Doubt is good -not just the play, but the concept. But the play proves the concept, and vice-versa. Doubt matters. It’s important. Some would say it’s vital.
The play is currently being presented by the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto. My video interview, in which I chat with director Marti Maraden and star Seana McKenna, is now up.
I’ve been thinking a lot about communication lately -the ways we use it (or don’t use it) and the importance it has to some of us, particularly those in the arts. Communication is what every artist attempts through a chosen medium. Whether it’s dance, film, music, writing or acting, every creative act is an attempt to communicate something to someone else. Within that chosen form of communication is a myriad of ideas and influences, not all of them original -some are sifted through the rough grains of hard-won experience, others are left unfiltered for consideration and conversation. When it comes to presenting a work of art, who can really say what is wholly original?
The question becomes all the more cloudy in the world of words, where research and source material often become intimately intertwined with the writer’s own opinions, approach, and sometimes, life work. History is fraught with examples of works that, while considered utter genius, are suspect in their originality at least, and acts of plagiarism at worst. Think of playwrights like Shakespeare, whose works were frequently based on other (popular) tales floating around, or the Bible, a collection of tales written and re-written through the centuries to suit the age and ruling classes.
Anton Piatigorsky tackles the huge questions swirling around authorship, originality, voice and its relationship to identity, and what makes art … well, art, in his play Eternal Hydra, now on in Toronto at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. This Crow’s Theatre production brings together the same acting/directing team from last spring, when the work was workshopped before an audience for a week. Originally starting out life as a one-act play at Stratford’s Studio Theatre, the work has been greatly expanded and explores larger notions of historical detail, authenticity, and what it means to really “create.” He uses the image of the mythical hydra -the scary monster Hercules fought with the multiple heads -as a metaphor for the writing process itself. Just when characters -and audience, in fact -think they’ve figured out what links writer Gordias Carbuncle’s work to past sources, another connection presents itself that renders theories incomplete. Throw in notions around race, gender, and religion, and you have one hell of a heady night of theatre.
That doesn’t mean Eternal Hydra is cold, however. It’s heady, but it’s also full of heart. Cast members Karen Robinson, Liisa Repo-Martell, Sam Malkin, and David Ferry, as the self-hating maybe-genius Gordias, all give fully-fleshed out performances that make you feel something beyond intellectual wonder. Piatigorsky’s piece is Stoppard-esque, no question, but it’s also fascinating for its mix of the epic and the intimate; the scenes between Robinson, as impoverished black writer Selma Thomas, or Repo-Martell, as the smitten researcher Vivian Ezra, and Ferry’s Carbuncle, are moving, enlightening, disturbing and challenging. Throw in some evocative lighting, where characters frequently move in and out of shadow, as well as multiple plotlines, where characters fall through time, and frequently blur lines between eras and realities, and Piatigorsky’s work is suddenly about a whole lot more than historical appropriation. It’s about life, art, and yes, communication -how we do it, and more importantly, why we do it.
Artists get communication: we’re just not sure if what we’ve produced is actually ours at the end of the day, or simply another screaming head. I mean really, there’s so many of those around already, competing for our attention, demanding time, energy resources, or sometimes, just perhaps, whispering something incredible.
Yesterday I was out all day doing video shoots for upcoming theatrical productions in Toronto. One of the interviews revolved around a soon-to-open Soulpepper production of Joe Orton’s satirical play Loot.
What I’ve always found so interesting about Orton is the way his work has aged since he wrote it; some of his lines are still as stinging and nasty as ever, while other stuff -dialogue, ideas, concepts -really aren’t so shocking in the twenty-first century. In a contemporary sense, Orton’s play, which features two burglars who try to hide a corpse (among other farcical elements), doesn’t seem all that surprising or shocking. Indignities to a human body? Whatever. Some might be outraged, but it doesn’t last. Go to any number of weird news sites; they’re not hard to find. Some of the stories might be kind of icky (for instance, anything involving corpses tends to provoke a sour face) but the ease with which to find such oddities has made our collective sense of outrage over such a thing much less pronounced.
