>>PREVIEW
MAN OUT OF JOINT
Opens May 10
Downstage Performance Society
The Studio, Vertigo Theatre (Tower Centre)
In the Downstage Performance Society and Sharon Pollock, Calgary has a pair of obsessions that seem inevitably to have met in the middle. The former, a company mandated to produce politically provocative theatre, and the latter, one of Calgary’s premier playwrights and an agitator in her own right, are both drawn to issues. Now, with the up-and-coming company premiering Pollock’s latest play, Man Out of Joint, the two are confronting two subjects of contemporary obsession: 9/11 and the prisoner abuses at Guantánamo Bay.
The collaboration between the two began when, after attending an Alberta Playwrights Network workshop facilitated by Pollock, Mallett invited her to attend his company’s production of Guillermo Verdecchia and Marcus Youssef’s Line in the Sand. After the show, Pollock outlined a few projects rattling in her head that she was considering workshopping: one about radical Second World War journalist Agnes Smedley and another about the American prison at Guantánamo Bay.
"At which point," says Mallett, "the conversation quickly escalated on my end. Workshop? Let’s produce it."
Given its unabashed social bent, Downstage appealed to Pollock’s own view of theatre as inherently political. With two Governor-General’s awards to her credit (Blood Relations and Doc), and a list of charged political works like Fair Liberty’s Call, a historical commentary on the Maritime Loyalists as another chapter in American political history, Pollock’s most recent foray into the political joins the work of a career. For Downstage, with a production including 14 cast members, most of whom remain on stage persistently, the show is the company’s largest to date and a considerable, perhaps even identity-defining, coup.
Woven between the stories of Guantánamo detainees, whose presence remains explicit throughout the production, the central arc of Man Out of Joint focuses on Joel Gianelli, a Canadian lawyer fighting with the persistent pangs of his conscience as a variety of inconsistencies mount regarding 9/11 and his latest client, Ed Leland. Together with the detainees’ accounts of their torture and the persistent reminders by Joel’s late father of the Canadian internment of Italian-Canadians during the Second World War, the play is a potent political statement on power and its myriad abuses. For both Pollock and Mallett, theatre’s ability to intimately engage its audience remains the only medium for the message.
"I don’t want to write a tract, I want to tell a story," says Pollock. "And inherent in the story some questions arise, and to me that’s politics in theatre. I’m not interested in those opinion pieces, which tend to be more about the person writing the piece than the opinion, so I can’t imagine doing anything except theatre in terms of that politic."
It was Pollock’s existing interest in various quagmires of current American politics, rather than the creation of a new play, that spurred her research, with resources including The Center for Constitutional Rights’ report on the torture of the Guantánamo Bay prisoners and contact with Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati, counsel for the Toronto terror suspects and Joel’s archetype. In fact, nearly all of the play’s dialogue is taken directly from interviews with detainees published in the CCR report.
"Sharon mentioned to me at various points, she was convinced she was being put on some sort of watch list," says Mallett.
Perhaps one of the play’s most provocative elements is the explicit inclusion of conspiracy theories linking the Unites States directly to the September 11 attacks themselves. In fact, one of the play’s central characters, Ed Leland, is based on Delmar Vreeland, said by some to have submitted an advanced and accurate prediction of the attacks in a sealed envelope. It’s a theory that Pollock doesn’t entirely dismiss.
"Personally, I believe (the American government) must have known something was going to happen," she says, "that they knew something was in the works, and it suited their plans to let it happen.
"Really, I don’t think it’s important what I believe," she adds. "I didn’t write the play to get (those ideas) out there. If you are confronted with that kind of information, which may or may not be valid, do you take a path of wilful ignorance, or what is an appropriate action? That to me is the dilemma that sits around so much of what happens. Do we indulge in a wilful ignorance, or are we compelled to say, ‘I’m going to do something about it.’"
That audience confrontation is essential to Pollock’s defence of a production whose focus may seem extremely grounded in the present, in a political reality that may still change. With the Democrats already cracking the aspirations of neo-conservatives who had hoped to build a lasting dynasty, for example, partisan attacks on the Bush administration have become de rigeur. But with the play’s references to our own country’s internment travesties, Pollock notes that the reality of abusive power relationships is not confined to a particular era. As both Downstage and Pollock prepare to premiere a work essentially connected to both, Pollock sees no shortage in sight for the kinds of social abuses that have fuelled both company and playwright.
"This is not to say, ‘Look what’s happening at Guantánamo, look what led us to this, look what Bush and his neo-conservatives have done,’" she adds. "To me, the play is about how we ordinary folk are at the mercy of power and war mongers, and that this happens over and over and over again. So to me it’s in no way dependent on, if the Democrats went in and took (American troops) out of Iraq – to me the play is still topical.
"I wish I believed it would become an irrelevant thing." |
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