Lady Parts: Vagina at the Anza Club

The final instalment of After Party Theatre's Lady Parts, their four-part series of sketch comedy shows hosted by Pi Theatre as part of their new "Provocateurs" platform, took place last night at the Anza Club. I had previously seen "Brains" at the Emerald Club back in November, having missed the inaugural "Boobs" and also April's "Heart." But co-creators Katey Hoffman and Cheyenne Mabberley saved the best for last, devoting a whole evening of taboo-smashing guffaws to that bit of the female anatomy that they refer to on Pi's website as "a beautiful flesh taco."

Joined on stage by performers Katie Findlay and Kiomi Pykel, Hoffman and Mabberley certainly didn't hold back in a succession of skits that focused on pap smears from hell, an abortion shower, and television ads that treat vaginal health as a perpetual spring stroll through the park. There was also an hilarious film interlude in which Hoffman and Mabberley talked with their mothers about their births and had them attempt to answer Google questions about sex.

The comedian Fatima Dhowre delivered a short but sharply funny stand-up set, and the Indigenous burlesque duo Virago Nation performed a stand-out number that deftly combined elements of exotic dancing and striptease with the vocabulary of First Nations fancy dancing. All in all, it was a most enjoyable evening, and I do hope that Pi continues with this serial showcase for edgy art.

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PuSh 2018: The Events at the Russian Hall

David Greig's The Events, currently being mounted by Pi Theatre at the Russian Hall as part of this year's PuSh Festival, is inspired by Anders Breivik's 2011 mass killing of young camp goers on the island of Utøya in Norway. In adapting those horrific events for the stage, the Scottish Greig has at once made the story more particular and more universal, focusing on an individual survivor, but also refusing to specify her nationality or where she lives. With the aid of composer John Browne, Greig also incorporates a series of rotating community choirs into the play's mise-en-scène, ensuring that wherever the play is staged it will have direct local resonance.

Claire (Luisa Jojic) is a liberal lesbian minister and choir leader who is struggling to come to terms with a random act of violence that has resulted in the deaths of most of her flock, and that has made her question the very foundations of her faith. This aftermath is framed by an opening scene in which we see Claire, in the middle of conducting her choir, welcome a young boy (Douglas Ennenberg) into the church. "You don't have to sing," she says by way of encouragement. "Nobody wants to sing every day." What follows is Claire's desperate and soul-shattering struggle to make sense of the actions wrought by this boy, and to make her way back to a place where she herself might one day be able to sing again. Along the way she seeks but fails to find answers from a host of characters who are either concerned for her own well-being (her therapist, her partner) or who knew the boy (his father, an acquaintance from high school, the leader of a far right party whose ideology the shooter briefly flirted with). All of these characters are incarnated by the same actor playing the boy and Ennenberg's loose and easy physicality, combined with subtle modulations in voice and tone, makes each of them both distinguishable and believable.

It is, of course, belief that Claire is looking for--something, anything, to explain what, as a woman of God, she can't bring herself to accept is unexplainable. But Greig wisely resists offering Claire, or us, pat homilies. In scene after scene, Claire chases after that which will confirm her worst convictions about the boy: that he was abused as a child; that he was picked on at school; that he was blinded by extremist ideology. But in these encounters what Claire is actually forced to confront are the limits of her own naïveté and rigidly moralistic worldview. To her expression of unknowing horror at the protocols of bullying, the high school acquaintance of the boy says that she was obviously extremely popular growing up. And she is flummoxed by the fact that the leader of the far right party whose meetings the boy occasionally attended is a family man who completely disavows what the boy has done. Greig also ramps up the dramatic tension by slowly revealing that Claire's obsession with the boy's motives masks a far more painful self-examination that would force her to confront the rightness of her own actions on the night of the shooting. In this, it is worth noting that performance and trauma share a similar structuring principle: repetition. Every time we see Claire replay the events of the shooting, Jojic's increasingly manic desperation--which director Richard Wolfe, working with movement designer Jo Leslie, cannily externalizes in physical actions that have no purpose, or that go nowhere--inches us at once closer to and then away from the horrible truth of what happened in the music room, where Claire and Mrs. Singh find themselves staring down the barrel of the boy's gun.

As is often the case in these situations, the truth after which Claire and the audience have been questing for most of the play ends up being banal--or, rather, "silly," to quote the boy, whom Claire eventually visits in prison. She has gone there with the express purpose of poisoning him (the only implausible note in the play), her nihilism now so total and complete as to be a match for his own. But the emptiness of his answers to her repeated queries of "why?" once again upends her certitude--this time in a bottomless well of pure evil. Not that Greig leaves us with an Arendtian equivocation on the singularity of remorse (or lack thereof). For into the void of the boy's culpability and Claire's own guilt, Greig and Browne fill the performance hall with the collective catharsis of song. Here, as Wolfe writes in his program note, the play's creators are taking us back to the very origins of Western tragedy, with the Chorus in Greek drama functioning as "both spectator and performer."

Thus it was that last night Vancouver's Cyrilika Slavic Chamber Choir, under the direction of Emilija Lale, at once completed the fourth side of Wolfe's in-the-round staging and also seamlessly melded into the action of the play. Each of the twelve volunteer choirs participating over the course of this production's run receive a copy of the script and musical score in advance. But they rehearse on their own, meeting with music supervisor Mishelle Cuttler only once, and only encountering the actors (and vice-versa) on the night of their scheduled performance. I can only imagine how nerve-wracking this is for all concerned in terms of coordination; at the same time, watching the choir watching what we were watching had the reverberating effect of binding us all in an act of witnessing that apportioned some of the weight of Claire's trauma to the other bodies in the room. This is, of course, the power of song: it travels through time and space, and from body to body, actively moving us with its force and energy. Physically registering this sense of connection and obligation--a choir per force being the sum of its individual voices--is what makes this production of The Events so eventful.

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Lady Parts Episode 2: Brains at The Emerald

Last night was the second instalment of Katey Hoffman and Cheyenne Mabberley's Lady Parts, a sketch comedy series exploring what it means to be a woman in today's world that is being presented as part of Pi Theatre's new Pi Provocateurs platform, which aims to present "political performance in unconventional spaces." The back bar of The Emerald was certainly cramped (and the line-up for drinks achingly slow), but that also created a nice sense of intimacy, and the crowd was certainly with the performers for the whole evening.

I had missed the first episode of Lady Parts, which focused on "boobs." This second episode was structured around "brains." In the interim, the whole Harvey Weinstein scandal and its ongoing aftermath has exploded, which made the true stories shared by Hoffman and Mabberley and guest performers Genevieve Fleming and Arggy Jenati about sexual discrimination and harassment in the local acting industry all the more powerful. As effective were the fictional episodes skewering myriad myths surrounding women's intellectual capacities (an ongoing gag about staying on hold while waiting to pay one's phone bill that featured Jenati was particularly effective).

Also showcased last night was the improv work of Nasty Women (liked the killer waffles at the AirBnB from hell bit) and the stand-up of Julie Kim, who was hilarious about life with her new baby.

Lady Parts: Hearts and Lady Parts: Vaginas are up in the new year. I shall definitely be in the audience for both.

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Long Division x 2

Since Tuesday I've been hanging out at Playwright's Theatre Centre along with the original cast and crew of Long Division as we prepare for a "refreshed remount" of the Pi Theatre show at the Annex on Seymour Street beginning next Wednesday. It is such a gift to be given the opportunity to revisit the work with this talented team. With a bit of distance from the first production at the Gateway in November, and in dialogue with director Richard Wolfe, I had made some cuts and tweaks to the script, which was distributed to everyone in March. In rehearsals we've been making some further adjustments, with a focus especially on smoothing out and making more organic the transitions between the choral scenes and individual characters' monologues.

