Theatre is about vulnerability. A play will not work if the people involved are too restrained. Actors need to be able to put themselves in intimate positions in public spaces, but like with all things, some plays are going to require more vulnerability than others. Beirut is like an exposed nerve ending with a glass of ice water hovering precariously over it.
This year's Live Five seasons begins with Hectik Theatre's presentation of a crushingly bleak dystopian future and the painful search for love and fulfillment within it. Beirut was penned by New York playwright Alan Bowne back in 1987, in response to the still-mysterious AIDS epidemic (and is all the more tragic in light of the fact that Bowne died from AIDS two years later). It takes place in a non-specific future when the United States (or possibly the whole world) is in the throes of paranoia over a terrifying new disease that is spread through intimate contact. All those who carry the infection are rounded up and sealed inside ghettos to await death. Those who aren't infected are "free" in a sense, but live in fear under constant monitoring, and are forbidden to have sex with anyone. The two characters are Torch and Blue (good 1980s dystopian New York names). Torch is a "P" (for positive) shut away in a ghetto with the other infected waiting for his skin to start falling off. His old flame Blue is still "N" (negative), but she has grown sick of the banal existence outside and has broken into the sick camp to be with Torch.
Beirut digs deep into its themes of mortality and freedom. It raises the question of what, precisely, makes life worth living. Blue breaks into the ghetto ready to accept a potentially agonising death in exchange for a brief period of what she considers real living. Torch, meanwhile, is ready to send her away, condemning himself to die in solitude, in the interest of saving her from disease. As time goes on, he is forced to choose what he values more: Blue's life or her spirit. Should he grant her happiness in what is tantamount to killing her, or should he save her and let her go on being miserable. Beirut raises the bold and potentially dangerous question of how recklessly we should treat our lives in pursuit of exhilaration. But the outside, illness-free world is made to sound so hopeless and lifeless, we have no choice but to take Blue's side. I feel that is the one weakness in the script; it could have been more ambiguous about the quality of life of the "N"s and gone to a darker place by leaving us to feel more ambivalent about Blue's self-sacrifice.
The director Kenn McLeod mentioned in his notes that he has been thinking about doing this play for some time, and I can understand why. It is not a production to be mounted lightly. A thorough grokking of the script is bound to take time, then one has to wait for the perfect climate, for the right people to come along who can trust each other intimately. This production requires a lot of trust.
McLeod created an elegant blend of romance and horror onstage. The set is a dilapidated urban hovel that looks like it belongs to a homeless person squatting in an old warehouse. A single stained mattress is the focal point of the room, surrounded by scenic array of cracked walls and tin cans. At an instant, it feels dirty. But the way the two characters revolve around the makeshift bed gives the set a sense of primal sensuality; this feeling is buttressed by the use of candlelight.
The pathos of Beirut is grounded in raw, sexual energy. But it never gets exploitative, or even particularly sexy, because this is always an uncomfortable undercurrent stemming from the darkness of the play's story. The actors have to be vulnerable, both physically (they spend the whole play in varying states of undress) and emotionally, but they strike a remarkable balance by maintaining that energy as well as the darkness. The scene gets intimate without ever being too graphic. There are times this balance works better than others. The play opens with a simulated masturbation scene which was on one hand kind of explicit, but on the other hand so cursory that in the effort to avoid getting to graphic it didn't seem at all accurate; it probably could have been framed differently to be less explicit but more convincing. Probably the most deftly handled moment of tension is when a guard (played by Jacob Yaworski, who had to step in last minute but delivers a chilling performance all the same) comes by for an "inspection". It's the most sexually graphic part of the play, all handled in low light, and really drags the sexual energy into its darkest place, leaving the audience horrified and squirming.
Munish Sharma is Torch. I am not familiar with Sharma's past work, but he definitely brings an air of experience to this play. He portrays the frayed nerve endings of someone who used to have it all together but now finds himself hanging on the precipice. He's endearing in his dreams about life outside the prison; he can bring out little moments of humour throughout. He's powerful, but crumbling. Sharma invigorates Torch with passion worthy of his name, but he can also dial it back to a very soft place.
I have seen Kate Herriot once previously, in Bottome's Dream, and while I knew she was talented I couldn't have imagined her doing something like this. As Blue, Herriot is fearless. She's fiery. From her pithy comments early on to her impassioned pleas toward the climax, she launches herself into this role. Every moment is connected from the way she explores Torch's room to how she entices him toward her, she is centred in the moment and all of her movements are fluid and natural. She lays so much of herself bare, I can't imagine what her process was, but it comes together seamlessly. She goes out onstage like a firecracker but never loses the feeling of fragility.
But talking about the two actors separately is only half the story. Beirut never would have worked if they couldn't have worked well together. But Herriot and Sharma are electric. The play is like a skeleton track, and the two of them hurtle down it, head-first, with no fear. Their moments together are so intimate and genuine that it is like the whole theatre dissolves away. But they also play off each other in snappy banter, bouncing between notes of love and anger. There was clearly a lot of trust built into this production, and each actor had to give everything to their stage partner. The end result is elegant, intimate, and smouldering.
I don't know how well this level of energy could have sustained itself, but coming it at a little under an hour, Beirut keeps its candle burning just as long as it needs to. It doesn't feel at all rushed or cut short, but lies in perfect balance.
Saturday 19 October 2013
Monday 14 October 2013
Eurydice
Whimsically tragic. Yes, that is the most concise way of putting it. A tale of loss and longing, the power of words, and family bonds that echo through eternity.