Still, there is something to director Jim Warren‘s comment that Orton was “an anarchist” -and it wasn’t just the fact Orton and partner Kenneth Halliwell had a predilection for defacing library books. Orton may have been writing in an England that was brutally classist and deeply homophobic, but in this age of smugness about our perceived permissiveness and laissez-faire-anything-goes attitudes, there’s a real smack of hypocrisy and meanness. Carry Orton’s ideas through on sexuality, and apply them to, say, older people (“Grandparents have sex lives? Eww! Disgusting! Gross!“), and you still find the same boring close-mindedness as existed in 1960s England. Viewed this way, Orton is more fresh, daring, and possibly anarchist than ever.
There’s something really, really cool about Madonna unabashedly dancing with herself, telling her man (in her head, through her hips), “Seriously dude, this isn’t on.” It has resonance for me, and I would imagine, for many women.
And I think Michelle Obama is absolutely correct. I hope we get a Canadian politician in power making the same statement soon.
“That is my very favourite Canadian play.”
These words were spoken by a friend Friday night as we came out of I, Claudia, Kristen Thomson‘s one-woman tour-de-force, now on at the Young Centre in Toronto.
The work is a mix of mask, mime, comedy, tragedy, and Thomson’s biography. It concerns the experience of one Claudia, who is, she tells us, “twelve-and-three-quarters” and struggling with her parents’ divorce. She hides in her school’s basement, where she makes up a fantastical world of her own devising, sharing her worries, torments, and passing thoughts with us (not to mention her ill-fated science project). Thomson plays Claudia with a big-cheeked mask, red beret, and uniform kilt; her body language is awkward and gawky, but she imbues Claudia with a bright, shining light of hope and playfulness. Thomson also takes on the roles of the school’s “Bolgonian” caretaker, Claudia’s paternal grandfather, and Tina, Claudia’s new stepmom. Each is given their own unique masque -the grandfather’s, long and wizened, the stepmom’s tight and over-make-up’d. Again, Thomson fully inhabits each of the characters physically, giving each their own unique life.
Developed with Chris Abraham of the lauded Crow’s Theatre and first performed in 2001, the work is breathtaking in its emotional scope and creative presentation. With a small gesture -a turn of the head, a shrug of the shoulder -Thomson suggests a world of hurt, loss, and yes, hope within the lives of the characters she portrays. We’re never in doubt about the fact that Thomson is taking us on a purposely-theatrical journey, changing between scenes and bopping to musical interludes, showing the funny, strange, sad lives of a diverse group of people and the common threads of humanity that bind them. The intimate, twisted relationships between children and parents are deftly, delicately explored, with great care and grace. You get the feeling when Thomson’s janitor refers to a son who lives in the United States, then quickly adds, “we won’t talk about that…” that there’s a mountain of hurt there that doesn’t require explanation.
Since the work is based on real events in Thomson’s past, I was curious to see how Claudia might represent her own hurt little girl within; it’s a personal theme I found myself relating to, on several deep levels, more than once through the evening. As a child of divorce myself, the feelings of abandonment, rage, loss, and confusion were easily recognizable. To publicly share one’s hurt over such events is incredible; to translate that into a piece of theatre, and in so doing, allow for a possible healing, is miraculous.
I, Claudia might just be my own favourite Canadian work too.
Last week I had the distinct and awesome privilege of seeing Simon Boccanegra onstage at the beautiful Four Seasons Centre. The last few years, I’ve developed a wholly new appreciation for an artform that I wasn’t entirely sure I liked, even though it was thoroughly entrenched in my upbringing from childhood. Hmm, maybe it’s a sign of maturity, or the fact I cover arts and culture for a living, or the fact that I’ve worked in theatre, and know how much time, effort, and skill goes into a production. And maybe it also has to do with the fact that I simply adore the work of the COC. Classy, musical, and deeply thought-full -just some of the ways I’d describe past performances (make that experiences) -and Verdi’s Simon is no exception.
In a nutshell, the story can be reduced to a very simple equation: politics = family, and family is always political. Duh. Seems like that’s the case with much of Italian opera. I’m still on the fence about it all, really; the entirely-gorgeous, crazily-romantic music has a way of drawing me in its spell, even if librettos are frequently ridiculous and maudlin. I mean, come on, throwing babies into fires? Magical love potions? Bitchy Ital-oriental women? That’s not the composers’ fault -obviously -and I realize grand opera, like romantic fiction, was the escapism of its day (and it’s not like Wagner ever attempted realism -or social commentary -either). I tend, like many I suppose, to sit back and enjoy the marriage of music and mise-en-scene, and let the rest go.
