AN UNDISCOVERED SHAKESPEARE

Transcription

1 AN UNDISCOVERED SHAKESPEARE season sponsor title sponsor partner

2 Supporting the arts, locally. Each year, through various donations and sponsorships, we are committed to helping our local communities. We re proud to be the 2018/2019 season sponsor of the Grand Theatre.

3 Last season we brought Rebecca Northan s brilliant production of Blind Date to our Spriet Stage. Now, Rebecca returns to the Grand with An Undiscovered Shakespeare and we get to experience a true work in progress. This production, in an exciting early phase of its development, comes to life as part of our compass New Play Development program, which is dedicated to supporting the creation of new works on our stages. What better place to explore and play than our own McManus Stage? As an active participant in this development, we invite you to watch and enjoy as this team of artists explores all the opportunities to improvise a play in the style of William Shakespeare. It is my sincere belief that this project will keep on developing over the years, finding its path, as Rebecca and her team continue to experiment and play. How wonderful that the Grand Theatre, compass, and our partner on this workshop production, the Stratford Festival, will play a part in the creation of An Undiscovered Shakespeare. You can say you were among the first to participate. Bask in the creative risk, the challenge, and the joy of An Undiscovered Shakespeare. Welcome. dennis garnhum artistic director

4 THE MAKING OF CANADA S MOST FAMOUS ROMANCE MAGGIE & PIERRE By Linda Griffiths with Paul Thompson A Timeshare Production Directed by Rob Kempson Starring Kaitlyn Riordan February 12 to 23 McManus Stage Set & Costume Designer Jung-Hye Kim, Lighting Designer Oz Weaver, Sound Designer Steven Lafond. season sponsor extended!

5 mcmanus stage, october 11 to 13, 2018 an undiscovered shakespeare A Spontaneous Theatre production by Rebecca Northan cast RAOUL BHANEJA BELINDA CORNISH IJEOMA EMESOWUM BRUCE HORAK KEVIN KRUCHKYWICH REBECCA NORTHAN SOPHIA PERLMAN production team Director REBECCA NORTHAN Stage Manager RENATE HANSON In development through the compass New Play Development Program and the Stratford Festival Laboratory. The Grand Theatre is an active member of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) and engages, under the terms of the Canadian Theatre Agreement, professional artists who are members of the Canadian Actors Equity Association. The Grand Theatre acknowledges with thanks the co-operation of Locals 105 and 828 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists, and Allied Crafts of the United States, its Territories and Canada, and The London Musicians Association Local 279. The videotaping or other video or audio recording of this production is strictly prohibited. season sponsor title sponsor partner

6 Gripping now magazine Deeply poignant the globe and mail This award-winning memoir by CBC Radio and Globe and Mail journalist Ian Brown, powerful and moving in print, is even more extraordinary on stage. THE BOY IN THE MOON A Crow s Theatre Production By Emil Sher based on a book by Ian Brown Directed by Chris Abraham Starring Kelly McNamee, Liisa Repo-Martell, and David Storch November 20 to December 1 McManus Stage season sponsor Set & Costume Designer Shannon Lea Doyle, Lighting Designers Andre Du Toit and Kimberly Purtell, Video Designer Remington North, Sound Designer Thomas Ryder Payne, Assistant Sound Designer Deanna H. Choi photo of david storch and liisa repo-martell in the boy in the moon by dahlia katz.

7 DIRECTOR S NOTES The first time we got up on our feet to attempt speaking off the cuff, in iambic pentameter, I was shocked to find myself too afraid to speak. With 30 years of improv experience under my belt, that level of discomfort was something I assumed was far behind me. It was, of course, a deep fear of getting it wrong, crashing and burning, and looking like a failure. I had to remind myself of what my improv teacher, Keith Johnstone, would tell us over and over, You should fail as quickly as possible it s the only way to learn something new, and get any good at it. I am happy to say that after four summers of kicking this idea around, I am now able to open my mouth and have words come out. Sometimes, they are in iambic pentameter! When this happens, I mentally congratulate myself, and feel quite chuffed which is exactly the point that the verse line falls apart and I m failing all over the place. The only option is to breathe, practise instant forgiveness, and then attempt to climb back on board. What a humbling and useful discovery. The spontaneous striving for absolute structure demands nothing less than total presence. Shakespeare is teaching me to be a better (and more humble) improviser! More importantly though, our goal of elevating an average person s love story to Shakespearian heights has been truly moving. Some very generous volunteers have shared romantic details with us that could have come from the Bard himself highlighting the enduring quality of his work, and proving our theory that every life is Shakespearian. We ve told the tale of a British Nurse, kidnapped by a Pirate King, being rescued by her brother. An Amazonian Princess had a thrilling affair with a tortured soul who could not outrun his own demons. And the ghost of a woman s one-true-love appeared to give her the tender goodbye they never got in real life. We are reaching for something big, poetic, truthful, and dangerous here. You will see us careening between success and failure in any given moment. Things will fall apart. We will make thrilling discoveries. If we re very calm, and a little bit lucky, we might manage some beautiful imagery. We hope it will be a delicious train wreck. If you re sitting in a good spot, be sure to peek at the face of the person whose love story ends up on stage the light that you see there is the reason we keep risking falling down. rebecca northan