Eurydice marks the beginning of the 69th Greystone Theatre season (and the 7th that I have had the privilege to witness). Our fair troupe tackles Sara Ruhl's modernised version of the old Orpheus myth. It's a poignant travelogue to the depths of Hades where the titular character finds herself cut off from the land of the living, fighting to retain her identity.
The traditional Orpheus myth involves the most legendary singer in Greece, Orpheus, and his beloved bride, Eurydice. When Eurydice dies tragically on their wedding night, Orpheus ventures deep into the underworld, playing his music, to bargain for her release. But he finds her freedom is not without a catch.
In Ruhl's adaptation, the couple are young lovers in the 1960s (ish?). When tragedy strikes, Eurydice finds herself cast down to Hades where she makes the long trip to her final resting place, first on a boat, then down a raining elevator, and then on a train that is not a train but rather the opposite of a train (we're not told what that is, but we're also not told that it isn't a giraffe). Nonetheless, after her abstract journey through the underworld, Eurydice arrives with no knowledge of who she is. There she unknowingly encounters her father, who uses his secret knowledge of the language of the living to restore her identity to her. I won't go into specifics about the play's ending, but I'll ask everyone to remember that we're in the realm of Greek tragedy where it's considered a happy ending if someone turns into a plant.
Sara Ruhl's script brings an ethereal quality to the character interactions. She refers to her plays as "3D poems". It's a provocative concept, but upon examination it's not particularly useful. It's a vague description, but this play capitalises on vague. It spends time discussing the word "interesting", which is interesting, because I also have a habit of overusing the word interesting, interestingly enough. Beginning with the discussion between Orpheus and Eurydice on the subject of interesting arguments, and then leading up to Eurydice's fateful encounter with the Interesting Man on her wedding night, our sense of language becomes fuzzy. "Interesting" does not pass judgement of something being either good or bad; it's just a term we throw around when we feel that something is worth talking about, but we aren't sure why. Eurydice starts off pursuing this vague sense of the "interesting" and it takes her to a place where nothing seems to mean anything.
The journey through Hades brings travellers to stop at the River Lethe, where they wash away the knowledge of their previous lives and begin their existence as the dead. Eurydice's father, for reasons that are not entirely clear, managed to avoid the river and retain all of his living knowledge, including the understanding of how to read and write. After we see his poignant lamentations in the early part of the play, it is heart-breaking to see Eurydice arrive and look at her father without any idea who he is. From there we move into an exploration of the nature of death, language, and memory. The true death represented in Eurydice is not physical death, but it is the moment the spirit is dipped in the River Lethe and is divorced of their memories.
The power of language is a running theme throughout the play, the way it unites and separates us. Eurydice and Orpheus have trouble communicating in the first scene of the play, with Orpheus never quite getting the meaning behind Eurydice's words. Eurydice starts to feel distance between them, and she is tempted by the words of the Interesting Man before realising they didn't mean what she thought they did. When she arrives in the underworld her language becomes so limited that interaction involves a confusing web of talking around things (such as the "opposite of a train"). When her father is trying to explain who he is, the closest word he can get to "father" that she understands is "tree". In one darkly comic but terribly haunting scene, Eurydice finds a book in Hades but, without memory of how to read, she angrily throws it down and screams "What are you?!" Language is ally and enemy; its circumspect nature is used to both nurture and injure. But when they don't have language they don't have anything to make them human. They become as "stones".
Ruhl's script has the resonance of verse. Her 3D poem wrangles this hyperreal, weighty rhetoric loaded with pathos where no word means precisely what it seems at first. The play is a whirlwind of abstract symbolism but still anchored in this very physical and immediate connection between family members. The dialogue isn't without fault, though. The first scene with Orpheus and Eurydice on a beach has the same unrealistic sense to the dialogue without sliding into the emotional gravitas, so it comes across as half B-movie, half children's book, and half philosophical musing (yes, that's three halves, and you should count yourself lucky if that's the strangest thing you read in this review). By the time Eurydice arrives in Hades and meets her father, the dialogue slides in and out of metaphors with much greater ease and builds to a forlorn emotional intensity.
Dwayne Brenna helms this production as director. He gives it a disturbed, dream-like feel similar to what he did with Woyzeck in 2011, but also plays with the classical Greek work he did in Love of the Nightingale. He blends the 1950s/60s aesthetic with dark fantasy and a little tinge of ancient Greece. What results is a tragic and enchanting play that feels something like a Hayao Miyazaki movie filtered through the lens of Edgar Allen Poe. Dark and tragic, but still with a very magical quality.
Bev Kobelsky's costuming starts off light and airy, getting darker as we travel into the underworld. Eurydice's wedding dress is slim and sleek, which gives her wispy and ghost-like feel. However, most of the imagination in the costume department went to the three "stones", our play's twisted Greek chorus. They appear onstage dressed ostentatiously in a Victorian disco pirate gothic chic, with rigid and ruffled jet black costumes and ghoulish makeup, looking very much like they just stepped off the set of a Catalyst Theatre production.
The set is remarkable. Collin Konrath's design plays on both the abstract and the grounded planes. Large picture frames contain the Stones as they stand vigil over the unfolding narrative. A large, ominous gate is fixed in the centre of the stage, used only seldom, but remaining as this focal point to make the whole stage seem a little oppressive. The aesthetic changes going from right to left, where we have the train station and elevator, which has actual rain pouring inside it when Eurydice arrives (my hat goes off to that trick). Then a curving staircase on stage right creates a bridge to a second level; the differing heights are used to great effect to emphasise the separation between the living and the dead. So the whole set creates a series of barriers: physical, like the different heights, or abstract like the picture frames or the "room" that Eurydice's father constructs for her. Our sense of security, longing, and alienation are all bound up in the subtle shifts between these constructs onstage.