But Rigoletto, easily one of the most famous operas ever written (as well as being my own mother’s personal favourite) has always, always grated on me. Yes, the music is breathtaking. But the story… leaves me cold. The idea of Gilda, the title character’s naive, shuttered daughter, being so naive, weak, and idiotic, and so willingly controlled by men… ugh. I know, sign of its time, victim-mindset, etcetcetc. Whenever it comes to shut-in daughters -and indeed, whenever I see or hear Rigoletto on radio or television -I always think of Shylock’s Jessica, who, like Gilda, escapes her father’s stern rules to go out and play.
But unlike Gilda, Jessica knowingly defies her father -for love, but also, we suspect, out of revenge. Shakespeare has it right: young women, especially those who feel their their freedom has been denied (or has, in fact, had it denied) by family or authority figures, are going to go out and find it themselves, in the most rebellious, dangerous, and irresponsible of fashions. So it makes sense that Gilda would take off with her nocturnal madrigal; the fact she’d be actually surprised -and then protest -at her kidnapping, however, is hilarious. The fact she’d be all good-girl over it, and protest his advances -when she probably had the hots for him all along -is beyond the pale. And then later telling daddy all about being … uh, raped? N-O.
Maybe it’s my modern sensibility. But even as a kid, never, for a second, did I ever buy it. The fact she’s pining for the miscreant Duke later on, while perhaps characteristic of a woman who’s been abused by her partner, remains, to my mind, woeful -and sexist. The Duke was never her partner -he was just that guy in the street she sadly trusted. The fact remains that neither she, nor her seemingly-heroic-meets-inept father see the truth of the sickly-karmic world they’ve created; Cordelia she is not. And why does that Duke wind up getting the best tunes, if he’s such a dickhead?
Simon Boccanegra presents another kind of daughter: one who, though committed to her father, nonetheless stands up for her own choices. Okay, so she says she’d die for her man before she’d let her father harm him -*cue eyeroll* -but the fact she’s essentially telling him, “Look, I love this person, and I really don’t care what you think, or whether you like him or not” -is brave, and it was refreshing to see. The fact that, unlike Rigoletto, the daughter in Simon doesn’t actually know her father until she’s an adult does, of course, make a difference in their interaction -it changes the mindset of the character -but unlike Gilda, Amelia never comes off as a victim, despite having been denied knowing her father, and only meeting him later in life.
That sort of reunion holds personal resonance for me. The scene between Amelia and Simon, as they stare at one another for the first time, comprehending everything, was, in the COC production I saw, handled beautifully, with just the right amount of delicacy and drama. Unsure whether to hug, stare, or be with their own thoughts, the pair just gaze in wonder and awe. I know what that feels like. Sometimes opera isn’t so fantastical after all -sometimes, it’s just life, with a beautiful soundtrack.
This seems very appropriate for Earth Day:
I attended the opening of the new Rick Miller show Hardsell Thursday night. Still not sure what to make of it, really -there are a lot of ideas around selling and advertising, and what that means to not just the wider society that created the selling culture, but to culture as well. Aren’t performers -of any ilk -essentially trying to “sell” you something, tangible and otherwise? I’ll be interviewing Rick Miller next week (Friday morning, in fact), so maybe I’ll get some answers, or at least ideas, about how the show came to be.
Hardsell is another collaboration between Miller and Daniel Brooks. The pair previously worked together on the alt mega-hit Bigger Than Jesus (which a former editor of mine called “a ninety minute religious rant with TVs” -he also added that he liked it, natch). Like “Jesus” and Roberts’ other hit, Machomer, Hardsell mixes improv, Pirandello-esque meta-theatre, sharp observations, role-playing, nods at past conventions, and Miller’s own awesome gift of mimicry. In the show, he accurately imitates (vocally) a wide range of folks, including Morgan Freeman, James Brown, and Richard Dawkins, as well as perform a clever riff as a German marketing expert.
Mainly, though, he plays Arnie, the supposed mirror-twin of Miller himself, a bitter, washed-up entertainer tossing out proclamations, observations, cynicisms, witticisms, fantasies and hard-to-soft pitches. With his clown-like makeup and slick white suite with shocking-red satin lining, Miller gave a nod to the many mimes, clowns, and stylized performers within the cultural spectrum –Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, the Joker, Kabuki performer, Mexican wrestler, Godot’s tramps, and even… Tom Wolfe.
And yet, this is the main reference that came to my mind:
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