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.
P
Showing posts with label Luisa Jojic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luisa Jojic. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 1, 2018
Thursday, January 25, 2018
PuSh 2018: The Events at the Russian Hall
David Greig's The Events, currently being mounted by Pi Theatre at the Russian Hall as part of this year's PuSh Festival, is inspired by Anders Breivik's 2011 mass killing of young camp goers on the island of Utøya in Norway. In adapting those horrific events for the stage, the Scottish Greig has at once made the story more particular and more universal, focusing on an individual survivor, but also refusing to specify her nationality or where she lives. With the aid of composer John Browne, Greig also incorporates a series of rotating community choirs into the play's mise-en-scène, ensuring that wherever the play is staged it will have direct local resonance.
Claire (Luisa Jojic) is a liberal lesbian minister and choir leader who is struggling to come to terms with a random act of violence that has resulted in the deaths of most of her flock, and that has made her question the very foundations of her faith. This aftermath is framed by an opening scene in which we see Claire, in the middle of conducting her choir, welcome a young boy (Douglas Ennenberg) into the church. "You don't have to sing," she says by way of encouragement. "Nobody wants to sing every day." What follows is Claire's desperate and soul-shattering struggle to make sense of the actions wrought by this boy, and to make her way back to a place where she herself might one day be able to sing again. Along the way she seeks but fails to find answers from a host of characters who are either concerned for her own well-being (her therapist, her partner) or who knew the boy (his father, an acquaintance from high school, the leader of a far right party whose ideology the shooter briefly flirted with). All of these characters are incarnated by the same actor playing the boy and Ennenberg's loose and easy physicality, combined with subtle modulations in voice and tone, makes each of them both distinguishable and believable.
It is, of course, belief that Claire is looking for--something, anything, to explain what, as a woman of God, she can't bring herself to accept is unexplainable. But Greig wisely resists offering Claire, or us, pat homilies. In scene after scene, Claire chases after that which will confirm her worst convictions about the boy: that he was abused as a child; that he was picked on at school; that he was blinded by extremist ideology. But in these encounters what Claire is actually forced to confront are the limits of her own naïveté and rigidly moralistic worldview. To her expression of unknowing horror at the protocols of bullying, the high school acquaintance of the boy says that she was obviously extremely popular growing up. And she is flummoxed by the fact that the leader of the far right party whose meetings the boy occasionally attended is a family man who completely disavows what the boy has done. Greig also ramps up the dramatic tension by slowly revealing that Claire's obsession with the boy's motives masks a far more painful self-examination that would force her to confront the rightness of her own actions on the night of the shooting. In this, it is worth noting that performance and trauma share a similar structuring principle: repetition. Every time we see Claire replay the events of the shooting, Jojic's increasingly manic desperation--which director Richard Wolfe, working with movement designer Jo Leslie, cannily externalizes in physical actions that have no purpose, or that go nowhere--inches us at once closer to and then away from the horrible truth of what happened in the music room, where Claire and Mrs. Singh find themselves staring down the barrel of the boy's gun.
As is often the case in these situations, the truth after which Claire and the audience have been questing for most of the play ends up being banal--or, rather, "silly," to quote the boy, whom Claire eventually visits in prison. She has gone there with the express purpose of poisoning him (the only implausible note in the play), her nihilism now so total and complete as to be a match for his own. But the emptiness of his answers to her repeated queries of "why?" once again upends her certitude--this time in a bottomless well of pure evil. Not that Greig leaves us with an Arendtian equivocation on the singularity of remorse (or lack thereof). For into the void of the boy's culpability and Claire's own guilt, Greig and Browne fill the performance hall with the collective catharsis of song. Here, as Wolfe writes in his program note, the play's creators are taking us back to the very origins of Western tragedy, with the Chorus in Greek drama functioning as "both spectator and performer."
Thus it was that last night Vancouver's Cyrilika Slavic Chamber Choir, under the direction of Emilija Lale, at once completed the fourth side of Wolfe's in-the-round staging and also seamlessly melded into the action of the play. Each of the twelve volunteer choirs participating over the course of this production's run receive a copy of the script and musical score in advance. But they rehearse on their own, meeting with music supervisor Mishelle Cuttler only once, and only encountering the actors (and vice-versa) on the night of their scheduled performance. I can only imagine how nerve-wracking this is for all concerned in terms of coordination; at the same time, watching the choir watching what we were watching had the reverberating effect of binding us all in an act of witnessing that apportioned some of the weight of Claire's trauma to the other bodies in the room. This is, of course, the power of song: it travels through time and space, and from body to body, actively moving us with its force and energy. Physically registering this sense of connection and obligation--a choir per force being the sum of its individual voices--is what makes this production of The Events so eventful.