Robert Grier is an endearing Orpheus. He starts off bright and shining with innocence, although not that bright. He's the free-spirited counterpart to Eurydice's more intellectual nature. In his grief he is lost and child-like, and creates a delicate balance with the sombre reflection going on below him. Connor Brousseau plays the opposite. When he shows up as the Interesting Man, he appears mature and intellectual, but with something very menacing underneath. He succeeds at playing both charming and threatening. When Brousseau shows up later as Hades (or perhaps he was Hades all along), he is dressed like a small child, in a morbid parody of Orpheus' genuine innocence. Hades acts with the emotional immaturity of a child, but still feels very evil. The two actors complement each other very well, representing opposing facets of Eurydice's anti-intellectual plane. They also have their share of comedic moments, but Grier makes the comedy endearing, while Brousseau makes you so uncomfortable you're not sure what else to do but laugh.
The three Stones embody the dark humour of this play. On one hand, they make the most insane Greek Chorus ever to grace the stage, but on the other they represent something very tragic and sinister: the oppressive nature of death itself. They spend most of their time railing against the attempts of Eurydice and her father to reclaim pieces of their living selves, but the Stones are so over-the-top they're fun to watch. Jenna Berenbaum is shrill and Banshee-like as the Little Stone, maintaining an implausibly rigid poise and always hovering in line of emotional intensity between lamenting mother and angry crow. Kashtin Moen as the Big Stone seems less smart than the other stones, but he has a tremendous command of the stage that always makes his lines ring out. And Mikael Steponchev as the Loud Stone is the most powerful voice of the trio. He sustains a huge amount of energy through the entire play and can rattle the audience to their bones. The whole dark, Burtonesque threesome do an excellent job of delivering comic relief and dark thematic material.
Torien C Cafferata plays Eurydice's father, a bit of a dry intellectual but with a profound sense of heart underneath. He begins the play in a state of sadness, writing mournful letters that he doesn't know how to send. Upon meeting Eurydice, he pauses in a moment of defeat, seeing her lack of recognition. But small bits of vibrancy well to the surface as he begins to get through to her. More than any single element of the production, Cafferata evinces the sad, whimsical Miyazaki nature of Eurydice. So much emotion exists in small, quiet moments, such as when he is imagining walking his daughter down the aisle, or the sustained scenes of him wrapping twine around four posts to give Eurydice a makeshift room. One moment in particular where he places his hat on Eurydice's head, like she's a little girl, captured the balance of enchanting and heart-breaking. A scene near the end where he remembers the directions to the river is probably the most delicate and profound delivery of Ruhl's subtle verse.
And then, of course, there is Ciara. Ciara Richardson takes the helm of Eurydice as the title heroine. On one level, she plays a socialite princess, frustrated with Orpheus, demanding a bellhop when she arrives in the underworld. But it's clear that underneath that veneer is a sense of sadness and loneliness which Richardson carries around with her in the weight of her step. This sadness occasionally spikes into anger, which she needs to ramp up to in a very short time to bust out of the general slowness of the rest of the play. But she does it. And she really opens up in those enchanting scenes with her father, where she is reawoken to child-like delight and innocence (in constrast to Orpheus' increasing grief). It's a vulnerable performance always weighted by tragedy but lightly flitting through an array of emotions.
The music is very good. It was all performed live in a darkened corner of the stage by the musical director Rodolfo Pino-Robles and Jesse Fulcher Gagnon (who alternates with Grier to play Orpheus). The music is soft with a few spikes in it, emulating the whimsical and tragic nature of the play as a whole. My complaint would be that the music should have been brought forward more into the play itself. Considering that Orpheus is such a legendary musician, the actor's musical talents should have been put to use in the character, instead of just on nights when he wasn't acting.
Eurydice is a full play, which has the power to drag us down into the depths of despair. But for all its sadness, it is a magical experience which highlights our own humanity and reminds of those things that make us who we are - our language, our memories, our connections - and why we hold them dear.
Eurydice marks the beginning of the 69th Greystone Theatre season (and the 7th that I have had the privilege to witness). Our fair troupe tackles Sara Ruhl's modernised version of the old Orpheus myth. It's a poignant travelogue to the depths of Hades where the titular character finds herself cut off from the land of the living, fighting to retain her identity.
The traditional Orpheus myth involves the most legendary singer in Greece, Orpheus, and his beloved bride, Eurydice. When Eurydice dies tragically on their wedding night, Orpheus ventures deep into the underworld, playing his music, to bargain for her release. But he finds her freedom is not without a catch.
In Ruhl's adaptation, the couple are young lovers in the 1960s (ish?). When tragedy strikes, Eurydice finds herself cast down to Hades where she makes the long trip to her final resting place, first on a boat, then down a raining elevator, and then on a train that is not a train but rather the opposite of a train (we're not told what that is, but we're also not told that it isn't a giraffe). Nonetheless, after her abstract journey through the underworld, Eurydice arrives with no knowledge of who she is. There she unknowingly encounters her father, who uses his secret knowledge of the language of the living to restore her identity to her. I won't go into specifics about the play's ending, but I'll ask everyone to remember that we're in the realm of Greek tragedy where it's considered a happy ending if someone turns into a plant.
