THEATRE PREVIEW
DR. FAUSTUS
U of C Department of Drama
Runs until December 8
Reeve Theatre (U of C)
Frank Totino isn’t your typical Masters of Fine Arts directing student. He isn’t fresh out of an undergraduate degree, for one thing, and he isn’t feeling his way as a director for the first time. As a matter of fact, he started his degree at the University of Calgary in 1987, but left because he was working too much as an actor and director. Every actor should be so lucky.
He recently decided it was time to return to the hallowed halls of academia, however, and so he picked up where he left off.
"Getting involved in a large institution has always freaked me out," he says. "It was something I didn’t want to do until I actually had some career behind me, so that when I came in, I might actually have something to offer to the students."
Among other things, Totino spent much of the ’90s sailing around Europe, working as a director and an acting teacher. One of the productions he directed was a staging of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus in Oslo – in Norwegian, no less – which left him wanting to take another look at the play. It has now turned into his MFA thesis production, and part of the U of C’s mainstage season.
The director says that his fascination stems from the primal place that the story occupies even in modern times. He points out that even if people say they don’t know anything about the play itself, they certainly know the story about a man who sells his soul to the devil. It seems inherent to western culture.
"Why does it resonate now, when most of the imagery in the play is medieval at best?" he asks. "The whole idea of what hell is like, what the devil is like, all that stuff comes out of the medieval period."
Dr. Faustus is a big production, using a cast of 33 U of C students and almost as many crew. Phil Fulton is a third-year drama student who says that he has learned a new way of working from Totino.
"It’s great for the students because we’ve never worked in the same way that Frank directs," says Fulton. "Usually, in the first couple of rehearsals, you’ve got your lines, and you’ve got your blocking down, and you say your line from where the director says to say the line, and then you spend the rest of the rehearsal period trying to justify why.... Whereas when we first started, it was ‘go wherever you want, and experiment a lot.’ I think that’s how a lot of directors work in the real world."
Totino says that he respects the input of everyone involved in the production.
"Everybody who’s here is an artist at something, and probably they’re interested in the theatre for the same reasons I was when I first got into the theatre," he says. "They’ve got ideas. Ideas are something that we can’t stop anyhow. They just happen – sort of like sweating or something. It’s a function of being alive that you have ideas. So why should I solve everything?"
There’s a lot of talk about the "real world" in our interview. Fulton admits that within the sheltered environment of the university, he hasn’t had a lot of exposure to what waits for him outside its walls. But he’s optimistic about his chances to make a career out of theatre.
"I don’t know much about the outside world," he says with a laugh. "But you see all of these upstart theatre groups, and they’re all so energetic and opportunistic, and I’ve heard great stories. They just want to go out there and do everything. It’s good to hear." |
