| It looks like novelist and visual artist Douglas Coupland has decided to become a triple threat and try his hand at theatre, too. And to help him do that, he’s turned to the experts – namely, the Royal Shakespeare Company and One Yellow Rabbit.
Coupland is creating a solo performance, September 10, 2001, which will be directed by OYR’s Blake Brooker for Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company. It will receive its tryout in Calgary at the Big Secret Theatre in September, then go on to have its official world première as a production of the RSC’s first annual New Work Festival at Stratford-Upon-Avon in England in October.
The monologue, which will open OYR’s 2004 - 2005 season, is a personal view of North American society and culture in the decade before 9-11, written and performed by Coupland, who became the unofficial spokesman for Generation X with his debut 1991 novel of that title. Exact dates of the run will be announced later.
Coupland isn’t the only big name gracing the Rabbit playbill next season. Laurie Anderson, American queen of the musical avant-garde, has deigned to appear at the 19th annual High Performance Rodeo. She’ll give a one-night-only performance of her latest, An Untitled Work, during the festival, which runs January 5 to 30, 2005.
The Rodeo will also be the scene of OYR’s three-way collaboration with Dutch and German theatre companies on a trio of works revisiting the Canadian liberation of the Netherlands during the Second World War. The project, timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the liberation, is provisionally (and rather dryly) entitled Liberators, Occupants and Population. It will go on to play Berlin and Maastricht after its Calgary debut.
Along with Coupland’s show, two other solo works will be part of the regular season.
Rabbit ensemble member Andy Curtis, who wowed ’em in Edmonton last season with his performance in Shadow Theatre’s Underneath the Lintel, will let the home audience see what all the noise was about when OYR brings the production to the Big Secret from October 12 to 30. Curtis stars in Glen Berger’s one-man comic mystery as an obsessed ex-librarian on the hunt for someone who returned a book 113 years overdue.
And Rick (MacHomer) Miller, who played to packed houses at this year’s Rodeo with his serio-comic look at Christ, will be back for an encore. Bigger Than Jesus runs from February 23 to March 6, 2005. Those who suffered through Mel Gibson’s gorefest should know that Miller’s take on JC is shorter, smarter and funnier. And it isn’t in Aramaic.
Also back for a (long-delayed) encore is the infernally funny OYR-Plaid Tongued Devils musical In Klezskavania. Originally produced in 1998, when some obscure critic at the Calgary Herald called it "a tasty tidbit of demonic lunacy," the over-the-top klezmer-ska-rock opera gets a second ghoulish go-round next spring, from April 5 to 23.
Spring will also see OYR co-hosting the fourth annual Solocentric Festival, which takes the stage in May. In addition to their local season, the Rabbits will hit the road in 2005 with a couple of popular items from their repertoire. A new production of Denise Clarke’s avian love story Featherland visits Victoria’s Belfry Theatre in February, while Brooker and David Rhymer’s surreal Beat musical Dream Machine plays another Toronto engagement in March at Theatre Passe Muraille.
For more information on the season or to purchase play passes, call the OYR office at 264-3224 or visit www.oyr.org. |
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