FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Don't tell Edward Albee
OYR dance around the issue with non-verbal staging of classic play
by Nikki SheppyPermission
directed by Blake Brooker
choreographed by Denise Clarke
Runs until December 6
Big Secret TheatreIf you've seen Elizabeth Taylor's wrathful performance in the 1966 film adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, you'll probably find it hard to imagine splitting a gut at a dance rendition. That would be sort of like laughing it up at musical version of Long Day's Journey Into Night or snickering as the Nazis drop an inmate in Escape from Sobibor, the ballet.
But One Yellow Rabbit reminds us that there's more than one way to read Edward Albee's award-winning 1962 play. And in their idiosyncratic interpretation, back on the Calgary stage after touring abroad, the boozy couples have at it in an absurd danse-macabre based on stage direction alone.
"We called it 'Permission' because we didn't get permission," explains director Blake Brooker, recalling Albee's point-blank refusal to let them mount his play. "lt was sort of an inside joke for ourselves. It was originally going to be about the ideas surrounding the notion of permission in society. But what we ended up doing was excerpting all the stage directions in the play and working from those."
With the exception of a few choice insults (for those familiar with the dialogue, "monkey nipples" comes to mind as a possibility), the entire dance-drama is performed without words to a soundscape by composer Richard McDowell.
What results is a harrowing but funny story told in a new movement vocabulary devised by choreographer Denise Clarke. In this way, minute stage directions ("snidely," "angrily," "small pause") translate into visible physical actions or expressions.
"It's a bit mischievous," admits Brooker about OYR's method of side-stepping Albee's copyright privileges. "But we're a physical theatre company anyway. When we stopped to think about it, we realized just how much information is expressed with movement, gesture and facial expression. We started to think about the power of physicality."
According to Brooker, the play is non-verbal but not abstract. The audience shouldn't have any problems understanding the story - even if they're not familiar with Albee's play.
"We're so attuned to posture and facial expression - and, for lack of a better word, body language or movement language. We barely even acknowledge it because we're such a verbal culture. But you can feel it. You can read it."
In 1996, the company tested this hypothesis while touring "Permission" in Mexico, where many of the audience members were unfamiliar with the play and spoke limited English. The piece was a smashing success.
"It's nice to have a play that is not dependent on language," says Brooker. "We look at it as a highly physical drama."
Giving the play its tension are actors Clarke (Martha), Michael Green (George), Andy Curtis (Nick) and Elizabeth Stepkowski (Honey). They play two married couples who get together for a late night party and wind up with more than they bargained for. The evening grows more and more cruel as the characters subject themselves to an endless stream of nightcaps and recriminations.
According to Brooker, the idea to mount the Albee play in the first place sprang from the coincidence that the four main characters happened to correspond rather well to the talents and physical types of four of the actors in the theatre company - waspish, domineering Martha; exhausted, acerbic George; upstanding Nick; and mousy Honey.
In the end, Brooker seems pleased that Albee never granted them permission to mount his play. He seems to prefer having tackled this wordless, highly physical adaptation with its implied subtext about consent.
"Actually, the word permission turns out to be very resonant," he says. "Permit. Permissive.... The word is powerful because it implies a lot of different things.... These people take permission in our play to say certain things to each other. They take permission to be wild."
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