Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Worth a peek

Published
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on March 26, 2009
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Theatre Projects Manitoba’s Age of Arousal offers up a hilarious look at love, lust and sexuality in 19th-century England

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AGE OF AROUSAL

Theatre Projects Manitoba

Until March 29, Rachel Browne Theatre

Linda Griffiths’ uproarious take on the Victorian era, Age of Arousal, has found a perfect home with Theatre Projects Manitoba.

Loosely based on the George Gissing novel The Odd Women, the play is a subversive, slightly surreal tale of lust, love and feminism in late 19th-century England which the cast and crew have artfully crafted into a delightful mix of comedy and pathos.

Set in an age in which women vastly outnumber men, Mary Barfoot (Patricia Hunter) and her lover Rhoda Nunn (Krista Jackson) run a school to teach women secretarial skills in order to support themselves. Enter the Madden sisters: the two spinsters Virginia and Alice (Carolyn Gray and Maggie Nagle), and the beautiful young shop girl Monica (Erin McGrath). Add Mary’s dashing cousin Everard (Eric Blais) to the mix and all hell breaks loose.

Rooted in sublime performances, especially those of Hunter, Gray and Nagle as women all on the edge of oblivion as far as the world is concerned, Age of Arousal turns the morals and repression of Victorian England upside down and sets them ablaze. In Griffiths’ hands this could barely be a more raucous and subversive romp.

While all of the characters struggle with their own inner passions, Griffiths cleverly allows us a first row seat into their psyches with her creation of ‘thought speak,’ in which the characters’ innermost thoughts are blurted out seemingly uncontrollably. Though it is not always a perfect device - there are occasions when characters’ voices are overlapping to such an extent it’s difficult to hear what is being said - but overall it’s illuminating and often downright hilarious.

The implementation of ‘thought speak’ also adds a pleasingly visceral element to the proceedings. The characters are often at odds with themselves within the realms of the inner/outer world, and the brute force of the tug-of-war between inner passion and outer duty is fascinating. It also leads to some exuberantly physical and comic performances, most notably by the marvelous Gray, whose tortured Virginia is an absolute wreck who transforms into a whole new person. Nothing or no one in this play is set in stone - sexuality, desire and passion are almost living, breathing elements which transform from moment to moment.

Leanne Foley’s design for the show, including the set and costumes, carefully bring about notions of the Victorian age, bustles and all, but yet, as with the characters, things are not quite as they seem. The design evokes the era while keeping it fresh and modern.

Special kudos must go to Eric Blais, the lone male in the production, who manages to be both dashing and sympathetic and not get lost among the whirling force of female passion. Blais is a brave man to undertake the task, which includes having to fake a pelvic exam with the luminous Hunter, and both manage to make it seem perfectly casual and absolutely hilarious.

Age of Arousal is a gorgeous melding of old/new, political/personal and passion/ repression into a heady mix of wit and intelligence. It’s a delight to watch.

- Barb Stewart

Play wins arousing round of applause

Published
by
rea
on March 23, 2009
in News
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By: Kevin Prokosh, Winnipeg Free Press

Photo Caption:  Krista Jackson, Patricia Hunter and Maggie Nagle snap, crackle and virtually pop out of their corsets.

The Victorian era was no time to be a lady.

Women were expected to be weak and helpless, their raison d’etre only to marry. That they largely outnumbered men in 1885 London meant these unpaired females were considered redundant.

Through five of these spinsters, Toronto playwright Linda Griffiths chronicles the awakening of the feminine consciousness in her randy costume drama Age of Arousal. Far from being expendable, this quintet are funny, hot to trot and, with a little prodding, ready to change the world.

Despite being set 125 years in the past, Age of Arousal is decidedly modern in how it attempts to reconcile feminist doctrines with traditional marriage and vexing sexual desire.

Griffiths has been absent from local stages for almost two decades and her agile writing, vivid characters and bawdy humour remind Winnipeg audiences what they’ve been missing.

Victorian society preferred to avoid talking about such a base subject as sex, but through Griffiths’ hilarious use of thought-speak — the actors voice their uncensored thoughts — Theatre Projects patrons learn that didn’t stop its subjects from being obsessed with it.

Mary Barfoot is an aging suffragette who was jailed and brutally force-fed to end hunger strikes. She and her lover and protegé Rhoda Nunn run a school for secretaries. They believe female emancipation will come through typing and shorthand. The destitute Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia and Monica, are new students, intimidated and reluctant to touch their “ferocious” type machines.

“Type, damn you! Type,” Rhoda commands them. “It’s the way to liberty.”

Another kind of liberty arrives in the handsome form of eligible bachelor Everard, an ex-doctor who is also Mary’s cousin. He immediately catches the eye of the ripe, young and willing Monica, but becomes drawn to the independent spirit and intelligence of the modern woman represented by Rhoda. He is attuned to the reform in the air and the coming ascendancy of the opposite sex.

“Men aren’t afraid of women, really, only of women in groups,” observes Everard to a gale of laughter from Thursday’s opening night throng.

To her credit, director Ardith Boxall accentuates Arousal’s many passions, as does the captivating female cast, outfitted in designer Leanne Foley’s elaborate frocks. Each performer fully inhabits her character and exposes the internal doubts and discord hidden away behind the flowery façade of Victorian propriety. As the suffragette icon Mary Barfoot, Patricia Hunter deftly communicates the anxiety that comes from advocating for the freedom of woman but not for her woman. Krista Jackson is impressive as Rhoda Nunn, a conflicted lady tentatively straddling the sexual divide.

Carolyn Gray and Maggie Nagle well play the two old-maid Madden sisters, who feel invisible and of little use to society. Gray’s Virginia is a loopy lush who yearns to escape to Berlin where she can smoke, wear men’s clothing and look like Oscar Wilde. Nagle’s Alice slowly throws off the shackles of her repression and is resurrected by her Remington typewriter. Erin McGrath sizzles as the lusty Monica, whose sisters dine on her unbridled desires.

As Everard, Eric Blais has the most fun, given that he finds himself in compromising situations with three of the women. Blais comes across as a metrosexual in the making.

Griffiths has the last laugh with the parting joke about the inevitability of gender equality in the early 20th century. “In 30 years, it will all be accomplished.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

Age of Arousal

Theatre Projects Manitoba

To March 29 at Rachel Browne Theatre

Tickets: $15-$20

Four stars out of five

Loose women

Published
by
rea
on March 20, 2009
in News
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Canadian playwright unlaces the corset of the Victorian age in popular new play

The actress/playwright Linda Griffiths was pawing through the buck bin outside a Toronto used bookstore when she came upon a beat-up copy of The Odd Women.  After noting the author of the 1893 novel was somebody named George Gissing, she flipped it over, discovered it was about five Victorian spinsters and was immediately intrigued. At $1, it seemed a bargain at the time.

Today it looks more like a steal, as Age of Arousal, the play wildly inspired by The Odd Women, gets set to open at Theatre Projects Manitoba tonight, Montreal next week, Vancouver and Austin, Texas, in April, and in North Carolina the following month. The sudden popularity has Griffiths running off in all directions to promote her most sought-after script in years.

“It’s kind of crazy but it’s also pretty great,” says Griffiths, who made an auspicious debut on the national stage in 1980 with her one-woman show Maggie and Pierre. “That’s a lot of productions for a Canuck play.”

The 50-something Montreal native is a theatre lifer whose career has sometimes seemed like a life sentence when a new play failed to find traction with artistic directors or audiences. There’s nothing like a spate of opening nights to make a stage veteran feel as if she has been sprung from theatrical confinement.  “I’m very up about Age of Arousal,” says Griffiths, who was recently in town to give a reading and visit the Theatre Projects set. “Being a Canadian playwright is brutal. I’ve done plenty of griping, but not right now.”

The central character in Age of Arousal is an aging suffragette named Mary Barfoot who believes she can foster social change in 1885 London by training women at her secretary school. She and her lover/protegé take in three starving women with no means of support and help them find a place in society. When Mary’s male cousin/cad visits, ideas and libidos clash.

Theatre Projects’s artistic director Ardith Boxall has assembled a potent lineup of Winnipeg actresses: Patricia Hunter, Maggie Nagle, Carolyn Gray, Krista Jackson and Erin McGrath. Eric Blais rounds out the cast for the March 19-29 run at the Rachel Browne Theatre, 211 Bannatyne Ave.

Griffiths’ first draft was faithful to Gissing’s story but then, as is her habit, wandered off in subsequent rewrites. “I’m not capable of writing an adaptation,” says Griffiths, who has always been a Canadian alternative theatre darling. “I’m too rebellious.

“I began to feel asphyxiated by the (Victorian) times myself. I felt like I was wearing a corset, restricted by what the women could say and what they couldn’t say.”

She soon realized that what her characters were thinking was more important than what they were saying. Griffiths decided to employ what she calls thought speak, which involves her characters speaking their thoughts to themselves or each other.

It is a device first glimpsed in Maggie and Pierre nearly 30 years ago and which has surfaced in her plays from time to time.

“What threads through my work is a sense of what I would call fabulism,” says Griffiths, whose plays are a rare sight in Winnipeg.

In Maggie and Pierre, she dressed as Maggie Sinclair and wore a tuxedo sleeve on one arm to represent Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau so she could change characters with a twist of her body.