8 GUEST ARTISTS raoul bhaneja belinda cornish ijeoma emeswum bruce horak Raoul Bhaneja Actor for the grand theatre: Debut. select theatre credits: Hamlet (solo), Life, Death and The Blues, Disgraced (Hope and Hell Theatre Co./ Off-Mirvish); others include the Stratford and Blyth Festivals, Soulpepper, Neptune, PTE, and several world premieres at The Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. other: Raoul is a Gemini, Dora and Canadian Comedy Award nominee and as a teenager began improvising in the Canadian High School Improv Games and performing Shakespeare on the streets of Ottawa with A Company of Fools. A graduate of The National Theatre School of Canada, he has appeared in almost 100 different television and film projects. He is also leader of the Maple Blues Award-winning band Raoul and The Big Time, semifinalists in the 2018 International Blues Challenge in Memphis, TN. Belinda Cornish Actor for the grand theatre: Debut. select theatre credits: Her relationship with Shakespeare includes 9 seasons with the Freewill Shakespeare Festival; as an improvisor, she has been a core company member of DieNasty: The Live Improvised Soap Opera for more than a decade, as well as performing with the renowned English company, Extempore Theatre, and she has completed twenty-two 50-hour improv marathons without sleep. She is a Canadian Comedy Award and Canadian Screen Award nominee. other: Belinda is thrilled to be embarking on this terrifying ship in such exceptional company. She is also a playwright she s even won some prizes and her next play, a circus adaptation of Dante s Inferno imaginatively entitled Inferno, will be premiering in Edmonton next January. Ijeoma Emesowum Actor for the grand theatre: Debut. select theatre credits: The Changeling, As You Like It, Love s Labour s Lost, Hamlet, Macbeth, Hay Fever (Stratford Festival); The Devil s Disciple, The Women, Ragtime, Guys and Dolls, A Man and Some Women (Shaw Festival). select film and tv credits: Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Love s Labour s Lost, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens (Stratford Festival HD). other: Stratford Festival Birmingham Conservatory 2016/17, BFA University of Windsor. Bruce Horak Actor for the grand theatre: Debut. select theatre credits: Bruce has been a part of the spontaneous theatre team since He has won numerous awards for his work as an actor, writer, and director. other: Bruce is originally from Calgary, Alberta where he trained in theatre and Improvisation. When not creating new works and performing onstage, he devotes his time to painting. His works can be seen at

9 kevin kruchkywich rebecca northan sophia perlman renate hanson Kevin Kruchkywich Actor for the grand theatre: Debut. select theatre credits: Paradise Lost (Stratford Festival); Romeo and Juliet, The Glass Menagerie, The Wars (Theatre Calgary); Death of a Salesman, The Wars (Playhouse); The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Red Priest (Globe); Hedda Gabler (Persephone); The Taming of the Shrew, Henry V, Falstaff (Bard On The Beach); Office Hours, Look No Hans (Drayton); The Secret Annex, The Philadelphia Story (MTC); The Drawer Boy, Picasso at the Lapin Agile (Belfry); Wit, Aberhart Summer, Respectable (ATP); Boeing Boeing, Mesa, The School For Scandal (Arts Club); The Woman In Black (Chemainus); Guys and Dolls (Gateway). Rebecca Northan Actor/Director/Creator for the grand theatre: Blind Date. select theatre credits: Rebecca is an actor, director, producer, and all-round theatre maker, best known for her hit show, Blind Date, which has toured across Canada, the US, London s West End, and off-broadway. She is a pioneer in spontaneous theatre, a hybrid genre of structured theatre and improvisation that she continues to develop through a variety of projects, casting audience members in lead roles. Rebecca is a regular panel member on CBC Radio s Because News, has guest hosted This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and appeared in feature films The Rocker and Mr. Magorium s Wonder Emporium. She also teaches improvisation at the Canadian Film Centre and the Stratford Conservatory and worked across Canada, winning several awards including Canadian Comedy Awards and Dora Mavor Moore Awards. Sophia Perlman Actor/Musician for the grand theatre: Debut. select theatre credits: The Tale of a Town Canada Music Director (national tour, Fixt Point), Medalta on Strike Music Director/Sound Designer/Associate Dramaturge (Fixt Point). other: Sophia is a singer, musician, songwriter, arts facilitator, choral conductor, music director and educator. She is known primarily for her work as a jazz, blues and improvising musician. When not performing, she finds a wide range of work rooted in her belief that music is everyone s birthright, and that anyone can sing. She currently teaches contemporary music at Mohawk College in Hamilton. Renate Hanson Stage Manager for the grand theatre: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cabaret. select theatre credits: 13th season at Stratford Festival as assistant stage manager including King John, Christina, The Girl King, Hirsch, Do Not Go Gentle, Cyrano de Bergerac, Zastrozzi, The Trojan Women, Love s Labour s Lost, King Lear, A Delicate Balance, Coriolanus, Don Juan, As You Like It, The Lark, Timon of Athens, King John, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry VI: Revenge in France, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Lunatic, The Lover and the Poet, The Trials of Ezra Pound, Good Mother, Elizabeth Rex, Medea. Other theatres include Manitoba Opera, RMTC, Neptune Theatre. other: Graduate of National Theatre School of Canada. For Dad.

