FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
| Theatre by Lori Montgomery Copper When you see a show at the High Performance Rodeo, chances are you’re having a theatrical experience that may have been a couple of years in the making. It was likely pegged for the Rodeo’s schedule after a demanding process that began over a year ago. Or maybe not. Little more than a month ago, Shannon Anderson’s plans for the ’99 Rodeo consisted simply of producing the Art Ranch’s Stop Thinking. Apart from that, she had her hands full preparing her one-woman show, Snatch – recently performed in Calgary under the Green Fools’ banner – for touring. As of the morning of December 1, she had been invited to Victoria’s Uno Festival of solo performances, and found that the application for the Canada Council touring grant that might get her to the island was due at the end of business that same day. Not to worry. She got on the phone to OYR’s Grant Burns, producer of the Rodeo, and asked if he had an application to spare. He did, and they chatted briefly. "I said, ‘How’s your day going?’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s okay, but a Calgary group pulled out of the Rodeo,’" Anderson recalls. "And I said, ‘Am I still on the shortlist?’ He said ‘I think so,’ and I said, ‘Can you give me two hours?’" The performer/producer then made a few well-placed phone calls: to playwright Trevor Schmidt, to ask for the rights to a play she’d had her eye on; to composer and Rabbit regular David Rhymer and musician Peter Moller to see if they’d be interested in putting a show together; and, two hours later, to Burns to offer him Muse Theatre’s Copper, a 45-minute one-hander with music by Rhymer, featuring Rhymer, Moller and Anderson, co-directed by Quest Theatre’s Duval Lang. "I think if any of those men had said no to me, I would have just decided to forget about it," she reflects. But they didn’t, and so Copper found its serendipitous way to the Rodeo’s schedule. All in a day’s work for a woman who is determined to make a place for herself on the local theatre scene. "I came back to Calgary a few years ago and I just decided to completely empower myself by building my own career, taking risks and doing stuff, and seeing what happens," Anderson says. Since her return, one of the things that has happened is a close collaboration with Schmidt, an Edmonton playwright whose one-woman play Snatch was one of Anderson’s on-stage empowerment exercises. "I like how he explores the emotional landscapes of these women, who are trapped by circumstances in their society," Anderson explains. "They’re all a little quirky and have some pluck to them." Copper is another in the same vein. The character of the title is a young woman in 1946 Montreal who meets and falls in love with a young man on his way back from the war. He later writes to her from his home on the prairies, proposes and sends her a train ticket out West. She makes the trek, only to see her betrothed die and leave her in debt to his hostile mother. Copper has no choice but to take a job singing in a converted Legion hall to make money. That’s where Rhymer’s music comes in. "What’s fun about it is that it takes place in the ’40s, but it’s done with a ’90s sensibility to it," Anderson says. "When I got David Rhymer involved, he said, ‘There’s no point in me writing a bunch of music from the ’40s... because there are so many great songs that come out of that era – it’s a wasted exercise.’ So what he’s done is interpreted the ’40s in a much darker way, lyrically. The songs are still melody based and driven, but the lyrics are far more twisted and bitter than it would have been socially decorous to have sung in the ’40s." Anderson is thrilled with the way that the ad hoc production came together, a feat that she says she wouldn’t have been able to achieve had she stayed in Toronto, her last stop on her way home. "In Toronto, everything that I admired in theatre was happening on a grassroots level. But I didn’t know any of those people and it was so hard to break in," she remembers. "In Calgary, it’s small enough that you can make a name for yourself quickly, if you work hard and you’re ambitious about it, but it’s big enough that it means something." |
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