Walking the border tightrope

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This article was published 31/03/2017 (3432 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The theme of Prairie Theatre Exchange’s 2017-18 season is “crossing borders,” timely in a political climate of border walls and travel bans south of the border.

“It’s not a huge political statement,” says PTE artistic director Robert Metcalfe, who has programmed 15 of the company’s 45 seasons. “The programming isn’t about the politics of the time. 

“I just had this notion that people seem to be alarmed by people crossing the border. But in actual fact, restricting people from crossing your border — or not crossing your border yourself — can be detrimental to your world view, politically and personally. That kind of fit in with the choices I was making.”

On PTE’s calendar:

Gracie (Oct. 11-29)

PTE’s first play out of the gate, a drama by Joan McLeod, centres on a 15-year-old heroine compelled to conform to the strictures of her faith.

It is also literally “about people illegally crossing the border into Canada,” says Metcalfe. “Gracie’s mom packs up her family from a polygamist community in Arizona and slips into Canada because there’s been an arrangement with the polygamist community in Bountiful (B.C.) for the mom to be married,” Metcalfe says. 

“But there’s more to that arrangement than our girl Gracie actually knows.”

 

Ubuntu (Nov. 8-26)

Created by the Cape Town Project in co-production with Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, this is a collective creation in which a man in South Africa and a woman in Canada share ghosts and secrets from their past. “It’s a beautiful story and it’s really theatrically exciting in its staging,” says Metcalfe. 

 

Salt-Water Moon (Jan. 24-Feb. 11)

The 1985 drama by David French is “a Canadian classic,” says Metcalfe, admitting some prejudice: “I was in it in 1986 at the Warehouse.”

Taking place just after the First World War, when Newfoundland was not yet part of Canada, it centres on a young man who has returned to his hometown from Toronto to meet an old lover and ask her to contemplate a future together.

Director Ravi Jain from Toronto’s Why Not Theatre “has just reimagined the staging of it in such a remarkable way, giving you an opportunity to see something familiar in a different context.

“It’s beautifully written,” Metcalfe says. “It keeps getting done for a reason.”

How the Heavens Go (Feb. 28-March 18, 2018)

Joseph Aragon, a local playwright celebrated for his musicals (Bloodless: The Trial of Burke and Hare and Bloodsuckers: The Musical) ditches the music for a thematically ambitious drama — getting its world première at PTE — about a woman who, while undergoing experimental drug treatments, claims to be able to see the energy that makes up matter, placing her in conflict with a physicist friend who believes she’s just having hallucinations.

 

Fly Me to the Moon (Apr. 4-22, 2018)

This comedy by Marie Jones centres on a couple of female home-care workers driven to escalating acts of wrongdoing when they try to cash in a winning horse-race ticket left by their elderly resident who died on the loo. It has farcical elements, Metcalfe says, in that “the more the protagonist tries to put things right, the more wrong it goes. Everything they do just compounds the problem.” 

 

As usual, PTE gets the Munsch-ies at Christmas time with their annual Robert Munsch-related holiday show. This year’s adaptation is The Good, the Bad, and the Munsch by Debbie Patterson, running Dec. 21, 2017 to Jan. 7, 2018.

Subscription packages for the upcoming season start at $119 and will be on sale in the lobby during the run of The Birds and the Bees from March 30 to April 16. 

Current PTE subscribers can renew now in person at 393 Portage Ave., by calling the box office at 204-942-5483 or visiting the company’s website, www.pte.mb.ca.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing