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.
P
Showing posts with label Richard Wolfe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Wolfe. Show all posts
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Thursday, October 5, 2017
1 Hour Photo at The Cultch
Tetsuro Shigematsu's 1 Hour Photo, which opened last night at The Cultch's Historic Theatre, is his follow-up to the wildly successful Empire of the Son. Like Empire, 1 Hour Photo is once again being produced by Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre (VACT), and Richard Wolfe returns as director. The two shows also follow a similar format, with Shigematsu, as writer-performer, recounting his story directly to the audience and using miniature digital cameras and live video feeds to animate various on-stage objects to startling effect, including in this newest work a miniature dioramic model of the North Vancouver house where Shigematsu lives with his family.
The replica house is a significant symbol, and in many ways represents the bridge between these two works. Thus, near the top of 1 Hour Photo, we learn that Shigematsu moved into it with his wife, children and parents at the insistence of its owner, VACT's Artistic Producer, Donna Yamamoto. It was here that Shigematsu cared for his dying father (who was the subject of Empire), and also where he discovered, in the form of an old Japan Camera coffee mug, the first clue to the life story of Yamamoto's father, who is the focus of this piece.
Mas Yamamoto, 91 years old and still going strong, owned a string of Japan Camera outlets, which were among the first photo development franchises that began offering one-hour return service in the early 1980s--hence the title of the show. But before he became a successful businessman, Mas lived several other lives, which coincided with some of the signal events in twentieth-century British Columbian and Canadian history. Distilling 36 hours of interviews with Mas into an 18-minute first-person narrative that he then pressed into a vinyl recording, Shigematsu, aided by composer and onstage musical sidekick, Steve Charles, proceeds to spin his tale, giving us an excerpt of Mas's voice, and then elaborating on the larger social and political context. We learn, for example, that Mas was interned with his family during World War II at Lemon Creek, and that it was there that he met his first love, Midge. With only a Grade 9 education at the end of the war, Mas went to work to support his family, losing touch with Midge, and eventually working on the Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic during the height of the Cold War. It was during this period that he met Joan, whom he would marry. Their growing family, and the need to supplement his meagre blue collar wages, prompted Mas to return to school, completing his high school equivalency, and a BSc, MSc and PhD in Pharmacology at UBC in less than a decade. And then, chucking his comfortable job as a government scientist, at the age of 50 Mas decided to become a photo shop entrepreneur. The story comes full circle when, later in life, Mas reencounters Midge, who will join Mas and his family in the gallery at the BC Legislature to witness Mas's daughter and Liberal Minister of Advanced Education, Naomi Yamomoto, deliver a speech endorsing a motion of apology to Japanese Canadians on the 70th anniversary of their interment.
All of this is supplemented by amazing archival photographs and film footage (the video design is by Jamie Nesbitt), and Shigematsu creates some wonderful effects with his live camera feed, as when a single miniature bunkbed placed within a mirrored box becomes multiplied into row upon row when projected on the backstage screen. Paradoxically, however, the visual design of the show points to the underdevelopment of the photographic metaphor in Shigematsu's script. Apart from one arresting description of multiple exposure as a way to think of the collapsing of time into a single stilled moment, I was struck by how Shigematsu's narrative portrait mostly eschewed such analogies. Indeed, it is the recording of Mas's voice that instead tends to dominate, and that via the repeated ritual of Shigematsu or Charles dropping the turntable needle into a given groove on the spinning record accords that voice a necessarily auratic quality (Shigematsu's likening of this audio document to the recordings that were sent into space on the Voyager satellites only deepens this feeling). As a result, Shigematsu's own voice at times registered to me as more adjunct than central to the story, mostly serving to amplify or illustrate the gist of what Mas had to say. Most telling, in this regard, is that the references to Shigematsu's own father felt extraneous to this piece, almost as if they had been imported to tie Empire of the Son and I Hour Photo more tightly together.
I don't think such dramaturgical stitching is needed. The two works already complement each other in myriad other ways.
