New year to ring in half-salvaged season

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This article was published 26/06/2020 (2243 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Call it the Silk Purse Season.

Like most theatre companies across the country, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre has had to adapt in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier in June, that adaptation included shutting down the first two significant shows of its season, Network and The Sound of Music.

But where many Canadian companies have jettisoned the 2020-21 season altogether, RMTC is still going ahead with a lineup of shows artistic director Kelly Thornton is calling a “reimagined season,” starting in January.

Even so, the scaled-down season does not include some previously announced shows, including playwright Pamela Mala Sinha’s New, an examination of Sinha’s own roots in its story of a group of immigrants coming from India to Winnipeg in 1970, and the Warehouse show The Runner, about an Israeli medic who saves the life of a Palestinian suicide bomber instead of a soldier.

Most painful for Thornton is the cancellation of the musical Children of God, which was to be the keystone presentation in Thornton’s The Bridge program, a “festival of ideas” that was to replace the Master Playwright’s Festival. The Bridge has also collapsed… for now.

The revised season retains six productions, now launching in January 2021. They include:

• Burning Mom (Main Stage, Jan. 7-30): Playwright Mieko Ouchi’s one-woman show follows the adventures of a widow who jumps into her RV and heads for the Burning Man Festival in Nevada.
• The Legend of Georgia McBride (Main Stage, Feb. 18-March 13): Matthew Lopez’s comedy follows the fortunes of an Elvis impersonator who adapts in unexpected ways when his music venue becomes a drag club.
• Calpurnia (Main Stage, March 25-April 17, 2021): RMTC associate artistic director Audrey Dwyer wrote this comedy set in a wealthy Jamaican-Canadian home where one woman’s examination of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird butts up against her family’s attitude to their own Filipina housekeeper. A co-production with Canada’s National Arts Centre.
• The Three Musketeers (Main Stage, May 6-29): Adapted by Catherine Bush from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, this adventure brings swash and buckle to the RMTC stage. 
• Yaga (Tom Hendry Warehouse, March 4-20): Playwright Kat Sandler (Bang Bang) wrote this comedy-mystery inspired by Baba Yaga folklore.
• The Wolves (Tom Hendry Warehouse, April 15-May 1): Playwright Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer Prize finalist play takes us to the pitch for a teenage girls soccer team’s weekly warm-up.

By now, Kelly Thornton is well aware of the fact the reimagined season may not go as planned if COVID numbers spike in the province, or if the provincial government simply decides that theatres may not be open by January. But Thornton also says she can’t discount Manitoba’s persistently low number of active COVID cases.

“I’m hoping the numbers can be contained and things can turn around for the theatre industry,” Thornton says in a phone interview.

Her rearrangement of plays is not random. Thornton says at both the main stage and the Warehouse Theatre, “we’re trying to start with smaller shows.”

“We reversed the order so Burning Mom comes out of the gates first. It’s a one-person show. And the biggest show — The Three Musketeers — is at the end because there’s a lot more people running around the stage.

The same philosophy holds at the Warehouse, where the lineup goes from Yaga, a three-person show, to The Wolves, which has a cast of nine.

The other consideration was to minimize travel by performers and behind-the-scenes crew, Thornton says. That means giving work to local artists as much as possible.

“I know the local community of artists are hurting,” she says. “I feel like my job is to get some employment for artists. So if I can get back onstage, I will, and I will lean in local so I don’t have to deal with travel.”

The loss of the inaugural Bridge festival is painful, especially since the focus was to have been on art and reconciliation, a theme reflected in the now cancelled musical Children of God, which looks at the children of an Oji-Cree family taken to a residential school in northern Ontario.

It was some consolation to hold onto Calpurnia, she says, which is a work that both the National Art Centre and MTC really want to produce, she says. “Especially with the Black Lives Matter movement and calls for justice. It’s a perfect show to put on the stage right now.

“I feel like we learned so much with every day and week that go by in terms of understanding what the path forward is,” Thornton says.

“So for me, it seems too soon to say we can’t meet again till March or for the whole season. I really wanted to take the great leap of hope to plan for a January return. And if, in September, once we’ve had three more months under our belt and we still think that’s not feasible, we’ll pivot again.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca 

Twitter: @FreepKing