David French, perhaps English-Canada's most produced playwright of the 1970s and 80s, is getting two revivals in the Greater Vancouver Area right now. Salt-Water Moon, part of French's Mercer Family cycle, opened at the Gateway this past Friday; directed by Ravi Jain, this touring co-pro from Toronto's Factory Theatre and Jain's own Why Not Theatre is a heavily stylized take on French's period-set Newfoundland love story. The production got raves when it opened in Toronto in 2016, but according to our friends Richard Wolfe and Connie Kostiuk--with whom we had dinner last night, and who attended the Gateway opening--Jain's choices produce decidedly mixed results, and there were more than a few walkouts.
By contrast, the Arts Club staging of French's backstage comedy Jitters, on at the Stanley through February 25, adopts a reliably naturalistic take to its story, and the audience ate it up. Director David Mackay has chosen to set the play in the year it was first produced, 1979, in part as an homage to outgoing Arts Club AD Bill Millerd, who opened the company's second Granville Island venue that year. More practically--and very rewardingly--in terms of production design, this choice has given costume designer Mara Gottler free rein to reproduce the shaggy hairstyles and flared pants and garish colour palettes and clothing patterns of the period. An eye for authentic temporal specificity also extends to both sides of Ted Roberts' revolving set, including: the psychedelic hues of the wallpaper, throw pillows, and afghan in the living room of the play-within-the-play of acts one and three; and the grimy, overstuffed dressing rooms of act two. Even the pre-show and intermission music was chosen with care.
Likewise the entire cast feels at home--both emotionally and physically--in their parts. Megan Leitch, as the diva Jessica Logan, and Robert Moloney, as her cynical and hard-drinking co-star, Patrick Flanagan, are expert foils, their constant verbal sparring nevertheless allowing us to see the vulnerability that each is attempting to mask: for Jessica, the Canadian who has made it in New York, a fear that she is past her prime; for Patrick, the home-grown talent who has decided to remain a big fish in a small pond, the gnawing anxiety of failing on a bigger stage. James Fagan Tait, whom I mostly know as a director, reveals himself to be a hilarious master of comic timing in playing Phil Mastorakis, the jobbing character actor who has a habit of drying on stage and who still lives with his mother. Kamyar Pazandeh, as the company's male ingenue Tom Kent, conveys just the right amount of wanting-to-please-everybody desperation, and also gets a breakout moment of Y-fronts-wearing physical comedy in the second act. As, respectively, the put-upon director George Ellsworth and the alternately protective and self-doubting playwright Robert Ross, Martin Happer and Ryan Beil do their best to referee all of these egos, while also finding time to needle each other on various artistic choices. Raugi Yu, looking like an Asian member of the Bay City Rollers, gets in a few good digs against everyone as the martinet of a stage manager Nick. Kaitlin Williams, as the front of house manager Susi, and Lauren Bowler, as props person Peggy, make the most of what little their parts give them to do.
And in terms of action, French's play is not an all-out farce in the manner of Michael Frayn's Noises Off. Which perhaps explains why, as a spectator, I kept leaning in and out of yesterday's performance. All three acts have significantly different tonal qualities, which mostly pertain to the additional statement about Canadian artistic nationalism and our longstanding cultural cringe towards the United States that French wishes to make. Thus, in act one, the set-up of the animosity between Jessica and Patrick at a rehearsal four days before opening is skewed in its beats mainly towards punctuating the binary choices facing theatre artists in Canada in the 1970s: flee to the US to make it on Broadway; or plod along anonymously in rep in Canada. To be sure, the start-and-stop rhythms of the rehearsal--with everyone offering an opinion on the script or wanting something from director George, and with Nick in voiceover reminding everyone about the ticking clock--are a warmly affectionate poke at the world of the theatre more generally. But it's only towards the end of act one, with an aborted entrance by Phil, that we actually start edging into the comedic hijinks we've been waiting for. And it's only in act two--set on opening night, with both Phil and Tom seemingly AWOL, and with the Broadway producer who's come to see the show stuck at the airport--that we move into full-blown farce. Director Mackay and the entire ensemble nail all of the physical action here, and both the laughs and the pacing are satisfyingly relentless, with the audience exiting into intermission on a nice collective high. But in act three French makes another tonal shift, returning to meta-commentary via an extended dissection of a post-opening review in the Toronto Star. Again, there are some nice moments of insider recognition here, but the resolution of the supra-conflict around artistic integrity as distilled through the opposition between Jessica and Patrick feels somewhat forced.
And also dated. This is by no means a fault of the production. I'm merely noting my own feeling that the extra layer of quasi-political critique about Canadian cultural production that French attempts to fuse to the genre of farce (and for a Quebec-focused 70s-era take on this see Robert Lepage's film No) hasn't aged so well.
P
Showing posts with label Stanley Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stanley Theatre. Show all posts
Sunday, February 18, 2018
Monday, October 23, 2017
King Charles III at The Stanley
Following last season's staging of The Audience, the Arts Club continues its Stanley stage love affair with recent British plays about the royal family. On now through mid-November is Mike Bartlett's King Charles III. Cleverly written in blank verse and with all manner of Shakespearean references, the play imagines an all too real crisis of succession that just might ensue following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. In the days after his mummy's funeral and leading up to his official coronation, Charles (Ted Cole) starts not just to believe in, but to act upon, his droit du seigneur. In his first official meeting with the sitting Labour Party Prime Minister, Mr. Evans (Simon Webb, channelling Jeremy Corbyn, albeit in more sharply tailored suits), Charles queries a new bill that will soon come before him for royal assent. The bill applies restrictions on the freedom of the press and despite his own family's private life having been mercilessly subjected to the muckraking of the UK's notorious tabloid press, Charles believes that the bill is fundamentally flawed. Be that as it may, Evans instructs Charles that it is his duty to sign the bill, for not to do so would run counter to hundreds of years of ceremonial convention and undermine the very foundations of Britain's parliamentary democracy. However, receiving the Tory leader of the opposition, Mrs. Stevens (Christine Willes), immediately after Mr. Evans, Charles latches on to her not at all disinterested statement that, as King, it is his prerogative not to sign the bill.
Things escalate when, incensed by the Crown's usurpation of parliament's democratically elected power, Mr. Evans introduces a new bill that would eliminate the requirement for royal assent for all future legislation. Once again at the prompting of Mrs. Stevens, Charles exercises his power to dissolve parliament and call for new elections, alienating the populace and throwing the country into a constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, inside Buckingham Palace there is additional intrigue. Prince Harry (Charlie Gallant, sporting a bad ginger dye job) moons over the free-spirited commoner Jess (Agnes Tong), whose past will soon be splashed all over the pages of the press that Charles has lately come to defend. The ambitious Kate (Katherine Gauthier, a dead ringer for the Duchess of Cambridge), sensing an opening, does her best Lady Macbeth in convincing William (Oliver Rice) to force his father's hand, with the abdication that inevitably follows leading to William's coronation instead of Charles'.
Not everything in Bartlett's play works. I found the conceit of having Diana's ghost (Lauren Bowler) appear to both Charles and William somewhat clunky, and the character of Camilla (Gwynyth Walsh) was curiously marginalized. The final scene's pageantry and tying up of loose plot lines also tends to foreclose upon any tragic pathos we might feel for Charles as a fallen protagonist, his brief "hollow crown" speech not enough of an emotional punctuation to the play's larger themes--especially when, as in this staging, the blackout that follows seems to come almost as an afterthought. But Bartlett's plotting is absolutely gripping, not least because of his success in making us believe that this scenario could indeed be something that comes to pass. He also pulls off the use of blank verse, successfully adapting its rhythms to contemporary colloquial speech while also showcasing passages of beautiful poetic interiority in many of the characters' soliloquies to the audience. The character of Charles is also richly complex, someone who is at once Machiavellian and idealistically naive, a little bit Richard III and a lot Richard II. That Bartlett is channeling both the Houses of Lancaster and York in his portrait of the divided Windsors is to be expected, but it's his wider allusions to the corpus of Shakespeare (including King Lear) that make the work even more satisfying.
Unfortunately, director Kevin Bennett's production does not always elevate the text in equally rich ways. The performances are uneven, with several actors having trouble speaking the verse. Some of the blocking choices are bewildering, especially when one character will stand in front of another downstage with his or her back to the audience. I also don't understand Bennett's penchant for upstage tableaux, often keeping his actors on stage as background figures to populate a scene. Sometimes it works, but mostly it's distracting and looks ridiculous, as when the company, in black trench coats, pulses in a line to techno music while Harry and Jess have a moment in a London club. The fourth wall is broken from the very start of the play, when the entire company does a version of a royal walkabout, kibitzing with and waving to the audience while the house lights are still up. Those lights continue to come up during Charles' and other of the main characters' soliloquies. However, the choice to have Harry climb down from the stage and walk out into the audience during a nighttime scene with his brother doesn't seem to fit at all within such a dramatic world. I did enjoy Kevin McAllister's set, which manages to feel sparely modern and imposingly medieval at the same time. And Christopher Gauthier's costumes were a monarchist's delight, especially Camilla's hats.
P
Things escalate when, incensed by the Crown's usurpation of parliament's democratically elected power, Mr. Evans introduces a new bill that would eliminate the requirement for royal assent for all future legislation. Once again at the prompting of Mrs. Stevens, Charles exercises his power to dissolve parliament and call for new elections, alienating the populace and throwing the country into a constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, inside Buckingham Palace there is additional intrigue. Prince Harry (Charlie Gallant, sporting a bad ginger dye job) moons over the free-spirited commoner Jess (Agnes Tong), whose past will soon be splashed all over the pages of the press that Charles has lately come to defend. The ambitious Kate (Katherine Gauthier, a dead ringer for the Duchess of Cambridge), sensing an opening, does her best Lady Macbeth in convincing William (Oliver Rice) to force his father's hand, with the abdication that inevitably follows leading to William's coronation instead of Charles'.
