Lysistrata at Bard on the Beach

By yesterday evening Vancouver's recent heat wave had finally abated, and so it was not at all uncomfortable sitting under the tent of the Howard Family Stage at Bard on the Beach with my friend and colleague Melissa Poll. We had gone there to see Lysistrata, which I will be teaching this fall, and which in Bard's production has been adapted by Jennifer Wise and Lois Anderson, who also directs. The comedy's scabrous sexual politics and anti-war message have, for better or worse, remained remarkably timely and on-point in the 2500 years since Aristophanes fist wrote the play (witness the world-wide Lysistrata Project in 2003, to protest the invasion of Iraq, and also Spike Lee's controversial recent film Chi-Raq, which I will be teaching alongside Bard's production). So I was curious how Wise and Anderson's version would make the text speak to our contemporary moment.

Their strategy has been to make this production resolutely local. This performance of Lysistrata is framed meta-theatrically as a play-within-a-play. The Howard Stage's Bard ensemble is meant to be doing an all-female Hamlet, but to protest a proposed plan by the city to expropriate and develop Vanier Park so that it can accommodate a shipping container, the company has hijacked the evening's performance in order to put on an impromptu protest performance of Lysistrata. The set-up for this conceit is wittily established via a bunch of pre-show stage business that also manages to incorporate Bard AD Christopher Gaze's curtain speech. Not everyone in the company, especially Colleen Wheeler, who is meant to be playing Prince Hamlet, is happy about this decision. The framing scenes in which the company--including Luisa Joijic as Lysistrata, Jennifer Lines as Kleonike, Marci T. House as the Spartan Lampito, and Ming Hudson as Myrrhine--argue about whether to continue, and the consequences of doing so, mirror the plot of Aristophanes' play, whose comedy turns on the fact that the women's sex strike is as painful to them as to their husbands. The framing scenes also incorporate the eventual arrival of two local cops (Sebastian Archibald and Joel D. Montgrand), who have come to question company member Adele Noronha, whose on-stage protest she has also extended to include the graffiti tagging of local landmarks. The different degrees of cluelessness of the cops, one of whom turns out to be married to Wheeler (a real-life plot point), leads to a series of lessons in feminist Indigenous pedagogy by company member Quelemia Sparrow, who somewhat uncomfortably to me is cast in the familiar role of the wise Indigenous woman who must educate her settler castmates and the audience about the real history of this place. At the same time, the frame narrative with the cops also occasions a lot of insider jokes not just about Equity theatre (who can and cannot be on stage, and for how long at a time), but about Bard as a company (as Melissa, who spent several seasons acting there herself, leaned over to let me know more than once). The risk here, however, is that the jokes becoming a little too knowing, and so end up excluding a portion of the audience from joining in the laughter.

This, of course, is always the risk of comedy, and especially of the kind of old, or sexually satirical, comedy practiced by Aristophanes. Part of my interest in attending this production of Lysistrata was also seeing how the bawdy jokes would land post-#MeToo, and also in the wake of Hannah Gadsby devastating indictment in Nanette of the very structural premises of comedy as a genre. This production doesn't shy away from those tensions, especially as they play out inequitably for women, who have historically been demeaned both for not being able to tell a good joke and for not being able to take one, no matter how bad or hurtful. In Act Two of this production of Lysistrata there is a noticeable shift in tone. Not only is this the act in which most of the singing and dancing happens (the composer and musical director is Mishelle Cuttler and the choreographer is Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg), but it also tackles head on the implicit sexual violence that underscores the climactic oath of peace that Lysistrata extracts from the men of Athens and Sparta. In Aristophanes' play Peace is incarnated as a beautiful woman, whose body the men jokingly carve up and verbally violate even as they pledge brotherhood to each other. In Anderson's staging, this violence is made material as the men rip bits of fabric from the beautiful green dress worn by Lines, who plays Peace (the wonderful costumes are designed by Barbara Claydon). It's an understandably unsettling moment for Lines and all of the other women on stage, and the edge it left me on helped redeem some of the lighter and more twee elements of the first act.

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Angels in America at the Arts Club's Stanley Theatre

Among the many ideas being explored in Tony Kushner's epic play Angels in America is a dialectics of scale. On the one hand there are, as Louis says to Belize late in the first part of the play, Millennium Approaches, monolithic concepts like freedom and democracy, even the "idea of America" itself, that seem so huge and abstract as to be unimaginable--except when they are organized into specific structures, like government and religion, that bear down upon and circumscribe our daily lives. And then there's the "small problem" of living those lives in the face of such monoliths: the intimate acts of care or betrayal, obligation or disconnection, that one performs with or on those closest to you.

