Hamelin girls are soo easy. Another one falls in Downstage’s The Piper

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Vertigo Theatre

In The Piper, the German town of Hamelin has reached a kind of twisted equilibrium. With a cast of 21, and under the leadership of mayor Poppenheimer, the town functions as a corporate democracy that includes rats, as second-class citizens led by the erudite Kingsley. With its order broken and exposed by the sudden drowning death of a child, the conflicted town turns to a mysterious wandering piper for a solution.

Through a mix of songs created by composer Don Horsburgh, the scattershot satire with no fear of the lewd, crude or disgusting, whirls through an array of familiar human weaknesses and social indictments.

In the past, Downstage theatre company has had no issue taking a particular aim, as it did with the Guantánamo Bay fiasco in Man Out of Joint or NIMBYism in Habitat. But if the company has built its reputation on plays that deal in provocation, director Simon Mallett is careful to deny any direct allegory in The Piper’s stylized world.

“I think it’s less about commenting and more about questioning,” says Mallet of the play. “Absolutely there are parallels [between the real world and] the world of the play, and allowing the audience to come in and understand them through the lens of their own consciousness.”

The Piper’s Governor General Award-winning playwright, Colleen Murphy agrees. “I really want to have a lot of wacky, goofy fun with this piece, rather than earnestly scoring points, which I was not interested in doing. I think there’s often a debate about the political content in Canadian playwrights’ work, but often it’s a lecture instead of a good time. For me, in any play, even a play this big and out of control, the most important thing, in order to make the political real, is that the piece is emotional.”

In pursuing that emotionalism, and the fun that Murphy sees as essential to the play, Downstage is preparing to mount a production that makes use of the tools available to a large-scale musical. With choreography by Mark Bellamy and the large cast that includes Calgary staples such as Valerie Planche and increasingly visible talents like Brendan McGuigan, the play partners Downstage with Hit & Myth Productions, whose “commercial alternativism” has already produced Urinetown and the upcoming Evil Dead: The Musical.

The play certainly doesn’t lack characters whose vile tastes make it difficult to sympathize with them. The rats, for one, are an underclass that manages the town’s garbage and snaps pornographic photos of its children. Its human denizens are often no better. The corrupt police officer Wag is the prime customer for the rats’s photos, and the town’s administration is focused on short-sighted gain —“We sold the ambulances to Hanover,” bemoans one character to mayor Poppenheimer, “so we could buy more televisions.”

For Mallet, though, there’s no difficulty in excavating the humanity in the seemingly irredeemable. “Everyone’s flaws are revealed, and when the humanity beneath them is revealed they become more sympathetic,” he says. “With the rats, because they’re rats being played by humans, things that they do in their natural behaviour become more disgusting or overt in our understanding, but it’s also part of rat nature as well”

Even the rats’ occasional penchant for cannibalism and dishes like “steaming afterbirth” ultimately express a nature that’s more human than we might care to admit, explains Murphy.

“I believe we are driven more by our needs than our wants, so The Piper is looking at a society not unlike our own, where people are often driven by their needs,” she says. “That their needs make them do stupid or greedy or awful things, exploit their own children, et cetera, is disgusting. But… those kinds of needs are recognizably human needs.”

For all its size, then, and driven as it is by the manic energy of songs and jabs at the near-sightedness of consumer culture, there is still something basic at The Piper’s core. For Murphy, this elementary approach, focusing first on the production’s ability to reach its audience rather than on its satirical focus, is the basis for any powerful piece of political theatre. It’s all right to laugh.

“True political theatre is emotional,” says Murphy. “True political theatre is very funny and true political theatre, even though very funny, is serious.