Love and Information at UBC

This semester I'm teaching Caryl Churchill's 2012 play Love and Information as part of a course on contemporary epic theatre at SFU. So I was pleased to discover that UBC Theatre was staging the work at the Frederic Wood Theatre this month. Helmed by MFA Directing candidate Lauren Taylor, the production is an ambitious and highly theatrical take on Churchill's elliptically dialectical staging of the relationship between knowledge and desire in the twenty-first century.

As with most of Churchill's work, Love and Information is a radical experiment in theatrical form. The play is made up of seven sections, each with seven scenes, plus a "last scene" called "Facts," which takes the form of a quiz, and which Taylor cleverly stages as a surreal game show that, with its eye-popping colour palette and fantastical costumes, looks like a diversion straight out of Panem in The Hunger Games. The scenes range in length from a few lines to several pages of dialogue. However, we are given no clues to setting, few stage directions, and the characters are not named or described in any way. But we are told that the characters must be different in each scene, which without the necessary strategy of actors (in this case an 18-strong team of very talented UBC BFA acting students) taking on five or six or more roles, would require a cast of more than 100. Additionally, Churchill instructs that the scenes in each section can be staged in any order. Finally, at the end of the playtext she includes several "random" scenes. Most of these (someone sneezing, someone reading bits of gossip from a magazine, multiplication tables or gene sequences, a display of sign language or morse code) are optional. However, the scenes she labels "Depression" are, in Churchill's words, an "essential part of the play," requiring one character to remain unresponsive as a succession of incomplete and banally offered non-sequiturs are articulated by someone else. Taylor's very smart choice for these scenes is to have each of the lines spoken in voice-over as a succession of cast members sit slumped on a chair downstage left, their morose and impassive faces projected in turn on a scrim behind them via a live video feed (the projection designer was Stefan Zubovic, who also did the lighting).

Because all of the "information" we get in each of the scenes in the play comes via the dialogue, a creative team is afforded much liberty in its interpretation of the different conversations and interactions. Taylor exploits this to maximum effect, playing with gender and setting and costuming and sound design to create fully-realized and often surprising mini-worlds, opening up a window onto these characters' domestic or professional or social lives, sometimes in the space of less than a minute. For example, "Lab," in which one character is explaining to another what he does with the baby chickens' brains which he injects with radioactive liquid and then dissects, is set in what I took to be the waiting area of a fancy restaurant, with the lab technician clearly oblivious to the fact that he is failing abysmally at seducing his date with the description of his work. "Spies," which unfolds as a conversation about the misinformation fed to the media and the public about the reasons for invading Iraq in 2003 (something that Churchill has allegorized before in Drunk Enough to Say I Love You), was staged as a debate between two spectators at a hockey game. And it was an inspired choice to have the dialogue in the super short "Decision," from section 6, delivered while the characters, ballroom dance partners, are engaged in a tango. And yet as much as I admired the deep thought that clearly went into constructing a back story for each of the play's scenes, and the relationship between the characters within them, I couldn't help feel that many of them were over-produced, with costume and prop and sound design choices often detracting from what I read as some of Churchill's more instrumental and frankly transactional exchanges of information between characters. For example, in Section 5, I'm not sure that anything fruitful was gained by having the "Children" scene (in which one character quizzes another about his infertility) preceded by a long live karaoke sequence. (While this production runs a compact and intermissionless 90 minutes, it still felt that the pacing could have been tighter, especially in the scene changes.)

There is a reason, I think, that the characters in Love and Information are presented as ciphers, bits of interchangeable binary code that, in the larger montage of scenes, form part of an algorithmic equation that suggests that everything, including people and feelings, is now data, and that it's not a question any longer of what we know but how we know--and maybe even more importantly who knows and who we know. This comes out in the one optional random scene that Taylor chooses to include, "Genes," in which a sequence of DNA codons unspools on a downstage scrim as the cast walks back and forth across the stage behind it. In this regard, I wonder what it might have meant for this production if a more uniformly coherent and, dare I say, clinical design aesthetic had been chosen for each of the scenes? Then, too, what additional discoveries might have transpired had Taylor taken up Churchill's invitation to mix up the order of the scenes in each section? The choices this play affords are on one level understandably overwhelming. At the same time, as Taylor states in her director's notes, being overloaded with choice is part of what Churchill is exploring in this play. Sifting through the structural rubik's cube that is this play to find its emotional core means not trying to resolve the contradictory pull between love and information, but rather isolating the feeling or epiphanic sensation or experience of the former amid all the memes that comprise the latter.

