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The Seafarer, at Alberta Theatre Projects

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Show poster for The Seafarer at ATP, featuring Paul Gross

Full disclosure: I went to Calgary to watch ATP’s production of Conor McPherson’s play The Seafarer, just because Paul Gross is in it. I had never seen Paul Gross on stage, despite his Albertan roots and his strong reputation in Shakespearean material at Stratford. I have watched the TV comedy Slings and Arrows several times through – and if you haven’t and you like theatre, you should! as well as other video performances. He was an integral part of the film production Passchendaele, along with his U of A classmate Francis Damberger.

Anyway, the weather was good and the mezzanine seats were reasonably priced, so a friend and I headed to Calgary. I knew that Conor McPherson was an Irish playwright who wrote The Weir (which I’d never seen or read), and I figured out later that he’d also written Port Authority, which I’d seen in a local production with Cody Porter in it. I didn’t read anything else about the story or the other actors.

Given all that, I was blown away. Directed by Peter Pasyk, it was the best production of a straight play I’ve seen in ages. The ensemble of five was all very strong, especially Shaun Smyth (whom I remembered from the solo Playing with Fire: the Theo Fleury story). Four residents of a near-contemporary Irish suburban town are heading towards Christmas. The set is the cozy, cluttered, and dingy basement living-room of two sloppy and foul-mouthed brothers, Richard (Christopher Hunt), recently blinded in a dumpster-diving accident, and Sharkey (Smyth), who’s arrived back home after finishing a chauffeuring job up the coast. Their Christmas preparations are mostly about laying in enough drink for everyone who might drop in for a mince pie or a game of cards – even though Sharkey is counting his first few days of sobriety. Two neighbours are frequent guests: Ivan (David Trimble) who has the audience gasping every time he tumbles down or scurries up the stairs, and Nicky (Chirag Naik), who now lives with Sharkey’s ex-wife, Sharkey’s kids, and even Sharkey’s car, which he left with Eileen for the school run.

I felt completely caught up in the group’s misadventures and disagreements, even before Nicky brings in a mysterious stranger, Mister Lockhart (Paul Gross), well-dressed and quiet, with a large hat brim hiding his face. Nicky (who’s not entirely welcome to Sharkey himself) says that he met Mr. Lockhart in a pub, and brought him along for the Christmas Eve card games. It’s awkward.

In the intermission break, my companion and I discussed what had been revealed so far and whether we’d seen it coming. My friend had more insight than I had, but we both enjoyed trying to figure out whether and how these hapless characters would get out of their predicaments. Neither of us guessed the ending, and both of us felt satisfied with it. We had lots to talk about on the way home!

The Martha Cohen Theatre with its mezzanines and balconies and tiny multi-level lobby spaces was a great opportunity for this intimate character study. Set designer Hanne Loosen has created a cozy two-story set that feels like it continues off the stage into the cold back alley, the tiny kitchen, and the barely-functional downstairs toilet.

I still love Edmonton theatre, where I watch so many good plays I have trouble keeping up with posting – but this visit reminded me to keep Calgary and ATP on my radar too. The Seafarer has three more performances, the last tomorrow Nov 10th at 2 pm. If you’re in Calgary, or you’re up for a drive, some tickets are available here.

Studio Theatre season ends with When the Rain Stops Falling

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The last play in the six-show season at U of A Studio Theatre was the MFA directing thesis project for Megan Watson, just as the first show last fall was directed by MFA candidate Nancy McAlear.  When the Rain Stops Falling was written by Andrew Bovell, and first produced in Australia in 2008.

There was a program insert with a family tree.  A quick study of the family tree and the cast of characters showed that it wasn’t going to be obvious who was who, with two women being portrayed by two performers each, with other performers playing more than one character, and with two characters named Gabriel (played by David Ley and by Tim Welham) and one named Gabrielle (played by both Sandra Nicholls and Bobbi Goddard).   Other performers included Christopher Hunt of Calgary, Nancy McAlear, and Kathleen Weiss.

The story started with a long monologue by performer David Ley (a faculty member in the Department of Drama, like Sandra Nicholls and Kathleen Weiss.  He seemed to be a solitary and self-justifying man, anxious about a reunion with his son.  The time seemed to be some unspecified future and the setting seemed somewhat dystopic and somewhat magic-realist, with a fish falling from the sky and a comment that nobody gets to eat fish from the sea any more.   Another clue was that the character, whose name turns out to be Gabriel York, had a subtle Australian accent.