10 shakespeare every life is There s something of a cottage industry that has grown up around the topic of Shakespeare the Man. Over centuries, there have been speculations that Shakespeare poached a deer, owned a dog, practised Catholicism, fell in love with a man in London, fell in love with a woman in London. Scholars and artists have pored over the second-best bed he willed his wife, pondered possible connections between the writing of Hamlet in 1600 and the death of a son, Hamnet, four years earlier, and they ve made the pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon where they scratch their names on a window in the house in which Shakespeare was born. Poems, plays, paintings, films, and biographies of Shakespeare abound. This enduring fascination with the biography we ve lost is sparked by the body of work that has been left behind. What kind of imagination could turn with such fertility from Julius Caesar to Hamlet to Twelfth Night, bringing life to characters as various as Rosalind, Othello, and Portia? Did arresting metaphors such as life s but a walking shadow and let slip the dogs of war flow effortlessly from his pen, or did he sometimes struggle, like the rest of us, to get an idea across? The sheer scope of his achievement is perhaps what drives conspiracy theorists to insist that Shakespeare, the glover s son from Stratford-upon-Avon, simply couldn t have written the canon we now ascribe to him. But somehow he did write those plays and poems, and we still wonder quite how. What was that process like? Shakespeare in Love first a film, and now also a stage play picks up on this modern curiosity about the creative artist behind the poetry. Upsetting notions of the solitary genius whose works spring fully formed from his mind, Shakespeare in Love gives us a writer who collects ideas for plots, speeches, and even character names from everyday exchanges and encounters as they unfold around him. The supposed magic behind Shakespeare s creativity, at least in this telling of it, comes to seem more imaginable, more grounded in ordinary lives. What then if one of our own lives could inspire a play by Shakespeare? Those amateur collaborators in An Undiscovered Shakespeare who cross from the auditorium to the stage provide the kind of raw material that perhaps once led Shakespeare to imagine a bereaved Viola, a swaggering Petruchio, a witty Beatrice, or a tragically stupid Leontes. My father had a daughter loved a man, Cesario (really Viola in disguise as a boy) tells the man he/she secretly loves.

11 an LUKE HUMPHREY (CENTRE) AS WILL SHAKESPEARE WITH MEMBERS OF THE COMPANY IN THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL S PRODUCTION OF SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, PHOTO BY DAVID HOU. And what s her history? Orsino replies. A blank, my lord. She never told her love. Telling her story, my story, our stories. It s a desire, possibly even a need, that s probably as old as theatre itself. Telling stories that might otherwise be lost to time. Collaborating across time in iambic pentameter, An Undiscovered Shakespeare stages some of the stories from our own age comic? tragic? tragical-comical-historical-pastoral? that Shakespeare never had the chance to stage. And therein lies the rub. Iambic pentameter. The verse form that strikes fear in many an undergraduate s heart. The everyday rhythm of spoken English. The rhythm of your heartbeat. Actors often claim that the drive of the verse helps them to learn and remember their lines, and even to improvise their way out of sticky spots in live performance when things go wrong. But an entire play improvised in iambic pentameter? Live theatre, at its best, is something of a tightrope act. A word or line can be forgotten, a piece of machinery might fail, an actor might suddenly get the giggles. Performers and their audience are in it together, mutually creating the energy that arcs like electricity from the stage to the auditorium and back again. Improvisation offers something like a virtuoso display of talent and creativity as spectators and possibly sometimes even the actors wonder and watch art take shape where previously there had been a blank history. This is maybe a little bit like the way Shakespeare once worked. Maybe something like a Shakespearean life in art, made new every night. margaret jane kidnie western university

12 2018/19 season packages august wilson s Book now and SAVE up to 25% fences INTERNATIONAL HIT FROM ENGLAND S NATIONAL THEATRE Barber Shop Chronicles margaret atwood s The Penelopiad The Donnellys return Vigilante Starring Nigel Shawn Williams Directed by Djanet Sears A MASTERPIECE variety london free press Starring Jan Alexandra Smith Starring Seana McKenna Directed by Megan Follows STUNNING toronto star...and more! grandtheatre.com season sponsor