>>PREVIEW
RE:GENERATION
THEATREBoom
Runs until June17
Motel (Epcor Centre)
Four years ago, its founders emerging as graduates of Mount Royal College’s theatre program, THEATREboom was a young company – it still might be. The company’s members are, after all, all less than 30 years old, creating and staging new work that has included a live mockumentary and even a short, sitcom-style look at a teenaged Jesus, crushing on Mary Magdalene.
In their latest production, Re:Generation, the company is acting its age, examining the generation of its members and the wider world that shapes their lives.
Growing out of a staged reading in 2005’s playRites Festival – originally titled simply The Generations Project – the show’s current incarnation represents the culmination of a five-week collaborative effort and a further month-and-a-half of consolidation.
As the "blueprint creator" for Re:Generation, Jason Patrick Rothery has been responsible for unifying stories including personal angst over the show’s creation, and the more general topic of anal sex, into a lucid piece. It’s a process the 27-year-old playwright says has been a sort of re-education in playwriting itself.
"At the tail end of this, ending the collaboration, going into the writing process, we were kind of tearing our hair out for a week and a half, going ‘Narrow, narrow, narrow – what is the central thesis?’ Then, in the middle of the night I had an epiphany, which I hope is an epiphany and not a huge mistake," he says. "It seemed like we were treating the vastness of this topic as an obstacle to overcome, as opposed to a benefit, because so many ideas have come up in rehearsal. What if we make an attempt to touch on as many as possible?"
"There was a sort of debate – where is the beginning, middle and end? – and Jason made a point that in other forms of art there isn’t necessarily a point," adds 24-year-old collaborator and performer Kelly Dawson. "If you look at a painting, you’re not sitting there and critiquing, ‘Why did this apple go there, what is he staring at?’ The audience can make its own decision of where the through line is, without (THEATREboom) spoon-feeding a beginning, middle and end. It’s not pointless."
Like the mash-up of biblical figures and pop culture shown on the production’s poster shows, Re:Generation is a broad, stream-of-consciousness meditation on THEATREboom’s generation, addressing in three parts, à la ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, "that which we inherit," "that which we have," and "that which we leave behind." For Rothery, while these themes may be large, they are still very much a part of the personal experiences of his generation.
"The saying ‘write what you know,’ I find, is mostly misinterpreted to write your experiences, write your life," he says. "I don’t think it’s meant to be taken literally. Draw on your experiences, make it personal – it doesn’t have to be about you, but you can imbue it with a sense of yourself."
Large or small, the danger in personalizing any story always lies in its potential to become inaccessible – a secret code sans the cereal box decoder ring. Certainly, Re:Generation’s actors and creators, including young theatre professionals like Dark Forest Theatre’s artistic director, Aaron Coates, are shaped not only by their generation, but also their unique personal experiences. But though the formative stories offered in the show’s collaborative period represent highly personal accounts, the collective result is an attempt by a young company to find something universal in a concept as broad as a generation.
"The personal stories that were the little snippets used in the show were used because when they were performed, they affected something in everyone," says Dawson. "It wasn’t isolating one person’s situation or experience, because what they went through when they performed it, it touched on what so many of us were experiencing, what so many of us were going through." |
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