Pulitzer prize-winning drama coming to town
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This article was published 16/10/2017 (2894 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
A father-son duo from Fort Rouge is bringing a Pulitzer prize-winning ode to the stage and silver screen to Winnipeg for the first time.
Director George Toles and producer and actor Thomas Toles will premiere American playwright Annie Baker’s play The Flick in Winnipeg on Oct. 18 at the Rachel Browne Theatre.
The nearly two and a half hour production features local actors Ivan Henwood, Jen Robinson, and Aaron Radwanski and runs until Oct. 22. It is produced by Snakeskin Jacket and The 28th Minute.
Awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2014, The Flick explores the realms of cinematic fantasy and the mundane through the employees of a struggling movie theatre as they sweep up after the audience has left.
George Toles, a distinguished professor of film at the University of Manitoba, said The Flick has excited many people in the world of theatre and is an evocative yet “user-friendly” play that caused him to rethink what plays are and what they can accomplish.
It’s also been a delight for Toles to direct a play that’s set in a movie theatre, saturated with movie references, and characters who are drawing upon movie fantasies that both reward and punish them, he said.
“The play combines two great loves of mine,” Toles said. “It’s a play about movies and cinema, and I’ve been teaching film for decades, as well as theatre.”
“I think Annie Baker is as talented and as gifted as any young playwright working,” he added. “There’s a growing sense in American theatre that she’s one of the great hopes to make theatre a place where young people, especially, will feel compelled to go.”
Toles has collaborated with his son Thomas, a Rhodes Scholar and film instructor at the University of Winnipeg, to stage The Flick. Thomas, 26, plays the role of Skylar/The Dreaming Man. According to Thomas, the opportunity to be directed by his dad is an unparalleled experience.
“He just has such a terrific sense of dramatic structure and character understanding and this sort of focus on unique funny and unexpected details in theatre,” Thomas said. “It’s weird that we’re family but I think that I would feel this way regardless.”
When the opportunity arose to bring Baker’s script to life in Winnipeg, Thomas said he jumped on the chance to be involved. Thomas has taught the script at the U of W for a few years and said The Flick is a production desired by audiences in the city.
“One thing we’ve been talking about in rehearsals is that this is a play that’s surprisingly accessible,” Thomas said. “It has all of these prosaic topics that the characters cover, they talk about Facebook, they’re cleaning up at this mundane job. At the same time there’s a real profound understanding of tragedy that Annie Baker shows. There’s a keen sense of the ordinary existence of these people.
“That kind of mundane existence gets elevated in certain moments to a kind of classical tragedy.”
The Flick will be staged nightly at 7 p.m. from Oct. 18 to 22 at the Rachel Browne Theatre (211 Bannatyne Ave.) with an encore matinee on Oct. 22 at 2 p.m. Tickets are between $15 and $30 and are available through snakeskinjacket.ca