I was put in mind of this framework by the Arts Club's current production of Millennium, which I saw in preview last night at the Stanley Theatre on Granville Street. Directed by the Electric Company's Kim Collier, the production is dominated by Ken MacKenzie's monolithic set design, a giant faux-marble pedimented structure with steps ascending upstage that puts one in mind of the facade of a courthouse (where Louis and Joe both work), or the Lincoln Memorial, or any of those other giant mausoleum-like structures that Harper suggests dominates the architecture of Washington, DC. The set is so overwhelming that no matter how inventively Collier distributes her actors about it, or through what myriad portals within it they (and their furniture) appear and disappear, the performers inevitably look puny on stage (even from where I was sitting in the sixth row of the centre orchestra section). Perhaps this is the point, with the neo-classicism of American colonial architecture here standing in (quite literally) for the symbolic nation-state that does not so much absorb one within its warm embrace (the US being "a melting pit where nothing has melted," as Rabbi Chemelwitz tells us at the top of the show) as threaten to obliterate one with its surveilling shadow.

I would have no problem with this if Collier remembered, dialectically, what the theatre--and this play especially (Kushner being a good Brechtian)--proposes as an antidote to such spectacularized separations: the proximate and material connection between bodies on stage. Instead, she embraces the scaling up of spectacle, in part by inserting a rotating chorus of figures in scenes normally featuring just one or two characters. I didn't mind this in the opening prologue by the Rabbi (Gabrielle Rose), when other members of the ensemble join Louis (Ryan Beil) and Prior (Damien Atkins) as members of Louis's extended family mourning the death of his grandmother. However, I thought the effect an unnecessary and distracting caprice in two other places: in the already split scene when Prior is being examined by the nurse Emily (Lois Anderson) and Louis is talking with Belize (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff), the rest of the company parades on stage in hospital gowns and trailing IV drips, the presumed nod to the scale and complexity of the AIDS pandemic here only managing to pull focus from Prior; and in the scene when Hannah (Rose again) is asking her friend Ella (also played by Anderson) to sell her house in Salt Lake City following her phone call with Joe (Craig Erickson), Collier mysteriously sends out a chorus of Mormon parishioners to moon for a few seconds before retreating.

Even more questionable for me was the use of live camera feeds and video projection. The conceit first appears with Mr. Lies's entrance, the physically nimble and charismatic Jackman-Torkoff entering the stage trailing a camera, which he then proceeds to train on Harper (Celine Stubel) as she chases him around the stage and declares her desire to visit Antartica to see the hole in the ozone layer. Thereafter cameras recur in all of the subsequent dream or fantasy scenes: when Prior and Harper share the "threshold of revelation"; when Prior is visited by the ghosts of his two similarly named ancestors (played by Craig Erickson and Brian Markinson); and when Ethel Rosenberg (Rose) haunts the brownstone of Roy Cohn (Markinson). I get that Collier is using technology to suggest that these scenes are taking place in another realm or medium; however, especially with the scene between Prior and Harper, each on separate beds with a mini-digital camera pointed at them, and with their respective images projected side by side on cloth panels that have descended between the pillars of the set, it felt like I was watching a Skype conversation. The whole point of these two shattered characters sharing the threshold of revelation is that we see and accept that in the theatre different temporal and spatial realms can touch and that bodies can cross over into those realms to speak certain truths to each other--and to us. I don't see the point of added technological embellishment, especially when the performances--as, in this case, by Atkins and Stubel--are already so strong. In its final use, in the scene between Roy and Ethel, I actually think the camera gets in the way of the acting, with Markinson--whose performance I was only really starting to warm to--and Rose--who doesn't really get a chance to establish a definitive take on her character--often struggling to make sure they stay in the frame. (Interestingly, Beil, who doesn't have to operate or appear before a camera, ends up giving the finest performance, and Erickson's Joe is also very compelling.)

Indeed, in terms of its embrace of scale and technological spectacle, this production bears an interesting contrast to the excellent and very low-tech staging of Millennium at Studio 58 last fall (which I reviewed here). I realize that the Stanley as venue in some senses calls for a scaled up and more spectacular production, complete with the full-on Spielbergian descent of the Angel at the end. That said, bigger isn't always better.

