That was the marvellous advertising slogan of the 40th Theatre Ontario Festival, which wrapped up in Sault Ste. Marie this afternoon. But more than that -- it's the perfect motto for all forms of the performing arts that I will be blogging about! No 3-D glasses, perhaps, but definitely these kinds of art call for 3-D awareness and 3-D audience involvement in what is taking place on the stage!
And what a wonderfully diverse collection of theatre we were exposed to. On Wednesday night we saw The Attic, The Pearls, and Three Fine Girls from the Gore Bay Theatre. On a representational set in which boxes played a large role (as they did in the script) a beautifully balanced cast of three acted out a dizzying range of scenes from the lives of the three "girls" in the Fine family. Early childhood alternated with middle age, adolescence rubbed shoulders with aging, and the cast kept us clearly in the picture every step of the way. Kudos to all three!
Thursday night brought the premiere production of a new Canadian script, The Mouse House, written and directed by Robert Ainsworth and staged by Peterborough Theatre Guild. It's a neatly scripted, intense thriller that builds through many stages and involves a whole series of startling plot twists. The script struck me as the product of several production runs with much rewriting and fine tuning in between, and I was awe-struck when I found out it was in its first production! Again this was basically a 3-hander, with a fourth character appearing briefly in the first scene to help set up the situation, and again the three actors (male this time) balanced each other off beautifully while (paradoxically) keeping each other and us totally off-balance at all times.
Friday night gave us Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin (yes, that is the Steve Martin -- which made this the only non-Canadian script of the week). True to its author's character, it was zany and absurd but leavened with enough thought-provoking ideas to stop it from descending into mere idiocy. After all, it does depict a fictitious meeting between the young Einstein and the young Picasso in the Paris bar of the title! Guelph Theatre's production was visually striking, technically impressive (the moment when the world of the play opened up to show the stars was unforgettable), and brought a beautifully unified ensemble from all of the 11 characters in the cast. This was the only large-cast show of the week, and oddly enough the only one with an intermission.
The other two plays I've already described could have just as well been granted an intermission by their authors, as the flow in each case was already interrupted by numerous scene changes (all handled very crisply, I might add). But in The December Man the non-stop flow of the action was the very essence of the play's enormous emotional impact. So was the peculiar conceit of having the script work backwards from the end of the story to the beginning, a device also used by Harold Pinter in Betrayal. The Curtain Club's production captured the bland sameness of the lives of the 3 characters (again, three!) even as it depicted the tragic events which fatally disrupted that boring routine. The play shows the "collateral damage" (the modern catchphrase) caused as the bullets of a gun-firing maniac ricochet into the lives of the onlooking survivors of mass murder and their families. It began tragically and continued to grow in intensity and heartbreak scene by scene until I felt that I could not endure any more. This was a very difficult play to watch, and yet powerfully presented and acted with deeply moving truth and presence.
And then there were the other great performances -- adjudicator Annette Procunier's witty remarks and perfectly timed comic zingers which insulted no one and set everyone laughing as hard as any moment in any of the plays, and the icing on the cake, Jack Weatherall's moving recitation of "The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces..." from The Tempest as he officially closed the Festival at the end of the Awards Brunch, as apt a Shakespearean comment on the moment as could well be found.
And some people wonder why I keep going back to Theatre Ontario Festivals year after year!
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