Not everything in Bartlett's play works. I found the conceit of having Diana's ghost (Lauren Bowler) appear to both Charles and William somewhat clunky, and the character of Camilla (Gwynyth Walsh) was curiously marginalized. The final scene's pageantry and tying up of loose plot lines also tends to foreclose upon any tragic pathos we might feel for Charles as a fallen protagonist, his brief "hollow crown" speech not enough of an emotional punctuation to the play's larger themes--especially when, as in this staging, the blackout that follows seems to come almost as an afterthought. But Bartlett's plotting is absolutely gripping, not least because of his success in making us believe that this scenario could indeed be something that comes to pass. He also pulls off the use of blank verse, successfully adapting its rhythms to contemporary colloquial speech while also showcasing passages of beautiful poetic interiority in many of the characters' soliloquies to the audience. The character of Charles is also richly complex, someone who is at once Machiavellian and idealistically naive, a little bit Richard III and a lot Richard II. That Bartlett is channeling both the Houses of Lancaster and York in his portrait of the divided Windsors is to be expected, but it's his wider allusions to the corpus of Shakespeare (including King Lear) that make the work even more satisfying.
Unfortunately, director Kevin Bennett's production does not always elevate the text in equally rich ways. The performances are uneven, with several actors having trouble speaking the verse. Some of the blocking choices are bewildering, especially when one character will stand in front of another downstage with his or her back to the audience. I also don't understand Bennett's penchant for upstage tableaux, often keeping his actors on stage as background figures to populate a scene. Sometimes it works, but mostly it's distracting and looks ridiculous, as when the company, in black trench coats, pulses in a line to techno music while Harry and Jess have a moment in a London club. The fourth wall is broken from the very start of the play, when the entire company does a version of a royal walkabout, kibitzing with and waving to the audience while the house lights are still up. Those lights continue to come up during Charles' and other of the main characters' soliloquies. However, the choice to have Harry climb down from the stage and walk out into the audience during a nighttime scene with his brother doesn't seem to fit at all within such a dramatic world. I did enjoy Kevin McAllister's set, which manages to feel sparely modern and imposingly medieval at the same time. And Christopher Gauthier's costumes were a monarchist's delight, especially Camilla's hats.
P
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Disgraced at the Arts Club
The Arts Club's Bill Millerd is certainly consistent in his programming choices, including when, for his largely subscription-based audience, he goes out on a limb and programs a "risky" play at a mainstage space like the Stanley. Having achieved success three years ago with Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park, a caustic comedy about contemporary racial and economic politics in Chicago (and about which I blogged here), his season opener at the Stanley this year is Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced. Like Norris' play, Akhtar's tackles head-on the issue of race in twenty-first century America; also like Clybourne Park, Disgraced comes to town bearing the imprimatur of a Pulitzer Prize and trailing lots of critical acclaim. Finally, this production of Disgraced is directed by the venerable Janet Wright, who also helmed Norris' play for the AC, and both productions share two cast members: Marci T. House and Robert Moloney.
All the winning ingredients for a repeat success. And yet I still left last night's performance extremely disappointed. The fault has less to do with the AC's production per se, which is snappily directed and for the most part well acted. The fault for me lies with Ahktar's script, which sets out to critique binaristic readings of what it means to be a Muslim-American man today, but ends up re-entrenching those binaries--often in extremely disturbing ways.
The play focuses on Amir Kapoor (Patrick Sabongui, making an assured AC debut), a successful New York lawyer of Pakistani descent. Amir, who long ago changed his last name from Abdullah, is an assimilated Muslim man who claims to abhor the fundamentalist ideology of the religion in which he was raised. However, his wife Emily (Kyra Zagorsky), a painter, finds inspiration for her art in Islamic tile-work and architecture, and even in the spiritual teachings of the Qur'an. Complicating matters further is the presence in the couple's life of Amir's nephew Abe (a very effective Conor Wylie). Like Amir, Abe has changed his name (from Hussein); but unlike Amir, Abe has not completely turned his back on his family and his community, and he has arrived at his uncle's doorstep seeking his help regarding the apparently illegal incarceration of a local Imam. Amir does not want to get involved and in the course of explaining to his nephew and his wife his problems with the Muslim faith, Amir recounts the story of his fifth-grade love, Rivka. When Amir's mother found out about the flirtation she told him he couldn't be involved with a Jew and spit in his face; later in the school hallway, when Rivka approaches him, he tells her that he can't see her anymore because she is a Jew and likewise spits in her face. It's one of many moments in the script that elicits a gasp from both of Amir's on-stage and off-stage audiences. But it's also an example, as we shall see, of Ahktar's framing of Amir's apparently available choices--acquired culture-blind liberal tolerance vs. the weight of family and religious inheritance--in impossible black and white terms.