Choreographer Lesley Telford, who is busy with her own show at The Dance Centre (on through this evening), popped into the studio yesterday to help adjust a couple of the movement sequences. The changes were exactly what was needed and it was fantastic to see not just how on board the actors were with the new material, but also how quickly they were able to absorb it into their bodies. When we started this second go-round on Tuesday I think everyone was a bit trepidatious about how much of the original movement score they'd remembered. But with the aid of video documentation and each other's kinetic memories, and with a lot of counted repetitions, the sequences came back incredibly quickly to the actors, and watching them yesterday during our first complete run through you would have thought they'd been doing this continuously since November rather than having had a hiatus of four months.

Generally we're trying to loosen things up with both the movement and the text, and to give the actors permission to play a bit more. Our costume designer, Connie Hosie, commented after yesterday afternoon's run-through that our efforts seemed to be working. Notwithstanding some dropped lines and a couple of starts and stops with respect to new movement and blocking, she said the piece was noticeably tighter and that all the actors were more clearly at home in their characters. That's great to hear, as we only have two more days of rehearsal before we go into tech. Getting into the actual Annex space will also be exciting, as we have a lot more room than we did at the Gateway's Studio B.

Tickets for the show can be purchased here. I probably won't be blogging again about the process until after we open. In the meantime, here's a selfie I took the other day in front of one of the bus shelter posters advertising the play around the city. Linda Quibell, who plays Grace, commented yesterday that the image is a bit CSI-y. That's perhaps not a bad analogy given the mystery that has to be unravelled in the play.

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Genetic Drift at The Fishbowl on Granville Island

The latest offering from Boca del Lupo's Micro-Performance Series at the Fishbowl on Granville Island is Genetic Drift, a pop-up piece conceived and directed by Pi Theatre's Richard Wolfe, and written by Amy Lee Lavoie. The title refers to a concept from evolutionary theory relating to the variation in different genotypes within a given species population owing to the disappearance or mutation of certain genes as individuals within that population die or fail to reproduce. In Lavoie and Wolfe's staging, however, this "natural" occurrence becomes something that is actively pursued, managed and regulated within corporate bio-tech labs. That is, the one-percent, finally waking to the reality of climate change and the likely total annihilation of humanity within and as a result of the anthropocene, have poured money into genomic research in order to find a way to transfer their DNA into a hybrid cellular organism conceived in a petri dish to survive the extreme planetary conditions of 150 years in the future.

All of this is presented to us in the present by our genial host, Tor Skroder (Alex Forsyth), who opens the show by welcoming us to the tony gallery that the Fishbowl performance space is meant to mimic. Within Lavoie's narrative imagination we have all apparently paid several thousand dollars to witness a demonstration of what the lab Skroder represents can do. As such, he asks his Siri-like AI-computer assistant (whom we view courtesy of the wonderful video projections designed by Daniel O'Shea) to conjure and transport to us a representative example of ourselves from the year 2167. By such means are we introduced to Gary 3 (Tom Jones), who appears to us from behind a scrim wearing a trench coat and with a cranium that looks like Hannibal Lecter's face-mask has been crossed with a fish head (the costumes are by Amy McDougall). Gary is not at all pleased to see us and much of his ensuing monologue is given over to insulting the audience for our narcissism and passivity and hubris, all of which, Gary suggests, are contributing factors in his own existence (which he also suggests is not at all comfortable). In this, Lavoie is troping on the conceit of human zoos from the nineteenth-century, in which folks deemed less-than-human (blacks, Indigenous peoples), were displayed as anthropological specimens for first-world consumption. But she is also suggesting that Gary, as a creature who has been designed to be more-than-human, is uniquely positioned to comment on the problems of the category of the human more generally. And as in all good dystopias, such commentary from the future is necessarily--and very urgently--about today.

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Long Division: Closing

It was the closing performance last night. A good-sized house. I thought the audience was a bit subdued, but my parents--who are visiting from Ontario and who had already seen the show once, this past Wednesday--said they felt people were very responsive. I guess it's hard for me to tell as the lines I think will (or should) get a laugh, or otherwise elicit some kind of more embodied response, often don't. But of course that doesn't mean folks aren't engaged with the work. As my Dad put it to me this morning, mine is a play that rewards more than one viewing. Of course, he's biased, but it was a deliberate formal strategy on my part to construct a work whose patterns and layers of connection only fully emerge at a distance. To that end, it has been most rewarding for me to hear from friends and colleagues about how the work has stayed with them after the end. Perhaps we should use this as a marketing strategy for the April run.

Closing a show is always bittersweet, especially when the process has been so generative and one has had the privilege of working with such an amazingly talented and warm and funny and intelligent creative team. It was great to hang out with some of that team last night after the show and share a drink and gossip and talk about holiday plans (London for Anousha; Cuba for Kerry; Vietnam for Jay; Mexico for Melissa; Toronto and Israel for Shayna; Hawai'i for Richard and Connie). It was a long two-show day for the cast, so I was grateful that most of them came out. And parting at 2 am on Granville Street was less painful knowing we'd all be gathering again in a few months to dive back into the work. I was only half joking when I said to the actors that I'd like to double the length of each of their monologues. I could watch all of them on stage forever. But in actual fact, any tinkering with the script between now and April will likely involve cuts and maybe the odd finessing of the choral interludes. I know Lesley is dying to revisit and even add to some of the movement, but Richard will likely have to restrain her given we only have a week's worth of re-rehearsal. At the very least, Jergus and Lauchlin and Jamie will get to supplement the visual design of the piece given the added space and technical resources available at the Annex.

Funny last note on the technical front. I knew that the lighting board and other equipment at the Gateway's Studio B dated from circa 1985. But what I didn't know was that everything connected with preserving our work was similarly ante-diluvian. At the end of the night, along with his stage manager reports on yesterday's shows, Jethelo sent Jayson McLean, our production manager, a note about making sure to save all the lighting, video and sound cues. On the drive home I learned from Richard that the method for storing said data was a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk!

I feel like there's something strangely appropriate about said means of transferring the binary code of our play. Just like the image below--supplied courtesy of Jay (aka Reid).

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Long Division: Tech Dress

So there were a few missed cues with the projections, and one of the lights blew at the top of act two, and not all of the actors had gotten the note about the revised exit at the end of act one, but otherwise it was a pretty fantastic tech dress yesterday afternoon.

It was amazing to see the actors in the vibrantly coloured costumes Connie Hosie has put together for each of them--and also to have Connie as an enthusiastic audience member. All of the actors nailed their monologues and were also pros with the new tweaks to the choreography Lesley had made only that morning. I also made one final cut and adjustment to the text that the women in the cast handled with aplomb.

I'm taking all of this--as well as Gateway AD Jovanni Sy's positive reaction and Richard's general calm--as a good sign. Preview performance tonight, then the opening on Friday. Three and a half weeks of rehearsal plus one workshop week on the script plus four odd years of writing and revising and dramaturging the original idea: all to get to this point. When you balance the run of the show (even including the remount at the Annex in April) against the length of time for its development, it seems an unfair equation. But I can live with the math.

Merde to all of us.