I like plays with non-linear narrative, where I get to figure out gradually who everyone is and how they connect with each other.  I also like plays where people are coping with the aftermath of something sad or awful, and we gradually find out about that without having to see it directly.  This play hit both those buttons for me, as well as the one where I get to feel smart as an audience member when I figure something out for myself shortly before it’s explicitly revealed.

The story was told in many short scenes, with much repetition of dialogue and stage business.  The action moved smoothly as characters for the next scene usually took their places on stage silently before the previous scene had finished, adding to the sense of overlapping and repetition.  The sets/props were minimal and didn’t give much information about era or location – a long dining table moved about the stage, chairs, coat-hooks, a soup kettle and soup plates, a pile of diapers, driftwood and a big windowframe, behind which were projected various images of weather, seaside, and Uluru (Ayers Rock).

After the various disjointed scenes of abandonment and secrecy through generations, the final scene provides some satisfaction as the old man of the opening scene, David Ley as Gabriel York, gives his son Andrew (Tim Welham) a suitcase full of family mementos.  Each artifact is handed around the long table by the silent witnesses of the cast, and by this point the audience knows enough to place each of them even when the characters don’t.  My companion admired the complexity of the story and the closure in the storytelling.

I was particularly touched by Sandra M Nicholls’ portrayal of an aging woman aware that she is losing her memory, and impressed by the way David Ley distinguished between the two characters he played.  I was also impressed by watching Bobbi Goddard’s fairly straightforward portrayal of a young woman seeking to move past her unhappy family background, since last night I saw her play Lady Macbeth in the Theatre Prospero production at the Thousand Faces festival.

When the Rain Stops Falling is playing until May 24th.  Next year’s Studio Theatre season starts with Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour in mid-September.

When That I Was

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The Shadow Theatre production of When That I Was played earlier this month at the Varscona Theatre.    I hadn’t been paying much attention to the various temptations of local theatre websites lately, so the first I heard of this one was on a LivingSocial discount ad.  But it sounded interesting, so I bought a ticket with the LivingSocial voucher.

Like The Kite Runner, the program for When That I Was had lots to read ahead of time, with a page-long glossary of terms and definitions and a couple of pages of historical timeline.  If you’re a Shakespeare fan, you might have recognised the title more readily than I did – it’s the first line from the song in Twelfth Night, “When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain”.

When That I Was was is a one man show (Christopher Hunt) about a character who has spent his life as an actor in Shakespeare’s company.  It was written by John Mortimer and Edward Atienza, around 1981.  It’s the same John Mortimer who wrote Rumpole of the Bailey. The show is mostly the character telling stories about Shakespeare, and acting bits of them out.  He’s speaking from a perspective of being old and impoverished, hiding from the Puritans who had closed all the theatres, but when he’s telling a story from his youth his whole bearing and voice change so you can see him as a small boy, an ambitious young actor playing women’s roles, or an older man recounting events later in his life and in Shakespeare’s life.

As far as I know, the stories in the play are consistent with known canon.   So the part about Hamnet was sad but not a surprise.  I thought the treatment of Shakespeare’s relationship with  Henry, the Earl of Southampton, was particularly deft, with the narrator explaining that he didn’t know for sure whether or not their love had been expressed physically but that he thought so himself.   That left it open for the audience members to accept the possibility they preferred, and not to feel distracted by a story that didn’t fit the canon or their own previous ideas.

The narrator’s costume comprised various layers of ragged beige and brown garments, as well as hose which were in noticeably better shape.  A more realistic creation might have included holes in the heels that were big enough to be visible above his slippers.  He also must have had really impressive poacher’s pockets, since he kept pulling things out of a flimsy-looking worn jacket without ever losing anything or clinking anything.  At one point I decided that the whole set was like a sort of Chekov’s mantelpiece, since it appeared to just be a mood-creating frame of dusty grey and beige abandoned space with the occasional red cloth, but I think that the character picked up and used almost every property during the play, mostly things that I hadn’t even noticed before he touched them.

The run of When That I Was is now over.  The next Shadow Theatre production at the Varscona is Flight of the Viscount, a David Belke comedy which starts May 1st.