>>PREVIEW
SPYMONKEY: BLESS
Runs until March 31
One Yellow Rabbit
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
From the Catholic Church to sin-soaked Las Vegas and back again, European clown troupe Spymonkey has certainly taken the long road in staging its latest play. Returning to One Yellow Rabbit’s stage after last year’s Cooped, Spymonkey’s collection of pan-European clowns is finding comedy in the church’s canon, lining up a collection of saints as played by an impromptu prison theatre company in Bless.
Following a two-and-a-half-year stint in Cirque de Soleil’s hypersexual cabaret Zumanity, Spymonkey’s play on the lives of saints is as appropriate, or at least as refreshingly removed a performance as any. With saints for concepts ranging from "abandoned people" (Flora of Cordoba) to "zoos" (Francis of Assisi), the list of canonized saints offered Spymonkey a broad range of comic springboards that immediately clicked with the four-member troupe. While Petra Massey is Jewish and Toby Park is an atheist, the company’s remaining members (Aitor Basauri and Stephan Kreiss) are Catholic, a majority that made the subject of Catholic saints seem more palatable. After all, says Massey, they’re only having fun.
"We never set out to offend," she says. "Our work is pure clown, set out to entertain. This show is slightly more satirical than any show we’ve done, just because we were exploring lots of different genres."
In the end, the troupe selected five saints as the subjects of the vignettes that form the play-within-a-play that is Bless – Saints Bernadette (sickness), Joan of Arc (prisoners), Maria de Guadalupe (The New World), Catherine (fire) and John the Baptist (surprise: baptism).
Like the first two shows of Spymonkey’s monosyllabic "Murdston" trilogy (Stiff, Cooped), the show is framed by the recurring character of Mr. Murdston (Park). A self-promoting impresario, Mr. Murdston is this time struggling with a cast of prisoners who hope variously to escape, publicly deny their crimes or burn the audience alive, all while performing their saint-centered vignettes. Honed during preview performances in Switzerland and England, Spymonkey’s collaboration is an ongoing process of audience observation and rewriting by director Cal McCrystal, amplifying the moments that turn religious foolishness into solid laughs.
Audiences hoping to see more of Mr. Murdston’s vain excess can also expect more of the nude cavorting that had Cooped’s audiences rolling in the aisles when the Spymonkey troupe emerged on stage wearing little more than some liberally applied greenery.
"Yes, there’s lots of nudity in (Bless)," she says. "I can’t help but have people laugh at my body because it’s short and stubby."
It’s comedy, she says, that – unlike the erotic overtones of Zumanity – retains a kind of playful, almost childlike innocence.
"(A child) wouldn’t see anything naughty or bad about nudity. It’s like a child just wanting to play like a child running around naked," she says. "That’s why in Cooped no one ever got offended by it, and we got the biggest laughs for that (nude ballet) scene, and was in its way quite beautiful."
Spymonkey had originally hoped to begin touring Bless four years ago, but was declined funding by Arts Council England because, according to Spymonkey’s announcement in 2002, the council’s assessors felt that "there was no intellectual value to the work." Four years later, the troupe has added to its existing notoriety with its clown creations in Zumanity and has received funding from the current Arts Council, which Massey believes has become more open to street and circus performance.
Appropriately, as the troupe prepares to mount a religious vignette play that is witnessing its own belated resurrection, Massey sees the troupe’s own series of disappointments and successes as a blessing.
"We went to Vegas and had the most fantastic time, and it made the company stronger and bigger," she says, admitting that, "at the time, it hurt.
"Had they given us the grant we never would have gone," she adds. "So I believe very much there’s a reason everything happened." |
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