SIPA – The Concordian

Press photo for SIPA Concordia’s production *The Yellow Wallpaper*

Jane enters the room and sits on the folding chair that’s been placed beside the bed they’ve created out of a stained folding table. She clasps her hands in her lap and crosses her ankles.

“What is your relationship with the wallpaper?” director Jen Cressey asks from across the room. Jane raises her eyes and answers in a despairing, timid voice that has a distinctive Victorian era intonation.

“I’m not quite sure, it’s obviously there and it’s what I’m looking at and it’s what I can engage with. I guess right now I’m just very, very sad. I’m sad that my husband didn’t listen to me and that I wasn’t important enough to listen to. I’m very sad that as hard as he tries he won’t be able to make me better.”

The year is 1899. Jane has just given birth to her first child, a boy. Unfortunately, she is suffering from postpartum depression. Her husband, John, a physician, is treating her. He has prescribed bed rest, a diet heavy in meat and absolutely no writing or other artistic activity.

“I tried very hard. I tried very, very hard to follow what he wanted me to do but none of it really worked, it only ever made me more upset and more deceitful,” Jane laments.

She spends her days in her room at the rental house they’ve leased for the summer. The room looks like it might have previously been a children’s nursery; the windows are barred and there are rings in the wall like one might see in a gymnasium. Furthermore, the floor is scratched and gouged and there is a black “smooch” running around the base of the room. Most notably, however, is the yellow wallpaper. The paper is peeling in places, it is stripped off in great patches all around the head of the bed, about as far as you can reach while lying on your back and in a great place on the other side of the room near the baseboard.

Natasha Perry-Fagant, who embodies Jane onstage, believes that John loves Jane very much and only wants her to get better.

“He loves her very, very deeply and he just thinks if she just believed in this treatment, if she just actively participated and put these thoughts out of her head, she would get better.” The reality is that Jane is not thriving within John’s confinement treatment, though she tries her best. She finds herself getting more and more depressed.

It’s been a 114 years since Charlotte Perkins Gilman first put Jane onto paper in the form of a short story called “The Yellow Wallpaper”. She put her there as a way to set her free from the confines set upon her by her husband. For a century she’s lived and thrived within the text, opening society’s eyes to her situation and consequently that of many women like her.

Now, three women are trying to bring her out and onto the stage so her story can impress the world in a new fashion. Perry-Fagant is serving as a conduit through which Jane can speak. Cressey is in charge of facilitating Jane’s emergence. She takes on the role of therapist in order to help Jane connect to her feelings and she directs the portrayal of Jane’s story as it will appear onstage.

Miranda Abraham keeps everything running smoothly. She makes notes on every decision that is made concerning Jane’s staging and sets up the appropriate set pieces. The women have been working on bringing Jane forth since the winter semester of 2012. It has been a long process, but their devotion to having Jane come across as accurately as possible speaks to their love for her.

As Perry-Fagant is where Jane resides for the most part, she often finds that Jane takes over outside of rehearsal. Sometimes Perry-Fagant will realize she’s thinking Jane’s thoughts or seeing things through Jane’s eyes, “Sometimes, I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll turn into Jane,” she said.

In the play, Jane is preoccupied with the wallpaper in her room.

“This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so, I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design,” she explains from her text.

Jane finds in the yellow wallpaper an engagement she can’t get from John. Confined as she is in her room, the paper becomes her escape from reality. She’s been spending all her time staring at the paper, peeling away the paper in spots, she thinks, John won’t notice. She sees something in the pattern of the wallpaper, she sees something…

Jane, why are you touching the paper so? What is it that you see there?

“A woman. A woman trapped within the pattern. She’s out. She’s gotten out!”

Round and round the room she goes, creeping along the baseboard, dragging her body around and around the room.

“What is the matter? For God’s sake, what are you doing!”

Jane smiles, “Creeping.”

The SIPA Short Works Festival will take place from March 7 – 10 at the Cazalet Theatre on Concordia’s Loyola Campus. Tickets are $2 per show for students and $5 general admission. For more information visit Facebook.com/SipaConcordia.

Erasing memories, pregnant nuns, dead babies and disenfranchised youths are just a few of the themes being played with at this semester’s SIPA (Student Initiated Production Assignment) Short Works Festival.

“You have all these projects that are directed, written or performed by students and so it’s really just a way to see where the students are and what they’re doing,” explained SIPA writer and performer Josh Williams.

The Concordia festival takes place once a semester, in the fall and winter. This semester’s event runs from March 8 to 11, showcasing four student productions, Naomi in the Living Room, In Memorium, Anonymous Sin and Greedy Graffiti. All but Naomi in the Living Room are student-written shows that run between 20 and 50 minutes.

Naomi in the Living Room was written by Christopher Durang, but is being re-staged by third-year performance and theatre student Kendall Savage. Savage plays Naomi who, along with her family, is struggling to cope with the death of five children. It’s a dark comedy, but one that Savage hopes will shed light on the healing power of laughter.

“I decided to do the play as a part of my healing process.The show itself is about a family who has gone mad due to the death of children and I myself lost a baby last year and I’ve been struggling with it,” she said.

In Memorium is written and performed by third-year theatre students Josh Williams and Vanessa Nostbakken. Based on a fictional procedure called “neuro-synaptic rearrangement,” which can erase your most terrible memories, In Memorium follows the encounter between procedure enthusiast Aries and dissident newcomer Nemo. Aries tries to convince Nemo that the procedure is a positive thing, while Nemo takes the opposite stance. The crux of this piece stems from exploring what kind of world would result from having this procedure available.

Anonymous Sin is written and performed by Charles-Smith Métellus, a fourth-year theatre student. The play tells the story of a pregnant nun who gives up her baby and what happens when 18 years later, that baby finds out the truth. Inspired by a friend’s anecdote about a man who dressed up as a pregnant nun for Halloween, Métellus plays both the nun and her son at age 18.

“I am approaching multiple roles—both roles.They are very contrasting, especially when it comes to a pregnant woman, but I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by an exclusively female production team, so they gave me some input in regard to a woman’s body language, especially that of a pregnant woman. I was also fortunate in my psychology class, to have lectures given by a woman who is about to give birth. So I was able to observe her during the lectures,” said Métellus.

Greedy Graffiti is written and directed by fourth-year theatre student Ariel Lefkowitz, and tells the story of several disenfranchised 16-year-olds who find support in one another’s company. Lefkowitz, who hosts a radio show on CJLO by the same name, is the only director to have cast members from outside the theatre department. The cast members come from the departments of music, history, finance, and marketing, making her show the first cross-department SIPA show.

This show is also the longest of the four, but speaks directly to the Concordia community. It attempts to spread the message about the importance of art and how it’s crucial get out of your comfort zone in order to get your art noticed.

The SIPA/Short Works Festival runs from March 8 to 11. Tickets are $2. Visit theatre.concordia.ca for the full schedule.