>>PREVIEW
INSOMNIA
Opens October 10
Theatre Junction and Necessary Angel Theatre Company
The Grand (Theatre Junction)
For playwright and actor Daniel Brooks, insomnia is a potent metaphor for the urban condition. Like coffee, culture provides a constant, stimulating drip straight to our brains.
"There’s a difficulty in processing as much information as we receive," he says. "The amount of strangeness and instability in so many of the institutions so central to our lives, family, politics, property, living close with people. And also the ubiquity of advertising, a constant hunger or fire of hunger that’s being stoked."
It is in this world, and the knowledge that a child must live in it, that Brooks and co-writer Guillermo Verdecchia have set Insomnia – a dark, dreamlike play that toys with the notions of family, society and reality.
Co-produced by Calgary’s Theatre Junction and Toronto’s Necessary Angel Theatre Company (of which Brooks is artistic director), Insomnia is Brooks’ second collaboration with Theatre Junction after the company’s Betty-winning production of the playwright’s The Good Life in 2003. Remounting the production more than nine years after its 1997 premiere, transplanting the production whole before its run at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times, Insomnia places Brooks himself onstage as the play’s deeply lost protagonist, John F.
Where his Disney executive brother represents a creature in touch with the world around him, John struggles with his responsibilities as a parent, his inert marriage and the interminable mess of the world around him – a rambling series of thoughts that fail to resolve into the opus he dreams of. He wanders aimlessly, a sleepwalking insomniac. Even his efforts to consider the needs of his child, Lily, can be seen as another symptom of John’s search for meaning in his own life.
"I think people who have children often want the child to be happy, an instinct for the child to have a happiness that they don’t have," says Brooks, himself the father of two girls.
But while Lily’s presence is essential for the survival of John’s loveless relationship with his common-law wife, Gwen, one of the play’s central ironies is that Lily is a non-character, only referenced peripherally in the way that some call for society to "think of the children!" It is only in an appalling moment where the sickness of the world invades John’s family that Lily’s presence becomes a palpable reality.
For Brooks, John’s social sickness and the seemingly absent role of his child are not incompatible, but inextricably linked.
"(John) has a very healthy instinct to care for his child," he says. "He definitely listens to his own thoughts with a little too much attention, has read too many books in his assessment of the world, has developed a really strong, healthy paranoia and has a real true understanding of the evil that lurks behind everyone’s eyes."
Brooks notes that the inspiration for Insomnia was due in no small part to a previous collaboration with Verdecchia, The Noam Chomsky Lectures, a non-fictional play based on the writings of one of the 20th century’s most prominent leftist thinkers. Of particular interest to Brooks was the notion of self-interest, leading groups of people toward what seem objectively to be horrible, even inhuman ends.
"One of the ideas of writing this play was taking some of the political ideas we were playing with in that play and making them very personal," he says. "I wanted to take those ideas and put them in a fictional character, (to see) what they might do to him."
It is in this fictional world, seen through a dreamlike haze as John and Gwen transition from scene to scene, that Brooks and Verdecchia revel in the play’s ability to evoke its own reality. Just as John’s social overload forces him into insomnia and obsession, Insomnia’s narrative is able to create a world where the dream itself is accepted as reality.
"There is no child, we’re just a bunch of actors in a room, so it’s all in the mind," says Brooks. "It’s all a dream, no matter what we call it. It’s about how much of the tremendous amount of our lives we create."
"Of course there are realities," he adds. "There are real things, there is a real material universe that scientists have been trying to describe for thousands of years. But we create so much in our minds." |
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