Tag: theatre

Halloween is a time to revel in all things spooky, scary and unnatural. But for most people the greatest fear is common, and grounded in reality: the fear of losing a loved one.

Rabbit Hole, a Pulitzer Prize winning play written by David Lindsay-Abaire, deals with the debilitating grief experienced by a family coping with the death of their four-year-old son.

This play is being brought to Montreal by director-actor Simon Anthony Abou-Fadel and actress Miranda Handford. Abou-Fadel has had an extensive background as a TV actor in Hollywood, with roles in shows like 24, Law and Order and Veronica Mars.

“I did TV in Hollywood and I was also a member of the actors’ gang […] I wanted to go into directing for a while and this will be my third play directing.”

Abou-Fadel and Handford play the parts of Howie and Becca, a married couple that recently lost their child in a car accident. Jean Nicolai plays the part of Izzy, Becca’s younger sister and Dawn Ford plays Nat; Becca and Izzy’s mother. Newcomer Jason Smiley completes the cast, playing the part of Jason Willette.

In Rabbit Hole every character is plagued by the question, “what if?”

What if Becca had latched the gate? What if Izzy hadn’t called Becca and distracted her?  What if Howie had watched the dog?  What if Jason had driven down any other street but theirs?

Haunted by their individual role in the tragedy, every character finds their own way to deal with their grief and guilt.

For many people Rabbit Hole is considered an almost therapeutic experience because it helps them deal with grief in their own lives.

Abou-Fadel says: “I dealt with grief in my family before, losing a brother at a young age. It’s a process, and it’s kind of always there. That is what attracted me initially to this play.”

Nicolai believes that the subject matter is universal, “I think it just touches on a fear that is so common, even if you haven’t experienced it yourself. It’s the biggest fear; to lose a child. Even if you haven’t lived it you can feel that fear.”

Fear is a key aspect of the play, and it was also a deciding factor with the actors who chose to tackle it:

“This play scared the crap out of me; I just had a son,” says Abou-Fadel with a smile, “but it was incredible. So I gave it to [Handford].”

“It took me two months to read it,” said Handford, “I was scared to read it too. I finally read it and agreed. Obviously we [had] to do it.”

A Hollywood movie adaptation starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart was made in 2010. Ford, the only cast member who watched the film, says that although it’s nearly identical to the play, watching it in theatre is an unrivaled experience, “the adaptation was very similar to the play, but a play is always so instant, you’re in it, you’re there, you’re with it—the impact is so much more with a play than with a movie.”

Abou-Fadel is very excited about the launch of this play in Montreal.

“It’s just a stellar cast, with some really seasoned actors. It’s a beast of a play, it’s gorgeous and it’s beautiful, we’re working hard to rise to the challenge.”

Rabbit Hole will run from Nov. 1 to 10 at the Free Standing Room – 4324 St. Laurent, suite 300.

What do you get when you combine a complex script, a play condensed to half its length, puppets and a bevy of other visual effects? All those elements compose an ambitious upcoming performance at next week’s Winter Short Works Festival in Concordia’s theatre department.

Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker is a difficult play, featuring a lot of wordplay and dense themes and imagery. Despite its challenges, theatre development student Jenn Kearney and the rest of her ensemble decided to work on The Skriker as their Student-Initiated Production Assignment. The Short Works Festival is a chance for students to run their own shows, and let their creativity go wild in their SIPA project.

The choice of The Skriker was mostly coincidence; Kearney was studying the script for a voice class at the same time as ensemble member Claire Hogan discovered the play. “It was kind of fated, meant to be,” said Kearney. With the script cut down from two acts to about 40 minutes, Hogan and Kearney set out to find anyone who had an interest in puppetry or Caryl Churchill to join them. “It was like, ‘does anyone want to come on this crazy undertaking?’” stated Kearney.

Eventually, they made the decision to work as an ensemble with Rhea Nelken and Morgan Nerenberg. “It was like four different interpretations of it that we were trying to put together in something cool, like a transformer, instead of something really awful, like, I don’t know, a pile of garbage,” shared Kearney. She said that although working in an ensemble can be difficult, it’s worth it in the end. “It’s much easier when a director can just be like, do this, do that, but in this case it’ like, well, what does everyone think?” explained Kearney. “The creativity takes twice as long, but I think in the end it’s twice as rich, because you get so much more input.”

The Skriker’s central character is a “nature spirit, death omen, shapeshifter, and she has come up into the human world out of the underworld to get revenge on humans for destroying nature and generally ignoring magical creatures everywhere,” summarized Kearney. The Skriker’s attention is especially focused on two women; the mentally-disturbed Josie and the pregnant Lily, who are played by “just plain, straight-up actors.”

However, due to the shapeshifting nature of the Skriker, all four remaining cast members are the nature spirit at some point in the production. When they are not busy being the Skriker, the rest of the cast are operating one of about 10 puppets. “There’s a lot of puppetry and masks and we have projections that we’re working on,” said Kearney. “It was really huge and very ambitious with our cast of four people.”