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Pericles at Bard on the Beach

I'm not usually a purist when it comes to radical revisionings of classic texts on stage. I do, however, take exception to reinterpretations that seem designed to make "difficult" plays--whether in structure or in moral content--more palatable to contemporary audiences. Unfortunately, in the case of Bard on the Beach's current production of Pericles, directed by the usually reliable Lois Anderson, that seems to be the case on both counts. A major compressing and rewriting of the first half results in the jettisoning of one of the play's distinctive structural conceits and the displacement and dematerialization of a key sexual theme.

I admit to not knowing Pericles very well, but I did have a quick read of the text before yesterday's matinee performance. Additionally, I was attending with my colleague, Tiffany Werth, who has published on the play (her work is cited in The Norton Anthology of Shakespeare, no less). Unlike most critics, who tend to be obsessed with accounting for which parts of the play were written by Shakespeare and which by his (of course) much inferior collaborator, George Wilkins, Tiffany concentrates on how the play's romantic and fantastical elements are filtered through a residual Catholic frame within post-Reformation England. Tiffany is not arguing that old Bill is a crypto-Catholic, as others have speciously suggested, merely that the genre of English romance in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods came to be read, in a society increasingly obsessed with policing and hierarchizing virtue, as carrying with it a certain Catholic taint. How this all relates to Pericles starts with the fact that each of the acts is preceded by a chorus narrated by the figure of John Gower, the more sober contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, and whose presence in Shakespeare's play suggests that we should be reading the tale of Pericles and his family through the lens of a Medieval morality play.

Indeed, Pericles can at a very basic level be reduced to an allegory of virtue rewarded and wickedness punished. That these outcomes are even more basically--and basely--linked to sex is established in the first act of the play, which takes place in the court of Antiochus, who greets any suitor wishing to marry his daughter with a riddle. If the suitor answers correctly, he can have the daughter's hand; but if he answers incorrectly, he is beheaded. (Needless to say, the walls of his court are lined with skulls.) Pericles (Kamyar Pazandah), hearing the riddle, immediately understands that Antiochus is having incestuous relations with his daughter. But he also realizes that to say so would likewise result in his execution. So he begs for more time and then hightails it back to Tyre, with the threat of Antiochus hunting him down setting in motion his subsequent maritime wanderings (to Tarsus and Ephesus and Mytilene) and the rest of the fantastical plot, including the birth of Pericles' daughter at sea and the apparent death of his wife, Thaisa (Sereana Malani), as a result.

In Anderson's staging, the story of Antiochus is narrated to us by the healer Cerimon (David Warburton), in whom the director seems to have collapsed Gower's chorus role, while also throwing in a dash of Prospero, with Cerimon having the ability to freeze and manipulate the action as needed. He does this ostensibly to bring not just us, but also his on stage captive audience, up to speed. This would be the young Marina (Luisa Jojic), the long lost daughter of Pericles, originally left by her bereft father in the charge of Cleon (Luc Roderique) and Dionyza (Jeff Gladstone), but following an aborted murder plot arranged by Dionyza subsequently captured by pirates and sold into prostitution. Still with me? Virtuous Marina is miraculously able to hold on to her maidenhead by convincing all of her clients to become better men, something that as Tiffany has written about would have been instantly recognizable to Shakespeare's contemporaries--not least through the remediating figure of Gower--as a rewriting of the story of St. Agnes of Rome.

But all of this happens much later in the play as written by Shakespeare. The effect of Anderson's temporal analepsis and narrative abstraction at the outset of her staging for Bard on the Beach is that Cerimon's storytelling to Marina declaws the shocking sexuality of the play in two ways. First, by reducing the opening act in Antioch to a dumb show involving pots and pans and a gilded bottle meant to stand in for a daughter who has for years been sexually abused by her father, Anderson turns an embodied act of violation into a mere speech act--and one relayed retrospectively at that. Second, placing Marina "in the know" about her father and the story of their separation early in the play means that when they finally come to be reunited in Mytilene at the end of the play the frisson of sexual misrecognition between Pericles and a woman he otherwise understands to be a prostitute is obviated, as is the pattern of ambiguous relationships between fathers and daughters that gets repeated throughout the play.

