Vicki Stroich and Bob White
Any phenomenon exhibiting symptoms of the supernatural — the Madonna appearing in your souvlaki, for example — often take on a religious significance to those bearing witness. As impressive as divine souvlaki would be, Sean Dixon has this image trumped with his latest play, The Gift of the Coat, debuting next week at Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites festival: a dead hobo being carried around the world by a talking coat.
“It's a very secular play, but a lot of religious imagery has things flying through the air,” says Dixon. “When people see a dead man flying through the air, they might not know what it means, but they know it must have some kind of weight. One thing I wanted to explore was what that weight was, because the dead man in the coat isn't supposed to be any sort of manifestation of a religious vision.”
The play begins following the death of Ned, a homeless man who had recently been given a coat by a charmingly befuddled philanthropist, Riddeau. Of course, in the kingdom of hobo, wearing an expensive jacket is about the same as painting “mug me” on your back in big, red letters. Ned awakens sometime after his inevitable murder and — after remarking on his own cadaverous state and apparent possession of a magic coat in an oddly nonplussed fashion — begins a whimsical journey across the world, literally in the arms of his new companion.
“Sean's work is really imaginative,” says Vicki Stroich, ATP's dramaturge and programmer of the playRites festival. “Many people who read his work admire it greatly, but look at it with a sense of puzzlement. It's a bit esoteric, but in the theatre, a lot of people’s stumbling block is, ‘How do you depict a dead man flying in a coat?’ Which is unfortunate because, to me, what's so beautiful about theatre — and certainly about Sean's work — is that it inspires imagination.”
Sometimes Dixon makes imagination necessary as well. Though a dead man being hauled around the globe by a wisecracking coat is certainly an interesting plot device, it's also incredibly difficult to stage. Dixon's longtime directorial collaborator, Amiel Gladstone, met the challenge happily, coating the stage in a reflective material and limiting the ever-changing set to some stairs off to one side. Relying upon lighting and sound wizardry to fill in the gaps left by the minimalist design, Gladstone is nevertheless confident that his audience will still be able to follow the show's myriad set changes.
“They say they're flying. With some finessing and enough suggestion, the audience easily knows they're flying,” says Gladstone. “It requires them to stand onstage and make them feel like they're suspended in the air. Of course, it's nice to talk about all of this stuff in preview. It's all working great in rehearsal, but we haven't had it in front of an audience yet, and the audience is a really great teacher.”
Every year, the playRites festival prèmieres five new Canadian plays with the mandate of giving them the “best possible first performance.” After the festival, many of its headlining productions find their way across the rest of the country — and other countries, in some happy instances. Far from being intimidated by Dixon's sometimes-demanding set pieces, Stroich sees playRites as a venue to encourage exactly that kind of bold experimentation. Pairing Dixon with Gladstone, then, is just one of the ways Stroich ensures the performance's creative success.
“I wrote a play about a couple who run off after a personal tragedy,” Dixon recollects. “They find this old-fashioned railroad jigger in the woods, and they hop on and just take off. Because of that particular stage requirement, I was never able to get a production. Then I started working with Amiel, and he said, 'Let us just build one out of wood. It won't be a working jigger, but it will create that notion in the audience's mind.' He set my imagination free, to a certain extent, allowing me to depict these things that you might not always see onstage. I guess I'm also trying to up the stakes a little bit and throw new challenges at him.”
Dixon's adventurous, creative approach to playwriting is part of what made The Courtship (a “brief new work” he submitted to playRites in 2000) an ATP darling, and he is someone Stroich has always had her eye on to produce more formally. This year's festival was the perfect opportunity. “There's so much nurturing and support for new plays here,” says Gladstone.
“I think it offers a real sense of the diversity of talent and ideas that people are able to be exposed to at a playwright's festival,” says Stroich. “You get a chance — on both stages — to really experience the excitement and the energy of that performance. It's that excitement of ‘the new.’ I think we're all really excited about that — to be premiering something and putting it up for the first time.”
