by AMY BARRATT

Like moles from their burrows, Montrealers emerge at this time of year to blink in the sunlight and ask, “Is it festival season already?” Well yes, Virginia, it is. And 2003 being an odd-numbered year, the Festival de théâtre des Amériques (FTA) is here in all its glory (as opposed to even-numbered years when the same organizers bring us a severely downsized version called Théâtres du monde).

One of the most sought-after tickets this year is for the revival of Robert Lepage’s La Trilogie des dragons. At a nearly six-hour running time, this is just the sort of insane proving ground that FTA frequenters crave. Any schlub can take in a two-hour play from time to time; Festival-goers pride themselves on sitting through four-hour Lithuanian Hamlets and living to tell the tale. The Lepage trilogy was first created by his company Ex Machina in the 1980s. This new production still reflects Lepage’s fascination with China, but is said to incorporate a greater understanding of things Asian acquired by actually travelling there.

At last year’s Théâtres du monde, German director Frank Castorf presented a mangled version of A Streetcar Named Desire called Endstation Amerika. He returns this year with The Insulted and Injured, loosely based on a Dostoevsky novel. La Presse critic Nathalie Petrowski wrote of Endstation, “When the guy at the box office told me that the play lasts two hours and 40 minutes with no intermission, I nearly shot him… Two hours and 40 minutes later I was on my feet, my hands red from endless clapping, my heart light, my mind so free and clear that I could have taken two more hours of it.” Apparently Castorf took those words to heart, even throwing in a bonus 10 minutes: The Insulted is four hours, 50 minutes long. There is, mercifully, one intermission.

Also returning is Sheffield, England-based company Forced Entertainment. The creators of Speak Bitterness, seen here in 1998, are presenting two works at this FTA. First Night goes beneath the peppy veneer of a variety show to reveal the dark, nasty side of showbiz. And on the Thousandth Night—which takes its name from Scheherezade—is a storytelling marathon beginning at midnight and going till 6 a.m. The audience is free to come and go throughout the performance. Breakfast will be served at the end.

More from the menu

•A Polish company presents Cleansed, by British playwright and suicide Sarah Kane, who is the darling of the theatre scene just now, here and everywhere else.

•Lepage’s closest collaborator in Ex Machina, Marie Brassard, is presenting a new piece at the FTA. Titled Le Noirceur, it explores similar themes to her previous solo work, Jimmy, créature de rêve.

•Local wonderboy Wajdi Mouawad makes his third appearance at the festival, after Littoral and Rêves, with a new play called Incendies.

•The FTA’s Nouvelle Scènes series has scooped up one of my favourite shows of the past season, Le Boson de Higgs by the Groupe de Poésie Moderne.

For the full schedule and showtimes, visit the FTA Web site at www.fta.qc.ca or call Info-Festival at 871-2224

Memory lane

>> Local theatre luminary Lisa Rae Vineberg delves into the past with Coming Home to Roost

by GENEVIEVE PAIEMENT

Mochin de gadlut is an Aramaic term meaning “big mind,” an opening up of consciousness, or enlightenment. It’s also the name of Montreal playwright and performer Lisa Rae Vineberg’s theatre company and it’s kind of her work’s mission statement. In a world full of cynical one-liners and “real-life” emotional piracy masquerading as entertainment, Vineberg’s ideals appear especially genuine (if ambitious). “The goal remains to create a feeling, through a resonant, palpable world of moments,” reads her company’s bio, “to pull the spectator in, to steal their things, to turn their houses upside down and then to stop suddenly, giving them back to themselves.” I’ve seen her stuff and, though it never pick-pocketed me or made my house a mess, some moments did make me squirm and give me goose bumps—surely physical proof of some kind of enlightenment or emotional revelation?

As evidenced in her earlier Women’s Project and, most recently, Telegraph From Departure Bay, which showed at the Monument-National in 2001, Vineberg has never been the creator of two-act, linear tales that build to a climax before intermission and tie up nicely at the end. But she must be doing something right because the prestigious, internationally renowned Festival de théâtre des Amériques has chosen to feature her latest work, Coming Home to Roost, in their Nouvelles Scènes showcase for younger, emerging artists.

Vineberg, who studied theatre at Vermont’s famous experimental Bennington College, makes “collages” for the stage, and her latest is a new spin on this genre. “This project is still a collage,” Vineberg explains, “there’s just much less dialogue, it’s more symbolic… like a quilt of moments.”