P
Claire (Luisa Jojic) is a liberal lesbian minister and choir leader who is struggling to come to terms with a random act of violence that has resulted in the deaths of most of her flock, and that has made her question the very foundations of her faith. This aftermath is framed by an opening scene in which we see Claire, in the middle of conducting her choir, welcome a young boy (Douglas Ennenberg) into the church. "You don't have to sing," she says by way of encouragement. "Nobody wants to sing every day." What follows is Claire's desperate and soul-shattering struggle to make sense of the actions wrought by this boy, and to make her way back to a place where she herself might one day be able to sing again. Along the way she seeks but fails to find answers from a host of characters who are either concerned for her own well-being (her therapist, her partner) or who knew the boy (his father, an acquaintance from high school, the leader of a far right party whose ideology the shooter briefly flirted with). All of these characters are incarnated by the same actor playing the boy and Ennenberg's loose and easy physicality, combined with subtle modulations in voice and tone, makes each of them both distinguishable and believable.
It is, of course, belief that Claire is looking for--something, anything, to explain what, as a woman of God, she can't bring herself to accept is unexplainable. But Greig wisely resists offering Claire, or us, pat homilies. In scene after scene, Claire chases after that which will confirm her worst convictions about the boy: that he was abused as a child; that he was picked on at school; that he was blinded by extremist ideology. But in these encounters what Claire is actually forced to confront are the limits of her own naïveté and rigidly moralistic worldview. To her expression of unknowing horror at the protocols of bullying, the high school acquaintance of the boy says that she was obviously extremely popular growing up. And she is flummoxed by the fact that the leader of the far right party whose meetings the boy occasionally attended is a family man who completely disavows what the boy has done. Greig also ramps up the dramatic tension by slowly revealing that Claire's obsession with the boy's motives masks a far more painful self-examination that would force her to confront the rightness of her own actions on the night of the shooting. In this, it is worth noting that performance and trauma share a similar structuring principle: repetition. Every time we see Claire replay the events of the shooting, Jojic's increasingly manic desperation--which director Richard Wolfe, working with movement designer Jo Leslie, cannily externalizes in physical actions that have no purpose, or that go nowhere--inches us at once closer to and then away from the horrible truth of what happened in the music room, where Claire and Mrs. Singh find themselves staring down the barrel of the boy's gun.
As is often the case in these situations, the truth after which Claire and the audience have been questing for most of the play ends up being banal--or, rather, "silly," to quote the boy, whom Claire eventually visits in prison. She has gone there with the express purpose of poisoning him (the only implausible note in the play), her nihilism now so total and complete as to be a match for his own. But the emptiness of his answers to her repeated queries of "why?" once again upends her certitude--this time in a bottomless well of pure evil. Not that Greig leaves us with an Arendtian equivocation on the singularity of remorse (or lack thereof). For into the void of the boy's culpability and Claire's own guilt, Greig and Browne fill the performance hall with the collective catharsis of song. Here, as Wolfe writes in his program note, the play's creators are taking us back to the very origins of Western tragedy, with the Chorus in Greek drama functioning as "both spectator and performer."
Thus it was that last night Vancouver's Cyrilika Slavic Chamber Choir, under the direction of Emilija Lale, at once completed the fourth side of Wolfe's in-the-round staging and also seamlessly melded into the action of the play. Each of the twelve volunteer choirs participating over the course of this production's run receive a copy of the script and musical score in advance. But they rehearse on their own, meeting with music supervisor Mishelle Cuttler only once, and only encountering the actors (and vice-versa) on the night of their scheduled performance. I can only imagine how nerve-wracking this is for all concerned in terms of coordination; at the same time, watching the choir watching what we were watching had the reverberating effect of binding us all in an act of witnessing that apportioned some of the weight of Claire's trauma to the other bodies in the room. This is, of course, the power of song: it travels through time and space, and from body to body, actively moving us with its force and energy. Physically registering this sense of connection and obligation--a choir per force being the sum of its individual voices--is what makes this production of The Events so eventful.
P
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