P

PuSh 2014: Seeds

Porte Parole's Seeds, on at the Freddy Wood Theatre in a PuSh Festival co-presentation with Theatre at UBC, is a documentary play by Annabel Soutar based on Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser's four-year legal battle with biotech giant Monsanto Inc. In 1997, having found Monsanto's genetically modified "Roundup Ready" canola growing near his farm, Schmeiser sprayed his own crop. When much of that crop survived, he realized Monsanto's seed had gotten on to his land; he then harvested this seed and replanted it. That's when Monsanto came calling, arguing that he was using Monsanto's patented technology without a license and that he should pay a fee just like all the other farmers in the area who planted its seed. Schmeiser refused, claiming that since the seed had blown onto his land, it belonged to him. But Monsanto, having conducted its own tests (whether legally or not is unclear) on Schmeiser's crops, said there was no way so much seed could have made its way onto the farmer's land unless he had purchased and planted it surreptitiously. They sued and won. And that's when things really got interesting.

First staged in 2005, this production of Seeds was updated in 2012 in collaboration with Crow's Theatre's Chris Abraham, who directs the show. Based on trial transcripts and interviews with Schmeiser, fellow farmers, executives at Monsanto, and experts in biology and agricultural science, out of her verbatim text Soutar has crafted a play at once suspenseful and philosophical. For example, following Schmeiser's loss of his initial case (which he eventually appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada), public opinion and media interest in the story shifted from whether or not the farmer was trying to shaft Monsanto to a debate on genetically modified food more generally, and why the Canadian government had okayed its introduction into our agricultural industry without public consultation (especially following bans in the EU and elsewhere). This leads our interviewer-narrator (Lisa Repo-Martell) on a search for the very meaning of life itself, one which upends, among other things, the received wisdom around Watson and Crick's double-helix theory of DNA. However, it's a credit to Soutar that she never loses sight of the initial mystery about whether or not Schmeiser conspired to dupe Monsanto about where the seed came from. No easy David vs. Goliath story (despite what one of Schmeiser's supporters states in the play), there is just enough ambiguity surrounding Schmeiser's background in his community, and his overall motives once global interest in his case takes off, to make him a suitably flawed protagonist. In his performance, the legendary Eric Peterson taps into this, moving from aw-shucks rube to savvy media celebrity to intimidating heavy with layered subtlety.

The rest of the cast is equally compelling in multiple roles and the multi-media production is snappily directed by Abraham, with just enough stage business and surprising effects to keep our interest from flagging. And it is a credit to Soutar's talents as a playwright that we never feel like we're being lectured--or hectored. My only major criticism concerns the direct address to the audience by our narrator at the end. It feels a bit weak and flat, as if Soutar didn't quite know how to end things. Which is, I guess, in keeping with the story of life itself.

P.

PuSh 2012 Review #3: The Idiot at Freddy Wood

The creative team behind Crime and Punishment, the award-winning theatrical adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel that played the 2005 PuSh Festival, is back with another large-scale interpretation of one of the Russian writer's novels. Commissioned by Neworld Theatre in conjunction with PuSh (through the Arts Partners in Creative Development program), and in partnership with Vancouver Moving Theatre, Theatre at UBC, and the Playwrights Theatre Centre, the play premiered last night at the Frederic Wood Theatre, where it runs until January 29th. Once again the incredibly talented James Fagan Tait has taken on the monumental task of condensing a 1000-page novel of immense scope and complexity for the stage, as well as directing a cast that numbers 19. It no doubt helps that several in the cast were also in Crime and Punishment, and that music composer and director Joelysa Pankanea is also back on board. Joined by Mark Haney on bass and Molly MacKinnon on violin, Pankanea plays the marimba live on stage over the course of the evening's many scenes, her jazz-infused score the perfect accompaniment to the many instances of sung recitative in the play. Yes, this is in part a musical adaptation of Dostoyevsky--and it works.

