Water world

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This article was published 17/10/2023 (1041 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The year is 2075.

It’s been 30 years since the Great World Flood, which left most of the country blanketed by water. In an effort to keep the 100,000 remaining residents of Winnipeg safe, the city has been walled off from whichever pockets of society remain.

The Winnipeg you know, love and tolerate is gone in Glad to Be Here, the upcoming project from the ever-inventive Theatre by the River in the company’s first show since 2021’s Meet Me at Dawn.

In New Winnipeg, Polo Park is drowning, The Forks are swimming and there is so much water on Portage Avenue that the skywalks are sidewalks instead.

Theatre by the River, founded in 2005, has spent the last two decades dedicated to making work that gets people talking, says artistic director Mel Marginet. And by honing in on a climate disaster that feels somewhat far-fetched but also somewhat realistic, the company hopes its latest production leads people to question where they are, who they are and how even a city can disappear under the crash of a tidal wave.

Glad to Be Here started in 2019, when creators Marginet, Daina Leitold, Derek Leenhouts and Karl Thordarson gathered to create a show about “here and now,” Marginet says. The group knew it wanted to tackle questions about the rise of “alternate facts” and online conspiracy theories.

They put on their tinfoil hats, and began to imagine what kind of calamity Winnipeg would succumb to.

“We did the science,” Leitold says; they figured out a flood would be the likeliest culprit, with waters flowing into the city from Hudson Bay.

“We got all heady imagining what that world would look like,” she adds, with the group certain there was enough material for a futuristic, dystopian narrative.

“But then we said you know what we need? A playwright. It’s good to have someone at the helm to steer the ship.”

So the company enlisted the award-winning playwright Ginny Collins (The Flats) to work her magic. The resulting story is set in New Winnipeg, which after 30 years of isolation is opening its gates to wanderers from other territories across the country seeking refuge.

Cassandra (Patricia Hunter) is the mysterious leader, written by Collins as the mouthpiece for a sales pitch for new settlers to come to the only remaining Prairie metropolis.

“It’s the first time anyone has been invited in to see behind these walls,” says Leitold, who serves as production designer, creating waterproof costumes for the cast and procuring life-jackets for audience members. (The show’s creators insist there is no Splash Zone, because that would ruin the carpets at the Portage Avenue Church).

It’s a massive production, with a cast of eight live performers, nine video performers and five audio performers, including Michael Lawrenchuk, Andrea del Campo, Lara Rae, Jordan Phillips and Gabriel Daniels.

“Ginny was able to take those initial thoughts and ideas and create characters who are very good representations of those ideas, not as ideological representatives, but as actual human beings,” says Jacquie Loewen, the production’s director.

Glad to Be Here has plenty of moving parts, which made Loewen, one of the city’s most in-demand stage-fight co-ordinators, an ideal choice to direct a performance centred on the global fight against climate change.

“In this world we’ve imagined, Portage Place is vitally important,” says Leitold, slipping into a sales pitch. “All food is grown there, thanks to its natural greenhouse effect, and it can store and purify water in these gorgeous fountains.

“You will arrive to a lively, active, colourful trade-show event where we are going to wow you with the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and the touches of New Winnipeg. It’s a feast for the senses.”

The show doesn’t require audience participation, but it is a production that will benefit from the guests buying into the concept, Loewen says.

“I use this term very carefully, but this is a style that requires you as an audience member to be a part of the show,” she says. “You’re not required to do anything other than listen, but the fact is, your presence there is what makes the show happen, which I’ve come to realize is a very potent esthetic choice.

“Even if the audience is mute, which they should be, they will still be within this immersive world, this imagined future place inhabited by humans who are humaning to the best of their abilities. It becomes unavoidable that the audience leaves feeling complicit and questioning where they were.”

The show’s creators had to imagine how humans would react in such an apocalyptic setting. When they first began talking about the show in 2019, some of those reactions seemed ridiculous, says Marginet.

“Any time you write something futuristic, you inevitably ask, ‘Would this actually happen?’ But we lived through Toilet Paper Gate,” she says.

The upheaval and instability of the COVID-19 pandemic, Marginet says, “allowed us to let our imaginations go and not be inhibited by reality.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com