Nevertheless, at Emily's prodding, Amir says he will look into the Imam's case and when, later, he is quoted in the New York Times about the brief, he begins a paranoid unravelling in which his neatly compartmentalized professional and personal lives start to overlap in increasingly combustible ways. That this is accompanied by a dinner party with his black colleague Jory (House) and her Jewish art curator husband, Isaac (Moloney), only ups the ante. We met Isaac in a previous scene, when he came to look at Emily's paintings, and now three months later, following a trip together to London to attend the Frieze Art Fair, Emily is hosting this dinner in hopes that Isaac will announce that he's including her in the upcoming Whitney Biennale that he is organizing. This is duly disclosed, but there are more revelations over the course of the evening: that Jory has made partner at the law firm, for example, whereas Amir is on the verge of being fired; and, most clunkily, that Emily and Isaac slept together while in London.
As in Norris' Clybourne Park, Akhtar is interested in using the well-worn conceit of domestic melodrama to rip away the polite veneer of race relations in America. But whereas everyone is made to look bad in Norris' play, the climax of Disgraced presents the audience with the picture of the Muslim man, having struggled in vain all his life to suppress it, discovering and unleashing his backward animal savagery, his inner jihadist--that part of himself that, as he puts it to Isaac after more than a few drinks, felt a "blush of pride" when the Twin Towers fell. My problem has less to do with Akhtar's suggestion that in a post-Patriot Act America the Muslim man is positioned between two impossible poles--assimilation or extremism--than with his overly-obvious and even cliched telegraphing of Amir's disgrace. So, for example, the story about Rivka is there in the first scene to set up the moment at the end of the play when Amir spits in Isaac's face; and the dinner-table argument with Emily about what the Qur'an has to say about wife-beating makes all the more inevitable the blows he lands upon her body when she confesses the truth about her affair with Isaac.
Clybourne Park and Disgraced are both "social problem plays" aimed squarely at a mainstream audience. Which means that complex issues like race and cultural difference to a certain extent get reduced to screaming matches, with everyone given an equal opportunity at outrage and boorish behaviour. But in Norris' play not only was the added context of class brought into the equation, the plot was also wedded to a two-act structure that created even more tension and depth through historical and dramatic parallelism. Akhtar is also aspiring to marry form to content, and the play concludes with a coda in which Abe/Hussein returns, newly radicalized and once again seeking his uncle's legal advice--this time in connection with his own arrest and questioning by the FBI. However, both the circular structure of Akhtar's play and that of fundamentalist ideology arguably conspire here to confirm rather than to challenge cultural stereotypes.
It's certainly not what I expected from this play--especially given what I'd heard about it and the playwright in advance. I am hoping that Pi Theatre's production of The Invisible Hand in April offers me a different perspective.
P.
All the winning ingredients for a repeat success. And yet I still left last night's performance extremely disappointed. The fault has less to do with the AC's production per se, which is snappily directed and for the most part well acted. The fault for me lies with Ahktar's script, which sets out to critique binaristic readings of what it means to be a Muslim-American man today, but ends up re-entrenching those binaries--often in extremely disturbing ways.
The play focuses on Amir Kapoor (Patrick Sabongui, making an assured AC debut), a successful New York lawyer of Pakistani descent. Amir, who long ago changed his last name from Abdullah, is an assimilated Muslim man who claims to abhor the fundamentalist ideology of the religion in which he was raised. However, his wife Emily (Kyra Zagorsky), a painter, finds inspiration for her art in Islamic tile-work and architecture, and even in the spiritual teachings of the Qur'an. Complicating matters further is the presence in the couple's life of Amir's nephew Abe (a very effective Conor Wylie). Like Amir, Abe has changed his name (from Hussein); but unlike Amir, Abe has not completely turned his back on his family and his community, and he has arrived at his uncle's doorstep seeking his help regarding the apparently illegal incarceration of a local Imam. Amir does not want to get involved and in the course of explaining to his nephew and his wife his problems with the Muslim faith, Amir recounts the story of his fifth-grade love, Rivka. When Amir's mother found out about the flirtation she told him he couldn't be involved with a Jew and spit in his face; later in the school hallway, when Rivka approaches him, he tells her that he can't see her anymore because she is a Jew and likewise spits in her face. It's one of many moments in the script that elicits a gasp from both of Amir's on-stage and off-stage audiences. But it's also an example, as we shall see, of Ahktar's framing of Amir's apparently available choices--acquired culture-blind liberal tolerance vs. the weight of family and religious inheritance--in impossible black and white terms.
Nevertheless, at Emily's prodding, Amir says he will look into the Imam's case and when, later, he is quoted in the New York Times about the brief, he begins a paranoid unravelling in which his neatly compartmentalized professional and personal lives start to overlap in increasingly combustible ways. That this is accompanied by a dinner party with his black colleague Jory (House) and her Jewish art curator husband, Isaac (Moloney), only ups the ante. We met Isaac in a previous scene, when he came to look at Emily's paintings, and now three months later, following a trip together to London to attend the Frieze Art Fair, Emily is hosting this dinner in hopes that Isaac will announce that he's including her in the upcoming Whitney Biennale that he is organizing. This is duly disclosed, but there are more revelations over the course of the evening: that Jory has made partner at the law firm, for example, whereas Amir is on the verge of being fired; and, most clunkily, that Emily and Isaac slept together while in London.
