First Theatre North West renovated its lobby and seating area, and now it is renovating the system of producing plays. Let the wild rumpus begin.
This past year was the 20th anniversary for TNW but rather than expect presents and a party from the public, the organizers decided to do the gift giving. The physical improvements to their home theatre will now be accompanied by improvements to the product on the stage.
"The audience and the sponsors needed to be properly thanked for 20 years of supporting this organization," said artistic director Jack Grinhaus. "Between the people who founded this theatre company and the people who bought tickets and volunteered their time and invested their support all kinds of ways, we were in a position to go to the next level."
So with the current season of plays not yet complete (award-winning drama The Secret Mask opens April 23), and with World Theatre Day freshly arrived (this past Saturday), Grinhaus pulled back the curtain on the brand new 2015-16 season. For those who have become used to how TNW had done business, it was a dramatic departure.
"Just to assure everyone, though, I want to make it really clear that we aren't getting off base, we're just adding bases," he said. "Instead of four plays and that's all, we are going to do our four mainstage productions as usual, but we are including two presentation tours (plays produced by others elsewhere and brought in for a local viewing), and one original local piece."
The four mainstage pieces have a subtle difference audiences would probably only notice in a subliminal sense, but Grinhaus wasn't being cagey. He explained that previous TNW plays were typically sourced from farther back in time. On Golden Pond, Biloxi Blues, Brighton Beach Memoirs and the like came from a pocket of plays that had been audience-verified by Hollywood but he knew there were other ways to be assured that a play would be a hit. He went looking into those pockets.
To give the season a theme, TNW is calling the whole package Taste And Aesthetic because each one talks about or will be built around elements of those two words.
First, he found the Tony Award-winning comedy (for Best Play, no less) Art, by Yasmina Reza, which ran for 600 performances on Broadway and now is available to community theatres for their interpretation.
"It is fast-paced and it's funny the whole ride," Grinhaus said. "It's about this guy who buys a $200,000 painting, but the painting is just a completely white canvass. This just infuriates one of his best friends, and thoroughly confuses his other friend, so there the three of them are locked in this debate we've all been in about just what is art anyway? They hilariously argue over morals and artistic values, tastes, and it gets into what friendship really is and what's so great about the way Yasmina Reza wrote it is, you'll be having that debate in your own head at the same time, and be changing sides on yourself."
The second mainstage play is
A Christmas Carol, which is a holiday favourite dating back more than a century. It has been done by TNW two times in the past, so in keeping with the theme, this time Grinhaus is changing the aesthetic.
"We are bringing in someone named Heather Davies who is an internationally renowned adaptor of plays," he said. "We aren't going to veer off of the Christmas Carol story, that will all still be there, we are keeping the family Dickens show but we are going to give everyone a steampunk, Tim Burton kind of feel to it and really push the visual elements into new territory so people get more from Christmas Carol than the same old predictable views. It's a story that has been rebooted a thousand different ways over the years, so we know it lends itself well to re-imagining."
Mainstage No. 3 will be the play Dreary And Izzie by a TNW favourite. The playwright Tara Beagan also wrote Thy Neighbour's Wife which was a smash hit for them in 2010. This new play is a love story and stitched into the clothing of the script is an examination of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. Grinhaus said he was aware that this region (the Burns Lake campus of the College of New Caledonia) was a national leader in FASD research, and, like most communities across Canada, has this disease running undercurrents through local society.
"To add some extra audience value to this, we are going to have Tara Beagan here in person to direct the play, and her partner Andy Moro is a production designer so he will be here working on the production as well," said Grinhaus.
And because of all the local implications with the play's subject matter, this is the opportunity Grinhaus spotted for extra legacy impact.
"Awhile back, Theatre North West ran a New Works Program which was a call for local playwrights to submit their stuff, and one would be workshopped and given a professional workover. That was before my time here, but I saw a chance to produce that play as a companion piece to Dreary And Izzie and that play is called Highway Of Fears by our own Betsy Trumpener and it is about exactly what you think it's about, so again, tackling that hard reality and bringing it out in the open for public thought and public discussion. And, it's a chance for Betsy, who many will know already is a really strong writer, to be mentored directly by Tara Beagan. It will also mean that Betsy is the first local playwright to be professionally performed by Theatre North West so that's a great fit with our goals of taking a big step forward after our 20th anniversary as a thank-you to our community."
The fourth mainstage TNW offering next year will be another first. B.C. playwright Morris Panych is a Canadian legend, earning smash box office returns for his many works, and two of them 20 years apart have won the Governor General's Award showing his consistency of high quality. None of his works has ever been staged by TNW, however, so Girl In The Goldfish Bowl will be the first.
"It is such a heartbreaking but hope-instilling story," Grinhaus said, and Panych has already agreed to be a consultant on the production, so all the creator's intentions are detailed. That will be needed, said Grinhaus, because Panych is not a conventional writer.
"There is a different system to the language, a different rhythm to the words. It'll take the audience probably half an hour to learn how to hear it, but you'll love it, you'll ride right along with it. You certainly won't miss what the story is saying."
That centres on a girl going through the last stages of childhood, facing the winds of mortality through the death of a pet and responding by clutching onto ritual and afterlife hopes and ultimately her imagination as her family dysfunction starts to rise to her consciousness. Grinhaus called it "devastatingly funny, absurd, and genuine" while the Governor General called it Canada's best English language play of 2004.
The two presentation tour shows are going to be audience treats, said Grinhaus, and because they are so different in nature to what TNW typically produces, he carved them off to be their own mini-series.
The first needs no introduction. Where The Wild Things Are is a classic children's book, made into a popular opera and also adapted to the theatrical stage. This version was nominated for a Dora Award which celebrates the massive annual works done in Toronto theatre, but it was produced by Prince George's own Kim Selody (now the artistic director of Presentation House Theatre in North Vancouver) who is coming back to his hometown to put it on display here at Theatre North West.
The second of these import shows is the wildly popular cultural magnifier called The Tale Of A Town. Its directors come to any given city, town or neighborhood and they engage in cultural research wearing theatrical lenses. The research is welded and wired together into a play that reflects the town back to itself. It has never been done in Prince George and Grinhaus, less than a year as a local resident himself, can't wait for what the presenters discover. Since it is the city's 100th anniversary, what better time to be made into a personalized civic play?
"Each year we are going to do this: bring in a couple of productions that are a little outside the box," he said. "One of them will always be a presentation especially for children, so Where The Wild Things Are is starting that tradition off.
"We wanted to make these changes, these upgrades, because we had come to a point where we were in a position to go for it, if we wanted to, so we're going for it and when you do that, you have to go after it hard," he said. "This next season, we are going to give people a smorgasbord of different theatre things, and people will let us know what worked and what didn't work, and that will form the plans for the season after that. We want to bring up surprises and new feelings and thoughts, but with the assurance it's not going to be freaky or offensive, just a sense of not knowing what's going to happen next, like a good book."
With more and different productions, the way tickets are sold must also change. There will be different packages available, so people can tailor the kind of shows they want to see or the level of prices. More details on the revamped ticket system will be unveiled soon.
"All these advancements are not ambitious. It is well within our capabilities as an organization, and it is what Prince George deserves," Grinhaus said. "Prince George has earned it, through all these years of support and showing in a sustained way that this is a theatre town."
