(The picture, incidentally, is from the Ottawa Citizen.)
Yesterday I got to see the preview show of Empire Builders!
I appreciate a play that has me walking out afterwards feeling as though my mind had been emptied out and rearranged: it’s a sign, usually, that the production managed to create a completely different space from the one I inhabit – and to convince me of its logic in such a way that I didn’t need explanations or exposition, and that I needed to readjust to my usual universe for a few minutes once I was released. That’s what Empire Builders (Third Wall Theatre, at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre until February 16th) did.
Empire Builders is a collaboration between the French and English theatre communities in Ottawa. It is a decidedly challenging play for both audience and actors. And this production, at least, involves some of the best and most original staging I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s Third Wall’s first production in their new home at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, which still has me impressed as a really genuinely Good Place for the arts. It’s in the studio theatre, a black-box-style space which just begs to be used well, and it is in this show.
It’s hard to say what actually happens in this absurdist comedy. But it is funny, and surprising, and thought-provoking, and entertaining, and bizarre. The family in the play – a father and mother, their daughter, and a maid – are driven further and further up a staircase in a house by a mysterious noise. Every time they move up, they lose possessions and the space gets smaller, but the parents insist that everything is fine and refuse to believe that things were ever different. The only one who seems to remember anything is their daughter Zenobia, who is also the only one who will acknowledge the strange creature that is in the space with them and that the others continually kick and slap and beat without admitting its existence. It’s a play about avoiding the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room; it’s also a play about people who would rather live in fantasy than reality, who don’t question their situation, and who collectively forget what it is inconvenient to remember. It rings interestingly true in this era, even though it was written in the late 1950s.
In a black box you have no curtains, and no definite stage. This could be a problem for the staging – or it could be the point. In this show, the audience is split into two banks of seats, facing each other across the stage space – marked out by a long white floor, hanging window frames that suggest high narrow walls, a vertiginous wall on one side covered in bits of flotsam, jetsam, and furniture nailed to it, and a curtained dormer window at the other side with stairs rising through it into nowhere. As we went in, the actors were already on stage, frozen in a tableau focused on a shrouded mummylike figure holding a music box. The costumes, in all-white costumes with faces painted slightly white and hair dusted white, are your first clue that verisimilitude is not exactly the point here, and the situation the characters are in – driven further and further up the stairs of a shrinking house while attempting to deny that anything at all is wrong – bears that out.
The cluttered stage, full of steamer trunks and baskets and suitcases, means that there’s almost always something you can’t quite see from whatever your position is in the audience, and that adds to the sense of claustrophobia, especially as the space in which the characters can act begins to shrink, eventually sliced down to one trunk at the end of the stage, up against the window. It also allows for some nice bits of blocking, allowing one character to appear (between two blocking trunks) to viciously beat another with a frying pan. (I was sitting on the end, so I could see the actual action, but most of the audience wouldn’t have been able to.) The innovative staging also benefits from some nicely timed, unflashy lighting and sound design, which adds to the mood, the scene, and the humour, without being obtrusive.
The translation must be great. I haven’t read the original French script, but this English version pops, and for a play that’s mostly about words – and about how slippery they are, and how you can use them to hide from reality – and that’s also fifty years old, that’s an achievement. For all that and a translation, that’s even more astonishing. Julian Doucet, as the Father, has a particularly virtuosic part. His comedy depends on timing and delivery, and massive flights of verbal fancy, and he did a marvelous job of it, with only a few stumbles, well surfed over, and understandable when he was the last person left speaking after an hour and a half’s worth of play.
The really outstanding thing about the acting in this show is the physicality of it. The characters go from slow, barely noticeable balletic movements to violence and brutality, to limp doll-like passivity; climb in and out and on top of huge steamer chests; and play to every angle of the room at once, entailing a lot of movement. Not to mention that in an impossible universe, they act believably, as well, which is difficult. You can see implicit motivations and thoughts in these characters as they negotiate their bizarre situation. I also have to be impressed by Riley Stewart, as the Neighbour, who was right behind me and had me convinced for a while there (and you’ll know what I mean when you see the show.) Matt Miwa, as the Schmurtz, the creature that is beaten and ignored and that moves around bringing menace to the stage, was also fascinating – working with no facial features or words, and having only his motions to convey threat, pain, or a sort of lurking presence. When he does remove the wrappings around his face, his expression evokes a whole series of silent-movie inhuman monsters, and his final confrontation with the father has a few of those echoes as well.
In some ways, Empire Builders talks about the world we’re living in now in the same language that dreams might use. It explains nothing. It creates its own world that seems, like the characters’ logic, to make sense only as long as you let it, as long as you go along with the premise that things do in fact make sense. It’s full of wonderful moments of comedy and delight and surreality, but most of all it not only makes you leave the theatre thinking, but it manages in the meanwhile to be eminently watchable. Go see it. You owe it to your eyes.