The Idiot focuses on Prince Lyov Nikolayevich Myshkin (Kevin MacDonald), who is returning to Russia after four years convalescing in Switzerland, and almost cured of his youthful epileptic "fits." On a train bound for St. Petersburg he meets two men, Lebedev (Tom Pickett) and the rake Rogozhin (Andrew McNee), who shows him a picture of the beautiful woman with whom he is obsessed: Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov (Cherise Clarke). Myshkin is himself immediately smitten: with both Rogozhin and Nastasya. But Nastasya is damaged goods, having been kept for much of her life by the older businessman Totsky (Luke Day), who now tired of her, has entered into a deal with the general Yepanchin (David Adams) to have Yepanchin's young assistant, Ganya (Craig Erickson), marry her in exchange for 700 rubles, thus ensuring that Yepanchin has easy access to Nastasya's bed. Meanwhile, Yepanchin's wife (Patti Allan) turns out to be a cousin of the Prince's, who after meeting her three daughters becomes enraptured with the youngest, Aglaya (Adrienne Wong). But Aglaya is also beloved by Ganya, whom she keeps toying with, and whose impecunity and embarrassment about his alcoholic and kleptomaniacal father, Ivolgin (Richard Newman), seriously tempts him to take the marriage deal with Nastasya instead. Got all that?

Dostoevksy is obsessed with doubles in this novel, and in his entire oeuvre more generally. At the centre is the contrast between the essential and unprepossessing goodness of Myshkin and the calculated guile of Rogozhin. But Nastasya and Aglaya are also paired, although in ways that are more complicated. Externally, Nastasya is compromised and sexually available, while Aglaya is pure innocence. But, inside Nastasya remains loyal to Myshkin (even though she dies at the hand of Rogozhin) while Aglaya is rather promiscuous in her affections. Similarly, the two patriarchs, Yepanchin and Ivolgin, are meant to be contrasted, with the former's outward moral rectitude masking his secret lechery, and with the latter's present fallen state unable to cancel out completely memories of a more glorious past, including as Napoleon's page. It is a credit to all of the actors, and to Tait's canny direction, that these novelistic nuances in character are given definite shape and substance in performance. At the centre of this constellation of types, whose motives and means keep shifting in relation to each other, is the Prince, the only person who remains pure and true of heart from beginning to end. Myshkin, despite the idiocy attributed to him as a result of his epilepsy, is neither simple nor guileless, and it is one of the great strengths of MacDonald's remarkable performance that he is able to convey both the generous depths of Myshkin's empathy for others and the extent to which he is also subject to his own divided conflicts and appetites.

That much of this conflict is conveyed through humour surprised me. Granted, Dostoevsky's novel is a mix of comedy and social commentary, especially at the beginning. But there are moments in this production that are downright slapstick, and Tait's updating of the language, especially with respect to the liberal oaths and epithets unleashed by nearly all of the characters, keeps the audience cackling. This is a good strategy in a production that runs 3 1/2 hours long. And while Tait has done a remarkable job in distilling both the novel's complicated plot and its grand themes, I do think there is room to trim another half hour, especially in the second act scenes at the summer spa town of Pavlovsk. For example, I don't think the scene where Burdovsky (Alexander Keurvorst) and Keller (Stephen Lytton) attempt to shake Myshkin down for money is needed; the Prince's goodness and social equanimity has already been indisputably established. To be sure, in a novel as rich as this one in scenes of social commentary and contrast, it can be hard to know where to cut, especially if you want to give each member of your large ensemble a brief moment in the spotlight.

That said, I was never less than gripped last night, and in ways that I haven't always been with the work of Catalyst Theatre, for example, who have also adapted classic works of literature (by Poe and Mary Shelley) for the stage--including the PuSh Festival stage--in a mix of sung/spoken narrative exposition and dramatization. I think Tait and his collaborators find a better balance between these two forms of presentation, wisely leaving most of the narration to the musical bits and letting the actual encounters between the characters on stage organically take shape in terms of those classic staples of good theatrical drama: rich dialogue and physical blocking and movement. On the latter front, one of the things I was most taken with in this staging was the canny spatial uses to which the large cast was put, creating various tableaux and massings that not only obviate the need for elaborate sets (as with the three stunning train rides that are evoked at various points) but also help materially represent the social maw Myshkin's virtue is at once separate from and will eventually be stripped by.

There is no doubt that this production of The Idiot requires a significant investment on the part of its audience: not of money, to be sure (it's cheap by half in that regard); rather it requires an investment of time and energy, of both affective and intellectual engagement. But what you put in will be rewarded many times over. This is a production, like the novel upon which it is based, that is overflowing with ideas, with richly drawn characters and social situations, with theatrical conceits and choric commentary. It is not to be missed.

P.