And like an old family quilt, the piece affords a peak into a world that is no longer. “Initially I had this flash of an Americana-style sideshow about family values, the recipes, the family photos and the tenderness,” Vineberg explains. She spent a few months reading up on day-to-day life and work in the early 20th century and rooting through old, anonymous family photos in antique and junk shops. Then actors Nathalie Claude and Paul-Patrick Charbonneau came on board and together they improvised their way into the present performance.

“I pictured these people who live in an abandoned world, full of things we don’t use anymore,” she says of the characters in Coming Home. “They are guardians of memory, servants to this old world, but they sense their own impending extinction. Nathalie and Patrick are so sensitive to the idea and feeling of the piece too. It’s the feeling you get when you walk down St-Laurent and see places like the old St-Laurent Bakery or the mom-and-pop corner store. That pace, those ethics are disappearing.”

All shakers and cake

The idea first came to Vineberg last year, when she had to clean out the apartment her grandparents lived in for 46 years, following the death of her grandmother. “Suddenly I was in touch with all this history. I was confronting the end of that world.” The play’s “undercurrent of deterioration,” as Vineberg calls it, is felt throughout, from the projections of ancient slides and slow-motion, burnt-out nature documentaries, to the eerie soundscape by Howard Bilerman and Becky Foon and the dusty, yellowed costumes and set by Anna Cappelluto.

But it’s not all doom and gloom; from time to time the three sing Shaker songs. “The characters and the Shakers do similar work,” says Vineberg, “and they both sing songs to lighten the burden of their toil.” The Shakers were one of many Christian sects who came from England and settled in America, searching for religious freedom in the 18th century. Famous for their functional, beautiful furniture, and religious folk songs, their governing principle of celibacy, however, eventually led to their extinction (except for one small community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, that exists to this day).

Though Vineberg has been toiling away on her own plays for nearly a decade, this was the first time she received a production grant. “What the festival and the Conseil des arts et des lettres have done for us is extraordinary,” she offers. “I’m extremely grateful because it left nothing for us to do except create, which is a luxury. It’s just been cake.” So expect to be enlightened, or at least feel an uncontrollable urge to hug the old woman sitting next to you. “We just want to give back a delicious present to the audience,” Vineberg ventures, “to make people’s hearts swell, and bring them closer together.” Mochin de gadlut, indeed.

Coming Home to Roost runs from June 1-4 at the American Can Co. (2030 Pie IX), 7pm, $20

The long
and short

>> Theatre Smith-Gilmour goes to the dark side with Chekhov Longs... In the Ravine

by AMY BARRATT

“For theatre people, Chekhov looms there,” says Dean Gilmour of Toronto’s Theatre Smith-Gilmour. “Michele [his partner Michele Smith] and I have been obsessed over the years with adapting literature to the stage… so going to Chekhov was kind of inevitable.”

Following the success of Chekhov’s Shorts, which we got to see last year at the Saidye, the company is presenting Chekhov Longs… In the Ravine at this year’s Festival de théâtre des Amériques.

Based on a single story rather than several, this show explores darker territory than the largely comic Shorts. Gilmour points out that this mirrors the overall evolution of Chekhov’s work. His early stories tend to be light and silly, and his first plays were slapstick one-acts like The Marriage Proposal. Over the years, more and more darkness crept in. Similarly, Theatre-Smith Gilmour in its early years mostly stayed on the lighter side, according to Gilmour, doing commedia-influenced clown theatre.

But why the stories of Chekhov? As theatre people, why not explore his plays?

Theatre Smith-Gilmour did undertake The Cherry Orchard in 1999. Even though they tried to break away from the stiff realism of a conventional Chekhov performance, “We felt there was a preconceived idea that we all had about how you play Chekhov,” says Gilmour, “and we were ultimately dissatisfied with the production.”

“We had been reading the stories while working on Cherry Orchard, and realized that no one had pre-conceived ideas about them. They were brand new territory, and that gave us the freedom to tell it in our own way.”

As opposed to the plays, which focus mainly on the fading aristocracy of turn-of-the-century Russia, the stories explore the peasant world that Chekhov would have been familiar with from his day job as a doctor.

Chekhov’s stories like to reveal characters from the outside in. He’ll start off with a physical description then, as the story goes on, reveal the psychology of the character. It’s an approach that clicks with Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s brand of physical theatre.

“The light and the dark give value to each other in Chekhov,” Gilmour says, “which is how it is in life. I’ve never laughed as hard as I did with my siblings and my cousins at my father’s funeral.”

Chekhov Longs… In the Ravine is at Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui (3900 St-Denis), May 27-30, 7pm

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