Tear the Curtain: theatrical moment

Where am I? Jonathon Young in Tear the Curtain

Anyone who has had the misfortune of listening to me blabber on about playwrighting will have heard the following: theatre uses simplicity to convey complex ideas. In working through my own scripts I identify what I think of as “literary conceits” versus “theatrical moments”. By literary, I mean those ideas that are best savoured in the mind; ones that make you look up from a page and ponder for a few moments. Because of its relentless, forward movement, theatre doesn’t easily allow for these sorts of mental breaks. Any moment that puts an audience into a reflective state also pulls them from the theatrical experience itself. The struggle I face is that often the elements I most love in the first draft of a script have to be excised because they are hard to follow or too subtle to survive within a theatrical landscape. The challenge then becomes to find a way of evoking the idea in a manner that’s appropriate to the form, one that is at once simple and profound (at its crudest, I guess this can be summed up as “show don’t tell”).

I have no idea what Antonin Artaud, the surrealist and theatre revolutionary from the early part of the 20th century, would have made about my concern over the purpose of text in theatre. I suspect acknowledging that theatre is the placement of language, movement and ideas in time and space would be okay, but that my interest in created artifices might have been seen as antiquated and bourgeois. I mention Artaud because his theories are so central to the Electric Company’s Tear the Curtain, which was recently presented by the Arts Club at the Stanley Theatre. Tear the Curtain walks a tightrope between naturalistic theatre (and cinema) and the ideas and theories of Artaud. In trying to process complex ideas through the language of theatre, I feel both affinity and sympathy with the aspirations of playwrights Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr and their co-creator Kim Collier. Tear the Curtain is a dense work and, as a consequence, is frequently elusive. Rather intriguingly, one of their areas of exploration is the nature of theatre and film as it relates to lived experience. In his review of the production in the Georgia Straight, Colin Thomas identified this theme as a search for authenticity. Young, writing in response online, defined it rather as the central character’s struggle for presence – about the conflict he confronts with his divided self.*

In many ways, Tear the Curtain is a companion piece to Palace Grand, the work of the Electric Company that has had the greatest impact on me as an audience member. Both shows explore the inner, psychological states of a central character through an externalized, theatrical story. Both shows play with the idea of where narrative is located and the presence of the performer (and by extension the creators) in the work itself. As with Palace Grand, how these explorations connect to the various narrative threads in Tear the Curtain is not always clear but I admire the Electric Company for not shying away from their instincts in the face of such a large canvas and, it has to be said, potentially more mainstream audience.

And, despite the intimate quest at its heart, Tear the Curtain is definitely on a big canvas. It is also a sly nod to the site-specific roots of the company as the Stanley Theatre’s past as a cinema is re-imagined. Sharp, beautifully filmed images (Brian Johnson was the director of photography) are projected onto a scrim that covers the entire proscenium space. For the times when this scrim is removed, the images are then projected onto David Roberts’ wonderful set (a great evocation of the architecture of the era – which also cleverly echoes the interior architecture of the theatre itself). The blending of cinema and theatre is superb and deftly handled as the narrative switches effortlessly between the two media.  Collier has a lot of fun with this conceit, for example, moments where we see the live performer in shadow through a window while we watch what’s “happening” on screen via the filmed sequences. On other occasions we see projected close ups of the actors and objects while the scene itself is happening simultaneously before us. The intricacies of this theatrical-cinematic interweaving put me in mind of the need for film actors to “hit their mark” during filming and how the actors (and designers for that matter) had to bring this kind of technical rigour to their performances at the Stanley.

The storyline centres on a theatre critic, Alex Braithwaite (Young). It’s quite unsettling to be a Vancouver theatre critic watching a production about a Vancouver theatre critic: particularly one who seems to be suffering from an acute identity crisis, something I suffer from about once a month. At the top of the show, Alex finds himself moved by the performance of a young actress, Mila Brook (played, note-perfectly by Laura Mennell). Alex’s response to the performance is later explained as somehow connected in his imagination/memory to an experience he had as a young man attending a theatre happening created by a group known as the Empty Space Society. To deepen the personal mystery, Alex then encounters a strange man (a terrific James Fagan Tait – made up to look like he’d just stepped out of the Cabinet of Dr Caligari) who may or may not be Stanley Lee (no, not the creator of Spider-Man, but the theatrical revolutionary behind the Empty Space Society) who may or may not be living in Stanley Park.