P
The replica house is a significant symbol, and in many ways represents the bridge between these two works. Thus, near the top of 1 Hour Photo, we learn that Shigematsu moved into it with his wife, children and parents at the insistence of its owner, VACT's Artistic Producer, Donna Yamamoto. It was here that Shigematsu cared for his dying father (who was the subject of Empire), and also where he discovered, in the form of an old Japan Camera coffee mug, the first clue to the life story of Yamamoto's father, who is the focus of this piece.
Mas Yamamoto, 91 years old and still going strong, owned a string of Japan Camera outlets, which were among the first photo development franchises that began offering one-hour return service in the early 1980s--hence the title of the show. But before he became a successful businessman, Mas lived several other lives, which coincided with some of the signal events in twentieth-century British Columbian and Canadian history. Distilling 36 hours of interviews with Mas into an 18-minute first-person narrative that he then pressed into a vinyl recording, Shigematsu, aided by composer and onstage musical sidekick, Steve Charles, proceeds to spin his tale, giving us an excerpt of Mas's voice, and then elaborating on the larger social and political context. We learn, for example, that Mas was interned with his family during World War II at Lemon Creek, and that it was there that he met his first love, Midge. With only a Grade 9 education at the end of the war, Mas went to work to support his family, losing touch with Midge, and eventually working on the Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic during the height of the Cold War. It was during this period that he met Joan, whom he would marry. Their growing family, and the need to supplement his meagre blue collar wages, prompted Mas to return to school, completing his high school equivalency, and a BSc, MSc and PhD in Pharmacology at UBC in less than a decade. And then, chucking his comfortable job as a government scientist, at the age of 50 Mas decided to become a photo shop entrepreneur. The story comes full circle when, later in life, Mas reencounters Midge, who will join Mas and his family in the gallery at the BC Legislature to witness Mas's daughter and Liberal Minister of Advanced Education, Naomi Yamomoto, deliver a speech endorsing a motion of apology to Japanese Canadians on the 70th anniversary of their interment.
All of this is supplemented by amazing archival photographs and film footage (the video design is by Jamie Nesbitt), and Shigematsu creates some wonderful effects with his live camera feed, as when a single miniature bunkbed placed within a mirrored box becomes multiplied into row upon row when projected on the backstage screen. Paradoxically, however, the visual design of the show points to the underdevelopment of the photographic metaphor in Shigematsu's script. Apart from one arresting description of multiple exposure as a way to think of the collapsing of time into a single stilled moment, I was struck by how Shigematsu's narrative portrait mostly eschewed such analogies. Indeed, it is the recording of Mas's voice that instead tends to dominate, and that via the repeated ritual of Shigematsu or Charles dropping the turntable needle into a given groove on the spinning record accords that voice a necessarily auratic quality (Shigematsu's likening of this audio document to the recordings that were sent into space on the Voyager satellites only deepens this feeling). As a result, Shigematsu's own voice at times registered to me as more adjunct than central to the story, mostly serving to amplify or illustrate the gist of what Mas had to say. Most telling, in this regard, is that the references to Shigematsu's own father felt extraneous to this piece, almost as if they had been imported to tie Empire of the Son and I Hour Photo more tightly together.
I don't think such dramaturgical stitching is needed. The two works already complement each other in myriad other ways.
P
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Long Division: Second Closing
Today's matinee is the last performance of this remount of Long Division. It would be wonderful to have a second week of shows, but I am grateful to have had the opportunity to revisit the work at all. The play is definitely stronger as a result, the actors have made new discoveries in the text and with their characters, and the work--especially Lauchlin's set and Lesley's choreography--looks great in the Annex space. Immense thanks to Richard Wolfe for making all of this happen.
Later this evening, after our strike, the cast and crew will come over to our place to celebrate. In the meantime, I thought I would share a response to the play by my friend Ziyian Kwan. I have enjoyed writing about Ziyian's work in this space over the years and it is a treat for me to receive her sensitive response to my own creative efforts.
P
***************************
Dear Peter,
Ziyian
Later this evening, after our strike, the cast and crew will come over to our place to celebrate. In the meantime, I thought I would share a response to the play by my friend Ziyian Kwan. I have enjoyed writing about Ziyian's work in this space over the years and it is a treat for me to receive her sensitive response to my own creative efforts.
