Thursday, May 07, 2009

Cups floweth over


I've spent the last couple of days taking in the City of Wine festival, a cycle of seven plays by Kingston playwright Ned Dickens about the mythical city of Thebes, which I wrote about for Eye Weekly. The whole shebang gets two performances, the first of which is a preview and therefore not for review.

But for a theatre writer, the experience has been enlightening. It's not every day you get to watch seven plays by the same writer played in quick succession. You start to notice Dickens' quirks that would have become lost with larger gaps between performances. It's not every day you get back-to-back performances by students at some of the country's top theatre schools, directed by seven different directors. You see real talent amidst confused direction--and vice versa. Students from Studio 58 at Vancouver's Langara College, for example, stood out as particularly naturalistic in their technique, while the Humber students were thrown into a production that was more experimental and fussy. Every class, it seems, has a big lug performer willing to play the clown for laughs and every class has more women than men.

Although the cycle has some kinks to work out in the amount of repetition necessary to connect the stories, what's remarkable is the structure of the whole project. The first show is full of gods but by the third one, it's humans talking about gods. The stories become more layered and ironic, with the actions of later generations resonating against what happened before.

A confession: The first four plays took up about 11 hours over two days so I needed to take a break, which meant I missed the cornerstone play, Oedipus. But I figured that I knew how that one ended.

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