FFWD Weekly
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On Stage by Lori Montgomery It’s hard not to be drawn in by Ian Prinsloo’s enthusiasm. As artistic director of Theatre Calgary, he was the guy who picked the plays for the company’s season, and since he’s also directing Holiday, their next production, you expect a certain amount of raving about the quality of the play. But Prinsloo uses words like "brilliant," "stunning" and "mesmerizing" without the slightest tremor of doubt, and needs little encouragement to wax poetic on the play’s virtues. "I feel very lucky to be able to do it," he says simply. "It’s a play that has tremendous significance in my life." The director first encountered Holiday when he was an apprentice actor at the 1986 Shaw Festival, where the play received its first Canadian production. He likens the story to a fairy-tale, illuminating the biggest questions in life. "It’s about how we live our lives and the choices we make, and about that time in our life when we give up and sell out," he says. The story is set in 1927 New York, and follows Johnny, a well-off young man who falls in love with Julia, the daughter of a millionaire. Johnny faces pressure from her family to give up his ideals and make the pursuit of even more money the centre of his life. The play is a particularly poignant condemnation of the materialism that preceded the Depression. The central characters are in their early 30s, about the same age as Prinsloo when he reread the play and was struck a second time by its message. "We all have a phase in our life, in our 20s, where life is good, life is fine," the director laughs. "And then around 30 – I’m sure this is why, in the Bible, at 30, Jesus starts putting everything together – it’s at that point that people start to make the decisions that they’re going to live with for the rest of their life. It’s at that point that we start to become the people that we’re going to have to live with for the rest of our life." Prinsloo draws clear parallels between the materialistic milieu of 1927 and the current booming economy. "I think in a city like Calgary," he points out, "where people are so driven, where people are working like mad, where there’s so much money being made, where you ask people sometimes why they’re working so hard, and they’ll simply say, ‘To get ahead’ – there’s not much effort or vision (spent) on asking, ‘What exactly is ahead? Why exactly do I need to work this hard?’" The play hasn’t been frequently produced since Prinsloo first saw it 14 years ago, and playwright Philip Barry, while highly regarded in his own time, is hardly a household name today. Prinsloo attributes this in part to the current focus on producing new Canadian plays rather than occasionally looking back at the classics. "We don’t often go back to these plays, trying to bring our theatre history forward, so that it’s part of our theatre present as well," he says. (Holiday runs until April 8 at the Max Bell Theatre.) In keeping with Prinsloo’s commitment to the classics, Theatre Calgary announced its 2000/2001 season this week, incorporating a broad mix of theatre stalwarts. You can never have enough Tom Stoppard, in my opinion, and TC is starting off with an often overlooked gem: Rough Crossing, Stoppard’s 1984 farce about a pair of Hungarian playwrights desperate to finish their play before their boat makes it to New York. Then, apparently emboldened by this season’s production of The Glass Menagerie, the company will take on Tennessee Williams’s intense Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. A Christmas Carol will, of course, take its annual place in the lineup, this year spiced up by new sets to go with last year’s new costumes. For those in the crowd with a musical theatre fetish – and I count myself somewhat guiltily among you – TC will take advantage of a partnership with the Manitoba Theatre Centre to stage Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot in February. I’m already humming "The Simple Joys of Maidenhood" in check-out lines.... That will be followed by J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner. The play by the insanely prolific author of An Inspector Calls details the nasty secrets uncovered by the suicide of a London publisher in 1932. The season will close out with that most novel of anomalies – a female playwright. Wendy Wasserstein’s 1992 play The Sisters Rosensweig focuses on a trio of Jewish-American sisters and their quest for fulfillment.

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