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.

Greek and modern tragedy

Seeing Medea and Jerry Springer - The Opera in the same week demands some kind of comparison, if only just for fun. An immortal work versus temporal trash? The perennial entertainment value of high emotions? The bells and whistles theatre has accumulated over the years, culminating in JSTO's barrage of operatic, religious, television and musical conventions, served up with a wink and a grin.

But what really makes Medea a work for the ages is its irony. Seana McKenna's performance highlights the distance between what Medea is telling people and what she's thinking -- motivations, goals and public perception all operate on their own tracks. In my experience of the play on the page, I had always focused on the emotions she must have been feeling in order to act so brutally. McKenna totally turned her into a schemer--arranging for other people to carry out her killing and arranging her getaway, leaving no one any wiser until her plan kicks in (signalled by a burst of flame on the stage--is it possible to eliminate all the cheese from modern productions of Greek tragedies?). There is more "how" than there is "why" in Medea.

With Jerry Springer -- the opera and the TV show -- our ignorance of the motives of the actors/guests is part of the pleasure. We don't want to know how they came to be cheating, how they managed to coax their lover onto the stage. We want it to be a mystery, their participation on the show, the pleasure they derive from their compromising engagements (affairs and perversions--all the same, all the same). The audience can stay back, keep its distance and experience them as freaks. But because we can see Medea's mind at work, we become engaged in her intentions and their deployments, even though, child murderer she is, she's the biggest freak of all.

The diva, espoused - EYE WEEKLY

My preview of the upcoming production of Medea at Toronto's Canon Theatre.

Doing research for a piece on Medea, which opens Jan 11 at Toronto's Canon Theatre, I've been struck by how the version that continues to intrigue us, Euripides' version that begins after Jason has left Medea for a princess, does not give us a Medea at the height of her powers or even in full awareness of what she is capable of. The full myth starts long before this when Medea puts her witchy talents to use to help Jason obtain the Golden Fleece (which, with my comic book upbringing, forever make think of Scrooge McDuck in The Golden Fleecing. She is much more powerful than Jason. But we don't want to seem to know about her superhuman powers. Why do we want her to be humiliated and vengeful like we are, rather than "over it" like she should be able to be? Perhaps we erase that part of her history in order to understand her weak as like we are, justified in letting go to our more vicious tendencies rather than rising above them.