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2000 Questions makes stocks sexy
by
AMY BARRATT
 How many
artists do you know who are interested in the stock market? A decade
ago, the answer would almost certainly have been none. But Alex Ivanovici
says it was when he heard his local butcher talking about his portfolio
that he realized investing was no longer an activity reserved for the
financial elite. Ivanovici is the director of 2000 Questions, a documentary
play about the people who trade stocks, opening tonight, March 21, in
Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle.
The play is produced by Projet Porte-Parole, and like the company’s
earlier work, including the critically acclaimed Novembre, its dialogue
is lifted directly from the mouths of ordinary people. Annabel Soutar
and Ivanovici did the interviews over the course of a year—the
year 2000—that saw Nortel’s dizzying rise and fall, huge mergers
such as AOL-Time Warner, the Microsoft trial and a presidential election.
Oh, did I mention the dot-coms?
After the extensive research phase, it was Soutar’s job to sit
down with, literally, reams of material, and somehow select and shape
it into a dramatic text. For the first time, with 2000 Questions, she
doesn’t make the interviewer disappear. There is a character in
the play referred to as a social psychologist, who is a fictionalized
version of the playwright. The character is obsessed with the world
of investing because her investor father mysteriously disappeared when
she was 10. Although no such event happened in Soutar’s family,
she has always been very aware of the markets because of the involvement
of her father and other members of her family. “At home, we always
talk about the stock market around the dinner table,” she says.
By injecting the play with a fictional narrative, Soutar is “testing
the recipe” of documentary theatre. “It makes us question
the objectivity of the documentarist, and is a way of showing our process
on stage,” she says.
Since they live in Quebec, it’s a process that inevitably takes
place in two languages. While Novembre, about the ’98 provincial
election campaign, was around 70 per cent in French, 2000 Questions
is more like 70 per cent English. That’s just because English is
the common language of finance. Soutar says even some of the francophones
they spoke to preferred to speak in English, because it is the language
of their work.
If a play about the stock market sounds dry to you, Soutar invites you
to come and find out differently. The trading floor is, she says, “a
naturally comic environment.” She was looking forward to a preview
audience made up largely of traders and financial analysts. Although
sure they would laugh and identify with certain parts, she wondered
if she would be accused of mocking them. She thinks, on the other hand,
that more artsy crowds may accuse her of glorifying greedy capitalists.
Soutar and Ivanovici are currently debating what topic to take on for
their next project. Soutar is leaning towards the health care crisis,
while Ivanovici is angling for something less heavy for a change, like
maybe sex. “But you know,” says Soutar, “there’s
a lot of sex in the stock market.” :
2000 Questions,
at Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle to April 6. $18–22,
842-2112 or 790-1245
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