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Sage Theatre’s season opener, One Flea Spare, looks at the lives of four people of varying backgrounds who are quarantined together in the same house for 28 days. The play is set in London in 1665, when the city is held in the grip of the plague.
The title for the play comes from The Flea, a poem by John Donne. “Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, and in this flea our two bloods mingled be…. Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, where we almost, nay, more than married are.”
The passage aptly describes the consequences of plague infection. “If someone had the plague present in the house, the house would go into a quarantine,” explains Geoff Ewert, director of One Flea Spare.
American playwright Naomi Wallace, who also wrote The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, which Sage produced in its 2004-05 season, wrote the play in order to capture the human cost of an outbreak that killed more than 75,000 people between 1665 and 1666.
“With the mass death of people, human life became greatly diminished. Wallace has used the period as a backdrop to un-diminish human life, to look at what it means to be a human being, what the human spirit is truly about,” says Ewert.
The play opens with a young girl speaking to the audience, recounting what happened in the house during the quarantine. Through the lens of her recollections, the play transitions to the scenes of events in the house.
“Wallace looks at different man-made obstacles that repress the human spirit. Class, for example, is a man-made phenomenon. In an interview, Wallace talked about how the race has taken the idea of sex and made it about the breasts and the groin, man and woman, and that’s what sex is,” says Ewert. But Wallace puts forth the view that sex can also be a connection on a higher level.
“Characters have sex on stage, if you look at it a certain way. But, it’s not in any way that requires a disclaimer. The characters redefine sex to involve two spirits connecting,” explains Ewert.
One Flea Spare also plays with the definitions of life and death and how people of different classes play into those definitions. “We look at whether their spirits are alive or dead, not simply whether their hearts are still pumping. It’s a spiritual notion about life and death,” says Ewert.
Ewert draws upon the Donne poem for inspiration to stage the play, saying he tried to create an atmosphere subtly suggestive of the inside of a flea’s body. The set relies upon the contrast between black and red to evoke different impressions, like coals on fire or the veins of an animal.
“We’re inviting the audience to come and be quarantined with these characters. There is audience on five sides of a six-sided space, so it’s very intimate. Hopefully, people will start to think about what it truly means to be a human being,” says Ewert.
“How many times do you hear about people experiencing road rage? It’s easier to see people driving around you as fleas and pests rather than as human beings. In Calgary, there’s a lot of people who are striving to make a good life for themselves, which is a wonderful thing, but there’s no purpose in that unless you realize the whole reason behind it, and that’s to feed the human spirit.”
