>>PREVIEW
MURDER IN GREEN MEADOWS
Runs until February 18
Vertigo Mystery Theatre
The Playhouse (Tower Centre)
The last time Kevin McKendrick brought suspense to a Calgary stage, he directed a grotesque parade of humiliation in Carol Churchill’s Far Away, the first production at the freshly minted Grand Theatre. In Vertigo Mystery Theatre’s production of Douglas Post’s Murder in Green Meadows, McKendrick trades absurdist horror for an upscale suburb, replacing an abstracted world of total war for the boxed-set elegance of a wealthy home.
Directing his first murder mystery for Vertigo, McKendrick notes that though the subject matter varies significantly between the two plays, the need for specific reality is no different in a suburban murder mystery from a haunting, abstracted horror.
"If you don’t spend enough time developing characters it doesn’t matter how well you can speak the text," he says. "But if you can get that to work where the stage business is looking and landing on the eyes and ears of the audience in a believable way, then you can really scare the bejeezus out of them."
Playing on the trope of the driven middle class as a convenient mask for darker desires, Green Meadows takes its macabre twists from the deceptions of Carolyn and Thomas Symons, a bourgeois couple whose initial affability belies a long and troubled history. Though the Symons’s initial encounters with their neighbors, Jeff and Joan, begin with the usual suburban pleasantries, their pathological tendencies soon begin to manifest themselves. Again.
Having designed the neighbourhood into which they have retreated, Thomas’s controlling nature extends in a sinister, hidden fashion that McKendrick sees as an extension of a professional world built on a kind of institutionalized, pathological greed.
"There’s almost a kind of unique moral code that seems to be aligned with new wealth," he says.
In trying to instil genuine fear in an audience without reducing his cast to caricatures, McKendrick appreciates that realism is essential to portraying characters driven to commit abhorrent crimes. Whether new money gives rise to an entirely new set of morals or the affluent simply become addicted to the euphoria of control, instilling his cast with a sense of their characters’ vulnerabilities and motivations is as essential to the play’s suspense as its twists.
"These characters who are evil, they’re not born that way, they don’t appear that way because of the business deals they’ve had. Events have had to transpire that give them a predisposition to that kind of behaviour," says McKendrick. "So that’s part of the truth of the character as much as anything else – where’s that character’s vulnerability? One or more characters you may find despicable, but they’re also incredibly vulnerable and you do start to understand what might have contributed to their behaviour. And that’s a key thing that takes something from being theatrical to reflective of real life."
Calgary theatre has never hesitated to select plays that call on the fears of an increasingly affluent city that overflows with affluence and conspicuous consumption. Lindsay Burns’s recent production of Dough: The Politics of Martha Stewart, for one, explicitly illustrated consumption’s toll, if not as violently as Post’s suburban nightmare. But for McKendrick, the dysfunction of consumption is a point that cannot be overstated at home.
"I don’t think we can hear about it too much," he says. "Calgary is so dominated by a corporate class. It’s not a bad thing, but it is what we are."
Following Green Meadows, McKendrick will tackle the dystopic Pillowman with Ground Zero, a dark turn whose paranoid world hearkens back to the unease of Far Away. In corporate Calgary and fictional worlds, McKendrick is certainly seeking out darkness.
"I’ll be ready to open a vein by February," he jokes. |
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