The Concordia Theatre Department’s Short Works Festival allows students to think outside the box by allowing them to produce and often write their own short plays. For Kearney, this was the first time she used puppets. “I had a chance to actually learn to make puppets and learn to operate them, and how to interact with them as a puppeteer and then also as an actor,” she said.

With less than a week of rehearsals left before the Friday opening, Kearney said things are on track, if a little chaotic. “It’s the theatre, everything seems like a horrible disaster until you get there on opening night, and you’re like, ‘wow, we have a show!’”

The Skriker opens at the Winter Short Works Festival on March 11. The festival runs from March 10 to 13 at the F.C. Smith Auditorium at the Loyola campus. Tickets are $2 for students. For the complete schedule, check out theatre.concordia.ca

Bedbugs isn’t just about the unpleasant creatures frequenting apartments around the city. According to director Deanna Dobie, it’s about human relationships. The Concordia Association of Students in English’s production shows what happens when a male bedbug becomes dangerously obsessed with a human female, changing the relationship dynamic between all the characters.

The show was written by Rachael Picard, who won a CASE competition that allowed her play a short run. However, Dobie only stepped in over the winter break, when the previous co-directors left the project. “Coming on late, it really took all the energy and the focus because it was already cast when I came on board,” explained the theatre development student. “In order to do justice and give all my energy to the play, I actually dropped my three credits that would have allowed me to have graduated.”

Dobie also had to make do without a stage manager, stating that the person she picked was involved in two other shows. “For various other reasons it just didn’t work out. The person that came on board was so overworked that I couldn’t in good faith keep him although he was fabulous,” she said.

Therefore, Dobie was left to make all the creative and planning decisions herself. “It meant quite a few late nights,” she shared. Even though rehearsals only started in mid-January, she stated that the lack of time was made up for by the cast’s motivation. “We’ve had minimal rehearsal, but everyone’s totally on board so it’s going to be a great show,” she said.

Despite difficulties on the planning side, Dobie managed to fulfill her vision on a creative level, with some help from her costume designer, Deborah Sullivan, and musician Yianis Mvoula. “With reading the script that Rachael Picard wrote, I got really, really excited and the theatrics started to come out, the visuals started to come out in my head,” said Dobie. What she imagined was a sexy tango between one of the bedbugs, Rex, who takes an interest in the human Julie. Luckily, choreographer Jenn Doan and Mvoula were up to the job. “You can’t teach somebody to be intuitive,” stated Dobie about Mvoula’s guitar work.

Working at the Freestanding Room came with its own set of benefits and challenges. “I eventually got to this place which actually suits the bedbugs because it’s like a large, large apartment,” explained Dobie. Since the Freestanding Room is so small, using complicated lighting and costume changes were out of the question. Therefore, music is used to indicate the switch between bedbugs and humans.

As for the costumes, Dobie’s vision clicked right away with Sullivan’s, and they made the decision to have the actors gradually add layers of red on top of shimmery, see-through material. “Even though it’s a short play, there’s a lot of scenes and a lot of costume changes, particularly for the bedbugs. The choice to just keep layering the bedbugs was partly born out of need and also because the bedbugs grow as they feed and they change colour.”

Now that opening night is creeping nearer, Dobie is excited by the pressure that seems to be energizing her cast. “If anything, I’ve got to calm it down more, which is a lot easier than having to pick up people,” she said. “Both bedbugs, they’ve got enough energy for all of us!”

Bedbugs runs from March 3 to 5 at The Freestanding Room, 4324 St Laurent Blvd. Tickets are $10, $8 for students.

“Sexy Dirty Bloody Scary does for theatre what Tom Waits does for music,” stated Jeremy Hechtman, the director of MainLine Theatre’s upcoming production. While this accounts for the pulp quality of the show, this would only be true if Waits pulled his verses out of a hat, or rolled a die to decided whether to begin with the chorus or the bridge. With a giant wheel of fortune not only overshadowing, but dictating the sequence of events, Sexy Dirty Bloody Scary promises to be a wild ride.

Written by Chris Brophy, SDBS was originally performed at the 1996 Fringe Festival. Brophy and Joanna Schmidt played all 15 characters, sometimes even trading characters with one another. Patrick Goddard, general manager of MainLine, found himself fondly remembering Brophy’s show while reviewing past Fringe plays in honour of the 20th anniversary of the Fringe Festival this past summer. He gave it “four highly appropriate title adjectives out of four.” It was at this point that Goddard and Hechtman decided to resurrect SDBS, but with a twist.

In the original production, the wheel of fortune only stood in the background as an overarching metaphor. This time, Hechtman and Goddard decided to literally use the wheel of fortune in the play to affect the narrative structure. Pushing what Goddard called the “theatrical insanity” of the original, they added the character of Blind Luck (played by Goddard himself). One part narrator, one part devil on the shoulders of everyone and literally blind, Blind Luck spins the wheel that decides which scenes will be played when.

