THE EVIL DREAD
Playwright Tannahill offers a dark vision of suburbia
A greenhouse is generally a positive place. It brims with new life, has faith in the future. Unless, that is, it’s the Concord Floral greenhouse.
Something dreadful has happened in that abandoned structure, and 10 teenagers are now fleeing a mysterious plague.
In other words, Concord Floral, by celebrated, Orléans-raised playwright Jordan Tannahill and coming to the NAC starting March 29, is not about your local greenhouse although it could be about your local teens.
Billed as a cellphone thriller and aimed at more than just a young audience, the play takes place in a surreal and gothic suburbia. In keeping with Tannahill’s vision, which you may recall from his multimedia show Post Eden that played the Magnetic North Theatre Festival here last year, that suburbia is less a place of faceless white picket fences than it is a spot where fact and fiction morph into each other and where dread can hold sway.
Ofa Gasesepe plays Rosa Mundi, one of the key characters in Concord Floral. Asked about that dark vision of suburban life, she says, “There is a sense of dread in life in general, in everything we do. I think when we make choices we’re dreadful (about), ‘If I do this or that, how is it going to turn out?’ It’s almost on an unconscious level.”
Like the other actors in the show, Gasesepe, a final-year student at Ridgemont High School, is young, Ottawa-based and not, at least yet, a professional performer. That’s deliberate, meant to add veracity to the story, and it will be interesting to see how it works out on the NAC stage.
Rosa Mundi, who Gasesepe describes as being very influenced by others and anxious to maintain a sense of control, is one of two teens who stumble across a bit of a horror show in the greenhouse, a favoured hangout spot for young people. That discovery leads to the rest of the story.
Rosa’s co-discoverer is Nearly Wild. She’s played by Sadie Laflamme- Snow, a Grade 11 student in Canterbury High School’s drama program.
Laflamme- Snow says she likes Tannahill’s writing because “it’s really relatable and current. It’s hon- est, not sugar-coated, and it makes teenagehood, that is kind of looked down upon by a lot of people, into something beautiful. It finds beauty in even weird things.” (Tannahill, it’s worth noting, is 27 and a Governor General’s Award-winning playwright.)
Also on stage: Emily Ong as Forever Irene. Saying she was “really surprised” to get the Concord Floral gig, Ong is also a Grade 11 student at Canterbury but is studying visual arts there.
She decided to try acting after seeing the fun drama students were clearly having.
She describes Forever Irene as “not afraid of being herself. Deep inside she’s also somewhat inse- cure but doesn’t want to show that because she wants to fit in.”
Tannahill has loosely modelled the story of Irene and her compatriots on Giovanni Boccaccio’s medieval allegory The Decameron. In that collection of tales, 10 young men and women take refuge from the plague in a secluded villa and pass the time by telling stories. In Concord Floral, the refuge from the world turns out to be anything but a safe house.
Tannahill’s play signals a growing interest in exploring teen characters seriously, according to Erin Brubacher, who had a hand in creating the piece and co-directs it with Cara Spooner.
That’s very different from the schlocky teen horror movies that get churned out in profusion or television shows like Beverly Hills 90201. Neither one, she says, accurately reflects teens’ experience.
She’s also adamant that Concord Floral is not just for or about teens.
“It’s a show about humans, and these encounters with our sense of collective responsibility is something that’s part of (all) our journeys.”
She adds that audience members in their 60s have said they responded to this story about contemporary youth because they could “feel echoes of their own youth in (it) and also feelings of human experience that they could relate to as their present, 60-year-old self.”