) premiere at Club PuSh this January.

Speaking of all things PuSh, we are a community partner on the upcoming return of Robert Lepage's Far Side of the Moon to SFU Woodward's in November. There's a special PuSh night on November 7th, when a sneak peek of our 2013 Festival will be revealed. The official program guide lands at JJ Bean, Terrra Breads, Festival Cinemas, and other locations the next day. Lots of exciting shows await.

All of which confirms Marcus's point: cutting edge performance is alive and well on Canada's west coast.

P.

PuSh Review #11: Peter Panties at The Cultch

From the start, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan was a character with a massive identity crisis: a boy who doesn't want to grown up, who can fly and whose best friend is a fairy, and who is traditionally played by a female actress in the stage version. So it makes sense that, over the years, Peter has become a creative canvas on which to project other, highly personalized, versions of difference and outsiderness. Perhaps the most extreme example of this was Michael Jackson's attempt to build his own Neverland, and to surround himself with a steady supply of "lost boys."

Local theatre artist Niall McNeil keeps things safely in the realm of make-believe in Peter Panties, a new musical play that opens at the Cultch's Historic Theatre tonight in a co-production between Neworld Theatre and Leaky Heaven Circus, and co-presented by the Cultch and the PuSh Festival. I caught a preview performance last night, and it was a most surreal experience. Working with co-writer Marcus Youssef, McNeil has used his own longstanding fascination with and interpretive deconstruction of the Peter Pan story to craft a pop-culture mash-up for our cynical, forensic (there is a CSI intertext) twenty-first century that nevertheless retains the sense of wonder and mythic possibility that was such a key element of the original story.

In Peter Panties, an oversexed Peter very much wants to grow up, settle down, and have a kid with Wendy (though there also seems to be a noticeable sexual frisson between Peter and Wendy's mother, Mrs. Darling). Tinkerbell, meanwhile, has a hate-on for Wendy, and seems to be working in cahoots with Hook and Starkey to see that she ends up dead. As for Wendy, who emerges as the protagonist of this story, her narrative arc appears to be one of increasing dis-enchantment: with her dull life at home chez Mother Darling; with the dreamworld of Neverland, which subjects her to violence and abduction; and with her fairytale marriage to Peter--which turns out to be just that, a fairytale, and which furthermore leaves her a young, single mother. Indeed, watching this Wendy I was very much put in mind of Joyce Carol Oates' teenage protagonist Connie, from her famous story "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" However, unlike the moral allegory at work in Oates' story, Peter Panties remains at heart a comic fantasy and so, true to form, we end on an upswing, with a second marriage for the resurrected Wendy--this time to Niall himself. Peter is left picking at his green tights back in Neverland.

Overall, the production is pervaded by a sense of wonderfully anarchic chaos. It is less about retelling the Peter Pan story in a straight-up, comprehensible way than examining the creative process of storytelling itself. To this end, we hear in voice-over before the house lights go down McNeil and Youssef talking through their ideas for the play, exchanges that are later projected in video format on a white sheet. And a recurring refrain among several characters is what happens backstage, including, we are led to believe, some creative workings through of creative differences. Banquo's ghost, escaped from the Scottish play, also serves as a metatheatrical reference point in this regard.

Indeed, for me this play is mostly a love letter to the magic of the theatre, a magic that is all about showing the wires, and making do with what is at hand, but that nevertheless thrills and astounds because, together, we choose to believe (however tenuously or temporarily) in the power of this magic. And, here, director Steven Hill does not disappoint: the coups-de-théâtre in this show are achieved so simply (Tinkerbell holding Peter's cape while he flies past Mrs. Darling's window, Wendy and a mermaid duking it out in a shadow boxing match), but are no less gasp-inducing because of that.

Not everything in the production had gelled by last night: the pacing was slow to begin with; it was hard to hear what Veda Hille and her band, The Bark Dogs, were singing at times; and I'm not sure the lighting design, which keeps too many characters in too many scenes in semi-darkness for too long, completely works. That said, I had great fun, and I'm sure things will only get tighter over the course of the play's run.

That run in fact extends beyond the end of the PuSh Festival, to February 13th.

P.

Ali and Ali 7 at the Cultch

Those hilarious Agrabanian showmen and shrewd foreign policy analysts Ali and Ali are back. Five years after skewering George W. Bush and the war on terror in a biting piece of political theatre--Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil--that was also drop-dead funny, co-writers and co-stars Camyar Chai (Ali Hakim) and Marcus Youssef (Ali Ababwa), along with fellow co-writer and director Guillermo Verdecchia, are taking on Bush Jr.’s successor in the White House, you know, the black dude with the Muslim-sounding middle name.

But audiences attending the Neworld Theatre production of Ali and Ali 7: Hey Brother, Can You Spare Some Hope & Change (on at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre’s Historic Theatre until April 24th) expecting to see Barack Obama ripped into on the housing crisis, or health care, or climate change, should be forewarned. Despite its title, the play is only tangentially concerned with the reconfigured American political landscape since November 2008. Having said this, Obama’s election does occasion two of the show’s wittiest and most expressly theatrical sequences: a Bunraku-inflected domestic scene that pokes fun at Obama as a beacon of hope to all the “brown” peoples of the world; and an expletive-laden, projected shadow puppet sketch involving Obama, his collective “revolutionary conscience,” Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and Stephen Harper in a rap about keeping the White House black.

Stephen Harper’s image here and elsewhere in the show, including its opening—and of course requisite—video tribute to Muammar Gaddafi, provides the clue as to the real subject of Ali and Ali’s political satire this time round: Canadian foreign policy, and in particular the country’s very American-style use of “security certificates” to detain—often in solitary confinement—or deport mostly Muslim men without charges and without providing the men or their lawyers access to the evidence against them. This is precisely the situation Ali and Ali find themselves in when a “rabid fan” of their work (the always wonderful Laara Sadiq) reveals herself to be an undercover RCMP officer, one Sukhvindar Dhaliwal. With but a brief wave of her ever-handy taser, Dhaliwal transforms the space of the theatre into a government tribunal and conscripts Ali and Ali’s all-purpose Chinese sidekick, Yogi Roo (Raugi Yu), to serve as their counsel.

Thereafter the play juxtaposes the legalese of Dhaliwal’s trumped-up and misappropriated evidence (much is made of their obsession with the movie A Few Good Men) with Ali and Ali and Yogi’s playing out of the “fictional reality” of their suspicious behavior (most of what shows up on the RCMP’s radar turns out to be “research” for the boys’ latest television pilot or newest idea for a play). In this way, Ali and Ali 7 succeeds in making some very interesting formal parallels between theatrical performance and juridical performatives, with the court of law’s precedent-based structure here revealed to routinely—and rather undemocratically—circumscribe who gets to be named a citizen and who a refugee, or a terrorist. However, in terms of overall tone, the play is also rather schizophrenic, with the gravity of the situation facing one of the Alis (I won’t say which one) leading to some very intense moments of high dramatic pathos that don’t always work alongside the more ribald and satiric sketch comedy scenes.

Then, too, I’m not sure if Canadian domestic and foreign policy (which, don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not defending under Herr Harper) lends itself to the sort of political satire that worked so well re the USA in the first Ali and Ali show. This Hour Has 22 Minutes is not Politically Incorrect and Rick Mercer is not Bill Maher. I fully support the production of topical political theatre in Canada, and I generally eschew overt earnestness on stage. But it seems to me that, this time around, Ali and Ali haven’t fully figured out what they want to say, and how they want to say it.

P.