George Acheson’s life onstage, with video and dancing.
We never realize the importance, or lack thereof, of our particular time and place; what movements we’re involved in, what music we listen to, what our beliefs are. Only looking back do we come to understand where we were and also where we’re going. It’s this looking back to understand that is the theme of STO Union’s 7 Important Things.
The story is a biographical look at George Acheson, who once lived on the West Coast during the rise of the hippy movement and then in London for the birth of punk. Acheson, who is not an actor, tells his story onstage with writer and director Nadia Ross.
As a teenager, Acheson was kicked out of his house for refusing to cut his long hair. It sent him out into the world to be assimilated by the counterculture. Now in his mid-50s, Acheson works as a barber.
“So it’s really this interesting journey of a guy who as a young man, left this kind of conventional family environment and went to the West Coast, joined the hippy movement, really became involved in that and then kind of all the disillusionment that went around with the loss of those ideals and values in the post-hippy world. Then he joined the no-future punk movement,” says Mark Lawes, artistic director of Theatre Junction.
The show is simple, sparse and intimate, an anti-spectacle according to Lawes. “Their premise for creating theatre is not to create illusion, but to try to find this authentic way of being with the audience. So it’s not around fiction, it’s around a discussion of what’s real,” he says.
“I call it a docu-fiction, because who knows what stories people tell are true anyhow.”
STO Union is a Montreal-based multi-disciplinary theatre company. There will be some dancing, some video and some music, but the essential element of the story is like an interview onstage. “It’s not about what’s around the story, it’s about them. It’s about Nadia and George,” says Lawes.
Lawes has been busy touring Canada and the world to find talent for Theatre Junction’s season, bringing in big names and relative unknowns. STO Union and Ross fit into the latter category, at least in Canada.
“For me it’s not about the big names or the stars, because I wouldn’t say Nadia Ross and George Acheson… they’re kind of anti-stars, almost,” says Lawes. “Compagnie Marie Chouinard, they’re stars now, but these guys, they’re not known, hardly at all in Canada. It’s kind of the anti-stars, too, that I like.”
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