Theatre Saint Thomas / Punching Ptarmigan Productions Fredericton, November 2003
Theatre is the art of making everything deliberate. The magic
comes, in large part, from creating what we might call a "sacred
space," a defined area in which there are no accidents, where
everything's meaningful. Of course, in practice it never happens (only
in movies can you do a retake when a hair's out of place), but the
trick in being an audience is to attend as though everything were
deliberate, and put off for as long as you can the realization that,
well, some important things aren't really all that coherently
constructed: there are things that are just accidents, or weren't
planned. You need to adjust your expectations and enjoy what's
done well and excuse what isn't. If you do, it can be an enjoyable experience, but it can take some work.
A case in point is the Black Box production of Jordan Trethewey's A Stable Base.
Everybody involved is learning, and everybody involved gives it her
best shot. An ambitious set, some pretty listenable and interesting
original music, the Black Box's effective lighting, and committed
performances by a young and energetic cast add up to an hour and a
quarter's pretty watchable theatre. I especially liked the
projection of almost every member of the cast: the Box is a difficult
space, and theatre with the audience on three sides of you is
notoriously difficult. This was a problem that had clearly been
addressed, and solved.
Nick Coates is strong as the young man, the center of the play, who is
going home to his beloved grandfather's funeral, and remembering, in
flashback while on the plane, scenes from his long relationship with
the old man. If he isn't clear about exactly how young he is
supposed to be in the first scene (it felt to me like he varied between
about three and ten), he nonetheless finds ways to make it absolutely
clear when he transforms into his younger self; and as a young adult he
is disciplined, focused, and convincing. Similarly, both Mark
Savoie and Lillian Drysdale, as the young man's grandparents, do
creditable jobs of focusing and delivering their characters, although,
again, they seem to age at rather inconsistent rates: the
grandfather's decline is well punctuated, for instance, but he seems
to walk with pretty much the same degree of difficulty through the
production. James Corbett as the phantom passenger who listens
to the young man's stories is properly attentive, though I was never
convinced that his gravelly voice was an effective way to signal his
age. Lisa Baker as the young man's girl friend is properly
polite, warm and bewildered, and Tiffany Roberts is a convincing
stewardess (I especially liked the fake smile as she surveyed the cabin
to make sure everyone had their seat belts fastened preparatory to
landing). And Stephen Taylor as the voice of the pilot sounds
quite like the pilots I've heard, though what he said wouldn't ring
very true to an experienced air traveler.
The premise of the play is a promising one, and the idea that a young
man might have a genuinely positive relationship with his grandparents
is certainly worth approving of. Unfortunately, there needs to be
an element of conflict or discovery (or, ideally, both) to generate an
audience's interest in the course of what's going on on stage, and
Trethewey and the cast don't provide us with much of either. Had the
young man discovered in the course of the play that what he thought was
an unpleasant relationship actually was pretty positive, or had we
seen, through the course of the flashbacks, a turning point in the
relationship, there would have been some development to hang our
interest on; unfortunately, the scenes didn't add up to such a
structure. Indeed, each gave us more of the relationship between
the grandparents and the young man, but even there there wasn't much
acknowledgment of what we (or the young man) might be learning.
Nor does he have much to say to his seatmate that suggests the kind of
growth in understanding or change in the relationship that an audience
is looking for.
As it turns out, what we have to be interested in and engaged by is
simply the relationship, and while there certainly was warmth and humor
in it -- the opening night audience was especially amused by the
grandfather's reaction when the young man showed up for Christmas with
his ears pierced -- it wasn't enough to compensate for the lack of
other structure.
There are further problems having to do with consistency of
conventions. Moving back and forth from the young man and his seatmate
on the airplane and the memory flashbacks is an interesting idea, but
there is no established convention whereby the move is
achieved. It is simply a matter of waiting till Coates gets out
of
his seat, climbs down the stairs to the main stage, adjusts his
costume, and enters as a child or adolescent. Were these transitions
consistent and stylized they would be far more effective,
and would not have the unfortunate effect of simply casting the
audience adrift to wait for the next scene to start. (This was perhaps
especially a problem while the airplane was disassembled and the
funeral home put in its place, just before the very last scene.)
I was
surprised not, at least, to have had the scene changes filled by the
quite listenable music, composed for this production, but which we
hear almost none of..
Perhaps more serious is the inconsistency around the mechanics of the
production. The set is very ambitious, including lots of realistic
props, like a working table saw and a convincing wood pile. But the
play isn't, after all, a realistic one, and in many case the realistic
props are used in unrealistic ways. Though Grandpa turns the table saw
on and sticks the wood into the blade, he doesn't actually make the
piece he produces, or even mime making it; similarly, though the
woodpile looks real, the stacking job that Keith does is completely
perfunctory and unrealistic: under his grandfather's tutelage, he still
starts the end pile in a random location (the grandfather doesn't point
this out) and actually doesn't have sticks of wood that can stack, so
the dialogue in both cases is oddly at variance with what we're
actually looking at. Are we to take the settings as realistic, or
as simply signs of what we're to believe? No consistent convention is
established. There are similar problems with the airplane (where the
stewardess goes and comes from, and where Keith enters and exits, seem
quite random) and the
family kitchen: though the kitchen is realistic, Grandma is regularly
seated facing the audience, her back to the people she's actually
talking to: if it's a real kitchen, it seems clear, she should act in
it as though it were, and sit where she'd sit in that real kitchen, at
the table facing Keith. The
sandwich she makes is a real one -- however, the language
suggests that it's a hamburger, not a sandwich. Are we to notice?
Similarly, there are difficulties with the realism of the
dialogue. I've mentioned that the pilot doesn't say what pilots
actually say; it's also true, however, that what he says isn't a
contribution to the action or our understanding of it (it's not clear
why we need the pilot's voice, except to establish that we're in an
airplane). At one point, early in the conversation with his seatmate,
Keith says, "but I must be boring you." Since he's hardly said
anything, it seems an unlikely thing to day, but there's no obvious
justification for the line.
Every time such a convention is violated, the audience is reminded that
we're having to make the adjustment, and we're pulled out of the play
and reminded of the company, the director, and the choices both are
making. Such inconsistencies accumulate to make the sacred, intentional
space far more difficult to posit.
In spite of such problems, the play and its crew show promise and
dedication, and the experience is engaging, interesting, and
not infrequently entertaining.