MANITOWANING—“Don’t call it a performance,” are the cautionary words provided by director John Turner as we sit down to a dinner in the kitchen of the Debajehmujig Creation Centre in Manitowaning, a dinner that was to be followed by a reading of playwright Karen Hines’ new play ‘Crawlspace.’ But reading is certainly an accurate description of the event, as the work is delivered by the author sans stage props (unless that stack of paper qualifies), special lighting or music soundtrack before the small audience of 22 patrons.
For all of what the reading is missing over a full-on performance, ‘Crawlspace’ the reading turns out to lack little in the way of spellbinding prose as the playwright/actress delivers her monologue in a rapid cadence that kept her dinner guests spellbound and in thrall. This may still be a work in progress, but it has obviously progressed along well.
Mr. Turner is likely a familiar entity to Island theatre-goers, being the Mump half of the world renown clown duo Mump and Smoot and the founder of the Island institution formerly known as ‘The Clown School,’ but which now bears the more intimidating moniker of ‘The Manitoulin Conservatory for Creation and Performance’ (MCCP). MCCP is “a unique facility for research, training, creation and performance in all areas of the performing arts,” notes the organization’s website.
Ms. Hines herself is an award-winning writer, director and performer and the artistic director of Keep Frozen: Pochsy Productions, “which develops Hines’ dark comedies for stage and screen.” The author of ‘Drama: Pilot Episode,’ ‘Citizen Pochsy,’ ‘Hello…Hello (A Romantic Satire),’ ‘Oh, baby’ and ‘Pochsy’s Lips’ as well as “several short plays and the neo-cabaret ‘Pochsy Unplugged,’ which have been presented across North America and in Germany at venues such as Alberta Theatre Projects, Tarragon Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Joe’s Pub (Public Theatre, NYC), Word Stage, Factory Theatre, Magnetic North, One Yellow Rabbit and Beme Theatre in Munich,” well, you get the picture. This lady has some serious theatre chops. But Ms. Hines is also a two-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for her trilogy of Pochsy Plays and for ‘Drama: Pilot Episode.’ The awards list is pretty long.
But ‘Crawlspace’ is a new work and it turns out to be a wonderfully neurotic/chaotic journey narrated by the mind of a marvellously complex individual.
Before the “reading” begins, the staff and crew of Debajehmujig Storytellers bustles about serving dinner to an audience made up of many familiar faces on the Manitoulin theatre scene. Executive Director Ron Berti is among the bustlers, setting plates of food and drink down in front of dinner guests, as is administrative director Joahnna Berti. This is definitely a theatre troupe with a difference.
As the dessert is nibbled away, Ms. Hines takes her place at the front of the room, settling in with a loose-leaf binder full of notes and lines and begins to read her new work.
Not to deliver too much of a spoiler, the message behind this new work is propelled through a medium that would be very familiar to most denizens of any major urban centre, finding and buying a new home. This semi-biographical monologue is a cautionary tale of first buyer angst and the perfidy of big city real estate agents (or maybe more than semi, the author admits her work is “based on a true story” and the gamut of emotions she expresses rings too true in her delivery to be simply an exercise in make-believe storytelling, but then, Ms. Hines really is truly an outstanding storyteller (she is a Second City alum after all), but the message behind the story digs down into the urban fairy tales we are raised to believe in sans query.
The audience is small, very small, barely the aforementioned 22 patrons of the arts, but it is by design, not a box office accident that the number is limited. The close quarters at Debaj will be replicated when the play is actually mounted as a boutique performance in a Toronto art gallery.
The intimate atmosphere of the…reading…can provide a bit of confusion for an audience member, from the very beginning the fourth wall appears to be challenged, or is it? Since the author is ‘talking’ to the audience, relating her experience to what might be a group of close friends and acquaintances at a cocktail party the normal wall between audience and actress fades into transparency—but there is no breaking of thespian faith here, more like a redefining of the audience/actor relationship into an intimate relationship—not completely unexplored territory, but certainly a different experience than the norm.
Following the “reading” (really, there will be a music score and lighting, particularly in the acid scenes, when the play is actually mounted—have we said too much?) the truth comes out. This really is a reading in the standard meaning of the term, as director John Turner and Ms. Hines return to settle in front of the audience to get their feedback on the work. The final tuning is taking place, the play itself was mounted in a few short days later in Toronto, and Ms. Hines and Mr. Porter were attentive to the impressions of the audience. Much of the response is laudatory, but there are nuggets of constructive criticism as well, particularly from the older members of the audience.
Should this work return to a full-on performance on Manitoulin Island it would be well worth an evening’s diversion.