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Long Division: Third Week of Rehearsal

Today is Q-2-Q day for the play. It's a long, twelve-hour day for the cast and production crew as they work to resolve and lock down all of the different sound, lighting, and video/projection cues in relation to the text and movement. Things are a bit more complicated than usual on this front for a number of reasons. First, there is the sheer number of cues (well over 80 for the video and projections alone). Then there is the fact that movement in Long Division is operating both on the level of traditional theatre blocking and in relation to an additional choreographic score. Richard and Lesley have been working hard, especially in the last week, to make the integration between the two as seamless as possible, but inevitably challenges arise with so much activity happening on stage--not to mention the sheer number of bodies engaging in that activity for the entirety of the play's 90+ minutes. Finally, there is the competition between the lighting and the video projections; despite the super-powered projectors video designer Jamie Nesbitt has borrowed for the production, as well as the decision to forgo any lino whatsoever in favour of the bare black stage floor, the word yesterday from the crew was that Jergus Oprsal's lighting was still washing out some of the images. (The fact that the Gateway's Studio B only has 24 dimmers for Jergus to work with isn't helping on this front.)

No doubt all of that will be resolved today (and possibly on Monday). For my part, it was just so exciting to see Lauchlin Johnston's amazing set installed yesterday, as well as a few of the designs Jamie has come up with projected onto it. Otherwise it was an intense day of grinding through with the actors and Richard and Lesley the finer details of both acts yesterday, especially with respect to the transitions between scenes. Part of me (the part eyeing next Thursday's preview performance) found the progress painfully incremental at times. But as Jennifer Lines said to me on the drive back into Vancouver, the minuteness and repetition of such drilling actually makes things go much faster in the long run. There is a moment, she said, when everything will click and fall into place for the actors and then the tech runs will seem like they are flying by. I certainly got a glimpse of this yesterday when we did full run-throughs of both acts; sure there were lines dropped and movement cues that were missed or late, but there was a definite sense that the actors were getting increasingly comfortable with the material and that things were coming together.

I can't wait to see a full run-through with tech to see all of the elements working off of each other. That will have to wait until Tuesday afternoon for me due to other commitments, including an interview with Radio-Canada about the play. I don't know who I'm going to talk about mathematics in French, but hopefully I'll muddle through.

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Long Division: Second Week of Rehearsal

If you'd asked me on Wednesday how things were going in terms of building the show, I probably would have smiled tightly and said "We're getting there ... slowly." I confess I was a bit panicked by the incremental progress we seemed to be making in blocking the play and integrating this with the movement sequences. And then there were all the other production elements that had yet to be integrated, including sound, lighting and video. Richard had distributed a scene breakdown table earlier in the week, with columns for all of these things and by mid-week a lot of them still remained blank.

But what a difference two days away makes. In the interim, Richard and the cast had sketched the blocking for all but the last few pages of the play, Lesley had set the movement for the top of the second act and refined several other sequences, and the designers had held a production meeting in which much of the video had been locked down and a production schedule laid out for paper tech, lighting hang, set load-in and install, and Q-2-Q. Clearly I should keep clear of rehearsals more often.

That said, I was back at the Gateway yesterday to watch Richard set the remaining blocking in the morning, as well as Lesley teach the actors in the early afternoon what she had come up with for the part near the end of act one in which Mobius bands are discussed. Then it was time for a stumble through of the whole play. To this point the scenes had been built and rehearsed in fragments, often out of order, and so it was revelatory to watch the whole thing unfold from start to finish, hiccups included. I know Lesley was concerned with the execution of much of the movement in the second half, and we have yet to come up with a physical score for the ending, but I was so pleased to see where we were. Rough around the edges though it currently is, we at least have a structure. And as Richard reminded Lesley and myself, there was, relatively speaking, still a fair amount of time to refine and polish things.

And all of this was accomplished in the midst of some unexpected and deeply trying personal circumstances for one member of our team. This play is partly about dealing with grief and let's just say that it has been a bit of shock to have that theme hit so close to home. But it has also reminded me of what a strong and resilient tribe actors are.

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Long Division: First Week of Rehearsal

Today is the end of the first week of rehearsals for Long Division. In fact, as I write this our amazing cast is still hard at it in Richmond, taking turns working on their respective monologues with director Richard Wolfe and Assistant Director Keltie Forsyth, while presumably also running lines from the choral group scenes under the watchful eye of stage manager Jethelo Cabilete. Having worked our way through the beats of those scenes and any lingering questions about them by the end of the day yesterday, I decided to knock off from today's rehearsals as I have so much else to catch up on.

Not that I regret for a moment being there the rest of this past week. It's such an exciting--and terrifying--thing to dive into the rehearsal process. The exploration and moments of discovery are so stimulating; at the same time, one is always in a bit of a panic about the steadily diminishing amount of time one has for said exploration and discovery. In our case, because there are so many different moving parts to the production--not the least of which is creating and learning actual physical movement--juggling available time is one of Richard's main priorities. Fortunately, choreographer Lesley Telford hit the ground running during the first three days of rehearsal, aided by the emerging dance artists from her Arts Umbrella class with whom she has been building much of the choreography for the show, and many of whom have very generously agreed to accompany Lelsey to our rehearsals to help teach the material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the delights so far has been to watch the dancers' and actors' mutual admiration for each other's specific performance gifts. The entire cast has done an amazing, and exceedingly fast, job of absorbing into their bodies some fairly difficult physical phrases. At the same time, they've also absorbed much of the text into their brains, with several of them already off book in terms of their very long monologues. Composer Owen Belton was also present to observe what Lesley was working on in relation to his music, and to get a sense of what he still needed to come up with to accompany the rest of her movement score.

Yesterday we also got a glimpse of Lauchlin Johnston's mock-up of the set, which blew me away with its elegance and beauty. The Gateway's Studio B is not a huge space and we're losing some of that to the backdrop that Lauchlin has created, and that will additionally serve as the surface onto which video designer Jamie Nesbitt's will project his images. One thing Jamie flagged for Lauchlin and Richard was the colour of the floor. If, as originally intended, it remained white, like the backdrop, then it would create a lot of bounce from the lights that would make it hard to see the projections. This would only be exacerbated if, as planned, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal used a series of shins to provide side light from the wings. So the lino floor will now be a light shade of grey. If everything goes accroding to plan the set will be installed by next Thursday, with the lighting grid hung soon after and the cue-to-cue happening much earlier than usual so that the performers will ideally have three full tech runs instead of cramming everything into one half day.

It was also useful to have Jamie at the table yesterday for our final beat-by-beat read-through of the text, as he asked a lot of tough dramaturgical questions about what exactly was going on in different sections, and how video might support them in some instances, or conceivably work against them in others. Combined with the cast's similarly probing questions from the rest of the week, the rigorous text analysis has really forced me to justify my choices, and to explain their relevance to the overall structure of the play and the respective inner worlds of each of the characters. It also required me to not be precious about material that clearly had to go, or about changes to specific lines, however micro or macro. I really appreciate the attentiveness of all involved to my writing, as it has indeed made the work stronger and, in one instance spotted by Keltie, saved me from making a pretty glaring mistake in the math!

Lots more work to do, of course, but so far the process has been thoroughly rewarding. The level of collegiality and collaboration on everyone's part has been inspiring, and that's in no small measure to the open and non-hierarchical environment Richard has worked hard to create. I can't be in the studio on Monday due to teaching commitments, but I look forward to being back at rehearsals on Tuesday.

So stay tuned for more.