As in Norris' Clybourne Park, Akhtar is interested in using the well-worn conceit of domestic melodrama to rip away the polite veneer of race relations in America. But whereas everyone is made to look bad in Norris' play, the climax of Disgraced presents the audience with the picture of the Muslim man, having struggled in vain all his life to suppress it, discovering and unleashing his backward animal savagery, his inner jihadist--that part of himself that, as he puts it to Isaac after more than a few drinks, felt a "blush of pride" when the Twin Towers fell. My problem has less to do with Akhtar's suggestion that in a post-Patriot Act America the Muslim man is positioned between two impossible poles--assimilation or extremism--than with his overly-obvious and even cliched telegraphing of Amir's disgrace. So, for example, the story about Rivka is there in the first scene to set up the moment at the end of the play when Amir spits in Isaac's face; and the dinner-table argument with Emily about what the Qur'an has to say about wife-beating makes all the more inevitable the blows he lands upon her body when she confesses the truth about her affair with Isaac.
Clybourne Park and Disgraced are both "social problem plays" aimed squarely at a mainstream audience. Which means that complex issues like race and cultural difference to a certain extent get reduced to screaming matches, with everyone given an equal opportunity at outrage and boorish behaviour. But in Norris' play not only was the added context of class brought into the equation, the plot was also wedded to a two-act structure that created even more tension and depth through historical and dramatic parallelism. Akhtar is also aspiring to marry form to content, and the play concludes with a coda in which Abe/Hussein returns, newly radicalized and once again seeking his uncle's legal advice--this time in connection with his own arrest and questioning by the FBI. However, both the circular structure of Akhtar's play and that of fundamentalist ideology arguably conspire here to confirm rather than to challenge cultural stereotypes.
It's certainly not what I expected from this play--especially given what I'd heard about it and the playwright in advance. I am hoping that Pi Theatre's production of The Invisible Hand in April offers me a different perspective.
P.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Helen Lawrence at the Stanley
Richard and I weren't planning to go to the Arts Club production of Helen Lawrence, on at the Stanley through mid-April. However, a pair of free tickets came our way and so we made a night of it. The experience confirmed my initial misgivings.
Conceived and created by Vancouver-based conceptual artist Stan Douglas, in collaboration with television writer Chris Haddock (Da Vinci's Inquest), the work combines live theatrical performance with real-time video projection and pre-recorded 3D imaging. Whereas the earlier Arts Club co-production at the Stanley, the Electric Company's Tear the Curtain!, had mostly cut between its live and mediated mise-en-scènes, Helen Lawrence attempts to superimpose them. On a mostly bare stage, behind a floor-to-ceiling scrim stretching across the proscenium, the actors perform a series of live action scenes. These are captured by three cameras we see being operated downstage, with the images simultaneously projected on the scrim, which via those pre-recorded 3D sequences fills in the details of the missing set. It's a neat trick, to be sure, but what's on the scrim so commands our attention--because so often in close-up--I don't know why Douglas and Haddock didn't just make a film. Indeed, liveness and the theatre seem completely ancillary to the whole ethos of the project. There isn't even a debate about the complementarity or the competition between the two media (as in Tear the Curtain!): not least because we are so insistently drawn to both the images on the scrim and the apparatus of their projection behind it, film completely dominates theatre in this equation.
To the point where the piece's film noir conceit seems completely foreign to the stage. Haddock squeezes virtually every cliché of the genre into his script and the hard-boiled dialogue, while handled deftly by the entire company, often sounds tinny and recycled. More problematic are the larger structural problems with the story. The ostensible main plot, about the eponymous wronged femme fatale (Lisa Ryder) traveling from LA to Vancouver to track down her no-good lover, Percy Wallace/Walker (The X-Files' Nicholas Lea), feels (thematically and politically) secondary to the sub-plot about brothers Buddy Black (Allan Louis) and Henry Williams (Sterling Jarvis) battling each other and the corrupt Vancouver constabulary in Hogan's Alley. Neither story is satisfactorily resolved, to say nothing of the confusing narrative MacGuffin we are thrown in the form of small-time grifter Edward Banks (Adam Kenneth Wilson), who holds up with apparent impunity Chief of Police James Muldoon (Gerard Plunkett) near the end of the play; meanwhile Banks' long-suffering German wife Eva (Ava Markus) may or may not be on her way to Hogan's Alley to have an abortion.
A noticeable hiccup in Helen Lawrence's development was the departure of original director Kim Collier (ex of The Electric Company). In press leading up to the premiere last week, she cited concerns with the story as one of the reasons for her parting ways with Haddock and Douglas, who assumed directing duties (assisted by the National Arts Centre's Sarah Stanley). I now understand what she means.
