Peepshow
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Theatre Junction Grand
Wednesday, November 14 - Saturday, November 17
More in: Theatre
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Postmodernism (pomo) has developed a kind of nasty gravity. In an academic setting, eyes roll at the relativist wanker whose views haven't developed beyond a simple portmanteau of more complicated ways of thinking. In a creative setting, eyes roll at the lazy writer who glues on superfluous genre appendages in a desperate grab for originality. In a more general setting, eyes roll at the wanker who uses words like “portmanteau” and “superfluous” to describe a relatively simple concept.
Like any philosophy or creative tack, pomo can be utterly uninteresting if done for its own sake. Though she'd never state it so blandly, Marie Brassard understands this sentiment implicitly, and it can be seen in nearly her entire catalogue of work. From 1990's Polygraph, which used the stage like a movie screen to create faux-camera angles, to the upcoming Peepshow, which uses disparate sound and visual elements to evoke a sense of surrealism, Brassard's work is undoubtedly what's thought of as “postmodern.” She'd just never sink to billing it so.
“I've always been interested in the new, in experimenting,” says Brassard. “Working with other (like-minded) people, we were always looking for new ways to renew the theatrical form. We just wanted to experiment with contemporary ways of putting things onstage. It's just evolution. It wasn't like, ‘oh, look, I found a trick.’ I'm an adventurous person. I like to explore new ways of doing things.”
Brassard's latest, Peepshow, presented by Theatre Junction, is a series of character vignettes connected thematically, but also through the impressively complicated sound design. Brassard plays men, women and children — even multiple characters simultaneously, and their voices boom (or whisper) through the loudspeakers, directly to the audience. “I think by emphasizing sound, I can have a very intimate relationship with people in the audience,” she says. “I think I can be a lot more subtle than I could be without the use of sound. It changes the quality of the performance. I can whisper in the ears of people. I can be very delicate, very subtle. It's not something I could achieve without those tools.”
Though she's also well-known for her accomplishments as a playwright, Brassard insists that she's an actor first. When she writes a play — a process that involves microphone dictation, a soundboard and lots of music — she writes it from an actor's perspective. “Acting is an art form that's very underestimated,” she says. “Mostly, you're looked at as someone who was hired to serve the purposes of the director or writer, but I think that an actor can be an artist. For me, sound is a new tool that helps me perform things onstage that are unusual. I love to write. I think I can write good things. But I don't think I'm a 'writer.'”
No matter what label's applied to it, Brassard's evolutionary approach has had significant impact on the theatre world over the past decade. As the latest example of her thoughtful methodology, Peepshow's unique, film-esque soundscapes promise to give audiences a new way of looking at character presentation on the stage, at the very least. “Maybe the cinema, in a way, helps us discover how sound is evocative, in a way,” says Brassard. “We have all been raised in front of screens. Whether that's cinema or television or a computer screen, we all absorb fiction that way. That definitely helps us shape the way that we perceive stories, how we look at stories.”
