Tag Archives: shakespeare-derived

Rough Magic

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A little over ten years ago, on February 5th 2006, when I was living in Kingston Ontario, I wrote these notes about a play I’d just seen.   I didn’t record the names of the actors or the director, but I wrote about it because the themes of creativity and aging were speaking to me in my own life.

 

In the evening, I bundled up in the cold wind and light snow pellets, heading out to the bank machine 7 blocks away and back towards the newly-renovated performance space which is only 3.5 blocks from home to see the play Rough Magic, by John Lazarus, a local drama professor and playwright. The space, formerly a big Masonic Hall which looks like an old Presbyterian church, is simple and functional, with about 80 movable chairs, a simple thrust stage, good acoustics, and appealing lighting. There were only 4 of us in the audience, on a cold Sunday night while the Superbowl of American football was on television.

I loved the play, and I also loved the intimacy of being so close to it. The play concerned two actors in a movie version of The Tempest being filmed in the Caribbean in the 1950s, and also included the romantic partner of each actor. One actor was older, English, gay, and a classical Shakespearean stage actor (inspired by Sir John Gielgud), and the other was young, American, nominally straight, and a “method” actor. He was inspired by Marlon Brando. The older actors were professionals, and the younger two were undergraduates. It was funny, and in parts very sexy, and it had interesting things to say about acting and relationships and movies and Shakespeare, as well as the problems of being queer in the 1950s. The older actor starts out struggling to make dramatic sense of Prospero’s speech about abjuring his powers and breaking his staff, but as the play progresses he considers the potential benefits of retiring while still successful, and ends up being in sympathy with Prospero. Meanwhile, we learned that his partner had left a career as a set designer partly because of a drinking problem and partly to follow the actor, but now wants to pursue his creative talents again. All of these were familiar themes to me.

I have a thing about not making standing ovations routine, so I didn’t stand, but the lights were up and I didn’t hide that I was wiping my eyes. On the way out, I realized that one of my three fellow theatre-goers was the playwright. I wondered how it must feel to be watching one’s work come to life and watching some people appreciate it. I marvelled at how hard it must be to tell a whole story just through dialogue and action and to let other people do the telling. Then I remembered the teenage campers at our camp in 2004, roaring with laughter at the skit I wrote for the staff to perform on the last night, and in a small way, I understood.

Queen Lear – a play about a play

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Part of the handful of theatre ticket vouchers that I acquired in the Rapid Fire Theatre Date Night auction in January was a pair of tickets to see Eugene Strickland’s Queen Lear, a Shadow Theatre production at the Varscona Theatre.  John Hudson directed, and the cast included Alison Wells as Jane, Ellie Heath as Heather, and Diana Nuttall as The Cellist.  The Cellist did not have a speaking role, but she was an active contributor to the story, as the music seemed to represent Jane’s inner thoughts and emotions.  Jane could hear the music, and sometimes it was loud enough to distract her or irritate her, even to the point of yelling “shut up!”  The Cellist also had an expressive face, showing what she was thinking about the various conversations and actions on stage.  I really enjoyed what the music and the musician added to the performance.

Jane is an actor in her 70s, who has been cast as Lear in an all-female production and who is anxious about being able to memorize her lines.  Heather is a 15yo family friend whom Jane has hired to run lines with her.  The show in which I’d seen Ellie Heath most recently, KIA Productions’ Closer,  also takes advantage of the actor’s skill at using unguarded facial expressions and casual postures to emphasize her character being younger than the others. As Heather, she’s a likeable young person with good manners but she is blunt, impatient, and uninterested in the problems of her elders.  In each scene, Jane and Heather work through a bit of the script in order, and they gradually get to knowing and trusting each other.  Heather lives with her widowed father.  Jane lives alone and is lonely and sometimes worried about being able to perform adequately in the play.

Costumes and stage dressing make a beautiful warm autumn-colours palette.  In the final scene, we see a small excerpt from the performance of Lear, with Jane in a rich gown too heavy for her and with Heather playing Cordelia, and it is so effective that it made me and my playgoing companion wish to see a whole production of King Lear with the title role being a woman.   Parts of the performance made me think about the third season of Slings and Arrows, and how easy it is to entwine the story of an aging performer with the struggles of playing King Lear.  Having it be a woman made me get it more, I think, too.

The run continues at the Varscona Theatre until March 30th.  More details are here along with a link to Tix on the Square.  It’s worth seeing, and generates lots to talk about.

I Am For You, by Mieko Ouchi

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I had the chance to attend the short Edmonton run of a new Concrete Theatre play by Mieko Ouchi that will be touring high schools and junior high schools, I Am For You.  And it made me happy.

The three characters in the play are a student teacher doing a practicum in drama, Mr Morris, (Jonathan Purvis) and the two students he catches fighting, Mariam and Lainie (Patricia Cerra and Samantha Jeffery.)  I found all of them appealing likeable people, and the character growth in the storyline was credible and satisfying.

I thought the student teacher was particularly well done.  He was awkward and inexperienced enough to be believable (the way he winced after talking about “meaty” parts of the body), and at the same time he was able to provide enough exposition for the audience within his teaching persona.  Many of the audience in the show I attended were actors or acting students and I got the impression that they were particularly amused by the things said about his career path from acting student to actor to teacher.  I was more impressed by the way he asked for explicit consent every time he touched his students during stage-combat instruction, and the way the students rolled their eyes at his rule-following but came to trust him.  It always irritates me when scenes of teachers and teenagers don’t fit current Canadian customs on this kind of thing (Friday Night Lights, I’m looking at you), and it is helpful for anyone who might be on either side of a similar situation to see the behaviour modelled properly and to see that it doesn’t disrupt the teachable moments or the physical comfort.

Cerra and Jeffery had realistic portrayals of teenagers, surly and defensive but occasionally becoming more open to each other and to the teacher.  Jeffery’s character is in some ways the harder case, but her flashes of grin are a victory for the teacher and a delight for the audience.  When the detention / fight choreography work ends and they gather up their bags, saying of course the real fight scenes would always go to the boys, I could see that neither of them had any expectation that this could change or that Mr Morris could be persuaded to intercede.   But of course in this story Mr Morris does intercede, persuading the (off stage) play director to cast the two girls as Tybalt and Mercutio.

The performance contains a lot of valuable information about theatre, about stage combat, and about the story and meaning of Romeo and Juliet.   I was fascinated to have some of the techniques of convincing falls and unarmed fights explained and demonstrated, and I was actually disappointed when the teacher says he doesn’t have time to teach them how to do a slap.

At the same time, some powerful messages about violence are being delivered.  Purvis’s character doesn’t let his students get very far into the fun of the choreographed dances of stage fighting before starting to remind them that they are learning to portray something dark and awful.  His statements about Juliet’s father slapping her mother, about slapping being an intimate or private form of violence extra shocking when done in public, and about how it’s the form of violence most often experienced by female characters in plays, connected with the audience as well as with the two students.  Although there is no explicit backstory expounded for the two girls, it is clear that they are aware of “messed up families” and found relevance in that part of the Shakespeare story.

Watching this play would be good entertainment and valuable conversation-starters for school groups, student teachers, beginning actors, or just anyone who likes stories about young people or about teaching.   And having seen this play, I would definitely make a point of watching anything else by Mieko Ouchi.

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.