However, an even more serious concern for me is the aesthetic ideology behind the piece. The performance theorist Patrice Pavis has written that intermedial interdisciplinarity doesn't just mean taking the technologies of one medium and plunking them down in another (e.g. screens in the theatre); rather, it means remediating those technologies within an aesthetic idiom specific to the mode of presentation of the work (e.g. finding a way to represent montage on stage through blackouts, or within the body of a performer). I think, in this regard, of how "cinematic" Crystal Pite's choreography often seems to me; now, she is not one to stint on additional technological effects (including projections). But in a work like Grace Engine, for example, she also gives one the kinesthetic "feel" of film noir with nary a camera in sight.
There is a lot of creative and financial muscle behind this production of Helen Lawrence, and it is on its way to some pretty prestigious presentation venues. It remains to be seen what kind of critical reception it will receive from national and international theatre audiences. For now, I remain convinced that the project would have been much more successful--and easier to make--as a narrative film. Given Stan Douglas' career to date (Suspiria, Journey into Fear, etc.), one would have thought that to be the logical next step (though, to be fair, in works like Monodramas, he has also shown previous interest in the theatre--particularly the work of Samuel Beckett). One wonders if the likely comparisons to Steve McQueen are an impediment.
P.
Conceived and created by Vancouver-based conceptual artist Stan Douglas, in collaboration with television writer Chris Haddock (Da Vinci's Inquest), the work combines live theatrical performance with real-time video projection and pre-recorded 3D imaging. Whereas the earlier Arts Club co-production at the Stanley, the Electric Company's Tear the Curtain!, had mostly cut between its live and mediated mise-en-scènes, Helen Lawrence attempts to superimpose them. On a mostly bare stage, behind a floor-to-ceiling scrim stretching across the proscenium, the actors perform a series of live action scenes. These are captured by three cameras we see being operated downstage, with the images simultaneously projected on the scrim, which via those pre-recorded 3D sequences fills in the details of the missing set. It's a neat trick, to be sure, but what's on the scrim so commands our attention--because so often in close-up--I don't know why Douglas and Haddock didn't just make a film. Indeed, liveness and the theatre seem completely ancillary to the whole ethos of the project. There isn't even a debate about the complementarity or the competition between the two media (as in Tear the Curtain!): not least because we are so insistently drawn to both the images on the scrim and the apparatus of their projection behind it, film completely dominates theatre in this equation.
To the point where the piece's film noir conceit seems completely foreign to the stage. Haddock squeezes virtually every cliché of the genre into his script and the hard-boiled dialogue, while handled deftly by the entire company, often sounds tinny and recycled. More problematic are the larger structural problems with the story. The ostensible main plot, about the eponymous wronged femme fatale (Lisa Ryder) traveling from LA to Vancouver to track down her no-good lover, Percy Wallace/Walker (The X-Files' Nicholas Lea), feels (thematically and politically) secondary to the sub-plot about brothers Buddy Black (Allan Louis) and Henry Williams (Sterling Jarvis) battling each other and the corrupt Vancouver constabulary in Hogan's Alley. Neither story is satisfactorily resolved, to say nothing of the confusing narrative MacGuffin we are thrown in the form of small-time grifter Edward Banks (Adam Kenneth Wilson), who holds up with apparent impunity Chief of Police James Muldoon (Gerard Plunkett) near the end of the play; meanwhile Banks' long-suffering German wife Eva (Ava Markus) may or may not be on her way to Hogan's Alley to have an abortion.
A noticeable hiccup in Helen Lawrence's development was the departure of original director Kim Collier (ex of The Electric Company). In press leading up to the premiere last week, she cited concerns with the story as one of the reasons for her parting ways with Haddock and Douglas, who assumed directing duties (assisted by the National Arts Centre's Sarah Stanley). I now understand what she means.
However, an even more serious concern for me is the aesthetic ideology behind the piece. The performance theorist Patrice Pavis has written that intermedial interdisciplinarity doesn't just mean taking the technologies of one medium and plunking them down in another (e.g. screens in the theatre); rather, it means remediating those technologies within an aesthetic idiom specific to the mode of presentation of the work (e.g. finding a way to represent montage on stage through blackouts, or within the body of a performer). I think, in this regard, of how "cinematic" Crystal Pite's choreography often seems to me; now, she is not one to stint on additional technological effects (including projections). But in a work like Grace Engine, for example, she also gives one the kinesthetic "feel" of film noir with nary a camera in sight.
There is a lot of creative and financial muscle behind this production of Helen Lawrence, and it is on its way to some pretty prestigious presentation venues. It remains to be seen what kind of critical reception it will receive from national and international theatre audiences. For now, I remain convinced that the project would have been much more successful--and easier to make--as a narrative film. Given Stan Douglas' career to date (Suspiria, Journey into Fear, etc.), one would have thought that to be the logical next step (though, to be fair, in works like Monodramas, he has also shown previous interest in the theatre--particularly the work of Samuel Beckett). One wonders if the likely comparisons to Steve McQueen are an impediment.