All the 20 scenes of SDBS will be played, but in varying orders each night. Yet, Hechtman explained that the story is still comprehensible: the characters are clearly defined and each scene has its own arc. So while a certain narrative normalcy is willingly sacrificed, nothing is lost in this jumble of scenes. Hechtman described the show as pulp fiction, a reference to the pulp magazines that were popular throughout the early half of the 20th century. These magazines told lurid fictional stories, usually involving sex and murder. Yet the focus of the show is less on what happens, and more on when it happens. Hechtman emphasized the random quality of the play, saying, “the perfect night will be the one where the first thing to happen is the intermission. It was just too good to pass up.”

While this production of SDBS has five actors instead of two, they are not given any chance to relax. Hechtman described the rehearsals as more drill-like than anything else; working bits thousands of times, actors are kept constantly on their toes, ready to jump into a scene at a moment’s notice. Like the audience, the actors have no idea what is coming next in SDBS. This “keeps [the show] fresh, and forces the actors to be in the moment” says Hechtman, suggesting that the actors remain terrified throughout the performance. It’s this energy, and not the plot, that drives the show. The rush from the spontaneity replaces the suspense of a linear narrative.

SDBS draws from the wealth of theatre that 20 years of Fringe has to offer. Its re-visitation brings new life to the original, just as the original offered a fresh look at the pulp fiction genre. Hechtman, who saw the original SDBS just after graduating from Concordia, can see how the production would intrigue any student who is attracted to the lurid world of pulp fiction, or is drawn to the seedy underbelly of the city. On this same note, it seems the show is ideal for anyone who enjoys the rush of the unexpected, as each Sexy Dirty Bloody Scary performance is literally a gamble.

Sexy Dirty Bloody Scary opens Tuesday, Feb. 15 at the MainLine Theatre. Tickets are $23.

Concordia’s theatre and music departments are collaborating on an ambitious original musical theatre piece based around the life of one of science’s most controversial figures, Charles Darwin. Darwin: Endless Forms Most Beautiful is a libretto, multimedia foray and science fiction parable, bringing live musicians and special effects to Loyola’s Oscar Peterson Hall this week.

You know Darwin from science textbooks as the father of the theory of evolution, a theory he developed after a long voyage around the world on The Beagle. The theory caused a lot of consternation back then, and it continues to do so today, as schools in North America vehemently ban the teaching of evolution in favour of creationism, the theory that God basically whipped up our planet within a few days and then took a day off.

Darwin: Endless Forms Most Beautiful has its feet planted firmly both in the past and in the future. A Cyborg (Cassandre Mentor) is about to undergo a major transformation, the next step in her evolution, so-to-speak. She strives to understand how it will play out by examining Darwin’s story, enacted by actors in period costume and accents.

Director Keith Turnbull places the Cyborg about 15 years from the present. To complete the look, Mentor is about a foot taller thanks to leg extensions, with her voice amplified and treated for that robotic edge, and parts of her seafoam-coloured body transform. (Summing up the show’s design aesthetic, Turbull quips it’s got “your tweed jacket and your high-tech.”)

If it’s starting to sound like a steampunk musical, you’ll be forgiven. Kyle Purves, who plays the young Darwin, admitted the show’s genre is “not easy to peg.” It’s not musical theatre, yet not quite an opera.

What it is is ambitious. The show features projections and extensive sound design, in addition to the complexities of Mentor’s costume.

Purves said the seven-member cast had to be on their toes throughout the preparation of what is essentially a “laboratory work,” with the bulk of the script coming in about two weeks before the final run-throughs. Ralph Denzer came up with the original idea, and wrote the music, while Concordia alumnus Ryan Hurl is the librettist. The show features six instrumentalists, and all the cast members are singers. The show itself has what Purves described as an “operatic aesthetic.”

As Darwin is a new work, the show has the advantage of the audience having no preconceived notions, but that in itself is also a challenge. The most difficult part, according to Purves, is the small cast having to tackle a changing script heavy in information. “There’s so few of us, but we’re trying to make a bold statement.”

But the theatre student is optimistic: “It’s a test run, but it’s going to be a really grand test run.”

Speaking on the phone after a rehearsal on Saturday, Turnbull said he finds that Darwin is now part of the “geist of the times,” meaning of the moment. “The thing with Darwin is that he’s pretty well part of the times now, because of the question of evolution. There have been like a dozen Darwin films in the past five years.”

One movie that leaps to mind is Creation, the 2009 film with real-life Hollywood couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as Emma and Charles Darwin.

The reason for this recent surge in popularity beyond the ongoing creationism debate, Turnbull said, is that people are being categorized more and more, a technique brought to the forefront by Darwin and used on animal and plant life, and now, humans. “We’re all being studied under the microscope.” Our shopping habits are analyzed, our opinions are ranked in polls, Facebook calibrates ads based on our a/s/l. “I think people are starting to recognize the depths of what he started.”

Darwin: Endless Forms Most Beautiful will be performed at the Oscar Peterson Hall at Loyola Feb. 17-19 at 8 p.m., and 19-20 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $5 for students.