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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Cercle Moliere play its last before move
CERCLE Moliere opened its last play ever Théâtre de la Chapelle Friday night and will move into its new $9-million theatre next month.
Doute, the French version of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, is the company's final offering of the 2009-10 season and swan song at its makeshift theatre, ending a 10-year run at the former chapel on rue Saint Joseph. Next October, La Marriage Forcé will christen the new 125-seat venue with a work by its namesake playwright.
"It's a feel-good space," says artistic director Roland Mahe. "It's very modern, It's not extravagant. It's just right for us."
Mahe, who has been at the helm for half of the St. Boniface theatre's 84 years of existence, is thrilled with his first impressions of the 19,000 square-feet glass and Tyndall stone building constructed right up against the sidewalk on Provencher Boulevard.
"People walking or driving by on Provencher can see right into the all-glass foyer and into our rehearsal hall," says Mahe, who last summer was invested into the order of Manitoba. "We're exposed entirely."
He is trying to temper his excitement and not create the impression that everything will be changing at their splashy new digs.
"We're not going overboard about leaving," says Mahe. "The kind of theatre and how we present is not changing. It's the same Cercle Moliere but in a new theatre."
"ö "ö "ö
Before Chris Johnson could direct Headspace, the University of Manitoba professor had to enter cyberspace.
The Mike Bell drama, which has its premiere at 7 p.m. tonight at the school's Black Hole Theatre, revolves around two U of M students: Twyla, who is a cyber-geek, and her boyfriend Mark, who is a technophobe. The couple is experiencing relationship problems mostly because he feels threatened by her bisexual anime vampire avatar. That Mark maintains no cyber-presence arouses the suspicion of the CIA, which may have invented Facebook to keep surreptitious tabs on society.
Internet culture is a foreign realm to Johnson and one he took tentative steps to join.
"I've had to learn it," he says. "I'm on Facebook now. It was the pressure from my students and of trying to depict this world that made me take this step reluctantly. That whole world of social networking is new to me. I still don't text but I do have a cellphone."
The Black Hole Theatre commissioned Bell, the author of 10 fringe festival plays, to pen Headspace and kick start playwriting on campus.
"Since Carol Shields left us there hasn't been the kind of playwriting happening at the U of M that there was when she was teaching and writing," says Johnson. "In those days Ian Ross and Mike Bell were also there. It was a really lively aspect of what we do."
In 2008-09 Bell was appointed U of M's playwright-in-residence and the school hosted a festival of student work last spring. Headspace was also workshopped in advance of it being taught in various classes this year.
"I had been really interested in the problem of depicting the lives of our students' generation on stage given that they spend so much time online," Johnson. "That was one of the major challenges that Mike took on. How do you represent that theatrically?"
Bell, a Winnipeg actor/playwright who is also a U of M theatre instructor, has penned an extremely complex structure, to replicate how technology shapes how young people see the world. The result, says Johnson, is more like surfing the web than watching a conventional play. Scenes are embedded in scenes, embedded in scenes. The design team developed a pop-up stage to replicate computer pop-ups.
At times all five entrances are in use at the theatre, located in the lower level of University College.
"It's a circus," says Johnson. "It's not like that all night, because if it was your brain would explode."
Headspace runs until March 13 and again from March 16-20. Tickets are $11 and $9 for students and seniors
and are available by calling 474-6880.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 9, 2010 C3
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