Yet, in Ground Zero Theatre and Hit & Myth Productions, something new is being added to the paradigm. From partnerships on Urinetown and The Pillowman last season to a completely shared slate this year, the two companies are producing work with a model that’s genuinely unique in Calgary. Unlike the city’s alternatives to bigger houses like Theatre Calgary and Alberta Theatre Projects — they’re opening large.
Last season, the nascent partnership between Ground Zero and Hit & Myth staged Urinetown, an ambitious send-up of musical theatre that blended dystopic song and dance. Beginning as an off-Broadway phenomenon inspired by its writer’s experience at a European pay toilet, Urinetown’s story of a society controlled by a pay toilet monopoly proved to have all the staying power of the same musicals it spoofed.
It’s no small coincidence, then, that the first production in Ground Zero and Hit & Myth’s entirely co-produced season is itself a musical. Nodding to the “commercial alternativism” so near and dear to the heart of Hit & Myth’s artistic producer, Joel Cochrane, The Full Monty is a production with the built-in draw of two considerable entertainment forces: comic male nudity and Hollywood credibility.
Based on the 1997 film of the same name, the 2000 Broadway adaptation deposits the story’s out-of-work, blue-collar characters into Buffalo, New York, while retaining the essential, titular striptease that draws both the play’s fictitious female audience and (ideally) the audiences of the production itself.
With a cast of 17 directed by Kevin McKendrick, who last collaborated with the companies on their co-production of The Pillowman, it’s an ambitious production with the scale of a show mounted by a large theatre company. Despite the relatively spare production slate for the season, the partnership between newcomer Hit & Myth and Ground Zero, now in its 11th season, is set to stake out space on the mainstage.
Lest audiences presume that it’s only singing and dancing genitalia that the two companies are prepared to tackle, the season’s second production lays any doubts to rest with the return of CockTales.
In a season where Lindsay Burns will take a critical look at the ostensibly revolutionary Vagina Monologues with her own Vajayjay Monologues, there’s definite symmetry in the latest incarnation of Ground Zero’s CockTales series, a collection of penis-centred monologues “conceived” in no small way as a response to the gender exclusivity of Eve Ensler’s vaginal musings. Adding a third incarnation to the original CockTales production (2001) and its sexually egalitarian sequel Cocktales 2: Mr. and Ms. Conceptions (2002), this third go is the brainchild of Sean Bowie, Ground Zero artistic director Ryan Luhning and Eugene Stickland, and will bring together 14 monologues drawing from new submissions and from CockTales 2.
In addition to his work with CockTales, playwright Stickland will end a four-year hiatus with the première of his first original play since 2004’s All Clear. After serving for 10 years as ATP’s playwright-in-residence, Stickland’s departure from the position also marked his last collaboration with ATP artistic director Bob White, who will be directing the Ground Zero/Hit & Myth co-production.
All these coincidences are then brought to a head under a play titled Writer’s Block that will also see Stickland’s return to comedy — the genre that has defined all his work save his last. Imagining a playwright whose failure to produce work leads him to try and claim worker’s compensation (a successful bilking that turns sour when the condition of his compensation cheque is that he never write again), the play also brings one final note of appropriate irony —Stickland’s latest is also the season’s last.
In a season tackling genitals and Eugene Stickland, Ground Zero and Hit & Myth are walking forward, hand in hand. Will they find synergy? Best practices? Will they leverage their core competencies? Only the season will tell.