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Long Division Creative Meetings

So I submitted the rehearsal draft of my play, Long Division, earlier this week. We're at draft 17 by this point. While I know individual lines and maybe even whole sections of the script will inevitably change once we get into rehearsals, and potentially once we open as a result of audience response, and likely as well in the gap between closing at The Gateway at the end of November and opening at the Orpheum Annex next April (did I mention that part yet?), for the time being I had to stop tinkering--if only so that the cast can start to absorb their parts before we begin rehearsals.

Those rehearsals begin in two weeks, but in the interim our director, Richard Wolfe, has been holding a series of creative meetings at the Pi Theatre offices with various members of the production team. So, for example, last week Richard and I met with our choreographer, Lesley Telford, to talk about ideas for the movement score. We went through the script page by page and very intuitively and organically threw out potential ideas. If you'll forgive the metaphor, it was amazing to see how in sync we all were, fairly quickly deciding on a set of three conventions for each of the monologues that we could manipulate and play with over the course of each's delivery. Then, too, the choral sections, and the different math concepts described therein, seemed to lend themselves fairly easily to different kinetic frameworks, ranging from geometric patterning and canon structures and instances of retrograde, to changes in tempo and direction and the use of spirals and even moments of stillness. It was exciting to hear and watch Lesley (moving in her chair and every now and then leaping to her feet) begin to develop a gestural vocabulary for each of the characters based on my descriptions of their imagined psychic and physical states within the play, as well as her own mental notes on the actors' responses to her movement prompts during the last day of our workshop back in September. Because we don't have the luxury of infinite amounts of rehearsal time to devote to a more collaborative and improvisatory development of the choreography (which is the way Lesley is used to working), we are incredibly lucky that in the next two weeks Lesley will be able to test and develop her ideas for different sections with the aid of the students in her Arts Umbrella pre-professional class. By some magical coincidence, there are seven students in that class, and she has already distributed the script to them, with the goal that they will each take on one of the characters and, even better, be available during some of the rehearsal period to act as individual movement coaches to the actors playing their corresponding parts. This is just one of the many bits of extra resourcing for this production that has fortuitously fallen into our laps; another is Keltie Forsyth, a recent MFA grad in directing from UBC, who is doing an internship with Pi this year, and who will also be helping to get our show up.

I met Keltie last night at another creative meeting that Richard organized, this time so that we could hear some samples of the musical score that our composer Owen Belton has created, and so that Owen and Lesley, especially, could think through some ideas together. It's easy to see why Owen, who works regularly with Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot, is such an in-demand composer for dance (simultaneously with my play he is working on commissions for companies in Switzerland and Germany); he creates music with so much texture and mood, and with so much room to move with and inside of it. What he played for us as a possible opening sequence, to which Lesley would add some more geometric and directional choreography, was absolutely perfect; ditto the underscoring he suggested for the opening bit of dialogue, which he has composed in two versions, once with piano and percussion, and once with just percussion (I think I prefer the addition of the piano). As someone who is not very musical, it was also amazing for me to instantly recognize where some of the samples Owen shared with us would go. For example, there was a cello sequence that immediately put me in mind of the God proof section of the play, for which Lesley had already been thinking of something quadrille-like that riffed on Beckett's square (Pascal's God quadrant is referenced in the text). Another bit of atmospheric piano underscoring I thought would work well with Alice's monologue. As Lesley said to Owen afterwards, "You make it so easy."

Of course the music is not just a support or supplement for the text and the movement. It is a key conceptual component of the work in its own right, and to this end Owen has even written a sequence based on the Fibonacci numbers. I thought it worked brilliantly and can see it providing a nice transition into the final section of the play, which is structured around the golden ratio, and which is where I see movement, music, text and video to be the most integrated.

It's all so exciting to see unfold--and we haven't even gotten to Jamie Nesbitt's video projections yet! Part of me would be happy just to see the creative process extend indefinitely, forgoing an actual opening. But I'd also be lying if I said I didn't also want to share the work with an audience. Working with such talented collaborators makes that prospect so much easier to contemplate.

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P.S. It's already been announced on Pi's website, so I can now also share it here: the news of who is in our cast. They are pictured below: left to right, Anousha Alamian (Naathim), Jennifer Lines (Jo), Melissa Oei (Lucy), Kerry Sandomirsky (Alice), Jay Clift (Reid), Linda Quibell (Grace), and Nicco Lorenzo Garcia (Paul). Photo by David Copper. Drawing by me!

Long Division Workshop

I don't know why it's taken me so long to announce on this blog that my new play is being produced this fall. I guess I didn't want to jinx anything. But after last week, one of the most intense and rewarding of my writing life, I think I can finally let Schrödinger's cat out of its box (bad inside joke).

My play is called Long Division and it is being produced by Pi Theatre in association with the Gateway in Richmond, where it will open on November 17 (get your tickets here). We don't begin rehearsals until October 24, but as part of the creative process our director Richard Wolfe had blocked off a week-long workshop with the actors in early September so that we could collectively dig our hands into the script, and so that I could respond to their comments and queries with rewrites as needed.

I can't disclose just yet who those actors are (I believe an announcement from Pi is imminent), but I can say that there are seven of them. For a long time I thought the size of the cast meant the play would never be produced. But now that I've met our actors--all of them amazing talents whose past work on stages across this city I've so admired--and heard them speak my lines, I can't conceive of having written the piece any other way.

The ensemble nature of the play is closely tied to its subject matter: a chain reaction of events that has thrown seven otherwise mostly disconnected characters into an enforced relationship with each other and, consequently, an accounting of what role they each may have played in precipitating--or not forestalling--said events. To do so, they use the language of mathematics, and the play has been partly constructed as an equation to be solved, with characters addressing the audience in a series of monologues that alternate with choral scenes that attempt to offer further lessons in what one of the books I consulted in the course of my research has called "the science of patterns."

One thing became immediately clear after Richard, the actors, our stage manager, Jethelo Cabilete, and several of the designers gave their feedback following the initial table read last Monday: some of the mathematics in the play had to be simplified and, more to the point, couldn't just be included in a "hey, isn't this cool" manner. It always needed to be in the service of the story and both the actors and the characters delivering the math lessons needed to understand what they were saying, and why. The actors' questions on what this or that concept meant forced me to explain things in more concrete, real-world ways, and often that very language found its way into the play.

As useful was the consensus note to create more of a balance between the cool and somewhat analytical feel of the math lessons and the warmer, more emotionally involving human stories that were being shared. I needed to find a way to make the structural dialectics of the play more compelling for the audience, to both suggest why these characters (only one of whom is a mathematician) might turn to numbers and geometry and the like as a way to abstract and make sense of an event that is still too painful to contemplate fully, and when and why the weight of that pain refuses to fit into neat and tidy patterns. In the course of these revisions, especially, I was able to begin refining the connections between the characters, tweaking each of the monologues to add greater individual clarity and depth, but also collectively to suggest how these folks are constellated as parts of a whole.

On this front, what was most exciting for me was to see how the actors responded to my new pages each day, discovering in my revisions added layers of complexity and vulnerability for each of their characters and, most thrillingly, bringing that out in their subsequent readings. It is such an amazing thing for a playwright to hear his or her words lifted off the page for the first time, and with this play in particular there are lots of choral moments where very conceptually and emotionally loaded lines have to be lobbed quickly and deftly back and forth between characters. Fortunately this crackerjack ensemble is more than up to the task.

