>>PREVIEW
AN OAK TREE
Runs January 17 to 20
News From Nowhere
High Performance Rodeo
Engineered Air Theatre (Epcor Centre)
A father believes an oak tree to be his dead daughter. A boy decides to raise his arm over his head for thirty years. For U.K. writer and performer Tim Crouch, the absurd and surreal are just the mundane twitches signifying life. Watching his children struggle with their toques and jackets to face a New York winter, Crouch experiences the pangs of surrealism.
"I hadn’t been in an airplane until I was 18," he says. "This generation gets to fly all over the place. I have a seven-year-old boy who has been to New York six times."
For two weeks, his family develops claustrophobia in an apartment in the West Village. The children sleep on the floor, while Crouch and his wife huddle on a cot designed to accommodate a family of gerbils. This is just like camping, he assures everybody. Moments like these are more surreal for Crouch than what appears in his work.
"Surreal? In a way, I suppose," he says. "I still think my plays work within reality. I place everything firmly in the story with the conviction that it can convey anything you want."
Crouch will soon leave the comforts of New York to import his brand of absurd theatre to Calgary’s High Performance Rodeo in the form of his new show, An Oak Tree. Inspired by a painting by Michael Craig-Martin of the same name, the play follows the emotional collision of a grieving father and a stage hypnotist. After killing a girl in a car accident, the hypnotist loses his hypnotic abilities. The father clings to an oak tree, believing it to be his daughter. At a comeback performance for the hypnotist, the father volunteers to be hypnotized, neither man aware of his connection to the other.
While Crouch plays the hypnotist, a new actor steps into the role of the father without reading the script beforehand. For the Calgary performance, upstart theatre group THEATREboom join Crouch. This is more than just improv, as these actors take audiences on a journey of discovery.
"It’s not just a trick. It’s the best way this story can be told," says Crouch. "Oak Tree has sort of an Oprah-esque storyline about loss, guilt and grief. It needed to have a big emotional heart or it becomes a rather dry working of a device."
Crouch uses the framework of hypnosis to subvert the subtext of the theatre experience to emphasize the audience. Nothing gets in the way of that emotional heart – the minimal set consists of a few chairs and sound equipment on a trolley. Only the flicker of familiarity or a suggestion of a memory is needed to connect with people.
"Audiences know they’re in a theatre, but despite that, they can still be transported," claims Crouch. "The oak tree acknowledges the preparedness in an audience to be taken by an act of suggestion. This play constantly tells the audience, ‘This isn’t true, I’m not really this and he’s not really that.’ It just acknowledges a fundamental human response.
"With the smallest thing, we can transport an audience to somewhere else or move them to tears by things that are not true," he adds. "That’s exactly what happens in hypnosis. You know you’re not Elvis Presley, yet you start singing ‘Are you Lonesome Tonight’ and shaking your hips. The imagination is stronger than the will."
Crouch believes the theatre brings the audience’s experience onto the stage, to make them complicit in the work. "We want to be drugged," he declares, referring to the power of television and film to lull an audience into reality. "I am drugging my audience, but in a different way." |
Copyright ©2007 FFWD. All rights reserved.