P.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Jack and the Beanstalk at the York Theatre
Last night Richard and I had the privilege to be among the first audiences to see a production in the restored York Theatre, on Commercial Drive at East Georgia. Theatre Replacement's Jack and the Beanstalk: An East Van Panto officially inaugurated the newly renovated space last night, just over a century after it first opened in 1912, and more than 30 years after Tom Durrie founded the Save the York Theatre Society in 1981 following the Vancouver Little Theatre Association's vacating of the building and its conversion to a cinema.
Durrie was in attendance last night, as were a host of civic and provincial dignitaries, prominent local arts producers and administrators, the generally excited public, and a gaggle of even more excited kids. As with the equally important renovation of the Stanley Theatre on South Granville, the architectural challenge for the York was clearly to fit a fully functioning 400-seat theatre (complete with flies and wings) within the existing footprint while also creating a visually interesting street facade. From what I was able to see and explore last night (which didn't include the stage, as Richard and opted not to stay for the after-party), this has been accomplished--the sole expense being, as again with the Stanley, significant lobby space. Indeed, the York's downstairs and upstairs lobbies are even smaller than the Stanley's, just a long thin wedge between the box office and the bar in the case of the former, and into which several hundred bodies were crammed last night to listen to Vancouver East Cultural Centre Executive Director Heather Redfern's opening remarks at a pre-reception. The Cultch, now a thriving arts juggernaut on the east side, will oversee the York Theatre, mostly renting it out to outside presenters, but also, as in this case, partnering with local companies and organizations to premiere new work or host important touring productions (as will be the case during the PuSh Festival, when Tanya Tagak's take on Nanook of the North opens there).
Richard and I had tickets for the last row of the balcony (GG), but there was nothing wrong with our seats. The sight lines were perfect, the acoustics impeccable, and the show itself a total gas. Charlie Demers' script, in adapting the venerable fairy tale to its local setting, does not spare the satire (even when directed at several members of the audience) and also doesn't talk down to its pint-sized viewers, whose wonder and energy must inevitably sustain the piece. Veda Hille's score is another marvel of offbeat syncopation and humour, and I was thrilled to see she'd incorporated into it another version of Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" (complete with trademark headband). Amiel Gladstone's direction was snappy in tempo and filled with wonderfully visual bits of stage magic. The actors, all except for lead Maiko Bae Yamamoto (who should perform--and sing--more often) in multiple roles, filled their outsized panto peronas (quite literally in the case of Allan Zinyk, who played both the Giant and Jack's mom) with charismatic aplomb.
In short, it was a wonderful way to open an important new cultural space in the city. Congratulations to all involved in getting us to this moment.
P.
Durrie was in attendance last night, as were a host of civic and provincial dignitaries, prominent local arts producers and administrators, the generally excited public, and a gaggle of even more excited kids. As with the equally important renovation of the Stanley Theatre on South Granville, the architectural challenge for the York was clearly to fit a fully functioning 400-seat theatre (complete with flies and wings) within the existing footprint while also creating a visually interesting street facade. From what I was able to see and explore last night (which didn't include the stage, as Richard and opted not to stay for the after-party), this has been accomplished--the sole expense being, as again with the Stanley, significant lobby space. Indeed, the York's downstairs and upstairs lobbies are even smaller than the Stanley's, just a long thin wedge between the box office and the bar in the case of the former, and into which several hundred bodies were crammed last night to listen to Vancouver East Cultural Centre Executive Director Heather Redfern's opening remarks at a pre-reception. The Cultch, now a thriving arts juggernaut on the east side, will oversee the York Theatre, mostly renting it out to outside presenters, but also, as in this case, partnering with local companies and organizations to premiere new work or host important touring productions (as will be the case during the PuSh Festival, when Tanya Tagak's take on Nanook of the North opens there).
Richard and I had tickets for the last row of the balcony (GG), but there was nothing wrong with our seats. The sight lines were perfect, the acoustics impeccable, and the show itself a total gas. Charlie Demers' script, in adapting the venerable fairy tale to its local setting, does not spare the satire (even when directed at several members of the audience) and also doesn't talk down to its pint-sized viewers, whose wonder and energy must inevitably sustain the piece. Veda Hille's score is another marvel of offbeat syncopation and humour, and I was thrilled to see she'd incorporated into it another version of Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" (complete with trademark headband). Amiel Gladstone's direction was snappy in tempo and filled with wonderfully visual bits of stage magic. The actors, all except for lead Maiko Bae Yamamoto (who should perform--and sing--more often) in multiple roles, filled their outsized panto peronas (quite literally in the case of Allan Zinyk, who played both the Giant and Jack's mom) with charismatic aplomb.
In short, it was a wonderful way to open an important new cultural space in the city. Congratulations to all involved in getting us to this moment.
P.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Torn Curtains
It was a gorgeous, sunny Thanksgiving Sunday yesterday, and I spent much of the afternoon in a darkened theatre. Not, as originally planned, at the Granville 7 watching another VIFF offering. Instead, I decided at the last minute to catch the final performance of The Electric Company's acclaimed play Tear the Curtain! at the Stanley, in a co-production with the Arts Club and the 2010 Cultural Olympiad.