Laid over top of this is a narrative that finds Alex and his Girl Friday (Mavis, Dawn Petten having bags of fun) caught up – in a very Film Noir kind of way – in the political/gangster crossfire of a theatre impresario named Patrick Dugan (Gerard Plunkett) and movie house mogul Max Pamploni (Tom McBeath). Both men have their eyes on an empty lot on Granville Street for their respective empires. Strangely this storyline represents a sort of beautiful wish. In contemporary Vancouver there would be no entertainment moguls fighting over an empty lot – instead they’d be killing themselves to build a condo tower.
As in the best Film Noir there’s a dame: an icy, sexual dynamo.  Here, it’s Mennell’s Mila who is being fought over by both Dugan and Pamploni but who is also covertly part of a revolutionary group (a group which somehow evolved out of Stan Lee’s Empty Space troupe) who want to destroy mass forms of cultural entertainment and replace them with a new, personal (and theoretically liberating) technology. This new form of entertainment turns out to be TV, and the show does a nicely understated analysis of the evolution and promises (largely unfulfilled) of new technology.

In his review, Thomas identifies Alex with the creative impulse which is something Young confirms in his online response. Yet, there is a problem, which Thomas alludes to, in that Alex is not a creator but rather a critic. Now, Vancouver isn’t short on playwright-critics, so this combo is not only possible in our collective experience, it’s highly likely. But for me there was a confusing cross-over as to where Alex was actually located in terms of his own process/experience and what he was meant to embody. One of Alex’s drivers in the script is to write an article which he can’t finish (eerily, much like my experience of writing this review).  While this, along with his identification with Stanley Lee, does link Alex with the creative process, his position within the world of the play (and one that he starts and ends with) is that of audience member – an, informed, critical audience member perhaps but still a receiver of work rather than a creator. Does it matter that Alex appears to be a stand-in for both the creative and the critical processes? After all, both, in the end, are forms of investigation and Alex does spend a great deal of time investigating both his own internal space as well as the mysteries that surround him.

Now, according to my own thesis, it does matter. It is too subtle to have Alex embody these two interlinked process and he should be, for clarity’s sake, either an artist or a critic. It should help make his “journey” and the thematic off-shoots of that journey more comprehensible. But judging from Young’s response to Thomas’ review, this sort of clarity was not necessarily what he and his co-creators were after. In what might be an Artaud-like manner, they wanted to confront the audience with the character’s (and, perhaps by extension) the creators’ own confusion over where he/they are located within this vortex of created “presences” – that is, in performance, on screen and in the reality of actors standing on the stage and the creators creating the work. Viewed in this manner, it makes sense for Alex to be both creator and critic.

The river that runs underneath – and is frequently exposed – is Artaud, who is directly referenced in the work and who has Stanley Lee as a kind of local stand in for the French surrealist. It’s definitely a surreal – and fun – idea that a remote logging/port town such as Vancouver in the 1920’s housed a community of radical performers (of course the argument is often advanced that most adventurous theatre work in Canada is currently emerging out of Vancouver which is certainly at odds with the Super Natural/Best Place on Earth ski/golf paradise that is presented as our home).

I know very little about Artaud, but it would appear that one of his goals was to engage the spectator viscerally and to not just provide them with comforting artifices. There is a beautiful moment towards the end of the show, where Young, the co-creator/performer, stands on the stage of the Stanley Theatre in 2010 and with the house lights up, engaging directly with the audience, acknowledging them as spectator and himself as performer. Young is such an amazing performer (and I use the term carefully) that this moment is filled with vulnerability and, I have to say, authenticity.

And yet – and yet: how did this moment fit into the narratives of the work? How did it complete the thematic stuff that the show is built on? My first response was that, as powerful as the moment was, it was unearned. But as I later reflected on the work, it did seem appropriate given what I understood were the thematic underpinnings of the work and the tropes – the performed/filmed existence versus or own existence in the moment – the company is playing with.  With this step out of the created world, we are forced to confront the artifice of not just theatre and cinema but also ourselves as performers in life before returning to our roles as spectators.

One thing I’ve come to realize in constructing this review – and responding to the work – is that my own eternal struggle to understand the dramatic moment versus the literary conceit is ultimately to create on stage moments of clarity, where everything comes into focus and the audience goes “oh yes” while still remaining engaged in the created world of the piece. For Kerr, Young and Collier I suspect they aspired to have their “oh, yes” moment not so much when a performer stands alone on the stage but rather later when the audience member is on their way home (or in my case, in trying to complete my review) working through the kaleidoscope of ideas and images that they were presented with. An experience that is meant to exist long after the curtain came down.

Some reviews you finish and others you abandon. I’ve gone on too long and probably not made the clear connections I’d hope to but it’s time for me to move on. I’d like to quickly thank the Arts Club and the Electric Company for allowing me to sneak in on the closing weekend to see this show even though what I was going to write would not to function as a review in the usual sense. I’d also like to thank the Arts Club for supporting the creation of this work. It is exciting to see the independent community breaking through onto the mainstage and affirming what we all know already, they belong there.

*I see that Young responded again, after the show closed, with more thoughts which I haven't had the chance to incorporate into this review.

By Andrew Templeton