Nowhere man

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This article was published 04/10/2023 (735 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘My plays come out of a feeling,” says Guillermo Verdecchia.

With the Canadian playwright’s latest work, Feast, that feeling was akin to falling off the face of the earth, skidding ever closer to a point of no return, where geography becomes amorphous, where one culture achieves ubiquity, where the exact same cup of Starbucks coffee can be bought everywhere from Brandon to Barbados to Bratislava.

No matter how much oat milk he added, Verdecchia couldn’t quite stomach the flat taste that left in his mouth. No matter how far he strayed, he could still be struck by the shock of recognition of home which, in itself, is often only a watered-down version of an idea of somewhere else.

“Why,” he asks, “can I fly to Prague and find it simultaneously beautiful and yet completely familiar? What is this world where I’m forced to listen to American pop music in a cafe in Santiago, Chile? What has happened to ‘here’? What has happened to ‘place’?”

Those questions leave the Argentina-born, Ontario-raised Verdecchia feeling that he is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. If his world got bigger, shouldn’t he feel more satisfied, not less?

He says all of this in mid-September in a boardroom at Prairie Theatre Exchange, where Feast will premiere next week to kick off the company’s 51st season.

Verdecchia, 60, is one of the country’s most revered theatrical minds and sought-after dramaturges, a four-time winner of the Chalmers Canadian Play Award and the chairman of the jury for the prestigious Siminovitch Prize.

“He’s one of the country’s greatest playwrights,” says PTE artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones, who will direct Feast. To snatch a world premiere from Verdecchia’s pen is a considerable coup for the company, he says.

Jones has been an admirer since his time as a student at the University of Guelph, where Verdecchia taught him playwriting.

What struck him then about Verdecchia’s work is the same thing that strikes him now. “He can take very large-scale events and ideas, and distil them in a sophisticated, nuanced way into a completely accessible situation.”

“Why … can I fly to Prague and find it simultaneously beautiful and yet completely familiar? What is this world where I’m forced to listen to American pop music in a cafe in Santiago, Chile? What has happened to ‘here’? What has happened to ‘place’?”–Guillermo Verdecchia

Three years ago, Jones reached out to Verdecchia to gauge his interest in developing a new work for PTE.

“My only prompt was to think about the climate crisis,” recalls Jones.

That led Verdecchia to revisit an abandoned concept that began as a one-person performance about a man “who had no grip, and found himself constantly sliding off the face of the earth.”

The man, a consultant, is accustomed to waking up at six in the morning to speak with clients for whom it’s six in the evening.

“One day, he wakes up completely disoriented,” Verdecchia says, describing a version of jet lag that feels more like purgatory. He delivered the performance as a keynote address at an academic conference.

“But it turned into something else,” he says. “It’s a play about the end of the world, or the climate emergency, but it’s not just about the end of the world or the climate emergency.”

It’s about the consequences of those situations “on the organism.”

Feast now features a cast of four — a father (Arne MacPherson), a mother (Melanie Whyte), a daughter (Bailey Chin) and a Nigerian businessperson living in Kenya (Ray Strachan) — all of whom are trying to achieve balance as their world turns at unpredictable speeds.

That’s a simplistic reading of Verdecchia’s decidedly anti-formulaic script, but is taken literally in Jones’ staging: the entirety of Feast is set on a revolving platform, a floating plate designed by David Oro, propelling the actors in a circular motion as the narrative moves along.

During a rehearsal Tuesday, the actors looked more than comfortable as stage manager Karen Kumhyr toyed with the revolving stage’s speed.

As a couple at odds, MacPherson and Whyte maintained an even keel. Only when the plate stopped spinning did MacPherson bump into a piece of stage furniture, a reminder of the real-world consequences of perpetual motion.

The play dances among locations, requiring the audience to be nimble and receptive to the world Verdecchia has written, which eschews traditional narrative structure.

“The theatre is much more agile and alive than this notion of a story that starts here, goes there, a crisis happens and blah, blah, blah,” he says. “The shape it needs to have is the shape of one’s experience.”

“It has a whole fantastic element,” Verdecchia says of Feast, alluding to the concept of magical realism, a genre most closely associated with novelists such as Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier.

“We read their novels and stories, and we read about clouds of butterflies, and we ask ourselves, can people really float? And the answer is yes, in that world. Yes, in that story. And it’s told so well, you buy in and believe it,” he says. “Hopefully, I’ve done a similar thing here.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com