A thousand-year struggle
Some fights take longer to settle than others. We’ll give you that. But a thousand years? That’s the timeline that’s the crux of Everything is Terribly Nice Here, Calgary playwright David van Belle’s take on the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
He’s the guy who made Submission, a short film starring Aayan Hirsi Ali that resulted in a fatwa being issued against both Ali and van Gogh for their perceived sins against Islam.
One day, van Gogh was riding his bicycle to his production office when he was stabbed in the chest by an Islamicist named Mohammed Bouyeri, who attached a note to the knife explaining it all.
For van Belle, one of Ghost River’s co-artistic directors (along with the show’s director Eric Rose), the event was almost more than a murder.
It was a piece of performance violence.
“It was such a mythologically powerful event that said something about what was going on (at that moment in the world),” van Belle says.
“Theo van Gogh was a pretty extreme person,” he says. “He offended everyone. I can’t even tell you the stuff he said about other religious groups, because you wouldn’t be able to print it.
“But I thought, what would happen if you took these two people of such extreme positions — him and Mohammed Bouyeri, his attacker and murderer — if you took these two guys and put them in a room together for a thousand years?”
There’s a rule of drama writing that suggests the launching point for a play should be a day unlike any other. But ten centuries?
How does one stage that without making it seem like a very long night at the theatre?
“One of the things I’m most interested in, actually, is how time functions within the play,” says director Rose.
“It’s the impression of a thousand years,” Rose adds. “What’s fascinating about that is the way in which you can denote change through movement, through the way a sound gets slowed down.
“You can start to imagine a moment as a much bigger space, and I think that live theatre does that best. By slowing things down in a way, or speeding them up, you can provide an extreme focus for the audience and there’s a kind of intensity about that — and (then) jump skip through time.
“The context is this room — and this room is timeless. The room is ... what it needs to be at that moment, and what’s beautiful about it is that David has set it up so that there’s three distinct ages that we move through.”
In addition to the char- acters of Gouyeri (Ali Momen) and Van Gogh (Clinton Carew), there’s a third character, called She (Alexa Devine) — an unseen feminine influence who weighs in to help steer the ship when things get dodgy between the two principal combatants.
For Rose, the character of She is van Belle’s way of illustrating an eternal truth: men might start wars, but women are civilization’s cleanup crew.
“Women are the people who are left to deal with the ramifications of what ... men do,” Rose says.
“So men go to war but the consequence of that often ends up being in the women’s court, so to speak.”
And if staging a thousand-year-long argument presents unique dramatic challenges for Rose, playing characters who get an entire millennium to forge a character arc is a luxury the cast doesn’t take for granted.
“One of the crazy things about theatre is that, generally speaking, change happens really fast,” says Carew, who portrays van Gogh, “whereas in real life, change happens really slowly.
For Momen, squeezing ten centuries into a character allows him more freedom than he’d normally have to explore a whole range of behaviour.
“In a weird way, there’s actually a liberty you have as an actor when you have a thousand years,” he says, “because there’s a really cool way that if this scene is way different than the last scene, it’s easier to throw yourself in it.
“I never have to be like, oh that was yesterday,” he adds. “(But) it wasn’t just yesterday, it was 25 years ago.
“Because of that, you can be braver in your choices ... it gives you more of a chance to just fall, and try something that you did not think could happen.”
For van Belle, who started the play five years ago, and has written a half-dozen complete drafts, the breakthrough in taking on the subject that has dominated contemporary consciousness more than any other since 9/11 came when he realized he didn’t have to get it right.
He just had to start a conversation.
“If I tried to speak right, I wouldn’t have written this play,” van Belle says.
“My hope for this is we make this play.” he adds. “We say something through this play. And somebody else is going to go, that’s great. I don’t know about that — and then they’ll make their own statement, or whatever it is.
“Maybe they’ll make their own play. Maybe they’ll write their own essay. Maybe they’ll just post something on Facebook, an idea, and then somebody will respond to that, and we talk, and we talk, and we talk.
“And in that talking,” he continues, “maybe we come to something that’s closer to a solution that’s closer to wisdom about the whole issue.”