>>PREVIEW
THIS IS A PLAY
Opens May 15
BD&P Emerging Directors Program
Lunchbox Theatre
(Bow Valley Square)
In an industry built largely on community, where audience members search for familiar names on their programs, it isn’t surprising to see one of Calgary’s oldest theatre companies setting its sights on raising an emerging artist’s profile. With its BD&P Emerging Directors Program, Lunchbox Theatre aims to provide the exposure so essential to new artists, as well as presenting a capping production for the season.
Last season, Lunchbox initiated a pilot version of the program, with local actor Valerie Planche directing The Duplex. In its second year, the program has been modified to allow its emerging director a freer hand in selecting the work presented with the resources of a professional company.
Chosen by a selection jury, this year’s emerging director is Simon Mallett, whose work in the community has already made him a fixture as the artistic producer of the Downstage Performance Society, a company presenting socially conscious theatre he founded as a graduate student at the University of Calgary. From its beginnings at the Calgary One Act Play Festival, the company’s current season is closing with the premiere of prominent Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock’s most recent play, Man Out of Joint. So, with three seasons already past for the emerging company and Mallet’s local directing experience demonstrated at the helm of most of those same shows, it might almost seem that Mallett is already a little too big for the "emerging" label. Not so, says Lunchbox’s artistic director, Rona Waddington.
"A director can get pigeonholed by working repeatedly with the same company or on the same type of material," she explains. "Most of (Mallett’s) experience has been self-generated. The BD&P program offers Simon an opportunity to hone his directing skills, without having to run around worrying about eighty other producer-related things at the same time."
Prior to the limited, three-day run of the program’s ultimate production, Mallet will be honing his skills with cast members Jennie Esdale, Karen Johnson-Diamond and Evan Rothery, as well as designers Caitlin Ferguson and Jason Pouliot. The result will be a play from one of Canada’s leading playwrights, Daniel McIvor, sending up Canada’s theatrical scene with This is a Play.
First produced by dad a kamera in 1992 and since published along with another of McIvor’s one-act plays, Never Swim Alone, This is a Play also happens to be one of the most inventively elegant comedies in the Canadian canon. Even with only a single act, its satirical jabs at theatre make the play an excellent selection as one of the final productions for Calgary’s mainstage 2006/2007 season.
The play begins as a play within a play called A Stranger Among Us, a tedious bit of Tennessee Williams-esque Americana revolving somewhat ambiguously around three heads of lettuce. But before the audience can get a true sense of the play’s action and lose interest in it completely, things begin to break down.
The fourth wall ceases to exist. The actors stop reciting their lines, and instead spout their inner monologues in all their conceited, kvetching glory in the most impressive – and certainly the most challenging – aspect of the play.
The actors may not be reading A Stranger Among Us, but that play within a play never ceases. Instead, the characters continue through the motions of that play even as they complain about the convoluted plot and their costars’ obvious lack of talent, allowing McIvor to take more than a few pot shots at every aspect of modern theatre.
Prima donna actresses and vacant leading men are both targets, but so are directors more interested in showing off their background in dance than in communicating a story, and playwrights who mistake abstraction for profundity. All of which could be seen as shaky ground if This Is A Play weren’t such a virtuoso piece of writing, mixing light-hearted humour with pointed jabs at theatre culture.
So, with no small measure of appropriate self-reference, Lunchbox Theatre will close the season with a play concerned with the world of play making, with Simon Mallett taking those same reins as a mainstage director. Emerging director or otherwise, Mallett now has the chance to sink his teeth into the same industry he represents. And if cutting his teeth in political theatre has been any indication, the result will have bite. |
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