P
***************************
Dear Peter,
Rodney and I attended Long Division last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I thought it
would be a fun exercise to do as you do and write about
the experience the morning after. And to limit the writing to within 500 words,
in a tone inspired by yours. Herewith:
On the day
I saw Long Division, playwright Peter
Dickinson’s partner Richard visited my husband’s bookshop, The Paperhound, to purchase
a precious pamphlet. Later that evening, upon arriving at the Annex Theatre, I ran
into David Kaye, an actor I haven’t seen for years, who lives in my building of
18 units. Then as I found my seat in the theatre, I realized that Jimmy Tait, whom
I hadn’t seen since attending a showing of Misunderstood,
was beside me. Hugs were exchanged.
All this to ask, what are the odds of running into people who are on the periphery
of our lives – in places where we share common interests, in remote
cities yet untraveled, or in our dreams? Are these collisions accident or fate? I think of
times when the course of my life was changed as a direct result of such chance
meetings.
Long Division invited me to consider the
gravity and levity of encounters with people. I found myself wishing to remember
exact lines that were pithy analogies of math and human exchange. The text, which was delivered by a fine cast of
actors, was recognizably Peter Dickinson’s: the sing-song syntax and dry
lyricism of precise words that captured potent questions about life. Throughout,
the clever use of phrases such as “in addition” to describe events.
Whereas much of the play was a silky cocoon of existential
inquiry, the story revealed a tragedy. This tension worked, yet I occasionally wished
for a less emphatic treatment of human drama. But then, I know nothing about theatre….
I do know a little about dance and found choreographer
Lesley Telford’s work bang on. Without being illustrative or literal, the actors
moved through space to navigate circumstances in time. The dance, though abstract, seemed natural, and
added texture to characters and scenes. And, the movement was styling!
I also liked the projection of mathematical formulas
on a backdrop of Pythagorean 3D triangles. Coming from dance, where projections
are often used but usually ignored, I appreciated that the actors actually
looked at the projections to confirm that, indeed, complex equations attend the
sum total of life’s many variables.
My favorite of the play’s many equations and
corresponding metaphors was this: the empty set is a subset of every set.
Like many people, I often feel like the outcast quality
in a mass quantity of digits that belong. But Long
Division helps me with this affliction, suggesting that the nothingness of
my empty set is part of a greater equation: humanity.
This morning I woke up and thought about my life as
an artist and realized that if nothing else, I have at my side and within me, the
exponential prowess of zero.
Thank you for the beautiful work,
Peter.
With love,
Ziyian
Saturday, April 22, 2017
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.
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.
P.
Saturday, April 8, 2017
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.
P.
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.
P.
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Long Division: Opening
So we're officially open. Last night was a full house, there was a good energy, and the actors nailed it. Richard insisted I take a bow, which I didn't really want to do. But it did allow me to sneak backstage with the actors afterwards and give them each a card and little joke gift, as well as share a quick sip of prosecco with them in the dressing room before the public reception put on by the Gateway.
Richard had said the night before, after Thursday's preview, that he thought folks would either love the play or hate it--which we both agreed was better than a meh reaction. I had some great conversations with audience members last night who fell into the former camp, although it mostly seems the critics so far are firmly in the latter. Not sure why, when it's obvious from the beginning that the conceit of the play is lecture-performance you'd dwell on the fact that there's not enough conventional storytelling. I also wonder why it was the preview performance that got reviewed instead of the opening. Oh well.
None of the actors could go out for a drink afterwards, as they have a 2 pm matinee today. So before we all scattered from the reception I gathered them together to tell them about the dream I had had about the play the night before. I never remember my dreams, but this one was incredibly vivid. It involved the entire cast and crew passing around a bong (which was no doubt planted in my subconscious by the fact that on Thursday afternoon we had been joking about a version of the play called Bong Division). In the dream, the police suddenly arrive and decide they have to arrest someone--whether for getting high or doing so in the theatre is unclear. They settle on Jay Clift as the fall guy--likely again this was related to the fact that in the play Jay's character, Reid, talks about being a small-time weed dealer in high school. Then again, it could simply be because Jay is so tall and he was easiest to pick out of the crowd. At any rate, the whole production was thrown into a tailspin because of this, requiring us to find a replacement Reid at the last minute. The candidate turned out to be a whiz at memorizing his lines in no time, but when it came to the choreography he decided that the best thing was to improvise. Unfortunately his improvisation involved doing grand jetes and multiple pirouettes across the stage during everyone else's monologue. The last thing I remember from the dream is Jethelo, our stage manager, madly trying to write down all the new blocking as Lesley, our choreographer, sunk deeper and deeper in stunned bewilderment into her chair.