Sara Ruhl's script brings an ethereal quality to the character interactions. She refers to her plays as "3D poems". It's a provocative concept, but upon examination it's not particularly useful. It's a vague description, but this play capitalises on vague. It spends time discussing the word "interesting", which is interesting, because I also have a habit of overusing the word interesting, interestingly enough. Beginning with the discussion between Orpheus and Eurydice on the subject of interesting arguments, and then leading up to Eurydice's fateful encounter with the Interesting Man on her wedding night, our sense of language becomes fuzzy. "Interesting" does not pass judgement of something being either good or bad; it's just a term we throw around when we feel that something is worth talking about, but we aren't sure why. Eurydice starts off pursuing this vague sense of the "interesting" and it takes her to a place where nothing seems to mean anything.
The journey through Hades brings travellers to stop at the River Lethe, where they wash away the knowledge of their previous lives and begin their existence as the dead. Eurydice's father, for reasons that are not entirely clear, managed to avoid the river and retain all of his living knowledge, including the understanding of how to read and write. After we see his poignant lamentations in the early part of the play, it is heart-breaking to see Eurydice arrive and look at her father without any idea who he is. From there we move into an exploration of the nature of death, language, and memory. The true death represented in Eurydice is not physical death, but it is the moment the spirit is dipped in the River Lethe and is divorced of their memories.
The power of language is a running theme throughout the play, the way it unites and separates us. Eurydice and Orpheus have trouble communicating in the first scene of the play, with Orpheus never quite getting the meaning behind Eurydice's words. Eurydice starts to feel distance between them, and she is tempted by the words of the Interesting Man before realising they didn't mean what she thought they did. When she arrives in the underworld her language becomes so limited that interaction involves a confusing web of talking around things (such as the "opposite of a train"). When her father is trying to explain who he is, the closest word he can get to "father" that she understands is "tree". In one darkly comic but terribly haunting scene, Eurydice finds a book in Hades but, without memory of how to read, she angrily throws it down and screams "What are you?!" Language is ally and enemy; its circumspect nature is used to both nurture and injure. But when they don't have language they don't have anything to make them human. They become as "stones".
Ruhl's script has the resonance of verse. Her 3D poem wrangles this hyperreal, weighty rhetoric loaded with pathos where no word means precisely what it seems at first. The play is a whirlwind of abstract symbolism but still anchored in this very physical and immediate connection between family members. The dialogue isn't without fault, though. The first scene with Orpheus and Eurydice on a beach has the same unrealistic sense to the dialogue without sliding into the emotional gravitas, so it comes across as half B-movie, half children's book, and half philosophical musing (yes, that's three halves, and you should count yourself lucky if that's the strangest thing you read in this review). By the time Eurydice arrives in Hades and meets her father, the dialogue slides in and out of metaphors with much greater ease and builds to a forlorn emotional intensity.
Dwayne Brenna helms this production as director. He gives it a disturbed, dream-like feel similar to what he did with Woyzeck in 2011, but also plays with the classical Greek work he did in Love of the Nightingale. He blends the 1950s/60s aesthetic with dark fantasy and a little tinge of ancient Greece. What results is a tragic and enchanting play that feels something like a Hayao Miyazaki movie filtered through the lens of Edgar Allen Poe. Dark and tragic, but still with a very magical quality.
Bev Kobelsky's costuming starts off light and airy, getting darker as we travel into the underworld. Eurydice's wedding dress is slim and sleek, which gives her wispy and ghost-like feel. However, most of the imagination in the costume department went to the three "stones", our play's twisted Greek chorus. They appear onstage dressed ostentatiously in a Victorian disco pirate gothic chic, with rigid and ruffled jet black costumes and ghoulish makeup, looking very much like they just stepped off the set of a Catalyst Theatre production.
The set is remarkable. Collin Konrath's design plays on both the abstract and the grounded planes. Large picture frames contain the Stones as they stand vigil over the unfolding narrative. A large, ominous gate is fixed in the centre of the stage, used only seldom, but remaining as this focal point to make the whole stage seem a little oppressive. The aesthetic changes going from right to left, where we have the train station and elevator, which has actual rain pouring inside it when Eurydice arrives (my hat goes off to that trick). Then a curving staircase on stage right creates a bridge to a second level; the differing heights are used to great effect to emphasise the separation between the living and the dead. So the whole set creates a series of barriers: physical, like the different heights, or abstract like the picture frames or the "room" that Eurydice's father constructs for her. Our sense of security, longing, and alienation are all bound up in the subtle shifts between these constructs onstage.
Robert Grier is an endearing Orpheus. He starts off bright and shining with innocence, although not that bright. He's the free-spirited counterpart to Eurydice's more intellectual nature. In his grief he is lost and child-like, and creates a delicate balance with the sombre reflection going on below him. Connor Brousseau plays the opposite. When he shows up as the Interesting Man, he appears mature and intellectual, but with something very menacing underneath. He succeeds at playing both charming and threatening. When Brousseau shows up later as Hades (or perhaps he was Hades all along), he is dressed like a small child, in a morbid parody of Orpheus' genuine innocence. Hades acts with the emotional immaturity of a child, but still feels very evil. The two actors complement each other very well, representing opposing facets of Eurydice's anti-intellectual plane. They also have their share of comedic moments, but Grier makes the comedy endearing, while Brousseau makes you so uncomfortable you're not sure what else to do but laugh.
