>>PREVIEW
CITY FARM SEED
Runs until August 5
Bit Part Productions
Motel (Epcor Centre)
Some partnerships were simply meant to be. Like the seminal vesicles and the prostate, Jon Lachlan Stewart and Ella Simon have combined to create a single, sticky double bill that takes aim at that ever-essential fluid: semen.
Titled City Farm Seed, Stewart and Simon’s show is a mingling largely of coincidence after both writer and performers met in Vancouver’s Studio 58 and found, over a cup of coffee, that their two shows seemed to be dealing with the same gooey subject matter. Now coming to Calgary after a run in Edmonton’s Living Room Playhouse, the two solo shows are offering two very different views, replete with original movement and choreography, on one of the most simple urges of all.
As its name suggests, City Farm Seed divides its seminal musings between urban and rural environments, with Stewart’s Urbantility using the spires of the city and Simon’s Spunk’d employing the lower, if equally phallic, extremities of bulls. In Stewart’s world, hypochondriac construction worker David Grave wrestles with his girlfriend’s desire to have a child, even as he is plagued by visions of an infertile future. It’s a bleak vision that Stewart has found in his own life, contemplating the fate of abandoned nocturnal emissions.
"For me, sperm is this whole life thing that we have, and I just got obsessed about it," he says. "I always think in a sick way, my head goes to masturbation. I keep thinking that each of them is a little life going away. Now think of thousands of households a night. We’re not exactly fresh flowering Christians out to have children."
But, where Stewart envisions billions of determined sperm swimming toward the drain, Simon’s show addresses an industry where those same swimmers are far too valuable to be left to dry out in handkerchiefs. In Spunk’d, a spurned Jenna tries to get back at her bull semen salesman ex-boyfriend by romancing his prized bull, only to find that she has actually fallen in love. It’s a parallel to Edward Albee’s own tale of beast love (coincidentally part of Alberta Theatre Projects’ upcoming season), The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, that Simon says was originally unintentional. But, while the subject of a woman falling in love with a prize semen-producing Hereford is certainly provocative, the show’s most graphic content returns to the more base concerns of semen.
"I think just talking about semen, discussing it in a frank way, the collection of and the distribution of, can be kind of graphic and shocking," says Simon.
She adds that, while the particulars of animal husbandry are themselves a touchy subject, the physicality of the act is just as contentious. "I tried to incorporate a lot of movement that is pretty abstract," she says. "Sometimes that abstract movement ends up being more graphic because a person’s imagination can take them wherever they want to go." |
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