Afterwards, over still more drinks with Richard, Lesley, Jethelo, Shayna Goldberg, Pi's GM, Rob Maguire, President of Pi's Board of Directors, and my Richard, we all agreed that ours is just about the best cast ever. Given all we've thrown at them--10+ minute monologues filled with math jargon, complicated choreography--and given all that they've been through during the process, it's such a gift to see them embrace the material so fully. And we get to do it all over again in April.
P
Richard had said the night before, after Thursday's preview, that he thought folks would either love the play or hate it--which we both agreed was better than a meh reaction. I had some great conversations with audience members last night who fell into the former camp, although it mostly seems the critics so far are firmly in the latter. Not sure why, when it's obvious from the beginning that the conceit of the play is lecture-performance you'd dwell on the fact that there's not enough conventional storytelling. I also wonder why it was the preview performance that got reviewed instead of the opening. Oh well.
None of the actors could go out for a drink afterwards, as they have a 2 pm matinee today. So before we all scattered from the reception I gathered them together to tell them about the dream I had had about the play the night before. I never remember my dreams, but this one was incredibly vivid. It involved the entire cast and crew passing around a bong (which was no doubt planted in my subconscious by the fact that on Thursday afternoon we had been joking about a version of the play called Bong Division). In the dream, the police suddenly arrive and decide they have to arrest someone--whether for getting high or doing so in the theatre is unclear. They settle on Jay Clift as the fall guy--likely again this was related to the fact that in the play Jay's character, Reid, talks about being a small-time weed dealer in high school. Then again, it could simply be because Jay is so tall and he was easiest to pick out of the crowd. At any rate, the whole production was thrown into a tailspin because of this, requiring us to find a replacement Reid at the last minute. The candidate turned out to be a whiz at memorizing his lines in no time, but when it came to the choreography he decided that the best thing was to improvise. Unfortunately his improvisation involved doing grand jetes and multiple pirouettes across the stage during everyone else's monologue. The last thing I remember from the dream is Jethelo, our stage manager, madly trying to write down all the new blocking as Lesley, our choreographer, sunk deeper and deeper in stunned bewilderment into her chair.
Afterwards, over still more drinks with Richard, Lesley, Jethelo, Shayna Goldberg, Pi's GM, Rob Maguire, President of Pi's Board of Directors, and my Richard, we all agreed that ours is just about the best cast ever. Given all we've thrown at them--10+ minute monologues filled with math jargon, complicated choreography--and given all that they've been through during the process, it's such a gift to see them embrace the material so fully. And we get to do it all over again in April.
P
Thursday, November 17, 2016
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.
P
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.
P
Saturday, November 12, 2016
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.
P
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.
P
Sunday, November 6, 2016
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.
P
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.
P
Saturday, October 29, 2016
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.
P
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.
P
Saturday, October 8, 2016
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.
P.
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!
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.
P.
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!
Monday, September 19, 2016
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
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
Thursday, August 4, 2016
The Romans in Britain at the Jericho Arts Centre
The plays of Howard Brenton are performed far less regularly in North America than those of British New Left contemporaries like David Hare and Caryl Churchill. That's a shame, because Brenton's work is every bit as formally inventive, historically capacious, and politically hard-hitting--and on the latter front often more so. So it comes as welcome news that Ensemble Theatre Company is presenting Brenton's 1980 play The Romans in Britain as part of its fourth summer season in residence at the Jericho Arts Centre; the play runs in repertory with Ensemble's productions of Harold Pinter's Betrayal and William Wycherly The Country Wife through August 20th.