After a shorter day on Thursday, which was mostly devoted to a publicity photo shoot with David Cooper (who is a wizard with the camera), Richard and I met with the dramaturg who has been working with me on the script for the past several years, my friend and colleague DD Kugler. Kugler's notes were, as usual, spot-on, and combined with what the actors and Richard had already given me by way of feedback, I had lots of material to attack in a more holistic way a comprehensive revision of the entire draft. This I undertook via a late night of writing on Thursday and some early Friday morning tinkering. Richard and I stopped to make some photocopies on the way to the Gateway and as I distributed the new scripts to the actors I held my breath a bit in anticipation of how this version would land. It was clear from everyone's reactions after the last line was spoken that I had definitely cracked a nut and that while there was still more work to be done, a corner had been turned and we were heading in the right direction (which is not just a metaphor in the context of this play).

We did one more reading on Saturday morning, this time with almost the entire production team present, including choreographer Lesley Telford, composer Owen Belton, costume designer Connie Hosie, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal, and set designer Lauchlin Johnston (only projection designer Jamie Nesbitt was absent). A great luxury of this extra workshop time is that it has allowed the entire team to bounce ideas off of each other and, what's more, to do so within the very space--Studio B at the Gateway--where we will be performing (a big shout-out to the Gateway's Jovanni Sy for making this possible). After the morning read and some time for the actors to do some movement exercises with Lesley, the production and design team then had a conversation of what might be possible to achieve within our space (which is intimate) and, as crucially, within the show's overall budget (also not huge, and with such a large cast, most of it needing to be allocated to human resources). Still, the ideas discussed--which I'm not at liberty to reveal--were so exciting. When I started writing this play, I conceived its visual design and movement score as being absolutely integral components--and ones, moreover, that would aid immeasurably in getting across or helping to supplement various math concepts referenced. I'm happy to say everyone else seems to agree.

So, now the ball's back in my court. Over the course of the next week and a bit I've got to turn around a new version of the script. I pretty much know what I have to do, and I'm anxious to get to work. Stay tuned for rehearsal updates beginning the end of October. And I hope to see you at the show.

P

The Invisible Hand at The Cultch

When Ayad Akhtar's Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced played the Arts Club's Stanley Theatre last fall, I was nonplussed by the production and frankly perplexed as to all the critical kudos trailing the play--which seemed to me over-plotted and rife with cliches about Muslim-American men (you can read my review here). Now comes Pi Theatre's Canadian premiere of Aktar's follow-up drama, The Invisible Hand, which is on at The Cultch's Historic Theatre through April 23rd. I still think Akhtar has a problem with endings, with this one thrown at us like an abrupt cliff edge as opposed to Disgraced's overly tidy circularity. Nevertheless, I felt more invested in both the characters and the issues being explored in this play, which in its probing of the links between global finance and global terrorism and its distilling of the history and economics of a western country's involvement in a so-called "failed" Muslim state registered to me as Akhtar's theatrical attempt to do for Pakistan what Tony Kushner tried to take on with respect to Afghanistan in Homebody/Kabul. Then, again, maybe it's just that Akhtar is better at suspense than domestic melodrama.

The play opens with a quiet tableau whose visual juxtapositions are rife with meaning: a machine gun-toting Dar (played by Conor Wylie, who also appeared in the Arts Club production of Disgraced) is standing over a seated and handcuffed Nick (Craig Erickson, who is on stage for the entire length of the play). Dar holds Nick's raised hands in his, and at first it appears that the two might be praying together; instead the captor is merely cutting his prisoner's fingernails, which along with Erickson's growth of beard neatly telegraphs for the audience that Nick has been held for some time. Soon the two men fall into a stilted conversation, with Nick asking after Dar's mother; things get more animated, however, when Dar thanks Nick for some previous financial advice, which apparently allowed Dar to make a tidy profit on some stockpiled potatoes. However, the connection between the two men is sundered by the entrance of Bashir (Muish Sharma), who knows about Dar's transaction and is not happy about it, beating the younger and physically smaller man and accusing Nick of corrupting him with visions of the almighty American dollar.

For Nick, it turns out, is a futures trader at Citibank; he is being held prisoner after a bungled kidnapping (they were supposed to get Nick's boss). The $10 million ransom being demanded for his release has not yet been paid because, as Bashir explains, the leader of their organization, Imam Saleem (Shaker Paleja) has just been labeled a terrorist. But as Saleem puts it to Nick when he finally appears, he is not motivated by the religious extremism of either the Taliban or the even more militant Lashkar-e-Jhangvi organization (the ones responsible for the execution of journalist Daniel Pearl). Instead, he is on a crusade to rid Pakistan of corruption, in part by circumventing the normal channels of government aid and finding a way to give money directly to those in his community most in need. This is where the play gets interesting. Recognizing that his captors no longer see him as an asset, Nick proposes to Saleem and Bashir that he be allowed to use his skills as a trader to raise the ransom himself, parlaying an initial input of capital from his personal offshore Cayman Island accounts into a stock portfolio that would see all profits going to the Imam in exchange for Nick's eventual release. Soon enough Bashir is seated behind a computer, with Nick advising him about "puts" and "options" and, above all, the sublime beauty of the short sell.

In these core scenes between Nick and Bashir, Akhtar certainly indulges in his obvious knowledge of economics. Nick, for example, schools Bashir in the intricacies of the Bretton-Woods agreement (upon which he wrote his senior Princeton thesis), which put in place the first global monetary system post-WW II by tying the currencies of independent nation-states to a gold standard backed by a fixed exchange rate of American dollars. Curiously, however, Akhtar leaves unstated the other part of the contemporary global financial equation, namely when Richard Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard in 1971, an event that has allowed the US Federal Reserve to respond to perceived financial crises at home as it sees fit (by, for example, raising or lowering interest rates, or printing more money). However, Nixon's move also paved the way for unscrupulous traders on Wall Street to short investors on Main Street (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, anyone?), as well as to take advantage of unstable situations abroad by buying up worthless stocks and properties and converting everything into American dollars--what has come to be known (after Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine and other texts) as "disaster capitalism." We see precisely this intersection of the "free market" and political crisis play out when, having been tipped off that the Minister of the Interior will be the target of violence, Nick has Bashir buy up various water-related stocks and then sell them as the price begins to fall. In these scenes, which sometimes become a little talky, Sharma and Erickson display an easy chemistry mixed with the heady intoxication of profit, like they are old bros bonding over a bet they have just won--in this case one worth $700,000.

Things take a twist in the second act when, having attempted a bold escape, Nick is now tied to a ball and chain, albeit in far posher digs (the wonderful set is by David Roberts, who almost does as good a job here as Drew Facey, who designed Pi's Jessie Award-winning production of Blasted last season). He and Bashir are still working together and still reeling in the profits, with Bashir now a seasoned trader savvy to the ups and downs of the market. Indeed, having been alerted by Nick at the end of the first act about Saleem's suspicious personal withdrawals from their accounts, Bashir appears to be putting in place a set of contingency plans as the $10 million benchmark for Nick's release approaches. Meanwhile Saleem also returns to warn Nick of the consequences should he be plotting some sort of double cross with Bashir. And all the while the American drones are getting closer and closer. It is to Akhtar's credit that he keeps us guessing until the end about who is most playing whom among this triumvirate. And the ending, as clunkily as it arrives, is thematically satisfying, if only for the way in which it shows us how well Bashir has absorbed Nick's lessons.

Under the direction of Richard Wolfe, the play steadily accrues tension and depth, and the scene transitions are additionally enhanced by the amazing vocalizations of Fathieh Honari (Chris Grdina is responsible for the music; the sound effects are by Christopher Kelly). Wolfe also elicits terrific performances from the entire cast, especially Sharma and Erickson. Sharma is a big man and he plays on that physicality by taking up and claiming space--including, in one especially funny scene, Nick's bed. Sharma also manages to convey in his lower class English accent and his violent temper how much of his character's extremist politics are grounded in the racism and poverty he experienced growing up in Houndswell, outside of London. Erickson negotiates Nick's transitions between fearful vulnerability and blustery bravado with tremendous skill. No matter the life and death situation he is in, Nick can't help succumbing to the addictive lure of the next trade--which is often where capitalism and terrorism fatefully (and often fatally) intersect.

P.

Empire of the Son at The Cultch

Yesterday afternoon I took a break from the grant application I was writing to catch a matinee performance of Tetsuro Shigematsu’s Empire of the Son, presented by Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre in association with the Cultch, where the solo show is being presented in the Vancity Culture Lab. The show instantly sold out its first two weeks of performances and so when a third was added I grabbed a ticket.

Shigematsu’s play is an autobiographical story of his stormy relationship with his father, a man who as child survived the incendiary bombing of his hometown in Japan and the fallout of Hiroshima, but who rarely talked about these events as an adult. Shigematsu Sr. immigrated first to London, where he worked for BBC Radio, and then to Canada, where he hosted one of the highest-rated foreign-language radio broadcasts for the CBC before his job was axed under Mulroney and he was demoted to mailroom clerk, retreating behind his yellow safety earphones so he wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of his fellow employees addressing him by his first name, Akira. Early on in the show we learn about the difficulty of Tetsuro’s father via an anecdote concerning his leather briefcase, which his son displays for us from the stage, embossed with the CBC’s familiar logo. Tetsuro had thought it might be a way for him to get closer to his Dad if he asked to borrow the bag; but his father refuses, saying only employees of the crown corporation could carry such a satchel. It’s just one of the many ironies of the tale being told that son, like father, also ends up working for CBC Radio, Tetsuro having inherited The Roundup from Bill Richardson in 2004.

And, indeed, this is a show very much about voice: finding it; sharing it; preserving it. Tetsuro talks in his father’s accented voice (and is rebuked, from beyond the grave, for doing so); he plays recordings of his father’s radio broadcasts and of taped conversations he made with him during his father’s slow decline while in hospital (the sound waves displayed to us indicating just how much silence Shigematsu Sr. left between each question); he amplifies his voice via various microphones and talks about how his CBC bosses worked with him to find a more masculine timbre at the beginning of his on-air career. And then there are the other voices brought into the story: those of Tetsuro’s mother and his sisters, who tease him about his Fu Manchu moustache and form an instant—and instantly natural—chorus of cooing love song around his father in hospital that puts the dryness in his own mouth to shame. We see and hear Tetsuro’s own children on video, challenging him as to why he never cries. And that is in fact the challenge that Tetsuro takes up over the course of the 75 minutes of this play—to cry for his father in death as partial recompense for what he could not say to him in life. It is a testament to the honest and unsentimental way director Richard Wolfe (of Pi Theatre) has approached this obviously very personal story that the fulfilling of this challenge by play’s end is not signposted for us by anything so crass as acoustically amplified heaving sobs; rather, we witness the tears that organically materialize on Tetsuro’s cheeks as he reaches the end of his story.

I would be remiss if I did not talk about the design concept for this piece. The two main elements of Pam Johnson’s set consist of a backdrop of warm wood, suggestive of shoji screens, and what looks a long laboratory counter. On top of this are several stations, some crowded with miniature objects, others filled with various substances (such as white sand or water). Using a moveable camera attached to a live video feed, at various points in the telling of his story, Tetsuro illustrates what he is saying by manipulating one or more elements at each station, which is then broadcast to us on a screen behind him. For example, the atomic mushroom cloud accompanying the Hiroshima bombing is achieved when Tetsuro injects a viscous liquid into a tank of water; and the crowded Tokyo commuter train carrying hundreds of thousands of salary men—including, at one point, both Shigematsu père and fils—we see whizzing by via a canny focalization of the camera’s lens on a toy train car being advanced by Tetsuro. But by far my favourite of these effects were those moments of what I’ll call double digitality—that is, when Tetsuro inserted his own fingers into the camera’s frame to literally stand in for different pairs of legs, as when he and his father, during his “anarchist” teenage phase, have an argument about his skateboarding, or when, in an illustration of a story by his daughter, Tetsuro uses his fingers to mimic the swoosh of skating atop a snowy Grouse Mountain.

If I have a criticism about the production, it’s that at times it felt a bit too rushed. Tetsuro tells his story at a breathless pace and perhaps his years of talk radio training leave him fearful of too many pauses. But I for one wished for some longer beats at various moments in the play, especially when a temporal or narrative transition was being made. I kept thinking back to those long silences in Tetsuro’s interviews with his fathers. In a play like this one something like dead air seems to take on so much added significance.

P.

Disgraced at the Arts Club

The Arts Club's Bill Millerd is certainly consistent in his programming choices, including when, for his largely subscription-based audience, he goes out on a limb and programs a "risky" play at a mainstage space like the Stanley. Having achieved success three years ago with Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park, a caustic comedy about contemporary racial and economic politics in Chicago (and about which I blogged here), his season opener at the Stanley this year is Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced. Like Norris' play, Akhtar's tackles head-on the issue of race in twenty-first century America; also like Clybourne Park, Disgraced comes to town bearing the imprimatur of a Pulitzer Prize and trailing lots of critical acclaim. Finally, this production of Disgraced is directed by the venerable Janet Wright, who also helmed Norris' play for the AC, and both productions share two cast members: Marci T. House and Robert Moloney.

All the winning ingredients for a repeat success. And yet I still left last night's performance extremely disappointed. The fault has less to do with the AC's production per se, which is snappily directed and for the most part well acted. The fault for me lies with Ahktar's script, which sets out to critique binaristic readings of what it means to be a Muslim-American man today, but ends up re-entrenching those binaries--often in extremely disturbing ways.

The play focuses on Amir Kapoor (Patrick Sabongui, making an assured AC debut), a successful New York lawyer of Pakistani descent. Amir, who long ago changed his last name from Abdullah, is an assimilated Muslim man who claims to abhor the fundamentalist ideology of the religion in which he was raised. However, his wife Emily (Kyra Zagorsky), a painter, finds inspiration for her art in Islamic tile-work and architecture, and even in the spiritual teachings of the Qur'an. Complicating matters further is the presence in the couple's life of Amir's nephew Abe (a very effective Conor Wylie). Like Amir, Abe has changed his name (from Hussein); but unlike Amir, Abe has not completely turned his back on his family and his community, and he has arrived at his uncle's doorstep seeking his help regarding the apparently illegal incarceration of a local Imam. Amir does not want to get involved and in the course of explaining to his nephew and his wife his problems with the Muslim faith, Amir recounts the story of his fifth-grade love, Rivka. When Amir's mother found out about the flirtation she told him he couldn't be involved with a Jew and spit in his face; later in the school hallway, when Rivka approaches him, he tells her that he can't see her anymore because she is a Jew and likewise spits in her face. It's one of many moments in the script that elicits a gasp from both of Amir's on-stage and off-stage audiences. But it's also an example, as we shall see, of Ahktar's framing of Amir's apparently available choices--acquired culture-blind liberal tolerance vs. the weight of family and religious inheritance--in impossible black and white terms.

