by AMY BARRATT

In the play Snowman, Denver and Marjorie are a couple who periodically, and for no concrete reason, pack up their lives and move to another town. What an apt metaphor for a life in the theatre. Both actors and theatre companies too constantly recreate themselves with each new project. They are transformed, for better or worse, by every experience.

Imago theatre has been through many mutations in its 18-year history, and more than once has seemed doomed to fade away. But with its upcoming production, Snowman, by Greg MacArthur, the company is poised to reclaim its rightful place on the Montreal theatre scene.

This shocking new work takes as its central image the frozen body of a boy found preserved in a glacier near a remote northern town by 19-year-old Jude. Beautiful but vacant, possibly pathological, Jude is "adopted" by Denver and Marjorie when he comes by the video rental they run out of their home looking for gay porn. He in turn "adopts" the corpse in the glacier as a child might a stray puppy.

"His skin is black and starting to bubble," Jude says to the audience, describing his discovery. "Reaching up out of the ice. Reaching up to me. Night of the Living Dead. I wipe the moisture off it. Try to be gentle and soothing. His skin… his muscle… it falls apart when I touch it."

The production has a soundtrack by Troy Slocum to match its ghoulish subject matter. There are re-mixed clips from horror films, and samples from Icelandic electronic band Sigur Rós. Slocum even managed to capture - by sealing microphones inside a giant block of ice - the sound of melting. Snowman's costume design, by Eo Sharp, is inspired by underwear; the show also - a rarity in English theatre - features nudity.

Imago ups and downs

Back in the '80s, Imago was one of the most exciting companies in the city. Founded by Andrés Hausmann, it had the courage - unheard of in those days - to try producing shows in French as well as English. It brought us foreign plays we probably would never have seen otherwise (such as Kundera's Jacques and His Master), as well as new, collective creations like Incandescent, about the creation of the atomic bomb.

Life is never easy for an alternative company, but Imago fell on really hard times in the mid-'90s. Ron Spurles and Lowell Gasoi managed to keep it alive for a few years with small studio productions like Never Swim Alone and Snapshot, but by the end of that decade it looked as if Imago might fade into history like so many other independent companies.

Enter Clare Schapiro. The founder (with Marianne Ackerman) of Theatre 1774 and before that Creations etc., Schapiro had been out of the biz since 1993. "I was burned out," she says of her decision to leave - for good, or so she thought at the time. She had a baby (daughter Sophie, now 11) and worked for Radio-Canada Internationale. When Spurles approached her in 1999 about taking over Imago, it was partly the company's glorious past that drew her back.

"When I looked around, of the companies that were there when Imago started [1986], there was no one left." She rattles off a string of names, "APA, POV, Snafu, Strange Fish… all gone. And here was Imago about to close." (It should be noted that Theatre 1774, founded in 1988, lives on, though it has changed names and mandates; it became infinitheatre in 1998.)

"I took over Imago thinking maybe I could do something to put Montreal back on the map a bit." She smiles wryly. "I found myself in a big financial mess."

Tiger bomb

Imago tried to come back with a splash in November of 2000 with alternating French and English performances of Tell Me About Tigers, a play about coming to terms with one's own mortality. With the lukewarm at-best reception that production received, it looked as if grief counselling might be in order.

But Schapiro hung in there, scheduling another mainstage production for the spring of 2002. Though Divinity Bash, by Bryden Macdonald, wasn't exactly a hit, it was a near miss.

If those two credits were all that Imago had to show for the last four seasons, the future would not be looking so rosy. It's the stuff they've been doing between the major productions and mostly out of the spotlight that, until now, has been the most impressive. First, there was the concept of the theatre "gym," an opportunity for emerging directors to direct professional actors under the guidance of a "mentor." These exercises have proved exciting not just for the participants but also for the audiences who have enjoyed the final products. Then there's the way the very persuasive and charming Schapiro has managed to draw so many talented people into the Imago "family".

A born socialist ("I started my first co-op when I was eight, convincing all my friends that if we worked together we could get on the Andy Williams Show"), Schapiro has been reaching out to other arts organizations since day one. Her pitch was that if they banded together to share certain resources, they could all save money. That outreach resulted in the establishing of Off Interarts, a three-storey building on the Main with office space for several companies and a rehearsal/studio/screening/reading space, which they share and also rent out at reasonable rates.

Scribe scope

When I went by one day recently, director Peter Hinton and the Snowman cast were hard at work in the ground floor studio while Schapiro and playwright Greg MacArthur worked the phones in the second-floor office. (Though officially listed as "artist in residence," MacArthur's duties with the company also include fundraising, especially writing grant applications, which is an art in itself).

Having seen girls! and read Snowman - both dark comedies at best - I had expected MacArthur to be a brooding, introverted type. In fact, he has a smile that lights up a room and, wearing a toque and slightly moth-eaten sweater, he could pass for one of the characters in his plays. He is 34 years old, but with his slight build and cute puppydog looks, could still pass for 19. His writing, although very fresh and youthful, has a sure-handedness and a poetry to it that suggests an older writer, even though his characters tend to be young. Girls! girls! girls! is about high school kids, and MacArthur has also written plays for young audiences, including Beggar Boy, recently produced by Youtheatre.

Although three of the four characters in Snowman are in their early 30s, they have not entirely moved on to adulthood. As Denver and Marjorie move from town to town it's unclear, even to them, whether they are running away from something or searching for something.

"There was about a two-year period after girls! girls! girls! was produced here [at the 2000 Fringe], when I was dying to be based in Montreal," says MacArthur. "But with my horrible high school French, how the hell would I make a living?"

Through friends, he met Schapiro and began working at Imago. From the beginning, they talked about collaborating artistically. Snowman was written during MacArthur's first winter here, and he sees that experience of uprooting reflected in the play's subject matter.

Hip check

"Snowman is about hitting your 30s, the struggle of leaving youth behind," the playwright says. "In my early 30s, I started to think about the past more than the future.

"My most important task is to talk about my generation," he adds. "I understand why [young people] aren't going to theatre. I'm not that interested in a lot that gets done."

Schapiro interjects, "I was thinking the other day how much Snowman speaks to me, even though I'm going to be 50, even having had a career and a child, I can identify with it. Greg writes in a language that seems very hip and fresh, and at the same time it's grounded in classicism."

For his part, director Peter Hinton says, "This is a play about isolation, hardship, endurance and beauty. Technically, it is a tragedy of Greek proportion, told through the modern Canadian experience."

Snowman received its first full production in Vancouver last April, and then it was done in Cape Town, South Africa, in September. But the play was developed from the beginning with the help of Playwrights' Workshop Montreal, especially Hinton. So it was a natural choice to get Hinton to direct this Quebec premiere. He and Schapiro then put together the same design team that did girls! girls! girls!

"I can't believe what they're doing with four chairs and a piece of foam," marvels Schapiro. "This play could be done with four actors sitting facing the audience," she says, "but what Peter has done is so physical, it's so amazing. Being a party to that is what drives me."

Snowman is at the Studio Theatre of the Monument-National (1182 St-Laurent) until Jan. 31, $15–$18, 871-2224

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