FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

On Stage by Lori Montgomery Alberta Theatre Project’s recently-announced 2000/01 season is a virtual orgy of Canadiana, so it’s not surprising that artistic director Bob White refers to it as a season of plays about "home." Of course, he’s referring to the themes addressed in the plays, but that seems more like a retrospective observation rather than an idea that guided his choices in the first place. It’s just a bunch of good Canadian plays, and it so happens that a lot of Canadian playwrights are preoccupied with defining their idea of home. First up is ATP playwright-in-residence Eugene Stickland’s A Guide to Mourning, which premiered at playRites ’98. It’s a comfy choice to start out the new season, since I have yet to meet anyone who didn’t like it the first time around – probably a good idea to prove to funders that the company can still fill a theatre. Following that will be George F. Walker’s Problem Child. Part of a spontaneously written series about stories occurring in the same suburban motel room, the play examines the struggle of an ex-con and a recovering junkie to regain custody of their child. During the "take the kids to the theatre" season just before Christmas, the company will stage Paul Ledoux’s non-musical stage adaptation of Anne, bringing a little bit of Avonlea to Calgary. For the first time, the season announcement includes an almost-definite lineup for playRites, including Red Lips by Connie Gault, which had a platform reading at this year’s festival, and 24 Exposures, the English premiere of Quebec playwright Serge Boucher’s musings on family. Following a much-lauded production at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre this season, Judith Thompson’s Perfect Pie will hit the stage when the playRites mayhem is over. It’s about two childhood friends who reconnect later in life and re-evaluate their lives. And the final play in the season is Michael Healey’s The Drawer Boy, which won four Dora Mavor Moore awards last year for the strikingly original playwright. This one revolves around a young actor researching a play, but like any of Healey’s work, a brief description does it no justice. The same artistic director who chose those plays began his tenure at ATP recently by restructuring the spring cycle, which was originally slated to include two expensive undertakings: Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and Art, by the European tag-team of playwright Yasmina Reza and translator Christopher Hampton. Replacing part of that lineup is the currently running The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, by playwright and NDP MP Wendy Lill. It’s yet another celebration of home-and-hearth, this time with a grim edge that in a way echoes the sacrificed Beauty Queen. The co-production was recently staged to a great response at Regina’s Globe Theatre before picking up and moving here, and there is a polish in the performances that certainly owes something to that experience. On the other hand, two members of the small cast are new to this version, and appear to slip in seamlessly. The story – filmed as Margaret’s Museum with Helena Bonham Carter – follows the love story of Margaret MacNeil (Esther Purves-Smith), a young woman whose bleak, tragedy-strewn life revolves around the Cape Breton mines, and Neil Currie (Paul Cowling), a storyteller and musician who would rather die than go underground. Purves-Smith and Cowling turn in outstanding performances, heading up a cohesive cast in a production that resists a weepy, sentimental interpretation of Lill’s very funny play. Director Micheline Chevrier shepherds them through the tale at a brisk pace, leaving no room for maudlin reflection, and highlighting the awakening spirit in Margaret’s formerly cheerless family, rather than the culpability of the mine’s owners for the MacNeil tragedies. The set design is simple but effective, cramming all of the fragments of Margaret’s life into her little house on reserve land, and the lighting design by Brian Pincott clearly evokes the ocean-side cliffs on which Neil woos Margaret. Drawn together expertly, the elements combine to form a moving, memorable production of a very Canadian play.

| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |