| The Edmonton Journal recently published a story dripping with envy at Calgary’s fall and winter arts festivals, the High Performance Rodeo in particular. Well, it’s a nice change, after all these years of Calgarians turning green at the thought of their sister city’s summer festival scene. But it’s true – Calgary really has become a cultural hotbed in the cold months and the Rodeo is one of the key reasons why.
Personally, I never cease to be surprised at how One Yellow Rabbit’s event has evolved from its scruffy, hole-in-the-wall origins. A decade ago, Rodeo regular Daniel MacIvor played to 60 people in the tiny original Secret Theatre; last week he opened this year’s Rodeo to a packed house in the spanking new, 350-seat Vertigo Playhouse. Like the festival, MacIvor has become a firm Calgary favourite and the standing ovation for his latest solo, Cul-de-sac, was almost inevitable. But then again, MacIvor seldom disappoints.
Cul-de-sac is the most linear and straightforward of MacIvor’s Rodeo shows to date. And while his past characters have included a psychotic septic-tank salesman (House), a pathological liar (Here Lies Henry) and a patricide (Monster), this piece revolves around a dead-average gay man named Leonard – an admitted mediocrity with little in the way of taste and talent, who merely, in his words, "types the stereo as well as plays it."
But everybody has a story, and Leonard’s is of his own death. As this posthumous narrator leads up to the tale of his sudden, violent demise, one evening on the dead-end street where he lives, he introduces us to his neighbours, who relate their memories of Leonard in documentary-interview style. It’s a curiously inclusive neighbourhood, encompassing a bickering blue-collar couple, a toffee-voiced matron and her husband who adore Gilbert and Sullivan, a crusty retired veterinarian who may have put down one too many cats, and a budding teenage novelist holed up in her basement bedroom and holding the adult world in contempt.
Where MacIvor the actor is somewhat limited in his abilities at impersonation, MacIvor the playwright compensates, dexterously sketching these different personalities with strokes of humour and insight, all the while reflecting on how our identities are defined by the people around us. Once again, he and director-collaborator Daniel Brooks have built a razor-sharp production, which plays out on a checkered stage – a square for each character – with a literally thunderous sound design by Richard Feren and retina-burning lighting by Kimberly Purtell at the gut-twisting climax.
Yet, oddly enough, funny-sad Leonard’s demise is something less than tragic – perhaps because, in the words of Dylan Thomas, he wisely knows that dark is right.
While MacIvor was dealing with death and dead-ends, over at the Big Secret Theatre One Yellow Rabbit and CBC Radio were also conjuring up ghosts to grapple with that timeless conundrum, Canadian culture, in a one-hour radio play.
High Performance Radio: Andrew Allan’s Chair is set in CBC Radio’s Toronto studio, where a nervous young producer (Brad Payne) is trying to record a new drama in classic Canadian style – i.e. dithering compromises in an effort not to offend anyone. Or is that really the Canadian way? Not according to the spectre of Andrew Allan (Andy Curtis), drama producer from CBC Radio’s Golden Age, who rematerializes to give the kid a little backbone and remind him of the Canadian wireless giants – such as Lorne Greene, the Voice of Doom, and Lister Sinclair, the Voice of Reason – who have gone before.
Blake Brooker’s witty script simultaneously sends up Canadian culture and reflects on its meaning, with Denise Clarke as a comically earnest writer defending her play about U.S. soldiers in Iraq against Onalea Gilbertson’s difficult actor, fresh from a soul-destroying stint in L.A. and eager to do something with CanLit stamped all over it. Allan Boss plays Gilbertson’s apologetic actor husband, who was luckier in Hollywood – he got to play a series of heavies à la John Vernon.
Boss and Gilbertson’s Milo and Deb may cut painfully close to the bone for many Canadian actors. Clarke and Curtis contribute the comedy, the former spoofing owlish authors, the latter turning the legendary Allan into an unflappable captain of the airwaves who returns from the grave still impeccably tailored and with his thirst for martinis intact.
After all that cultural angst, the first week of the Rodeo ended in one big, mellow cosmic groove with the Canadian première of Terry Riley’s Sun Rings by the Kronos Quartet.
Like the better-known Philip Glass, who performed at last year’s Rodeo, Riley is a major American minimalist composer who has frequently written for Kronos. This 10-part, 90-minute suite marries the quartet’s otherworldly playing to sounds that have been recorded by plasma wave receivers in the vicinity of the planets for the past 40 years. The noises – which resemble, among other things, chirping birds and crickets, bubbling water and gunshots – are enhanced here with astronomical visuals by Willie Williams, so at times Kronos appears to be sawing away somewhere in outer space, under the watchful red eye of Jupiter or the roiling fires of the Sun. Added to the mix are choral sections – hymns to the universe sung on this occasion by the Festival Chorus of Calgary.
At its best, Riley’s music is strange and majestic but – the pitfall of minimalism – a sameness eventually creeps in, and I’ve seen more impassioned performances from Kronos. The Festival Chorus, however, was excellent and Larry Neff’s painterly lighting design does almost as much as Williams’s imagery to create an interstellar mood. Now, if only I’d done a hit of acid before the show. |
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