SEAT FILLER
Teatro’s Lemoine packs them in
Think about what you would put in the world, if it was yours to create.
Judging by the more than 70 plays he has written, Stewart Lemoine’s world would include, variously, a vile governess, a potential tussle with a savage, and a Victrola.
Fresh variations on Lemoine’s idiosyncratic universe hit the stage May 31, as this most Edmonton of playwrights launches his 36th season with a brand new play.
The Finest of Strangers, one of four offerings in the upcoming Teatro La Quindicina season, sees a well-known television personality return to the house where he spent part of his childhood, only to find himself unable to leave, creating screwball havoc for current occupants. There is a cast of nine, including five Teatro veterans, which makes Lemoine ever so happy. He likes a big cast.
“If I could always have 12 to 14 people on stage, the plays would write themselves,” says the 58-year-old, who was born in Winnipeg but came to Edmonton as a youngster when his dad, an employee of The Bay, was transferred.
That’s because something amazing almost always happens when you have a bunch of talented folks bumping up against each other. It’s anything but improv, but there is something about groups — citizens of an invented country, partygoers, or dancers in a conga line — that inspires action, high style, and frivolity.
Watch for those key features throughout the Teatro season, which boasts a classic in the style of Lemoine, a fresh Fringe production, and a remount of a beloved favourite.
The Importance of Being Earnest (by Oscar Wilde) runs July 12 to 28.
A Lesson in Brio, Lemoine’s first, all-new, full-length bit at the Fringe in four years, is on from Aug. 17 to Sept.1.
The 2003 play, Skirts on Fire, running Sept. 27 to Oct. 13, is a caper set in the magazine publishing industry in 1950s Manhattan. It involves, yes, a hoax.
Many of the actors in Teatro casts, large or small, are longtime regulars with the Varscona ensemble, many of whom have been together since Lemoine’s first play appeared at the first Edmonton Fringe Festival in 1982. Lemoine writes to the strengths of the ensemble — which includes venerable talents such as Julien Arnold, Cathy Derkach, and Andrew MacdonaldSmith — and some of them are eccentric (another hallmark of the Lemoine galaxy).
The Salon of the Talking Turk, for instance, was written specifically as a vehicle for the rubberfaced Mark Meer, who played a automaton with an uncanny knack for predicting the future. Pith! was written with Jeff Haslam in mind, because he is able to be just about anybody instantly, and the play requires a character to switch roles rapidly while paddling the Amazon. At the Zenith of the Empire, about Sarah Bernhardt, was penned for Leona Brausen.
“Leona has the natural command and flamboyance of the lady who advertised herself as the greatest actress in the world,” says Lemoine. “You need that kind of panache, and also a facial resemblance. It needed to be.”
Clearly, Edmonton audiences lap that stuff up; since 2009, the theatre’s subscription base has grown by 143 per cent and now rests at about 800, filling one quarter of the 3,200 seats at the Varscona Theatre for each show in the season.
That’s not to say Lemoine is ignored outside the city. He has had critical success elsewhere, often in Toronto, with plays such as The Exquisite Hour, a two-hander that thrusts a long-time bachelor into the path of an encyclopedia saleswoman. Pith! received the New York International Fringe Award for Overall Excellence in Playwriting in 2004.
But it’s here at home where Lemoine best butters his brioche.
The connection between the playwright and his audience is no accident. Lemoine’s topics are quirky, his characters, unusual. But he designs them that way because “people want to be struck with things they weren’t expecting to hear or see.”
Of course, he is right. People do yearn for novelty.
“Really, it’s just me, sitting at home and having a notion, and fiddling with it until it makes sense to me.”
Why, I’d buy tickets to see that.