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Theatre by Lori Montgomery The History of Wild Theatre One Yellow Rabbit Big Secret Theatre March 28—April 15 The History of Wild Theatre. The title of the play sounds like a celebration of the inherent "wildness" of the art form. But on the contrary, to hear director Blake Brooker describe it, it sounds more like an elegy. "What does wild mean?" he asks, not at all rhetorically. "Wild is not that pervasive in our lives. We don’t necessarily attend wild events, or have wild things happen to us. When it does, we notice it. Those are the things that we remember." Brooker’s point is that there’s a lot less "wild" in the world than there used to be. Even in the world of theatre, where a casual observer might think the wild would flourish, the One Yellow Rabbit artistic director sees little to crow about. "Usually, theatre is not wild at all. Usually, theatre is very predictable," he points out. "You know you’re getting a drawing room mystery or a drama or you’re getting a musical. There will be some nice songs, and something pleasant will happen to the hero.... Most theatre is not wild – most theatre is mild. It’s a pastime of the bourgeois." It’s that observation that led to the current co-production between OYR and Scotland’s Traverse Theatre. The play begins with a group of cops, charged with finding out where the wild in theatre went. Along with the regular OYR ensemble, the production involves Glasgow natives Anne Marie Timoney and John Macaulay from Traverse Theatre, as well as local artists Peter Moller, Judd Palmer and Bev Wooding, all of whom have played an important role in creating their characters and shaping the production. In typical OYR fashion, the collaboration is near impossible to describe in traditional theatrical terms. It has more in common with musical experimentation, a metaphor that Brooker himself calls up to explain his admittedly un-scholarly fascination with the history of theatre. "It’s not unlike a musician sitting around remembering different kinds of music, and getting interested in playing different kinds of music, historical music, investigating it," he muses. "What ends up happening is that the influences of history make themselves felt." One byproduct of this historical examination, Brooker says, is the realization that there aren’t many boundaries left to be crossed in theatre. He speculates that what used to be considered wild on stage had more to do with the prevailing social circumstances than the theatre itself. "Wild depends on the context, and context depends on the audience," he says. "We live in an era of great freedom. I can stand up and say that Ralph Klein is an utter schmuck. I can say that Rod Love is a corrupt bastard. I can say Preston Manning is a simpering weasel. And no one will bat an eye, or even care. There was a time when criticism or discussion of events controlled by certain people could result in a very dangerous situation." So what’s left to make theatre wild again? Apparently not a simple desire to push boundaries, which Brooker refers to as an "adolescent" approach to theatre. Perhaps the key is simply in challenging the form itself, something that is integral to Brooker’s philosophy when it comes to creation. "Each moment is injected with life – the artificial life of the stage, but it’s living, it’s breathing, it has oxygen in there. It’s not dead. And of course, it’s all experimental in a sense," says the director who presented his cast with major changes four days before their first public performance. "It never gets fixed. It’s kind of like a piece of protoplasm that will continue to bubble and morph and change and show itself in different ways."

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