FFWD Weekly
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| Theatre by Nikki Sheppy Preview When American lyricist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt first worked on the musical that would become The Fantasticks, New York’s longest running theatrical production, it was called Joy Comes to Dead Horse and it was set to be a $400,000 mega large-format Broadway hit. But when it finally opened off-Broadway in the summer of 1960, it was something else entirely – a simple allegory about lost innocence in which characters donned their makeup on stage and sportingly played up the strategies of their art beneath a cardboard moon. The Fantasticks styles itself more after commedia delarte and Kabuki (with ironic inversions of Shakespeare) than after West Side Story. And by showing its seams, the play admits its artificiality, making possible a magical, fantastical and highly theatrical staging with a minimalist design. It’s an interesting choice for Theatre Calgary. Known for their elaborate sets with precise period furnishings, TC is really letting their hair down with this one. The play tells the story of two young lovers, Matt and Luisa, who discover that they’re being manipulated by their parents. The mothers stage a fake feud of Capulet-Montague proportions, building a large wall between their two houses in order to trick their willfully disobedient children into falling in love. It’s reverse psychology at its most devious. Calgary-based actor David Leyshon and Edmonton-based actress Andrea House play Matt and Luisa. At 19, Matt already waxes poetic, comparing Luisa to "the microscopic inside of a leaf." Who could resist that? Certainly not Luisa, the dreamer with whom Matt lovingly conspires by vaulting fervent vows over the wall. "In the beginning," says House, "we’re really in love with the idea of being in love." Leyshon agrees, citing the play’s purposeful allusions to Shakespeare’s most famous lovers. "We’re in love mostly because we can’t be," he says. "Our mothers erect a wall between us and we become very much like Romeo and Juliet. We speak over the wall and desperately try to conceal our love.... In the second act, we discover that although the wall is now down and everything is how we wanted it to be, we don’t really know each other. We feel trapped." The wall paradoxically made love possible. But taking it down alienates the lovers. Even the relationship between the neighbouring mothers changes when the wall comes down. "They start to fight," says House. "They start to want to build the wall again, this time out of all sorts of terrible materials so that it can never be taken down." One of the commedia delarte archetypes central to the play is El Gallo, the narrator who invites the audience into the world of the play, where he takes the lovers on their rocky journey only to bring them back together again. According to Leyshon, he’s one of the main forces in the play. At one point, he even disguises himself at the mothers’ behest to stage a phony abduction, making Matt into a hero when Luisa is rescued. In El Gallo, the power of narrative is personified, announcing once again that this is a play and that we as audience members and actors must submit to its story. "I think that’s really the key to the play," says Leyshon. "What the playwrights tried to do was create a relationship between the audience and the actors where we go on a journey in an imaginary world together. We’re not pretending to be in a forest; we’re asking you to imagine with us that we’re in a forest. I think that’s an exciting relationship. We accept the fact that we’re in a play and that we’re asking you to suspend your disbelief." |
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