If all of this were meant to be read as a deliberate burlesquing of the play, that would be one thing (and some of the frankly cheesy choreography in the first half of this production put me in mind of this possibility). But, notwithstanding all of the sexual punning that is such an important part of the text, I don't think a camp aesthetic is what Anderson was going after. Instead, I suspect that the desire to resolve the moral and narrative tensions inherent in Shakespearean romance by emphasizing a happy ending (this being a common temptation with works like The Tempest and Cymbeline as well) led to this staging's unwitting emphasis on the normative rectitude of family. Even the goddess Diana is transformed into a beneficent figure, with the last insult for Tiffany the fact that we learn nothing of the violent revenge wrought upon Dionyza and Cleon.

In the end, the whole production was just too light, a tone that even carried over into the sandblasted costume and stage design. As Tiffany and I both agreed upon exiting the theatre, we prefer our romance a little darker and messier. Cue those skulls in Antiochus's castle.

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A West Coast Macbeth

Sexy and conceptually innovative restagings of The Scottish Play seem to be all the rage these days. Sleep No More, Punchdrunk's immersive, film noir-style take, in which audience members follow different characters from room to room, is into its second year at a New York hotel. The National Theatre of Scotland did a one-man version of the play on Broadway last year starring Alan Cumming. And on through this Sunday at the Russian Hall on Campbell Street in Strathcona is To Wear a Heart So White, Leaky Heaven Circus' re-imagining of the text for our Coast Salish West Coast that is equal parts historical, liturgical, and scatological.

In the Shakespearean canon one thinks of The Tempest as the "postcolonial play"--as, indeed, it has been taken up in countless rewritings, including Aimé Césaire's classic Une Tempête. However Leaky Heaven director Steven Hill and his creative collaborators take as their starting point for this piece the fact that shortly after "discovering" our fair shores, Captain George Vancouver (along with Captain James Cook and others, one of several white colonial "ancestors" to whom we are invited to pay homage at the top of the show) and his crew staged as a little diverting theatrical entertainment for Indigenous locals a version of--you guessed it--Macbeth. Using Shakespeare in this way to reconfigure the colonial project not as a Prospero-like act of magic (e.g., the depopulating rhetorical sleight-of-hand that comes with declaring an inhabited region terra nullius) but as a calculated power grab and incredibly bloody conquest is a bold and fascinating move. As is the suggestion that the violence continues in and through Shakespeare's historical and contemporary (re)productions--from the various audio and video excerpts from past Macbeths to which the Leaky Heaven actors attempt to synch their performances to that species of local theatrical colonization that unfolds every summer in Vanier Park.

Plot-wise, To Wear a Heart So White condenses the action to the three characters of Macbeth (Alex Ferguson), Lady Macbeth (Lois Anderson), and Banquo (Sean Marshall, Jr.). And, taking a cue from Roman Polanski, the creative team does not stint on the gore. At the climactic banquet scene (generously laid to involve a portion of the audience), Banquo, oozing blood from the knife stuck in his back, serves a pig's head to the newly crowned king and queen, whom we see (via outsized pantomimed gestures) and hear (courtesy of Nancy Tam's brilliant sound design) gulping their wine and slurping their food with lustful abandon.

The play concludes with Ferguson's Macbeth accepting a bear's head from Marshall's Banquo, and being coaxed by Anderson's Lady Macbeth into taking to the proscenium stage with it (where several of the scenes, along with Parjad Sharifi's amazing projections, take place). Once on stage, Ferguson recites Macbeth's famous concluding soliloquy ("Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..."). Following a brief blackout, Marshall emerges with a step-ladder and squeegee, and as he appears to wipe down the condensation from the inside of the rain-swept windshield we see projected on the screen, Ferguson reappears from the stage's back safety door in full British naval regalia. A perfect synecdochic image linking our colonial past to our neoliberal present.

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Plugging The Unplugging

Just a brief note to say that The Unplugging, a new play by Yvette Nolan, began preview performances at Arts Club Theatre's Revue Stage on Granville Island last night. Richard and I, along with our good friend Cathy, visiting from the UK, were in the audience.

In the play, Nolan (former Artistic Director at Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto), has adapted an Athabaskan legend, as recorded by Velma Wallis, called Two Old Women, in which the complaining protagonists of the title are cast out into the wilderness during a time of hardship after they have become too much of a burden on the rest of the community. Forced to rely on each other, and their storehouse of strength, stamina, and skills, the two women thrive against the odds, to the point where the community that has cast them out comes calling for their aid.

