>>PREVIEW
A LINE IN THE SAND
Downstage Performance Society
Written by Guillermo Verdecchia and Marcus Youssef
Directed by Simon Mallett
Runs November 16 to 26
Dancers’ Studio West
Canadian playwriting has seen its share of shit-disturbers: George Ryga, Sharon Pollock, Mansel Robinson, Guillermo Verdecchia. These dramatists aren’t afraid to confront ugly subjects – racism, sexism, torture, social injustice – and deal with them in provocative ways. And if you’ve never seen a play by any of them, it’s not surprising – most of Canada’s larger theatres, with an eye on the box office, would rather please and reassure their patrons than needle their consciences and force them to think.
It’s up to little companies with less to lose to produce these important and neglected writers. Companies like Downstage Performance Society, a new outfit that’s opening its first full season of plays with the Calgary première of Verdecchia and Marcus Youssef’s Chalmers Award-winning play, A Line in the Sand.
"Our broad mandate is to explore socially and politically important and relevant subjects," says Simon Mallett, Downstage’s founder-artistic producer and the director of A Line in the Sand. "We’re interested in creating work that is thought-provoking and more than just entertainment."
Verdecchia and Youssef’s decade-old play, first produced in Vancouver in 1995, certainly falls under that category. Set in the Middle East in 1990 in the lead-up to the Persian Gulf War, it’s about a Palestinian teenager who is brutally beaten and shot inside a Canadian Armed Forces base and the role that the youth’s former friend, a 20-year-old Canadian soldier, played in the murder. Although its locale is Qatar and its historical backdrop is Operation Desert Shield, the play was clearly inspired by the killing of 16-year-old Shidane Arone by Canadian soldiers in Somalia in 1993.
"I’d read it a number of years ago and the events at Abu Ghraib immediately reminded me of the play," says Mallett, explaining why he chose to revive it. He was struck by the way the abuses in the Iraq prison were seen as reflective of a particularly American military culture. "It seemed like everyone had forgotten what had happened in Somalia a decade earlier. I think the fact is that it goes far beyond anything you can easily put your finger on and raises larger questions about such things as Canada’s peacekeeping tradition."
For Downstage’s production, Mallett has pulled together a mix of onstage talent. Seasoned professional Joe-Norman Shaw is playing the colonel who grills the soldier over his role in the killing, young actor and recent University of Calgary graduate Kevin MacDonnell stars as the soldier and Masud Khan, a second-year student in the U of C’s drama program, has been cast as the teenager. Mallett has also been able to get some firsthand guidance from Verdecchia himself. The Argentina-born Canadian playwright, whose other award-winning works include Fronteras Americanas and The Noam Chomsky Lectures (with Daniel Brooks), taught Mallett at the University of Guelph and the young director considers him a mentor.
"While I’m really drawn to his work, a lot of what he writes about is outside my own personal experience and research can only take me so far," says Mallett, "so he’s been really great about being a resource for any questions that we have."
Mallett, who was born in England and grew up in Ontario, took his undergraduate drama degree at Guelph and is now completing a master’s in directing at the U of C. He launched Downstage last year along with several colleagues and their first season consisted of a series of four activist performance creations on different themes – the culture of fear, human rights, Canadian identity and the cyclical nature of abuse – as well as a piece presented at Theatre Junction’s Random Acts and another play that toured to the Edmonton Fringe Festival.
This year the group is mounting a regular season of plays at Dancers’ Studio West, which in addition to A Line in the Sand includes George Ryga’s Prometheus Bound and Darren O’Donnell’s Pppeeeaaaccceee. The latter is a recent work by up-and-coming Toronto playwright-actor O’Donnell, whose experimental interactive show Diplomatic Immunities will also be seen this season at Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites festival. The Ryga play, meanwhile, will be a world première.
Although Ryga, who died in 1987, gained fame as the author of the Canadian classic The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, he turned his back on mainstream theatre and, as a consequence, left a large body of work that remains largely unseen. Prometheus Bound is his free adaptation of the Aeschylus tragedy and was published in 1982.
"It’s never been produced because it’s quite strongly political and Ryga developed a name for himself as not being a safe bet," says Mallett.
However, in the current climate of social and political unrest, it could be that audiences now have an appetite for the work of outspoken Canadian playwrights like Ryga. It may not be a safe bet for Downstage, but it’s certainly a wager worth making. |
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