The conceit of Brenton's play is to juxtapose and invite historical comparison between the Roman invasion of Britain in 54 BCE and England's military occupation of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 70s; he also throws in some scenes depicting the Saxon invasion and war with the Romano-Celts in the 4th century AD, though wisely decides to forgo a staging of the Norman conquest in 1066. The play opens with two petty criminals (Yurij Kis and Matthew Bissett) on the run. Having killed a man and stolen his iron and wine, they are hoping to make it to the Irish Sea ahead of the advancing Romans, terrifying stories of which are already sweeping the land--including the fact that the Romans are said to have eagle heads, an allusion to their iconic centurion helmets (duly reproduced by expert costume designer Julie White). Publicly, however, one Celtic family, led by a formidable matriarch played with assured command by Rebecca Walters, is having none of the rumours, arguing that the Romans are just a ruse to get them to abandon their land. The folly of such thinking is brought to stark and brutal light in the next scene, when the sons of said family, having just enjoyed a pleasant afternoon swim, find themselves staring down the swords of three Roman centurions. What follows earned the play lasting notoriety when it premiered at London's National Theatre, the graphic depiction of an attempted rape of one of the sons--also a Druid priest, and here played by Ensemble company member Ennis Hannah with a palpable mix of defiance and vulnerability--having provoked a legal charge of "gross indecency" by one offended and over-zealous patron, Mary Whitehouse. While director Richard Wolfe does not shy away from foregrounding the physical violence in this scene, what shocks the most is Brenton's language, liberally salted with obscenities that transcend historical time periods and reflecting the casual brutality of the soldiers' actions: indeed, the Roman rapist is most upset that his victim's soiling of himself has caused him to lose his hard-on. (Brenton is quite fond of the scatological, and there is a running joke about the building of latrines that spans the play's different temporalities.)
At the end of the first act, one lowly female slave, having just avenged herself by killing her own rapist (one of the criminals from the first scene), raises a rock against the anonymous hordes who will surely continue to come. And, indeed, this is the cue for a coup de théâtre that will also serve as Brenton's transition to his depiction of more contemporary "troubles" on the British Isles: for the slave woman's rock-wielding arm is immediately answered by the arrival of half a dozen fatigues-clad and machine gun-toting British paramilitary. Plus ça change. What makes the second half of Brenton's play continue to resonate, even after the Easter Accords and almost 20 years of tenuous peace in Ireland, is that he doesn't force the historical parallels; he merely lays bare the evidence by counterpointing scenes. Thus, in the 1970s we are presented with Tom Chichester, an English intelligence officer attempting to infiltrate the IRA by posing as a sympathizer and runner of illegal Communist weapons having uneasy dreams in a wheat field of past atrocities, including the death of a Saxon soldier, an act of patricide by two Celtic sisters, and the murder of a Romano-Celt lady by her servant-turned-lover. (At last night's performance the role of Tom, as well as that of Julius Caesar in Act 1, was taken on with last-minute aplomb by the on-book Ensemble AD, Tariq Leslie, who was subbing for an absent cast mate.) Tom's own eventual murder by the IRA members who expose him underscores the brutal logic of endless wars begat by self-perpetuating imperial powers, a lesson as applicable to Iraq and Syria and the DRC and the Ukraine and the war against ISIS today as it was to Northern Ireland or Vietnam or any number of African states in the 1960s and 70s: as one of the IRA cell members puts it, in war the rules are simple, whereas in peace they are much less clearly defined.
Nevertheless, Brenton ends his play with an epilogue that takes us back to the 4th century, where the two sisters form an alliance with two runaway cooks, formerly part of the retinue of the murdered lady. The male cook starts to tell a story of a legendary king in whose name a long peace is established in the land; when the sisters ask the name of this king, the male cook turns to his female companion, who says: "Arthur? I don't know, Arthur?" That Brenton has to turn to myth to construct a plausibly perfectible narrative of national solidarity for Britain--just as successive generations from the Middle Ages to the Victorian era would likewise recycle Arthurian legend to shore up their sense of identity--is telling. Indeed, this scene and the play as a whole had special resonance for me post-Brexit, when the political chimera of a united (and ethnically pure) Albion is also being returned to as justification for anti-immigrant sentiment and ugly acts of racism. As interesting to me is that Brenton begins and ends his play with scenes depicting members of the lumpenproletariat (criminals, slaves, refugees and other members of the lower orders whom Marx theorized could not be trusted to achieve class consciousness and join the workers' struggle), suggesting perhaps that if the revolution continues to perpetuate the crimes of the imperial state, then perhaps it's best to eschew organized system of power altogether. In our present post-Occupy and hacktivist era, with multiple forms of precarity (economic and otherwise) extending through various strata of society, it's a bracing sentiment that likewise continues to resonate. And it offers lessons to those guilelessly angry followers of Donald Trump who continue to think he has even the remotest clue (let alone a genuine desire) about how to make America great again. Faded empires do not return to past glory; they simply sputter on, mired in the detritus that is their legacy.