Nevertheless, at Emily's prodding, Amir says he will look into the Imam's case and when, later, he is quoted in the New York Times about the brief, he begins a paranoid unravelling in which his neatly compartmentalized professional and personal lives start to overlap in increasingly combustible ways. That this is accompanied by a dinner party with his black colleague Jory (House) and her Jewish art curator husband, Isaac (Moloney), only ups the ante. We met Isaac in a previous scene, when he came to look at Emily's paintings, and now three months later, following a trip together to London to attend the Frieze Art Fair, Emily is hosting this dinner in hopes that Isaac will announce that he's including her in the upcoming Whitney Biennale that he is organizing. This is duly disclosed, but there are more revelations over the course of the evening: that Jory has made partner at the law firm, for example, whereas Amir is on the verge of being fired; and, most clunkily, that Emily and Isaac slept together while in London.

As in Norris' Clybourne Park, Akhtar is interested in using the well-worn conceit of domestic melodrama to rip away the polite veneer of race relations in America. But whereas everyone is made to look bad in Norris' play, the climax of Disgraced presents the audience with the picture of the Muslim man, having struggled in vain all his life to suppress it, discovering and unleashing his backward animal savagery, his inner jihadist--that part of himself that, as he puts it to Isaac after more than a few drinks, felt a "blush of pride" when the Twin Towers fell. My problem has less to do with Akhtar's suggestion that in a post-Patriot Act America the Muslim man is positioned between two impossible poles--assimilation or extremism--than with his overly-obvious and even cliched telegraphing of Amir's disgrace. So, for example, the story about Rivka is there in the first scene to set up the moment at the end of the play when Amir spits in Isaac's face; and the dinner-table argument with Emily about what the Qur'an has to say about wife-beating makes all the more inevitable the blows he lands upon her body when she confesses the truth about her affair with Isaac.

Clybourne Park and Disgraced are both "social problem plays" aimed squarely at a mainstream audience. Which means that complex issues like race and cultural difference to a certain extent get reduced to screaming matches, with everyone given an equal opportunity at outrage and boorish behaviour. But in Norris' play not only was the added context of class brought into the equation, the plot was also wedded to a two-act structure that created even more tension and depth through historical and dramatic parallelism. Akhtar is also aspiring to marry form to content, and the play concludes with a coda in which Abe/Hussein returns, newly radicalized and once again seeking his uncle's legal advice--this time in connection with his own arrest and questioning by the FBI. However, both the circular structure of Akhtar's play and that of fundamentalist ideology arguably conspire here to confirm rather than to challenge cultural stereotypes.

It's certainly not what I expected from this play--especially given what I'd heard about it and the playwright in advance. I am hoping that Pi Theatre's production of The Invisible Hand in April offers me a different perspective.

P.

Pi Theatre's 2015/16 Season

I don't usually blog about theatre companies' season announcements. But Pi Theatre's 2015/16 season is of special interest to me--and not just because AD Richard Wolfe is directing the other Ayad Akhtar play in Vancouver this year.

Richard is also helping me workshop a little performance venture of my own! Details here.

P.

Blasted at Performance Works

Pedophilia (possibly incestuous), rape (vaginal and anal), cannibalism: just your typical Sunday afternoon at the theatre. At least it was for those of us in the audience at Performance Works yesterday, there to take in Pi Theatre's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted, directed by Richard Wolfe and on through Saturday, April 25th. The play premiered at the Royal Court in London in 1995, where its increasingly horrific catalogue of acts of violence and sexual degradation incensed critics. Never mind that Kane was referencing the very real atrocities then taking place in Bosnia, nor that she was consciously drawing on Greek tragedy--albeit in a way that makes plainly visible all the physical nastiness that in the classical tradition happened off-stage. To upstanding London theatregoers of the time, Kane was being unnecessarily provocative, too "in yer face," to reference the label that, for better or worse, got attached to Kane and several of her fellow upstart UK playwrighting contemporaries.

Now, of course, twenty years after its premiere (and sixteen after Kane's suicide in 1999) the play feels more relevant than ever, what with the various acts of unspeakable brutality we daily witness in the media emanating from Syria, or Iraq, or Kenya, or the Ukraine--not to mention the armed interventions our own governments in the West have undertaken in order to ensure, or so we are told, that such acts don't reach our shores. To that end, a nice touch by Wolfe in this production is having the voice of current UK Prime Minister David Cameron extolling on the radio at various points all that his government has done in the name of defending the integrity of the British Isles against the infidel hordes clawing at the gates. However, to Ian (Michael Kopsa), the male protagonist of Kane's play, such measures are too little and have come too late. A virulently racist, misogynistic and homophobic journalist whose specialty is covering sensational stories involving sex and murder--but who may also be an undercover government operative (he carries a gun)--the fiftyish Ian has taken refuge in a hotel room in the middle of the vile, foul-smelling city (we presume London, but in fact it's Leeds) he has come to loathe--in part because according to him it's now overrun with "Wogs." Joining Ian is Cate (Cherise Clarke), a much younger and extremely quiescent woman who just may be: a) mentally disabled; b) Ian's daughter; c) Ian's former lover; d) all of the above. At any rate, much of the first half of the play concerns Ian's attempts to cajole Cate into having sex with him, and Cate's attempts to fend him off.  When rhetorical persuasion fails, Ian simply takes what he has been denied when Cate is unable to defend herself: dry humping her on the floor when she is unconscious as a result of one of her fits and, it is suggested after one of the play's strategic blackouts, raping her when she is out cold during the night.

The relationship between Ian and Cate would quickly descend into caricature were it not for two things. First, Kane, is at pains to show us that her protagonists are much more complex than we might at first credit them to be. Ian's rage at the world comes from a deep vulnerability, a compensatory realization that as an aging white, middle class man whose body is rapidly betraying him (and whose past sins may be catching up with him), all he wants is for someone to love him. For her part, Cate has an inner core of strength, as well as a capacity for cold assessment of the situation when she needs it. She realizes that Ian is pathetic and ridiculous, and announces as much to him; but she also has compassion for him, as she does for humanity in general (there are several references to her taking care of her mother and brother, and she is shown caring for and, after it dies, burying an abandoned baby later in the play). Indeed, it is a mark of Kane's subtlety as a playwright that, almost without us knowing it, and in apparent contradiction of what we are witnessing physically on stage, we end up feeling that there is a real bond--something that indeed approximates love--between these two damaged souls. It helps, in this regard, that the roles are played by actors as talented as Kopsa and Clarke, who in their very demanding emotional and physical interactions over the course of the play effortlessly convey the complex shared history of their characters. In fact, the play ends with a quiet scene between the couple that, precisely because of all the horror that precedes it, is shatteringly tender, and that involves Ian uttering to Cate a simple "thank you."

Except that it's not that simple, and for Ian and us in the audience to feel any measure of grace at play's end we first have to earn it. Which is where the second, and primarily structural, innovation of Kane's writing comes in. She shows us that the domestic violence between Ian and Cate inside their hotel room is parallel to, and in fact an extension of, the military violence outside by having the latter literally intrude on the former. I am referring here to the appearance of the third character in the play, the Soldier (Raresh DiMofte), whose specific allegiance (apart from that he shows to the memory of his slaughtered girlfriend) is never identified, just as the factional conflict that mysteriously creeps up on Ian and Cate remains primarily allegorical. The Soldier is Ian's shadow self, the abjected other whose return is designed to remind Ian--and us--that, in direct antithesis to the compassion represented by Cate (who, crucially, during the scenes between the two men is locked in the bathroom), perhaps what most marks us as human is that we are capable of both imagining and doing just about anything. It's a brutal truth that is almost impossible to confront--which perhaps explains why, after he sodomizes him, the Soldier chews out Ian's eyes. As I said, Kane knew her Greek tragedy.