My choice of live theatre over mediated film is of course the very subject of ECT's brilliant show. The piece is at once an historical exploration of the economics of entertainment specific to the Stanley's original construction--when vaudeville stages were being cast aside in favor of cinemas, which in turn had to be retrofitted to show the new talking pictures then eclipsing the theatricality of silent movies--and a philosophical meditation (mostly via Antonin Artaud) on both the power and the limits of each medium to awaken and engage its audience's senses. That the production itself, in form and content, seemed to make some very definitive choices of its own in terms of the prioritization of media surprised me.
First the praise: Vancouver audiences are unlikely to see anything so technically accomplished and intelligently conceived on local stages this fall (although I may eat my words after Brief Encounter at the Playhouse). The interplay between filmed and live sequences was literally seamless, and the sheer inventiveness by which the former were projected (on screens, scrims, and even David Roberts' magnificent set) kept astounding. Kim Collier's direction also drew out the site-specificity of the piece, using actors' entrances and exits, in particular, to play with the Stanley's proscenium, incorporating or excluding the live audience into the (mediated) mise-en-scène as the situation dictated. Finally, the entire company was in top form, equally comfortable on stage and on screen. Laura Mennell, as femme fatale Mila, and Dawn Petten, as loyal girl friday Mavis, were especially impressive.
Now the critique: Tear the Curtain! does not, it seems to me, challenge the binary between film and theatre (at least not in the way other ECT shows have, particularly No Exit). Rather it maintains, and even reinforces that binary--at times in some ideologically disturbing ways. Not only does the play's plot (which, for all the curve balls it throws us, is fairly conventional) resolve itself in favor of the soporific effects of Hollywood romanticism; its blending of filmic and live theatrical effects mostly unspools as a form of continuity editing, with progressivist and predominately linear match cuts between the two trumping those moments when their coming together was more engagingly juxtapositional (as when, in a favourite moment of mine, Mavis drives Jonathon Young's Alex across the stage in a makeshift Model T, while a projected rear screen backdrop moves behind them).
My bigger problem is that the case for the theatre--which, don't get me wrong, is there--is made almost as an inside joke, with winking references to Peter Brook (the Empty Space Society) and Philip Auslander (the television set's "liberation"/remediation of theatre in the end only a red herring) presented for the cognoscenti, but otherwise not fully elaborated in terms of a theory of either theatrical liveness or sensory and political "aliveness." A telling moment, in this regard, is when jaded theatre critic Alex, equal parts amanuensis and usurper of local artistic visionary Stanley Lee (James Fagan Tait), delivers his/Stanley's Artaud-inspired manifesto in favour of a new kind of total theatre. At the end of his oration, the house lights come up and Alex comes to the downstage lip, acknowledging the felt connection between audience and actor that can only come through live performance: "You are here," he says. "Here you are."
Too often, however, it felt like the audience's only available response to the material was "Where are they?," so relentlessly are we buffeted back and forth between virtual and embodied actors, not to mention the representational telos specific to each medium. For André Bazin, that telos in film has, ever since the camera began to move, been realism--but a realism that, in the words of another French film theorist (Christian Metz), is doubly imaginary (in the sense that what is imaginary masquerades as real). By contrast, even the "bourgeois" theatre that Mila and her revolutionary cronies in the ESS decry acknowledges its constructedness, makes visible in greasepaint and in costumes and in wires and in different-hued specials its status as a representation. For theorists from Plato to Michael Fried this very artificiality condemns the theatre to corrupting inauthenticity, and its audiences to slavish worshippers of false idols. But for artist-theorists like Brecht and Artaud, among other members of the European avant-garde who borrowed extensively from non-Western traditions, the theatre's codified and anti-mimetic properties also make it the ideal form to make an assault on representationality itself. (This included linguistic representationality, and a further irony of a play that takes Artaud, and his anti-textual bias, as a guiding light, is that it is incredibly wordy, Young and Kevin Kerr's script clocking in at well over 2.5 hours. I had the same complaint about Studies in Motion--it was just too long.) Moreover, they trusted their audiences enough not just to weather this assault, but to actually welcome it.
Would that ECT, in putting together Tear the Curtain!, placed more trust in their audiences to follow Alex beyond the threshold of the new theatrical experience he quite literally brings them to the very edge of. Instead, theatre is presented as a cordon sanitaire, a form of cultural capital that, as businessman and impresario Patrick Dugan (Gerard Plunkett) suggests, is meant to keep the riff-raff out. Whereas film emerges as the medium with which the masses can, again quite literally, most identify. Thus, the piece ends with Alex and Mavis, now a happy couple after the faithful secretary has helped the troubled critic find his "real" self, seating themselves amongst us in the audience, and then staring contentedly up at their screen surrogates.
Romantic, yes. Radical, no.
P.
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