“I always root the fantasy with a political element so it’s never ‘dreamy girl writes play,’” she says. “There is always this leaping-off point out of reality. In Age of Arousal, it’s the thought speak.”

The Victorian period was a time of tremendous social and economic flux, exploding with the beginnings of communism, Darwinism and socialism. The suffragette movement was beginning to loosen the limitations on women.

“The corset does not represent the Victorian age, but it being ripped open does,” she says. “It was believed that if women were unleashed they would be nymphomaniacs. They were entirely at the mercy of their bodies. They needed to be protected and controlled.”

It all makes Griffiths appreciate how much gender politics has evolved since the 19th century.

“For all this talk about all this explosion of ideas, there was a lot of repression of women,” she says. “If I was a Victorian I might like to be a man. I’m not sure I’d want to be a woman. Even now, it’s hard enough, but then it was hell.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

Griffiths File

1956 — Born in Montreal.

1976 — Asked to leave the National Theatre School.

1978 — Founding member of 25th Street Theatre in Saskatoon.

1980 — Co-wrote and starred in Maggie and Pierre.

1984 — Her play Jessica opens in Saskatoon and goes to win a shelf full of Toronto awards.

1990 — Performed The Darling Family with Alan Williams at PTE’s second stage.

1999 — Wrote Alien Creature, about poet Gwendolyn McEwan, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary award.

2007 — Age of Arousal premieres at Calgary’s playRites Festival and moves on to Toronto and Philadelphia.

Sexier than a bare ankle

Published
by
rea
on March 20, 2009
in News
. Closed

Sexier than a bare ankle

Theatre Projects Manitoba’s production of Age of Arousal explores Victorian-era sexuality - but don’t expect a stuffy historical drama

Barb Stewart - Uptown

What if your innermost thoughts suddenly came popping out of your mouth?  You would probably be so horrified you would never leave the house - or open your mouth - again.  Thankfuly, the characters in Linda Griffiths’ play Age of Arousal, which makes its Winnipeg debut at Theatre projects Manitoba this week, suffer this fate, but still come out for the entire world to see.

In their defense, only the audience is privy to these outbursts, so the characters are spared the indignity and embarrassment of others confronting them about it. Those offstage bear witness, making the work an intriguing combination of fantasy and reality not often seen on Winnipeg stages.

“I feel like we don’t see this kind of work in Manitoba,” says the play’s director, TPM artistic director Ardith Boxall. “It’s a very modern Canadian play combined with really rich, heightened language. Her work has a real sense of the fantastic. Her scenes are personal/political, but she feeds them through the eye of a needle. That’s the fabulous sort of fantastical element.”

Griffiths calls the process of her characters’ outbursts “thought speak” and as intriguing as it sounds for an audience, it is equally as thrilling and demanding for the Theatre Projects cast (Eric Blais, Carolyn Gray, Krista Jackson, Patricia Hunter, Erin McGrath and Maggie Nagle) and director. Whether the device takes the form of one person’s breathy aside or a group of characters joining together in an almost aria of hidden thoughts, the piece takes a great amount of choreographing and structure to maintain.

“It’s essentially the interior voice of the character, it just comes spilling out and we have to stage things in such a way that it makes sense, that we know the other characters onstage aren’t hearing it. It’s very technical and it’s very challenging. It’s basically like patting your head and rubbing your stomach,” laughs Boxall.

What makes this all even more fascinating is that Age of Arousal is set in Victorian England, a time and place rife with repression and, one could conclude, plenty of innermost thoughts to be hidden away, or not, as the case may be.

Griffiths’ work is “wildly inspired” by George Gissings’ 1893 novel The Odd Women. A pioneering work of feminism, even if written by a man, Griffiths uses the same characters as the novel, but has the luxury of the 21st century’s more relaxed moral code to play with. The story involves Mary Barfoot and her lover, Miss Nunn, who run a secretarial school for women who need to find their own way in the world (i.e., are unmarried). When the Madden sisters arrive at the school, followed soon after by the dashing Everard, all hell breaks lose.

Even though the play is set in the Victorian era, it is anything but a dry historical drama. The piece is decidedly up-to-date, making it a fresh and exciting work for a modern audience.

“It’s a very modern play,” Boxall says. “It’s not a look back in time, it’s a cry to race towards the present. There are very many visual and oral clues in the play that this is not real, this is not a historical reenactment. They are not dry historical figures. And one of the biggest ways that happens is that these characters are dealing with what is never dealt with in the Victorian-period: sexuality. Everyone in this play is thinking about sex all the time.”

AGE OF AROUSAL
Theatre Projects Manitoba
March 19-29, Rachel Browne Theatre