This is the second staging of Blasted that I have seen, the first being the celebrated Soho Rep run in New York in 2008 that starred the amazing Reed Birney and Marin Ireland. I have deliberately avoided comparing the two, as I wanted to judge Wolfe's production on its own terms. To that end, my first props go to the design team (led by the ubiquitous and super-talented Drew Facey--see my previous review of Indian Arm); not only have they created a more than credibly generic hotel room, but they manage to blow it up in a believable fashion. That I have spent more time in this review than in my previous one (which you can read here) contemplating the sophistication of Kane's script speaks to Wolfe's attentive care to its layered complexity. I do think the pacing in the second half flags a bit--the blackouts that mark the space between Ian's successive "states of emergency" could come more quickly (though I do understand that there are some basic technical encumbrances that are also being dealt with here). Finally, there is the question of nudity. Given what happens in the play, a degree of it is more or less to be expected. And yet, whereas we see Clarke full frontally in a longish scene where, following Ian's night-time sexual assault, she gets out of bed and traumatically stumbles into her clothes, we only ever see Kopsa's backside--despite ample opportunity, given what happens to him, to display more (and this goes for DiMofte as well). Not that I'm making an argument for upping the titillation quotient. And I have no idea whether this was a primarily directorial or an actorly decision. In the absence of that information, however, the decision does seem to replicate some familiar tropes of gendered gratuity--tropes that Kane's play, I would argue, expressly critiques.

P.

Push 2012 Review #11: Almighty Voice and His Wife at The Waterfront

As PuSh Festival Senior Curator Sherrie Johnson and I were discussing last night after the premiere of Daniel David Moses' Almighty Voice and His Wife at the Waterfront Theatre, it's hard to believe the piece was written and first premiered way back in 1991. That's how theatrically audacious and representationally daring the piece is, made even more so in this compelling production from Canada's premiere Aboriginal theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts, which is here vividly directed by Michael Greyeyes in a co-presentation with Touchstone and Pi Theatres as part of this year's Aboriginal Performance Series at the Festival.

The play is a two-hander told over two acts and based on historical incidents. Almighty Voice is a Cree man from the One Arrow Reserve in Saskatchewan who is arrested after poaching a cow. He escapes from prison and a manhunt is initiated by the Northwest Mounted Police. Hiding out at his mother's home with his wife, White Girl, who has already had a terrifying vision of his demise, Almighty Voice prepares for the inevitable shootout. When it comes, it is brutal and bloody. All of this is told in a fairly straightforward manner over 10 compact scenes, the titles of which are announced in a Brechtian manner by White Girl. However, this metatheatrical conceit--together with the almost deliberately anthropological/dioramic way (most of the scenes are played in a single large centre spot on an otherwise bare stage) this "true story of the dying Plains Indian" is staged by Greyeyes--is a clue to what's coming next.

Indeed, returning from intermission the audience discovers the stage now cluttered with props, the flies open to expose the wings, and a cue card dangling from the rafters announcing Act 2: Ghost Dance. The actors themselves, we soon discover, return in white face, with White Girl now additionally dressed like a Mountie and, true to the interlocutor/impresario role she now takes on, charged with getting the person she addresses as Almighty Ghost to perform his Indianness for us. Combining aspects of the vaudeville routine and the minstrel and medicine shows, the second act is a series of increasingly outrageous and high-stakes riffs on "redskin" stereotypes, addressed directly to the audience. Indeed, in Act 2 Moses doesn't just break the fourth wall, he explodes it, with both Mr. Interlocutor and Almighty Ghost coming out into the audience at various points, and each strategically playing to and upon our ideological sympathies in order to gain the upper hand.

And it is this last point that makes Moses' play at once so groundbreaking and compellingly contemporary, for it accomplishes via its canny structure the double task of exposing both real and representational violence to us, theatricalizing Aboriginal stereotypes and then catching us in the act of succumbing to them. It is risky material, to be sure (think of some of the backlash and misinterpretation that accompanied Spike Lee's film Bamboozled), and it takes very accomplished performers to bring it off successfully, capturing both the ironic comedy and the tragic drama underlying the jokes. Happily, the incredibly talented Derek Garza and PJ Prudat are more than up to the task, and kudos must go to all the artists involved in bringing this masterpiece of Canadian drama back to the stage.

Almighty Voice and His Wife continues at the Waterfront through this Saturday.

P.

PuSh Review #4: In the Solitude of Cotton Fields at Performance Works

PuSh Acting Managing Director Kent Gallie said to me just before the Festival that he thought In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, which ended its run at Performance Works last night, might be this year's White Cabin. In other words, edgy, surreal, sensorially and emotionally extreme in a suitably Eastern European way. He was right.

In the Solitude is rising young Polish director Radoslaw Rychcik's bold new staging of a 1986 play by the late French writer Bernard-Marie Koltès. His generation's answer to Genet before his AIDS-related death in 1989, Koltès's work is known for the brutality of its themes and the lyrical poetry of its language. And, indeed, one of the extraordinary things about this production is how that poetry translates simultaneously via the actors' spoken Polish and via the projected English subtitles. Those subtitles were sometimes obscured by the puffs of white smoke billowing across the stage--including, unfortunately, during the final exchange of dialogue--but one is easily able to discern the broad parameters of the relationship unfolding before us.

Two men meet for some sort of illicit exchange. One, The Dealer (Wojciech Niemczk), has something to sell; the other, The Client (Tomasz Nosinski), wishes to buy. However, the object of this exchange remains unnamed. Is it drugs, sex, something else? It doesn't really matter, as the text informs us that the real subject of the play, and what both men are themselves subject to, is desire itself. Or, to put things in the proper psychoanalytical context, the desire to desire. The two men are bound together in terms of what each can give the other, but paradoxically their relationship is sustained only to the extent that their desire remains unfulfilled. It is this space of lonely, needful encounter--the cotton fields of the title, presumably--that this play explores, where the boundaries between men and beasts dissolve and where the requisite poses of humility (on the part of The Dealer) and hauteur (on the part of The Client) need to be adopted in order to maintain the fiction of reciprocity and an equal exchange of power.

All of this might appear tediously pretentious were it staged in a conventionally naturalistic way, and a production of this sort in 2002 in New York was savaged by the Times. However, Rychcik adapts the posturing and swagger implicit in the characters' competing monologues to the punk concert setting (a mini-theme at this year's Festival, what with Hard Core Logo: Live opening next week at the Rickshaw), complete with live musical accompaniment by the band Natural Born Chillers and dual downstage floor mikes into which the performers bark, scream, and hiss their lines, and in front of which they strut, dance, and pose. Dressed in matching mod suits, and with kohl-rimmed eyes (Nosinski) and eventually ruby-red lips (Niemczyk), the two performers were riveting from the moment they stepped on the stage and started to shimmy, groove, and bust to the music. The energy was electric, the atmosphere was loud, and the tension in the room did not let up until the performers' climactic embrace.

This is precisely the sort of performance that would not come through Vancouver without the PuSh Festival and, in this specific case, our wonderful co-producers, Pi Theatre. The enthusiastic reception by last night's audience is in part a recognition of this. That In the Solitude's concert/cabaret-style setting also inaugurated, to a certain extent, Performance Works as the venue for Club PuSh before its official opening next Wednesday was an added bonus. To that end, the Natural Born Chillers came back on stage after the performance for a late-night set to celebrate the end not just of this show's run, but an extraordinarily successful first week of the Festival.

P.