All of which is to say that this production deserves to be seen. Mounted in the round, and with Ensemble's incredibly hard-working cast of 16 taking on a remarkable 45 different parts, the staging is as sensorially affecting (dirt and stones litter the floor, we hear the howling of dogs and the cawing of birds, and live drums beat throughout) as it is intellectually invigorating. Sitting in the front row, I was able to feel the pulsating physicality underscoring so many of the performances--even when characters are cowering behind rocks or bushels of wheat, hoping to remain unseen. The simple yet highly effective choral movement that Ziyian Kwan has choreographed for the opening of each act helps to telegraph this reciprocal kinaesthetic bond between the performers and spectators, something amplified by Wolfe's decision to have most of the ensemble, when not onstage, remain visible and seated alongside the audience on opposite risers--as if they, too, are powerless to stop the terrible onslaught of history.
From 1978-1980, Hare, Churchill and Brenton scored a theatrical trifecta with plays that deconstructed, in both form and content, the legacy of British imperialism. And yet while Hare's Plenty and Churchill's Cloud Nine have definitively entered the Western dramatic canon and are often remounted (with a revival of Plenty starring Rachel Weisz scheduled for New York's Public Theatre this fall), Brenton's Romans in Britain remains more on the fringe. Kudos to Ensemble and director Richard Wolfe for giving Vancouver audiences a rare opportunity to see this important and still powerful work.
P
The conceit of Brenton's play is to juxtapose and invite historical comparison between the Roman invasion of Britain in 54 BCE and England's military occupation of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 70s; he also throws in some scenes depicting the Saxon invasion and war with the Romano-Celts in the 4th century AD, though wisely decides to forgo a staging of the Norman conquest in 1066. The play opens with two petty criminals (Yurij Kis and Matthew Bissett) on the run. Having killed a man and stolen his iron and wine, they are hoping to make it to the Irish Sea ahead of the advancing Romans, terrifying stories of which are already sweeping the land--including the fact that the Romans are said to have eagle heads, an allusion to their iconic centurion helmets (duly reproduced by expert costume designer Julie White). Publicly, however, one Celtic family, led by a formidable matriarch played with assured command by Rebecca Walters, is having none of the rumours, arguing that the Romans are just a ruse to get them to abandon their land. The folly of such thinking is brought to stark and brutal light in the next scene, when the sons of said family, having just enjoyed a pleasant afternoon swim, find themselves staring down the swords of three Roman centurions. What follows earned the play lasting notoriety when it premiered at London's National Theatre, the graphic depiction of an attempted rape of one of the sons--also a Druid priest, and here played by Ensemble company member Ennis Hannah with a palpable mix of defiance and vulnerability--having provoked a legal charge of "gross indecency" by one offended and over-zealous patron, Mary Whitehouse. While director Richard Wolfe does not shy away from foregrounding the physical violence in this scene, what shocks the most is Brenton's language, liberally salted with obscenities that transcend historical time periods and reflecting the casual brutality of the soldiers' actions: indeed, the Roman rapist is most upset that his victim's soiling of himself has caused him to lose his hard-on. (Brenton is quite fond of the scatological, and there is a running joke about the building of latrines that spans the play's different temporalities.)