In Nolan's version, set in the very near future, she has tapped into the current cultural zeitgeist re our anxiously wired, digital culture (see TV's Revolution), imagining a post-apocalyptic world without electricity. Bern and Elena must re-discover the lost ways of their Aboriginal foremothers, "becoming," in the words of Nolan's script, something new. But the arrival of a mysterious stranger, Seamus, threatens their fragile new community of two. Jenn Griffin (as Bern) and Margo Kane (as Elena) are powerful stage presences, and they are ably supported by Anton Lipovetsky as Seamus. Lois Anderson is the director, with dramaturgical assistance having been provided by Rachel Ditor and my buddy DD Kugler.

I'll have more to say about the play after it officially opens next Wednesday, October 17th, and I get a chance to return for an additional viewing. But I did want to acknowledge how generous Yvette has already been in sharing the script with me--and the students of my Introduction to Drama class at SFU, who will be studying it and the production over the next two weeks.

I also wanted to say that I think the tag line and poster design for the show are among the most savvy that I have encountered in a long time. See below.

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Not Completely As I Would Have Liked It

There is much to admire in David Mackay's production of As You Like It at Bard on the Beach, which I caught in preview performance last night along with several members of my Women and Comedy class (we are discussing the play next week). Lois Anderson is a spirited, intensely physical, and very sexual Rosalind, and she is matched in comic timing, vivacity, and stage presence by Luisa Jojic as Celia. These two bosom buddies do not moon coquettishly over the de Boys brothers (Todd Thomson as Orlando and Sebastian Kroon as Oliver), but rather openly display their desire and revel in the frank ribaldry of Shakespeare's language. As such, we are given much lustier portraits of both women than we normally see in productions, their respective sexual ids having been unleashed by the wilds of Arden--a point reinforced especially by the staging of one of the songs requested by Jaques (John Murphy) of Duke Senior's men in Act IV as a fever dream of Celia's.

At the same time, I did chafe a little at what struck me as the resolutely heteronormative channeling of the women's open sexuality. After all, the play is pretty clear in suggesting that Celia and Rosalind, who share a bed in addition to an intensely symbiotic friendship, are same-sex cousins who kiss, and very likely a lot more else besides. When Rosalind falls for Orlando, Celia is openly jealous, and as critics like Julie Crawford have suggested, one way to interpret the speed with which Celia accedes to Oliver's marriage proposal so late in the play (and so soon after first laying eyes on him) is that she sees in a union with Orlando's newly reconciled brother a way to remain close to her own "most true" bosom buddy--Rosalind.

Of course, one of the delicious ironies of As You Like It is that the marital epithalamium is actually forestalled at the end of the play. To be sure, the god Hymen is magically conjured by Rosalind to unite each of the four couples (Rosalind and Orlando; Celia and Oliver; Touchstone and Audrey; Silvius and the truculent Phoebe), but the bonds are actually never pronounced and Duke Senior's concluding couplet announcing their imminence is followed by Rosalind's epilogue, which takes us out of the fictional temporality of traditional comic closure and into the subjunctive temporality of the play's real-world staging ("If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me..."). Spoken by a boy actor who has just finished playing a woman playing a boy playing a woman, both the potential cross-gender and same-sex pathways encapsulated by this phrase are made manifest not just in the radically unstable referent behind the first-person pronoun, but also in the equally ambiguous second person addressee, whose multiple and multi-directional identifications cannot be pinned down.

So what happens if you excise the epilogue altogether, as this Bard production does? For one thing, you necessarily make marriage the de facto end point, both structurally in terms of the play and ideologically in terms of normalizing the free play of gender identifications and sexual desires that up until that point had reigned in Arden. The homoerotic associations that resurface in Rosalind's epilogue, and that link it to her cross-dressing elsewhere in the play, are here jettisoned in favour of an explicit staging of the revelries only hinted at in Duke Senior's final lines.

As disturbing, to me, is the fact that removing the epilogue also imperils if not destroys altogether the complicity established between performers and audience, that we are not only in on the joke (of gender and sexuality, generally, but also of theatrical masquerade more specifically), but that we are enjoying the joke. In a production that has up until this point traded in broad winks at the audience, not least in Ryan Beil's delightful capering, ad libbing, and general breaking of the fourth wall as Touchstone, this seems a curious final choice. And falling back on an excuse of changing theatrical conventions--i.e., that to a contemporary audience a female actor speaking the epilogue as written just wouldn't make sense--betrays an equally grievous failure of imagination in presuming audience members' identifications with both the character of Rosalind and the actor playing her are singular and straightforward.

