When Good Plays Go Bad

OK, call this one "belling the cat".

Saturday afternoon I attended the above-mentioned lecture at the Carol Shields Festival of New Works at PTE.

Robb Paterson (MTC), Ardith Boxall (MTP) and a panel of actors, playwrights, dramaturges and directors were all in attendance.
Bill Kerr, the dramaturge from the U of M started off by saying there would be no discussion of specific productions. Indeed.

Monique Marker said, we all love each other too much to say what needs to be said sometimes. But how loving are we being if we keep spending limited resources giving big productions to scripts that aren't ready, leading to mixed press and grumpy audiences?

Every theatre in town knows darn well that in the past two seasons we the paying customers, have been subjected to a whole lot of script material that was clearly not production ready: BOYS IN THE PHOTOGRAPH, NORTH MAIN GOTHIC, SHAKESPEARE'S DOG and TRANSIT OF VENUS, the opera all spring to mind. Every last one of those shows had the potential to be exponentially better than they were had the scripts had major revisions before receiving expensive public productions. If only half the PR or the set budget had been spent on rewrites.

In all of the above, swell production values and a game cast couldn't paper over the fact that the book just plain wasn't ready.
Basic structural problems like protagonists without consistent objectives ( TRANSIT, NM GOTHIC ) and meandering unfocussed plotlines ( BOYS, GOTHIC) can't be fixed by a great lighting design, great singing or fine acting. Moreover they all ran at or over 2 hours, an almost sure sign the writer needed to refine their thinking and clean up the story. Sorry, but it's a rare play that really needs to be longer than 90 minutes.

I've been there myself. I took a show on the road to 4 cities last summer that had considerable merit but that needed three more weeks of rewrites before it opened.

The year before I'd been lucky enough to be touring with my director. We rehearsed every day in the first two cities and made cuts to the play also a new script. It still needed more but it did get better on the road. Last year, I wasn't touring with my director. I went to colleagues I respected and had them tell me what I needed to do to fix the show. It did get better but it was never as good as it would have been with three more weeks of work upfront.

I figure taking it out before it was ready cost me 6K in lost box office revenue. Worse yet, even though I now know what I need to do to fix that script, it'll be 5 years before I can show it again anywhere. It'll always bother me to think I could have done better, had I taken more time off the top to rewrite.

This year, I've given myself 2 months to rewrite, rework and rehearse the new show I'm in. Why ? Because new work takes time to be ready. Right now, we have weekly rewrite meetings.

All of those theatres could have backburnered producing those shows when they saw it wasn't going to be ready in rehearsal and scrambled to stick something else in at the last minute. But they lose a lot of money doing this and they break a promise to subscribers by not giving them the season as advertised. Most theatres are so loath to do this they prefer to present a script that's not really ready rather than cancel a production.

The problem with sending new plays out as productions when they are only really at a draft stage is the audience walks out feeling more ripped off than they would have had they been shown something different but ready. It deadens their appetite for new work and makes it harder for new writers to get productions.

Rick Chafe did bravely say 50 people a night walked out of MTC during SHAKESPEARE'S DOG two winters ago, but 600 people stayed. The problem for MTC is those walk-outs add up to about a thousand people over the run. If those thousand people are subscribers and they choose not to renew the following year because they are fed up with seeing expensively mounted, unready scripts, MTC may well pull from doing more challenging new plays and do more murder mysteries, warhorses and musicals to lure them back.

I didn't dislike SHAKESPEARE'S DOG, but a largely unsympathetic protagonist, an unpalatably glib conclusion and a 2 1/2 hour running time were probably more than some audience members could take for $50. I expected a seasoned playwright and an experienced production team would have known to cut 15-20 minutes out of the last act. The moral grayness of Shakespeare's decision to abandon his wife and babies to pursue his career was whitewashed right over. And yes, I'm sure as they said, it was better by the time it got to Ottawa, but why was Winnipeg used as the out-of-town try-out?

Robb made an excellent point that 3 1/2 weeks is a too short rehearsal period for new work and many of the rougher edges could be taken off many new plays with a longer rehearsal period. But the structural and run time problems with SHAKESPEARE"S DOG were problems that needed to be figured out around a table not in front of 700 paying customers a night. MTC could and should have done their audience and the writer a favour, spent less on the set and more on the rehearsal period.

When people shell out good money at one of the bigger places in town ( MTC, Manitoba Opera) they have every reason to expect a finished play to go with the finished set and fancy costumes.

PTE on the other hand did a great production of ALL RESTAURANT FIRES ARE ARSON. Much of the really good new work I've seen here in past few years both local and from out of town ( LIAR, WHERE THE BLOOD MIXES) has been on that stage.

PTE doesn't have a lot more dough than its colleagues down the street but it does maintain a writers' room, a place where plays in development get worked informally in a peer group as well as sponsoring the writers' festival which showcases new plays. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of that room when it goes on stage. I'm willing to bet it's going to look a lot more ready than some of the new offerings elsewhere in the past few years.

I love writers' rooms. I was part of one for 10 years. Our group developed a Chalmers award-winning play (STUCK) and two film scripts that received HAROLD GREENBERG FUNDING for further development. Trust me there was a lot of re-writing done on those scripts fueled by notes from other writers.

If theatres in town want to do new work, they would do well to consider pooling resources, talking to MAP and the funding bodies and setting up a writers' room for the writers whose work they have under consideration. Meeting twice a month, the writers could share work in progress and give each other notes.

That way writers would have more feedback to do rewrites before their plays go into workshop or into production. All it would take is a room and a bit of organization. That's a whole lot cheaper than trying to win back a thousand subscribers lost by charging them full fare for a script that was only half ready. It's also a lot cheaper for the writer to fix the play before it opens than to try and repair his or her reputation and bruised ego when their work has been publicly presented in an unfinished state. Trust me, I know.

Truth and Powerful Storytelling at PTE

My sis Lisa and I attended a sold-out performance of WHERE THE BLOOD MIXES last night. The audience gave the company a well-deserved standing ovation. Tonight is the show's last performance in Winnipeg before the Governor General's Award winning play moves on to the National Art Centre Studio and The Factory Theatre in Toronto. I can't recommend this production highly enough.

Beautifully written, powerfully acted, well directed and featuring an effective understated set design and a fabulous live onstage score provided by Jason Burnstick, this is one of the best shows I've seen this season.

Kevin Loring spent four years honing his script about a trio of First Nations friends living with the aftermath of a childhood spent in residential school. It shows. Not one false note is hit in 90 riveting minutes of theatre.

A great cast of four: Ben Cardinal and Margo Kane as the alcoholic Mooch and his long suffering enabler girlfriend June, the great Billy Merasty who made the difficult, angry Floyd sympathetic and Kim Harvey as Floyd's daughter Christine are all terrific.

Perhaps Loring's greatest achievement is his truthful mix of humour with the pain and anger of these people. It made me laugh and cry - often at the same time. These guys were sure fun to go fishing with.

When Christine comes home to reconnect with her birth father, the ghost of a shared tragedy rises to the surface of June Mooch and Floyd's collective memory and threatens to drown them all. In the end, hope glimmers for the people like spring salmon in the river: the hope of a better future for their children.

It was especially poignant seeing the show in Winnipeg, where the Truth and Reconciliation Committee for residential school survivors opens its offices on April 8th. Justice Murray Sinclair blessed the audience on opening night. I'm sad my Metis dad didn't live to see this play with us last night. I sure heard his voice on that fishing dock yesterday.

Let's hope this chance for everyone to share their stories will finally heal this history and set us free from its awful legacy.

Mother Courage at MTC

With a coterie of fellow theatre lovers, I went to see what for me was one of the most anticipated events of the winter theatre season here: MTC's co-production with the NAC of Bertold Brecht's MOTHER COURAGE.

It was my first chance to see the English language theatre company artistic director Peter Hinton created at the NAC.

Hinton is a director with a fine visual sensibility and the team he assembled for sound, set, lighting and costumes were all first rate. The use of the black uprights was absolutely inspired. However his production of this play about the folly of war and the costs of doing business that unfolded under a red sky felt curiously - bloodless. It's a dog of war with few teeth.

The comedy in the script was played for all it was worth, and largely to good effect, by the seasoned cast. Tanja Jacobs is excellent at depicting the world-weary cynicism of Mother Courage, her short-sighted greed, and her motherly wisdom, but the bottom notes of the depth of character's pain and suffering seemed to elude her tonight.