The three Stones embody the dark humour of this play. On one hand, they make the most insane Greek Chorus ever to grace the stage, but on the other they represent something very tragic and sinister: the oppressive nature of death itself. They spend most of their time railing against the attempts of Eurydice and her father to reclaim pieces of their living selves, but the Stones are so over-the-top they're fun to watch. Jenna Berenbaum is shrill and Banshee-like as the Little Stone, maintaining an implausibly rigid poise and always hovering in line of emotional intensity between lamenting mother and angry crow. Kashtin Moen as the Big Stone seems less smart than the other stones, but he has a tremendous command of the stage that always makes his lines ring out. And Mikael Steponchev as the Loud Stone is the most powerful voice of the trio. He sustains a huge amount of energy through the entire play and can rattle the audience to their bones. The whole dark, Burtonesque threesome do an excellent job of delivering comic relief and dark thematic material.
Torien C Cafferata plays Eurydice's father, a bit of a dry intellectual but with a profound sense of heart underneath. He begins the play in a state of sadness, writing mournful letters that he doesn't know how to send. Upon meeting Eurydice, he pauses in a moment of defeat, seeing her lack of recognition. But small bits of vibrancy well to the surface as he begins to get through to her. More than any single element of the production, Cafferata evinces the sad, whimsical Miyazaki nature of Eurydice. So much emotion exists in small, quiet moments, such as when he is imagining walking his daughter down the aisle, or the sustained scenes of him wrapping twine around four posts to give Eurydice a makeshift room. One moment in particular where he places his hat on Eurydice's head, like she's a little girl, captured the balance of enchanting and heart-breaking. A scene near the end where he remembers the directions to the river is probably the most delicate and profound delivery of Ruhl's subtle verse.
And then, of course, there is Ciara. Ciara Richardson takes the helm of Eurydice as the title heroine. On one level, she plays a socialite princess, frustrated with Orpheus, demanding a bellhop when she arrives in the underworld. But it's clear that underneath that veneer is a sense of sadness and loneliness which Richardson carries around with her in the weight of her step. This sadness occasionally spikes into anger, which she needs to ramp up to in a very short time to bust out of the general slowness of the rest of the play. But she does it. And she really opens up in those enchanting scenes with her father, where she is reawoken to child-like delight and innocence (in constrast to Orpheus' increasing grief). It's a vulnerable performance always weighted by tragedy but lightly flitting through an array of emotions.
The music is very good. It was all performed live in a darkened corner of the stage by the musical director Rodolfo Pino-Robles and Jesse Fulcher Gagnon (who alternates with Grier to play Orpheus). The music is soft with a few spikes in it, emulating the whimsical and tragic nature of the play as a whole. My complaint would be that the music should have been brought forward more into the play itself. Considering that Orpheus is such a legendary musician, the actor's musical talents should have been put to use in the character, instead of just on nights when he wasn't acting.
Eurydice is a full play, which has the power to drag us down into the depths of despair. But for all its sadness, it is a magical experience which highlights our own humanity and reminds of those things that make us who we are - our language, our memories, our connections - and why we hold them dear.
Saturday 5 October 2013
My Chernobyl
As it turned out, I chose a suitably grey and dismal day to attend a play called My Chernobyl. I stepped in out of the dreary rain into the warm embrace of Persephone Theatre, and I was greeted by the sight of a cartoonish cooling tower and a mushroom cloud of cyrilic lettering above it. And I had to remind myself that I was about to watch a raucous comedy about an irradiated wasteland.
My Chernobyl is a recent Canadian play which came out of Victoria five short years ago. It offers to provide a Canadian perspective on the nuclear disaster (sort of). Our main character is David, a nice guy Canadian who has been charged with delivering his own inheritance to a cousin in Belarus. And he's doing it, presumably because he's so nice. Soon, his nice nature gets him taken advantage of by a pair of scheming locals, and wrapped up with his old relation's comely daughter, who sees wedding bells when the rich Canadian comes knocking.
It is a peculiar play. On one hand it is a tragedy of a country in shambles with its people forgotten (and the value they place on American culture is somewhat amusing given recent events). On the other hand it is a rollicking semi-Vaudevillian comedy with a little bit of fairy tale mixed in. Our setting is the edge of the "exclusion zone" - the 30km radius around Chernobyl deemed uninhabitable. People in this area are prone to cancer but unfortunately lacking in super powers. It's as hardscrabble a life as you can imagine. So when we watch the scheming supporting characters manoeuvre for more of David's money, we do so with the knowledge that they are clawing through the dirt for survival; a classic stock crook is underscored with a real sense of tragedy. All set to a soundscape of Bryan Adams music.
Despite its basis in a real-world disaster (even more immediate now with the recent disaster in Japan), My Chernobyl maintains a whimsical feel. Scene transitions are accompanied by folk dancing interludes, where U of S acting alumna Alex Hartshorn puts her authentic Ukrainian dance skills to work keeping the stage vibrant with some beautiful choreography. When there is no dancing, we get these cartoonish scenes of "potato bandits" sneaking around the countryside. These transitions make the whole set feel alive, shifting from one place to another. And the way the actors themselves are involved in the set movement creates a cohesive feeling, like the flora and fauna of the play are all bound together in one large choreography.
The plot unfolds in a storybook fashion. With the quick 90 minute runtime we don't have a lot of opportunity to digest the dramatic developments; we cling to them as they whisk us from one scene to another. We see a fairy tale romance unfold from the opposing perspective. David is thrust into this world and finds himself held up as a young damsel's saviour without really understanding what he is in for, and he seems oddly amenable to the idea. As the flaws in the fairy tale image begin to show, we want to caution David away, but he is too wrapped up by that point to make an escape.