At the end of the first act, one lowly female slave, having just avenged herself by killing her own rapist (one of the criminals from the first scene), raises a rock against the anonymous hordes who will surely continue to come. And, indeed, this is the cue for a coup de théâtre that will also serve as Brenton's transition to his depiction of more contemporary "troubles" on the British Isles: for the slave woman's rock-wielding arm is immediately answered by the arrival of half a dozen fatigues-clad and machine gun-toting British paramilitary. Plus ça change. What makes the second half of Brenton's play continue to resonate, even after the Easter Accords and almost 20 years of tenuous peace in Ireland, is that he doesn't force the historical parallels; he merely lays bare the evidence by counterpointing scenes. Thus, in the 1970s we are presented with Tom Chichester, an English intelligence officer attempting to infiltrate the IRA by posing as a sympathizer and runner of illegal Communist weapons having uneasy dreams in a wheat field of past atrocities, including the death of a Saxon soldier, an act of patricide by two Celtic sisters, and the murder of a Romano-Celt lady by her servant-turned-lover. (At last night's performance the role of Tom, as well as that of Julius Caesar in Act 1, was taken on with last-minute aplomb by the on-book Ensemble AD, Tariq Leslie, who was subbing for an absent cast mate.) Tom's own eventual murder by the IRA members who expose him underscores the brutal logic of endless wars begat by self-perpetuating imperial powers, a lesson as applicable to Iraq and Syria and the DRC and the Ukraine and the war against ISIS today as it was to Northern Ireland or Vietnam or any number of African states in the 1960s and 70s: as one of the IRA cell members puts it, in war the rules are simple, whereas in peace they are much less clearly defined.
Nevertheless, Brenton ends his play with an epilogue that takes us back to the 4th century, where the two sisters form an alliance with two runaway cooks, formerly part of the retinue of the murdered lady. The male cook starts to tell a story of a legendary king in whose name a long peace is established in the land; when the sisters ask the name of this king, the male cook turns to his female companion, who says: "Arthur? I don't know, Arthur?" That Brenton has to turn to myth to construct a plausibly perfectible narrative of national solidarity for Britain--just as successive generations from the Middle Ages to the Victorian era would likewise recycle Arthurian legend to shore up their sense of identity--is telling. Indeed, this scene and the play as a whole had special resonance for me post-Brexit, when the political chimera of a united (and ethnically pure) Albion is also being returned to as justification for anti-immigrant sentiment and ugly acts of racism. As interesting to me is that Brenton begins and ends his play with scenes depicting members of the lumpenproletariat (criminals, slaves, refugees and other members of the lower orders whom Marx theorized could not be trusted to achieve class consciousness and join the workers' struggle), suggesting perhaps that if the revolution continues to perpetuate the crimes of the imperial state, then perhaps it's best to eschew organized system of power altogether. In our present post-Occupy and hacktivist era, with multiple forms of precarity (economic and otherwise) extending through various strata of society, it's a bracing sentiment that likewise continues to resonate. And it offers lessons to those guilelessly angry followers of Donald Trump who continue to think he has even the remotest clue (let alone a genuine desire) about how to make America great again. Faded empires do not return to past glory; they simply sputter on, mired in the detritus that is their legacy.
All of which is to say that this production deserves to be seen. Mounted in the round, and with Ensemble's incredibly hard-working cast of 16 taking on a remarkable 45 different parts, the staging is as sensorially affecting (dirt and stones litter the floor, we hear the howling of dogs and the cawing of birds, and live drums beat throughout) as it is intellectually invigorating. Sitting in the front row, I was able to feel the pulsating physicality underscoring so many of the performances--even when characters are cowering behind rocks or bushels of wheat, hoping to remain unseen. The simple yet highly effective choral movement that Ziyian Kwan has choreographed for the opening of each act helps to telegraph this reciprocal kinaesthetic bond between the performers and spectators, something amplified by Wolfe's decision to have most of the ensemble, when not onstage, remain visible and seated alongside the audience on opposite risers--as if they, too, are powerless to stop the terrible onslaught of history.
From 1978-1980, Hare, Churchill and Brenton scored a theatrical trifecta with plays that deconstructed, in both form and content, the legacy of British imperialism. And yet while Hare's Plenty and Churchill's Cloud Nine have definitively entered the Western dramatic canon and are often remounted (with a revival of Plenty starring Rachel Weisz scheduled for New York's Public Theatre this fall), Brenton's Romans in Britain remains more on the fringe. Kudos to Ensemble and director Richard Wolfe for giving Vancouver audiences a rare opportunity to see this important and still powerful work.
P
Monday, April 11, 2016
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.
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.
Sunday, October 25, 2015
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.
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