Similarly the Cook, played with a kind of louche pickled pathos by Geordie Johnston is a womanizer, but the sharp knife of his contempt is flashed ever so briefly in SOLOMON'S SONG. He's an asshole, but a nice asshole who knows that, thanks to his mom, he has a nice home to go to in the end no matter who dumps him.

Richard Donat as Chaplain gets some great lines and he makes the best of being cast in the loser role in a romantic triangle.

Jani Lauzon plays the flashy Yvette the hooker/countess flat-out, making the most of the comedic elements of the character, and showing off her vocal chops.

Still, when I came home, I put on Marianne Faithful singing that rep. Her whiskey gravel voice hits every note in Brecht and Weill's compositions: humour, irony, pathos, rage, desire, longing. It was a breadth and depth of feeling that largely went missing for me, tonight.

I think the blame for this has to be placed on the shoulders of the director. It was as if he thought the only way to sell an audience on a three hour Brecht play was to treat the thing as if it were some sort of musical comedy, that comes to a bad ending quite by accident.

Instead of building on the play's increasingly tragic losses, almost all the big action that happens to the main characters, takes place off stage. Both of Mother Courage's sons, the brave soldier and the honest payroll clerk are dispatched with so we hear, not see, what happens to them. Katrina, her mute daughter is deflowered by  a bunch of drunken rapists, with barely a notice.

The death of Mother Courage's last child, for the one real act of selfless heroism in the entire play gets cut off, almost instantly by a blackout, and the rolling around of set pieces in the dark. The audience was left to cough under a cloud of gunpowder for the denouement:  the delivery of Katrina's lifeless body to her mother. Is there no way in the 21st century to make a big noise on stage, without filling an interior space with stench and smoke? How fair is it to the actors to have to perform under this pall?

Jacob's director left her to perform her big final scene as several people in the audience struggled to breathe. Patrons and performers were both deprived, one final time, of a chance to connect emotionally with the tragedy of the play for the sake of an effect.

There were some great moments in the production: the procession of pianos for the great military leader's funeral, four women singing in beautiful harmony about a poplar at the gate, viewed from the warmth of their home, lit only by the reading lamp on the piano with Mother Courage's peripatetic wagon stationed just beyond the light. The scene between Jacobs and young hothead who wants to kill his boss was brilliance. It was these nuanced moments that made you see all the production could have been, in terms of poignancy and affect, and sadly, is not.

Waneta Storms as Mother Courage's mute daughter Katrina, steals the show by giving a performance full of heart without one false or strained note. If only all the gunpowder, and piano music had held more moments equal to her silence, this might have been a more satisfying, and less shallow-feeling production. Certainly war, of which Brecht speaks so powerfully, has lost none of its power to wreak havoc on our lives.

itin/erant lit: Women Can't Write: AKA Friday, Less Than Fun Facts

itin/erant lit: Women Can't Write: AKA Friday, Less Than Fun Facts

This link courtesy of Derek McGrath offers an interesting (and depressing) theory on why women are under-represented as writers on stage and in television.

Top Girls First Rate!

OK, first off, an apology. I have seen so much less of Churchill Fest than I 'd planned to, it's ridiculous.

Apart from the fine BLUE KETTLE which closed last weekend, this is the only other show I've made it to.

Judging from the standard of the two productions I did manage to see, that's a pity because both were both very good.

TOP GIRLS is currently playing at the Tom Hendry Theatre ( the theatre formerly known as MTC Warehouse) You still have a chance to see it this weekend and it is outstanding.

Ann Hodges does a fabulous job of directing her fine cast in multiple roles. The pacing and the transitions with one exception were very adeptly handled.

This is a difficult play about the intersection of the personal and the political in women's lives. In the wrong hands, it could easily have become a rant or worse yet, a soap opera. Here, each performance is marvel of nuance and restraint, illuminating the individual character's struggles to navigate a world where a Top Girl still holds a one-down position.

Sharon Bajer, Philippa Domville, Jacqueline Loewen, Tracy Penner, Daria Puttaert, Marina Stephensen Kerr and Jennifer Villaverde all deserve kudos for their fine ensemble and character work.