Elizabeth Nepjuk commands the stage as Natasha. I can see some of Puck in her, because she is a trickster character in her own way, albeit here her sly nature is tangled up with a truly tragic past. She provides the emotional centre of the play and some of its most spirited action. She has to ride the line of comedy and tragedy and seamlessly slips from one to the other. Every moment is filled with energy, and she keeps the action moving while playing off of Beaudry's comparatively subdued David.
Blaine Hart and Pamela Haig Bartley both take on scene-stealing roles as the scheming locals Yuri and Katrina. Hart brings a lot of weight to his role and really delivers on the dark humour. He's great with the comic antics, but also slows for sombre moments. Haig Bartley is a bit more over-the-top, embodying her off-centre character with clumsy grace. Her comedic timing is impeccable, and she truly sinks in to Katrina's mismatched socks. I'm reminded of the question she often poses to her acting students: "to what end?" That piece of advice shows, as all of her choices are really followed through. Then Darren Zimmer shows up late in the show, countering the zanier characters with a drier sort of humour, in his personality-deprived government official.
Josh Beaudry is often remembered for his colourful supporting characters, so it was a departure for me to see him in a low-key leading role. He succeeds at playing a very genuine character, and manages to add some small nuance to the general state of bewilderment that David always finds himself in. Then his final eruption right near the end is fun to watch.
My Chernobyl is kind of directionless, and I mean that as both a compliment and a criticism. As a criticism, I mean that sections of this play that are entertaining on their own are strung together in a way that doesn't achieve much. Hart and Haig Bartley have a couple dialogues at different points in the play, largely divorced from the main action. The scenes are very funny and the actors showcase great chemistry, but ultimately gives off the sense of "meanwhile in a different play". And a lot of David's trajectory is disjointed. His actual personality is hard to pinpoint. As a compliment, I mean that there is an overall tone of directionlessness that ties the plot together. We have entered a hopeless world where David appears as this possible saviour, but people have been without hope for so long they don't know how to react.
At its core, this is a very dark play for everyone involved. We see David being taken advantage of right at the beginning, but it's hard to get upset when we see the dreadful existence of the locals. They have been left behind to die by the rest of the world, and David will never know their suffering. But it's also frustrating to see them charging blindly forward in pursuit of money without considering what they will do with it. Katrina keeps talking about buying a new truck, but no amount of money she swindles appears to get her any closer to buying. Yuri articulates the problem clearly: "I always want more money. It's in my nature." They are the refuse of capitalist society, driven to desire money but far away from a place where it will do them any good.
Before I started writing this review, I spoke about the play with my good friend Torien Cafferata, and he first put me on to the idea of a Russian fairytale. The more I think about that idea, the more it seems to tie the threads of this play together. The problem with reading Grimm fairy tales in their close-to-original form is that they are so incredibly frustrating. The main characters are typically stupid and bereft of personality, stumbling their way through events to some heroic or gruesome end; the stories take weird, inexplicable twists and have sometimes incomprehensible endings that reflect back on the values of a culture totally alien to us. Taking that perspective, the disjointed nature of this play makes more sense. David is a minimalist protagonist, who begins the play on a quest to carry out the wishes of his father against all human rationality (as fairy tale characters do) and he is swept from one scene to another, tacitly accepting his circumstance, until he finds his princess. Then the fairy tale begins to unravel (it has a meltdown, if you will allow me to be crass), that veneer, for whatever it was worth, is lifted, and we find ourselves staring into the heart of the troubled culture that created the tale in the first place.
My Chernobyl has a lot of things going for it, with the talented cast and heavy themes. But it suffers from not entirely knowing what it's doing. There were ideas and commentaries in the script that could have been punched further, and character arcs that needed to be cleaned up. The direction could have darkened the comedy by a couple shades to make the grim ending less of a hairpin turn. Still, it's an entertaining, emotional ride that makes good viewing for a dreary evening.
My Chernobyl is a recent Canadian play which came out of Victoria five short years ago. It offers to provide a Canadian perspective on the nuclear disaster (sort of). Our main character is David, a nice guy Canadian who has been charged with delivering his own inheritance to a cousin in Belarus. And he's doing it, presumably because he's so nice. Soon, his nice nature gets him taken advantage of by a pair of scheming locals, and wrapped up with his old relation's comely daughter, who sees wedding bells when the rich Canadian comes knocking.
It is a peculiar play. On one hand it is a tragedy of a country in shambles with its people forgotten (and the value they place on American culture is somewhat amusing given recent events). On the other hand it is a rollicking semi-Vaudevillian comedy with a little bit of fairy tale mixed in. Our setting is the edge of the "exclusion zone" - the 30km radius around Chernobyl deemed uninhabitable. People in this area are prone to cancer but unfortunately lacking in super powers. It's as hardscrabble a life as you can imagine. So when we watch the scheming supporting characters manoeuvre for more of David's money, we do so with the knowledge that they are clawing through the dirt for survival; a classic stock crook is underscored with a real sense of tragedy. All set to a soundscape of Bryan Adams music.
Despite its basis in a real-world disaster (even more immediate now with the recent disaster in Japan), My Chernobyl maintains a whimsical feel. Scene transitions are accompanied by folk dancing interludes, where U of S acting alumna Alex Hartshorn puts her authentic Ukrainian dance skills to work keeping the stage vibrant with some beautiful choreography. When there is no dancing, we get these cartoonish scenes of "potato bandits" sneaking around the countryside. These transitions make the whole set feel alive, shifting from one place to another. And the way the actors themselves are involved in the set movement creates a cohesive feeling, like the flora and fauna of the play are all bound together in one large choreography.
The plot unfolds in a storybook fashion. With the quick 90 minute runtime we don't have a lot of opportunity to digest the dramatic developments; we cling to them as they whisk us from one scene to another. We see a fairy tale romance unfold from the opposing perspective. David is thrust into this world and finds himself held up as a young damsel's saviour without really understanding what he is in for, and he seems oddly amenable to the idea. As the flaws in the fairy tale image begin to show, we want to caution David away, but he is too wrapped up by that point to make an escape.
Elizabeth Nepjuk commands the stage as Natasha. I can see some of Puck in her, because she is a trickster character in her own way, albeit here her sly nature is tangled up with a truly tragic past. She provides the emotional centre of the play and some of its most spirited action. She has to ride the line of comedy and tragedy and seamlessly slips from one to the other. Every moment is filled with energy, and she keeps the action moving while playing off of Beaudry's comparatively subdued David.
Blaine Hart and Pamela Haig Bartley both take on scene-stealing roles as the scheming locals Yuri and Katrina. Hart brings a lot of weight to his role and really delivers on the dark humour. He's great with the comic antics, but also slows for sombre moments. Haig Bartley is a bit more over-the-top, embodying her off-centre character with clumsy grace. Her comedic timing is impeccable, and she truly sinks in to Katrina's mismatched socks. I'm reminded of the question she often poses to her acting students: "to what end?" That piece of advice shows, as all of her choices are really followed through. Then Darren Zimmer shows up late in the show, countering the zanier characters with a drier sort of humour, in his personality-deprived government official.
Josh Beaudry is often remembered for his colourful supporting characters, so it was a departure for me to see him in a low-key leading role. He succeeds at playing a very genuine character, and manages to add some small nuance to the general state of bewilderment that David always finds himself in. Then his final eruption right near the end is fun to watch.
My Chernobyl is kind of directionless, and I mean that as both a compliment and a criticism. As a criticism, I mean that sections of this play that are entertaining on their own are strung together in a way that doesn't achieve much. Hart and Haig Bartley have a couple dialogues at different points in the play, largely divorced from the main action. The scenes are very funny and the actors showcase great chemistry, but ultimately gives off the sense of "meanwhile in a different play". And a lot of David's trajectory is disjointed. His actual personality is hard to pinpoint. As a compliment, I mean that there is an overall tone of directionlessness that ties the plot together. We have entered a hopeless world where David appears as this possible saviour, but people have been without hope for so long they don't know how to react.
At its core, this is a very dark play for everyone involved. We see David being taken advantage of right at the beginning, but it's hard to get upset when we see the dreadful existence of the locals. They have been left behind to die by the rest of the world, and David will never know their suffering. But it's also frustrating to see them charging blindly forward in pursuit of money without considering what they will do with it. Katrina keeps talking about buying a new truck, but no amount of money she swindles appears to get her any closer to buying. Yuri articulates the problem clearly: "I always want more money. It's in my nature." They are the refuse of capitalist society, driven to desire money but far away from a place where it will do them any good.
Before I started writing this review, I spoke about the play with my good friend Torien Cafferata, and he first put me on to the idea of a Russian fairytale. The more I think about that idea, the more it seems to tie the threads of this play together. The problem with reading Grimm fairy tales in their close-to-original form is that they are so incredibly frustrating. The main characters are typically stupid and bereft of personality, stumbling their way through events to some heroic or gruesome end; the stories take weird, inexplicable twists and have sometimes incomprehensible endings that reflect back on the values of a culture totally alien to us. Taking that perspective, the disjointed nature of this play makes more sense. David is a minimalist protagonist, who begins the play on a quest to carry out the wishes of his father against all human rationality (as fairy tale characters do) and he is swept from one scene to another, tacitly accepting his circumstance, until he finds his princess. Then the fairy tale begins to unravel (it has a meltdown, if you will allow me to be crass), that veneer, for whatever it was worth, is lifted, and we find ourselves staring into the heart of the troubled culture that created the tale in the first place.
My Chernobyl has a lot of things going for it, with the talented cast and heavy themes. But it suffers from not entirely knowing what it's doing. There were ideas and commentaries in the script that could have been punched further, and character arcs that needed to be cleaned up. The direction could have darkened the comedy by a couple shades to make the grim ending less of a hairpin turn. Still, it's an entertaining, emotional ride that makes good viewing for a dreary evening.
Friday 4 October 2013
Remembering Max
Tonight was going to be the launch of my new "season" of the Prairie Groundling, as it were, with my review of My Chernobyl. That will still be forthcoming shortly, but I ended up taking some time to go see the No Nos perform. It was a special occasion.
If any of you aren't aware, the No Nos are an improv troupe who have kicked around Saskatoon for several years now. I first discovered them in my second year of university, about five years ago, when they were still performing in the Off-Broadway. I was an instant fan. The whole thing was like Whose Line is it Anyway on cocaine. The cast was filled with so many talented and hilarious people, it was like learning to laugh again. Since those early nights the No Nos have bounced around quite a bit, from venue to venue like they're out of some folk tale. Every time I've come back to see a show, wherever they happen to be, I would always see Max Bembridge keeping the ship afloat.
Tonight was meant to be the opening of their new season. But to my shock, on Tuesday there came an announcement that Max had died, and that this show would be a special memorial to him.
I never knew Max, personally. But through what I saw of him through the No Nos, and the occasions I saw him outside, I came to an understanding of the sort of person he was. He was endlessly enthusiastic, charismatic, and funny. He always thanked me for coming out to the show, and he seemed to remember me, even though I could spend months between attending performances. I always saw him running like a workhorse behind the scenes to get everything ready, right up until the minute the show started, and then he would burst out onstage, brimming with energy. I know the word "vivacious" is mainly applied to aging female celebrities, but all it really means is full of life, and I think we can agree that Max was vivacious.
I wasn't sure what to expect from tonight's show; I don't think anyone was. In part, it was a regular show, with the familiar improv games, and despite the mood all the performers came out swinging. But in between sketches, members of the cast took the stage to share their own memories of Max. Heartwrenching, heartwarming, and also really funny. There were plenty of tears shed, both by the cast and by the audience members packed into the makeshift auditorium at Le Relais (a fire code or two may have been broken). The show was not an elegy. As emotional as it was, I wouldn't call it sad. Above all it was a celebration of Max's life and this group and would not and could not exist if it hadn't been for him. And I suppose there was no better send-off for Max than raucous laughter from all the people who loved and admired him.
This is not how I had imagined starting off a new season of this blog. But here we are. I've had to think about what we're really doing here, about Saskatoon theatre. The term "theatre community" gets tossed around a lot, by me and by others. Tonight really gave me a clearer understanding of what that idea actually means. We are a community, all of us connected. Seeing the crowd come out for Max it made me think about how each member of this community has such a profound effect on everyone else, even outside of what they do in the actual theatre. We're a family, and working in our own backyard like this brings us all close together: closer than we realise until we lose someone. Even those of us who didn't know Max feel like we know him, in a small way, at least.
Honestly, I didn't know why I started this blog. The past year I've been testing the enthusiasm of other people about it, and my own dedication in keeping it running. So far the former has outstripped the latter. But that's going to change. Because looking at recent events I finally understand what I'm doing here. I'm not a reviewer; I'm a historian. This whole theatre community is such a fantastic beast, filled with comedy and tragedy, and I'm watching over it. I don't know if that's necessary, but for the moment it's where I belong.
Now, before I say goodbye to you all for now, and before I say goodbye to Max forever, I'll share my favourite No Nos scene right here.
Max and Derek in "Hobo Feeder"
So long, Max. I'm happy for almost knowing you.
If any of you aren't aware, the No Nos are an improv troupe who have kicked around Saskatoon for several years now. I first discovered them in my second year of university, about five years ago, when they were still performing in the Off-Broadway. I was an instant fan. The whole thing was like Whose Line is it Anyway on cocaine. The cast was filled with so many talented and hilarious people, it was like learning to laugh again. Since those early nights the No Nos have bounced around quite a bit, from venue to venue like they're out of some folk tale. Every time I've come back to see a show, wherever they happen to be, I would always see Max Bembridge keeping the ship afloat.
Tonight was meant to be the opening of their new season. But to my shock, on Tuesday there came an announcement that Max had died, and that this show would be a special memorial to him.
I never knew Max, personally. But through what I saw of him through the No Nos, and the occasions I saw him outside, I came to an understanding of the sort of person he was. He was endlessly enthusiastic, charismatic, and funny. He always thanked me for coming out to the show, and he seemed to remember me, even though I could spend months between attending performances. I always saw him running like a workhorse behind the scenes to get everything ready, right up until the minute the show started, and then he would burst out onstage, brimming with energy. I know the word "vivacious" is mainly applied to aging female celebrities, but all it really means is full of life, and I think we can agree that Max was vivacious.
I wasn't sure what to expect from tonight's show; I don't think anyone was. In part, it was a regular show, with the familiar improv games, and despite the mood all the performers came out swinging. But in between sketches, members of the cast took the stage to share their own memories of Max. Heartwrenching, heartwarming, and also really funny. There were plenty of tears shed, both by the cast and by the audience members packed into the makeshift auditorium at Le Relais (a fire code or two may have been broken). The show was not an elegy. As emotional as it was, I wouldn't call it sad. Above all it was a celebration of Max's life and this group and would not and could not exist if it hadn't been for him. And I suppose there was no better send-off for Max than raucous laughter from all the people who loved and admired him.
This is not how I had imagined starting off a new season of this blog. But here we are. I've had to think about what we're really doing here, about Saskatoon theatre. The term "theatre community" gets tossed around a lot, by me and by others. Tonight really gave me a clearer understanding of what that idea actually means. We are a community, all of us connected. Seeing the crowd come out for Max it made me think about how each member of this community has such a profound effect on everyone else, even outside of what they do in the actual theatre. We're a family, and working in our own backyard like this brings us all close together: closer than we realise until we lose someone. Even those of us who didn't know Max feel like we know him, in a small way, at least.
Honestly, I didn't know why I started this blog. The past year I've been testing the enthusiasm of other people about it, and my own dedication in keeping it running. So far the former has outstripped the latter. But that's going to change. Because looking at recent events I finally understand what I'm doing here. I'm not a reviewer; I'm a historian. This whole theatre community is such a fantastic beast, filled with comedy and tragedy, and I'm watching over it. I don't know if that's necessary, but for the moment it's where I belong.
Now, before I say goodbye to you all for now, and before I say goodbye to Max forever, I'll share my favourite No Nos scene right here.
Max and Derek in "Hobo Feeder"
So long, Max. I'm happy for almost knowing you.
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