Standing-room-only

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This article was published 11/09/2015 (3965 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The everyday elevator has been the site of some of the greatest dramatic moments in film and television history, so it should come as no surprise that theatre would want to squeeze in there, too.

FemFest 2015: Hear Her Roar will present two plays from the National Elevator Project — a collection of 16 short works set in lifts by established and up-and-coming playwrights — hoping to prove that behind those sliding doors is the perfect stage, where passengers have no choice but to interact with each other.

At the very least, Hope McIntyre — artistic director of Sarasvti Productions, which has staged FemFest for 12 years — promises a moving experience for the limited-size audiences of The Club and Closed for Urgent and Extraordinary Work.

“Part of our mandate is to break boundaries; sometimes they are cultural boundaries and sometimes it’s shows that go beyond what traditional theatre is,” says McIntyre.

“I thought it would be intriguing for our audiences.”

The 13th annual festival celebrating female playwrights opens Saturday, Sept. 12, at the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film with a revival of Kim Zeglinski’s 2014 fringe show Mittleschmerz and performances of the two elevator plays before the opening night’s cabaret and reception.

The Club, by Vancouver’s Kendra Fanconi, thrusts the audience into the middle of a spontaneous dance party, where actors and audience experience a brief but meaningful moment of human connection. In her whimsical drama Closed for Urgent and Extraordinary Work, Montreal’s Alexandra Haber brings together two women in an elevator who discover that, far from being strangers, they are the same person living entirely different but parallel lives.

Both are about 10 minutes long and will be performed 12 times for between five and 10 people in a University of Winnipeg elevator. The confined theatre space offers a unique experience where characters can create conflict quickly and without much exposition.

“Like any site-specific work, there is an immediacy that comes into it,” says Edmonton’s Melissa Thingelstad, who is the co-curator of the National Elevator Project.

“You take away the regular audience/actor contract and people don’t know the rules. In an elevator, there is nowhere to hide. Sometimes people are witnesses and sometimes participants.”

While some purists might think that elevator plays are nothing more than attention-grabbing gimmicks, Thingelstad considers The Club and Closed for Urgent and Extraordinary Work full works. The same rehearsal process was followed as for a full-length script.

“We are presenting the story that the playwright intended to tell,” says Thingelstad, who will be in Winnipeg to direct both lift pieces. “They are full-fledged plays. It’s not an improvised skit.”

The playwrights were given guidelines — the most strict rule forbids the pressing of the emergency button and stopping the elevator during a performance. The lift must always in motion. Thingelstad remembers when the Edmonton elevator she was performing in broke down and stranded her with her audience for 40 minutes. Improv skills, she discovered, can come in handy.

This year’s FemFest lineup also includes readings, as well as Monday’s Bake-Off, in which playwrights are given a list of ingredients and have two weeks to mix up a script. Last year’s Bake-Off winner, The Dance-Off of Conscious Uncoupling by Frances Koncan, will be presented next Thursday. Touring productions coming to Winnipeg include Sitaraha — The Stars, a solo show about women in Afghanistan written and performed by Monirah Hashemi, and A Side of Dreams, an hour-long story of reconciliation by Métis playwright Jani Lauzon.

“It started from a question I was asking myself: How do you pass on cultural knowledge and generational knowledge if you don’t know what it is?” says the Toronto-based actor-musician, calling from a car travelling across northern Ontario this week. “A lot of us, as Métis and First Nations people, have grown up disassociated from it or it has been taken from us.”

It was something she needed to know as a single mother — how does she pass down family history she never received? The answer, she discovered, was to go inside herself and connect to oral customs.

A Side of Dreams offers a similar trip down the rabbit hole, la Alice. Haisa, a single mother, has gone mute after her husband is killed, and is unable to communicate with her angry daughter. She enters the dreamcatcher world and meets three ancestors who help her face the truth about family secrets.

Lauzon, who appeared in Mother Courage and her Children at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in 2010, is touring A Side of Dreams for the first time.

McIntyre says it is the FemFest’s good fortune to have such a very powerful exploration of Métis identity as part of its lineup.

“It’s our 13th year so I hope that it is not going to be unlucky for us, especially doing plays in elevators.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca