This isn’t everyman’s Everyman. Theatre Encounter continues to twist classics.
DETAILS
Vertigo Theatre
Vertigo Theatre
Thursday, February 25 - Saturday, February 27 Tuesday, March 2 - Saturday, March 6
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Notwithstanding modern exceptions like Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater or every Tyler Perry script ever written, most theatres would be hard-pressed to find mainstream audiences for dramatized sermons. Most companies would rather play than preach.
It’s no surprise, then, that while Theatre Encounter’s upcoming production of Everyman is tapping a nearly 600-year-old morality play about man’s need for divine salvation, the company has also decided to make a few considerable changes to the material.
Like John Bunyan Pilgrim’s Progress, another famous Christian allegory, Everyman is a sequence of episodes that draw its titular character ever closer to God, encountering allegorical characters (here played by an ensemble of four actors) along the way. In this case, Everyman (co-artistic director Mike Unrau) is confronted by Death and must find a witness willing to vouch for him at his final reckoning. When allegorical figures like Kindred and Cousin fail him, he is forced to convince Good Deeds to come along.
“You’d better get your act together if you want to get to that better place,” explains Theatre Encounter co-artistic director Michael Fenton, of the play’s plot. “That message is always kind of fresh, even though it’s ancient.”
In fact, while his production strays significantly from its original, Christian roots — Hindu and Buddhist elements find their way in as well — Fenton, who also directs the production, considers the play’s religious underpinnings inseparable from the play itself.
“It’s most certainly spiritual,” he says. “I think if someone were to take this piece and try to eradicate its spirituality, you would be going down a very wrong place, not to mention pulling all the flavour out of it. The spirituality drips from it.”
The basic sequence of events that leads an allegorical man toward his righteous death remain intact, but the company hasn’t shied away from a liberal interpretation. Over a year-long-production process, the script has been changed, with parts removed and additions like parables integrated, and movements substituted in their place.
The result is an alley-style staging in a space designed to resemble a mausoleum, with a live sound artist encased in a wheat and latex sculpture, and sensor-based lighting that is manipulated dynamically both by the performers and — without its knowledge — the audience. Based more on movement than text, Theatre Encounter’s version of this anonymously authored play would certainly be alien to its original 15th century audiences.
“I think the performance itself really is contemporary art,” says Fenton. “Theatre Encounter does in a big way keep up with what is happening in the contemporary theatre art world and try to stay on the cutting edge of where things are going.”
Recognizing some of the companies’ past productions, including Caligula and The Glass Menagerie, have sometimes left modern audiences a little bewildered, Fenton notes that Everyman will feature explanatory information on the play’s history and the company’s process. Those prefaces aren’t the only place in this movement-based production. In a morality play designed to spread the church’s good word, Fenton insists on language that feels appropriately canonical — the play’s physical movements are its “physical score,” the text that remains exists as “renderings,” which are “laid on top” of the score.
But if the language that describes the process is cerebral, the effect Fenton hopes to evoke in his audience certainly isn’t. Sermons delivered by travelling players might not be in vogue, but the reactions that underpin them still are.
“We’re bringing the script across in a physical reading, which we view as stronger and more effective on a visceral level,” says Fenton. “So it comes from a much more primitive place. It’s not coming from the simple metaphor of language that’s being thrown at you, like most plays.”
Comments: 1
stephanielis wrote:
The house opens in the middle of the action, giving a sense that what is unfolding has been happening for aeons. Duncan is on the floor in a back arch, pointing to the ceiling (she holds this pose for an impressive five minutes) and singing a continuous refrain of “you know it’s true / God hates you” as Ritchie circles in stilted crawls the omniscient figure of the sound-tech (Fraser), who is not backstage, but centre-stage, manipulating loops of basso electronic sounds and live recordings of the performers’ own screams. The seating is arranged in parliamentary style, implying that the viewers of the action are also the judges of it, and each other. This feeling of judgement is highlighted by the lighting, which illuminates not only the action, but the audience as well, by a hundred individual 100 watt bulbs hanging by yellow extension cords visible in the rafters, and gathered in a Pandora’s box towards one end of the stage. Switches for these bulbs hang down from the rafters, and are activated by different figures throughout the action, responded to with awe or terror. On the ground is written in blue tape: INTO THE ENTERNAL FIRE GO WICKED ONES.
The performers wear simple suit pants, collared shirts and ties, and hooded masks of translucent cloth, all donning bare feet. Various pieces of this costume are shed throughout the action, dressing and undressing comprising much of the gestures of the actors. This is probably the most physically demanding performance I’ve seen, and demonstrates a wide range of ability within all of the performers as they throw themselves on the ground, jump, run backwards, scrape along the floor, and mimic self-torture and flagellation. Much of the movement I would describe as catatonic and spasmodic, as if motivated by outside sources. If this weren’t enough, the vocalizations employed are heart wrenching and likely torturous to the vocal cords: screaming, moaning, crying, whimpering, singing, yelling, laughing. Again, the abundance of non-linguistic elements develops a beautifully intricate sense of longing, alienation and sorrow that is relieved only at the climax when three of the performers finally touch each other in order to cut loose the suspended scythe none were able to reach on their own.
An intriguing conceptual journey for the audience, the consistent physical and vocal intensity of this performance serves to build an equivalent emotional intensity in the viewer. Although this play will appeal most to audiences who revel in experimental theatre, Fenton and Unrau provide a Director’s Note, prologue and scene descriptions in the program, which is of great assistance to those more attuned to narrative theatre. This was a thrilling theatrical experience. Five stars.
on Mar 15th, 2010 at 4:50pm Report Abuse
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