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Iphigenia at SFU Woodward's

The gods and goddesses in Greek mythology have a lot to answer for. First there's that rigged beauty contest between Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite that leads Paris to inadvertently initiate the Trojan War, the absconded Helen being his prize. Then there's all the mischief the immortals get up to in the lead up to the Greeks' attack on Troy. Wouldn't be a fair fight if there weren't some additional casualties and especially familial collateral damage along the way.

And poor Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army, seems to suffer more than most, starting with his fateful decision to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, which, depending on whom you read (Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles), sets off an escalating series of retributive and self-destructive acts by other members of his family: his wife Clytemnestra, his other daughter Electra, and his of course his son, Orestes.

In Euripides' first version of the story, Iphigenia at Aulis, it all starts with Agamemnon's presumption that he's a better hunter than Artemis. In retaliation for this boast, Artemis stills the winds behind the sails of the Greek ships gunning for Troy just as they reach the harbour of Aulis. Agamemnon is told by an oracle that the only way the winds will pick up again is if he sacrifices Iphigenia. He doesn't want to, but his bloodthirsty lieutenant Menelaus is insistent (in one version of the story even intercepting a missive by his boss warning his daughter and family to stay away), and so he sends for his daughter under the pretext that she is to marry Achilles. Problems arise when the none-too-stable mother of the bride gets caught up in planning her daughter's nuptials, arriving with a full-on trousseau, and consulting the young and het-up Achilles about his plans for her daughter. Achilles (who, you will remember from Homer, has his own issues to deal with, not least a more than brotherly affection for his comrade-in-arms, Patroclus) has no idea what she's talking about, and soon Clytemnestra outs her husband's plan and the real argument of the play (and of all Greek drama, really) takes centre-stage: the rights of the individual versus the interests of the state.

In Lois Anderson's staging of John Barton's 1980 translation/adaptation of the play, SFU Contemporary Arts' inaugural student production at Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, that question gets aligned in a very 21st-century way with political and religious extremism. That is, Iphigenia's eventual acquiescence to the will of her General father and her willingness to sacrifice her own life for the greater good of the Greek people (at least as the choice of death in this case is presented to her), it is suggested, starts to look a little like jihadism. In other words, if we connect the dots between Iphi's choice and that famous wooden horse that eventually gets wheeled beyond the gates of Troy, the girl starts to look a little like a suicide bomber.

It's an interesting approach to the material, but unfortunately in this production it mostly stays on the page--i.e., in the Director's Note on the program--rather than getting worked through materially on stage. Fanaticism to a cause is incarnated most forcefully by Menelaus (Troy Kozuki), and there are some wonderful moments of physical choreography (local dancer/choreographer Noam Gagnon advised on movement for the piece) that suggest a bodily short-circuiting of rational debate to a moral and ethical problem. But Iphigenia's own conversion to her father's ideals seems remarkably passive and resigned as portrayed by Anouska Anderson Kirby (the director's daughter). This could have something to do with the fact that this decisive moment in the play occurs on video rather than live, and while I applaud Anderson's overall integration of different media in this production, I question the choice of mediated delivery in this case, if only because in the cavernous space we were in it was difficult to hear what was being said.

Mostly, however, Anderson made terrific and theatrically novel use of the space, starting with Talthybius's (a superb Aryo Khakpour) opening entrance on his bicycle and the dropping of the upstage safety curtain. Special kudos must go to sound composer Elliott Vaughan, who made fantastic use of the space's available ambient sound sources to produce simple yet wonderful effects: moving the curtains along the stage left and right walls to suggest wind; pounding on exposed pipes and chairs and the floor for rolls of thunder, or approaching armies; and, in conjunction with Anderson, showing an intuitive understanding of the Greek chorus and the aural basis of Greek drama more generally through a canny use of recorded voice-over and live call-and-response from different parts of the theatre.

Lighting, costumes, and especially props (the reproduction of the stalled Greek ships was most effective) are also superb. And, in this regard, I was delighted to see that three crew members from The Objecthood of Chairs made material contributions in these areas: Milena Popović, Jordan Boivin, and Lain Kim.

Iphigenia at Aulis runs at SFU Woodward's through to this Saturday. Call 778-782-3514 for tickets.

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