Teatro itchy for comedy
Piano teacher centre stage in revival
PREVIEW Eros and the Itchy Ant Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine Starring: Rachel Bowron, Cathy Derkach, Ryan Parker, Jeff Haslam Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83rd Ave. Running: through July 27 Tickets: 780-433-3399 or Tix on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)
Asking a bunch of artists the classic question “but what does it MEAN?” is like yelling “Fire! Possibly! Or Maybe Not!” in a crowded theatre.
It’s a red flag to the analytical. It’s what the worrier actor does — with every speech, phrase, word. Ah, and in the case of the worrier musician, every note.
In the romantic comedy that opens Thursday in a Teatro La Quindicina revival, we meet a piano teacher who regards every work of art as a test of interpretation. When Maxine Wall is confronted by a baker with a provoking question of artistic interpretation — “I think there’s more there than you’re finding” — she’s goaded into further rigour in her quest for meaning.
It in no way dims Maxine’s enthusiasm for regarding art as there to be interpreted, decoded, deciphered diligently, that the artistic battleground in question isn’t the late symphonies of Mahler, or Wagner’s Parsifal, or Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (all three, incidentally, have figured prominently in Stewart Lemoine comedies before now). It’s a beginner’s piano piece called The Itchy Ant. The ant world, Maxine notes earnestly, hasn’t traditionally been examined “through the prism of art.”
The actor who originated the role of Maxine custom-made for her in the 2002 première of Eros and the Itchy Ant is out for a snack in the sun with the actor who plays Maxine in the current revival: two triple-threats with a hankering for a salad. Both Cathy Derkach and Rachel Bowron have taken piano lessons in their time, and taught them. Derkach, who has graduated to play Maxine’s breezy wiseacre pal Wanda, a mezzo-soprano, in the current production, still does. Bowron is a coach with the St. Albert Children’s Theatre. Maxine’s diligence and her anxieties are not foreign to either of them.
“Digging into an interpretive answer to something seemingly simple, well, it’s what we do!” Derkach laughs. Bowron concurs. “Even reading the script, I can hear Cathy in Maxine’s lines. Absolutely.” She adds quickly, “but not in a bad way....”
“Maxine tortures herself,” says Derkach brightly. She comes to Eros And The Itchy Ant, and the role of Wanda the mezzo, direct from three months playing the sardonic office manager Violet, a real “conversational belter,” in Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 at the Mayfield. This might be the definition of vocal range since an opera, The Artful Tragedy of Psyche, starring Wanda and Eros God of Love (Jeff Haslam, reprising his role), gets presented in the course of events. “It’s a whole different voice,” says Derkach. “Boot camp, here we go.”
This comedy, incidentally, also references the oeuvre of Nana Mouskouri for the first and only time in the Lemoine canon. “She has perfect pitch and her glasses are a hoot,” says Derkach by way of annotation.
“Maxine is seduced by the need for meaning; it runs rampant,” says Bowron, whose history with Teatro includes a sensational turn as an hilariously self-deluded singing pupil in The Hoof and Mouth Advantage, and half a spectacularly dim-witted songand-dance duo called Medley in Angels On Horseback. “I’m such a worrier, a perfectionist, an over-thinker,” Bowron grins. “Maxine directly speaks to that. Her instinct is to analyze.”
You can see that a baker with an interpretive query might turn Maxine’s world topsy-turvy. Can their mutual attraction survive artistic differences?
Meanwhile, in one of the play’s funniest scenes, Maxine’s student Kevin is the victim of her nagging dissatisfaction that she’s not using her musical knowledge to its full potential. Young Kevin’s Festival is the season’s single most scathing piece of criticism. “Please,” she says sternly. “Leave the weeping to the audience.”
When Bowron was in Grade 2, incidentally, her teacher helpfully told her mom that little Rachel “would never shine.” It can be a matter of
“Digging into an interpretive answer to something seemingly simple, well, it’s what we do!”
Cathy Derkach
attachment to his favourite piece from the Grade 1 repertoire, “here we go/ in a row/ to a birthday party,” is capsized by Maxine’s formidable investigative skills.
“Do you ever wonder what happens to little Kevin after the play?” both Maxines muse, simultaneously. It seems doubtful that he’s still practising piano. The educator’s zeal has its destructive potential. Wanda’s withering adjudication of a class of tearful young singers at the Kiwanis no small satisfaction to Mrs. Bowron that the teacher in question was demonstrably out to lunch.
From Maxine you’ll never hear “relax, it’ll be fine! Don’t push it!” That’s the salutary advice of the sassy Wanda, in whom both actors hear the voice of playwright/director Lemoine.
“I was thinking about the way music lovers can be intimidated by music practitioners,” says Lemoine, an opera aficionado with an archival knowledge of the repertoire. “How do they communicate with each other?” Questions like that, or “where does discipline fit in the midst of creativity?” occurred to him in fashioning the comedy, he says.
There’s a gap, possibly an abyss, between artists dogged in their pursuit of meaning and artists riding the waves of inspiration and instinct.
“When artists say ‘I’m searching for truth,’ I tend to roll my eyes,” says the playwright wryly. “We’re looking for what’s convincing, not what’s true.... We’re trying to put one over on you here.” As a director, Lemoine has been known to say “don’t think about it, just play it.”
“When people ask me ‘where do you get your ideas?’ I honestly don’t know,” he says. “It’s more a question of what to do with the idea once you have it.”
As for Lemoine’s own childhood piano lessons, which petered out in classic fashion, “I just felt I’d be happier if I didn’t have to go.”