Shakespeare shake-up

>> Elysian River takes it to the mountain

by AMY BARRATT

Most people agree that William Shakespeare wrote some pretty good plays. So why would somebody want to cut and paste them together to come up with a new text? Does the Bard need help?

These are some of the questions I recently put to Lowell Gasoi, whose company Elysian River Theatre opens its fourth annual Shakespeare on Mount-Royal production tonight, July 5. The show, titled NOT in a Dream, combines text from Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, in much the same way that 1999's Shakespeare on Love mingled text from three plays.

Indeed, you could say that NOT in a Dream is the flipside to Shakespeare on Love, in that the earlier piece emphasized comic elements, even within tragic texts, while this time the action is allowed to spiral downward into the violence and tragedy that lurks beneath the surface. Gasoi admits that one of the main reasons for doing another collage instead of a full play (ERT initially hoped to present a Richard III this summer) is economic.

"This way allows us a smaller cast and to produce a show with little resources," Gasoi tells me. "When I looked at the actors available to me I said, 'I don't think we can do a full production,'" says Gasoi. It's not that he didn't have a talented group, but that it was a very young group: mainly CEGEP and university theatre students with an average age of 20 or 21. Instead of trying to disguise that fact, the director decided to use it.

"We've taken the young characters from both plays. There are no adults in our play," he explains. This choice has allowed the company to focus on the adolescent energy that is present in their source material. "Without any adults to guide them, the characters are left to instinctual, impulsive devices," says Gasoi. "It's allowed us to explore that youthful hunger, how teenagers need to have everything now."

If spectators think they see nods to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet in NOT in a Dream, Gasoi says they probably do. Although he didn't like everything about the movie, he loved the sense of immediacy it invoked, the sense of young people essentially abandoned to a world in which everything is both a game and at the same time deadly serious.

Along with the switch from comedy to tragedy, Elysian River will go in a bold new design direction with this show. In the past, their Shakespeare shows have not gone for a specific time or place, but the costumes have tended to have a vaguely period, possibly Celtic look. This year, under up-and-coming designer Geneviève Genest, the look is modern. "I told her they have to look contemporary," Gasoi says, "but they can't look like the audience," he laughs.

Genest solved that problem with modern clothing emphasizing intense colours and certain fabrics tying the performers together.

"She's given the fairies a raver look," Gasoi says, "with all this crazy neon stuff."

In a break with tradition, the actors will not sing the audience along to each new location as they have been wont to do. This year's play has a soundtrack from the likes of Nirvana and Bon Jovi played on a boombox. "I looked at characters like Tybalt," Gasoi explains, "and I said, 'These guys are not singers, they're killers.'"

NOT in a Dream, through July 21 (except Sundays & Mondays). Meeting place the Cartier monument at the base of Mount Royal, 7pm, admission by donation (suggested $8); more info: 926-3992