The set, projections and costume designs by Denyse Karn were elegant and effective. The contrast between the modernist dining room appointments and the period costumes on the actors in the first act worked particularly well. This was the best use of that space I'd seen in a while.

My only complaint was with the decision to dispense with the interval at the end of Act One and break the play in the middle of the second act instead. Yes, it's a long play. However the audience needed a pause at the end of the first act to sit with what they'd just see and heard. Breaking up the play two-thirds of the way through the second act felt awkward and arbitrary and created uneccessary confusion. It was the only cumbersome choice in an otherwise great production.

Up In The Air

Middle-aged people in extra-marital affairs must be the zeitgeist in Hollywood this season.

Jason Reitman's latest picture UP IN THE AIR is a mirror held up to a moral vacuum in 21st century American society and as such it's unsettling and more than a little depressing.

There's a lot of Oscar buzz around this film and I must say I infinitely preferred it to the cloying and self-consciously clever JUNO. This is a great cinematic adaptation of a novel, unabashedly posing hard questions and offering no easy answers. The film is anchored by a trio of extraordinarily fine performances.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who has made a life making the best of a bad job: firing people on behalf of bosses who lack the balls to do their own dirty work. He swirls through concrete airports and beige hotel rooms, leaving voided lives in his wake as he racks up frequent flier miles. The distance he's covered in his travels is the only value he holds sacred. He keeps his human connections to a minimum: movement maintains distance.

He's framed by two women: a corporate newbie (played with wonderfully intensity by Anna Kendrick) who wants to ground everybody and fire people online and his lover, fellow frequent flier Alex Gordon ( a cooly elegant Vera Farmiga ) a woman whose life is as compartmentalized as the backpack Ryan talks about in his corporate seminars.

It's a rare American film that manages to be this thought-provoking and nuanced. I lay awake for a long time last night thinking about those people's lives. Completely worth seeing.

"It's Complicated"

I saw this rom-com for the freedom fifty-five set with two friends tonight at a late screening. It's a very well-written comedy about love in late middle age and like the kitchen our heroine is building, there's a few sharp knives of wit hidden in its well-oiled drawers.

The film stars the great Meryl Streep who has shown much flair for romantic comedy in recent years ( Mamma Mia!) as Jane Adler, a divorced woman in her '50s with a successful bakery business, three great kids, a gaggle of girlfriends and a large, beautiful and suddenly very empty house as her youngest heads off to university.

On the weekend of festivities for their son's graduation, Streep and her ex-husband find themselves alone in the bar of a hotel where they're both housed, pre-commencement. He has remarried: she has not. His second wife is at home with her young child, which, conveniently for the plot, is not his. It's the Adler's first dinner together alone, in a decade. A few bottles of wine later, complications ensue.

As befits a comedy for middle-aged people, the action is divided between the kitchen and the bedroom. Streep is preparing to renovate both with the help of an architect who has more than a professional interest in her. Steve Martin comports himself with admirable restraint as Streep's other love interest.

The ex-husband, played brilliantly by Alex Baldwin, is a somewhat louche legal lion who has realized, a decade later that the kitten he ran off with has long since become a cat and he already had a much nicer one and kittens in his former home. His appropriately tiger-tattooed second wife is marching him off to the fertility clinic at a point in his life when his children from his first marriage are finishing college. His longing for the comfort of his former life is palpable: you feel him wanting not only to sleep with Jane but to just come home where he knows he belongs and stay there, raiding the fridge with his grown kids and drinking wine in the garden.

This is a romance: all weddings and nice hotel rooms and witty friends and homes beautiful and an endless procession of culinary delectations. You know the Adlers belong together in cosy, late night domesticity: but there's a fly in the ointment. It's not the obstacle of Mr. Adler's current marriage which seems like one of the warmer rooms in hell, but rather the fact he's the kind of man who is only truly in love when he's after something he knows he shouldn't be having at the moment. The former Mrs. Adler knows him too well to be so unwise the second time around. Her wisdom tinges the film with sadness, a problem in a vehicle that requires by its very nature for love in all its heady blindness to conquer all.

I'm the target audience for this sort of thing and I enjoyed it. Unlike the lovely pastry Streep's character offers guests throughout the film, the ending was bittersweet and a little flat: not in the best way for such a frothy confection of a film to end in my view, but it's a small quibble with a mostly charming offering.