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Hello... Hello (a romantic satire) by U of C Dept of Drama
University Theatre
Tuesday, November 25 - Saturday, December 6

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Business and art have always had a troubled relationship. From wealthy patrons to advertising campaigns that are half pop art and half packaging, art seesaws between a need and a disdain for funding that sometimes feels more like a dysfunctional love story than a business arrangement. It was in this torrid juxtaposition that playwright Karen Hines created Hello… Hello, a whimsical but oddly unsentimental musical, currently being produced by the University of Calgary.

Set in a nameless megalopolis, the play cunningly incorporates production values that could bankrupt even a well-heeled regional company, by employing two chorus characters who describe the play’s beautiful, dying world. While a salesgirl and an advertising executive find romance at the gravesites of their lost loves, dead birds rain from the sky and exuberant musical numbers send office workers jetéing onto the streets.

A satire of consumer culture and the recognizably commercial musical itself, Hines describes her play as a “love letter to the world” in all its paradoxical beauty.

If done well, the juxtaposition of beauty with the grotesque as a performance style causes a short circuit in the brain, according to Hines, an expert on a clowning style know as bouffant, based in grotesque juxtapositions. “Anything horrific also needed to be beautiful somehow. Anything beautiful needed to have some darker component, some gravitas, some weight to it.”

Even with its relatively small cast size — two leads and two chorus characters — Hello… Hello presented exactly the kind of challenge directing masters student Jamie Dunsdon was looking for. A love story couched in the decadent musical theatre genre that simultaneously tries to strip the play to its essential qualities. The play is a complex set of contradictions.

From choreography designed to suggest dance without showing it, courtesy of Calgary director and playwright Glenda Stirling, to the lavish descriptions of unseen set pieces, Dunsdon’s production embraces the play’s nature.

“This play really resists spectacle,” says Dunsdon. “It asks the director and designers not to go crazy and show everything that is going on onstage, so the goal all along has been to find ways to suggest what’s going on onstage without showing it.

“The play takes place in the future where art is something of an extinct form, and so the idea has been that we’re doing a play for a world where there is no money for arts,” she adds. “So what sets and lights do we have? Nothing.”

In fact, the play itself owes its current form to economic necessity. It was stripped down from an earlier draft with an eight-member cast to its more elegantly minimal current form during development at the playwriting unit of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre.

“Mike Harris was in power, really stripping everything back in terms of funding to artists and kind of telling us that we should be able to make theatre with nothing,” recalls Hines. “So I tried to simulate making theatre with nothing as best as I could.”

This production marks the first time Hines has not starred as Cassandra, the retail-savvy heroine — a convention also born by necessity when mounting the production with her own company, Poschy Production. Though the piece was later picked up by the Tarragon, Hines is particularly aware of the limitations and hidden benefits of the funding limitations that created her play.

“When you have a small independent company, I believe one of the benefits is that I’m able to just be an artist while I’m going to be crappy as a businessperson and work around it,” she says. “That’s ultimate freedom. If you’re creating something where financial gain isn’t part of the necessary outcome, then it becomes something else and exists for its own sake.”

So while a cathartic resolution between funding and the arts isn’t likely to emerge anytime soon, Hines hopes that there’s still something to be gained in the contrast. “What I’ve always tried to do with my writing is go for that underbelly, the dark and the disturbing that I think we all experience every day,” she says. “Bringing light into these darker places so there can be an experience of these darker components, but also a release.

“A cleansing, that’s my ultimate aim,” she says. “To give the audience psychic colonic.”