FFWD Weekly
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| Theatre by Nikki Sheppy Preview It all began in a moment of crazy inspiration. Teatro La Quindicina was founded haphazardly in Edmonton in 1982, when a group of friends heard that anyone could mount a play at the Fringe Festival. Their name, taken from Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene, is as arbitrary as the company’s origins. It means "fifteen theatre." "In the book, they spend 15 days in each town," explains co-founder Stewart Lemoine. "It’s a travelling brothel, a colorful collection of whores that everyone thinks is a theatre company. For some reason, we added the name and it just sort of stuck." Now, TLQ is anything but arbitrary. Lemoine describes Pith!, the vivid three-person Rodeo performance that he wrote and will direct, as "a lot of creativity with four chairs and a gramophone." Pared to its physical essentials, Pith! puts acting at the heart of the show. We follow a trio of characters – a grieving society woman, a helpful housemaid and seafaring guide – played by Teatro veterans Leona Brausen, Jeff Haslam and Davina Stewart. In 1930s Providence, Rhode Island, these three people pretend to go to South America. Using only their imaginations and a few handy props, they set out to find a silverware tycoon who’s been missing for 10 years. The missing man happens to be the grieving woman’s husband. "They pretend to go the way you would if you were five years old – playing with chairs and putting blankets over the backs of them and pretending to be on a train. The play is a tribute to that (playfulness) and also to the idea of improvised drama – which is something we do a lot in Edmonton. We improvise plays by making up an entire story just by moving from one scene to the next and just by believing in it." The characters in Pith! imagine what it would be like to actually go, and their transformative journey reminds us of the power of the imagination. In the end, the journey has more far-reaching consequences than anyone expects. "If you’re having a hard time letting go of something," says Lemoine, "you can at least imagine how you would do it. And it may be as simple as that." Despite the widow’s grief, Lemoine says the play is very funny. "There’s a pretty wide emotional spectrum, given the subject matter and the fact that it is a bereaved person and her journey to coming out of that." "The overt humor of it comes from seeing unlikely characters in an unlikely situation. You have two very well-dressed women negotiating their way through the jungles of Ecuador with great aplomb, dispatching everybody they meet and solving all their problems just because they can, because they’re making it all up." According to Lemoine, the atmosphere is not unlike period comedy. The women traverse exotic landscapes, foil a gigolo, and shake their fannies in a tea dance on the poop deck. Who knows? What they discover in the end may forever alter the way we look at children and their ever-readiness to pretend. |
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