Closer at Canoe Fest
The arrival of Closer for the first time on an Edmonton stage has a backstory: It’s the story of a theatre baby.
Keltie Brown Forsyth made her stage debut, age six, at Workshop West. Four years later, she was onstage again, at that all-Canuck theatre. A couple of decades after these precocious forays, Brown Forsyth became the general manager of Workshop West for four seasons, plus the curator of the company’s Canoe Festival, dedicated to showcasing off-centre performance theatre.
She’s been a dramaturge, a producer, a director; she’s been a stage manager, a set builder, theatre techie, sound designer. She can hang lights or program a lighting board. She’s lived for months on end at Fringes across the country. This year, if she has time, she’ll turn 30.
Canadian theatre genealogy rarely comes as bluechip and incremental as Brown Forsyth’s. Her dad is the notable actor/director/ playwright Kenneth Brown (Life After Hockey, Spiral Dive). Lately, Brown Forsyth has had the unusual experience of directing her father in his play about his own father, Minding Dad. Her mom, Heather Redfern, was a Catalyst Theatre producer when the company started touring internationally; currently she’s the artistic director of The Cultch (the high-profile Vancouver East Cultural Centre).
With the opening of Brown Forsyth’s indie production of Closer, an award-winning 1997 dissection of love as a merry-go-round of desire and betrayal by the English playwright Patrick Marber, the theatre baby comes of age. There’s something hypnotically weird about the fact that this chilly and lacerating deconstruction of romance is her first production as a newlywed with a double last name. With its blistering skepticism about relationships, Closer wouldn’t be every woman’s choice of play post-honeymoon — especially since her husband, actor/playwright Alexander Forsyth, is in the cast.
The director is amused. “The last thing Alex and I did together was a mask show, Seven Ways To Die: A Love Story, a rom/com about suicide, and oddly enough one of the cheerier shows we’ve done.”
Now there’s Closer, with its circular pattern of lust and deceit. Rehearsals, she says with a smile, involve “the four actors and me sitting in a room, considering what drives the play’s chain reaction. How do you source this stuff? We all tap our own experience, reveal our worst breakups and terrible moments ... That’s what’s so compelling about the play; it’s both familiar and extreme.”
Mounting indie productions during the season instead of the Fringe is a particular challenge. Luckily, Brown Forsyth is a veritable repository of theatre savvy. She also knows what she doesn’t want, to be acting for instance. “From being onstage as a kid, I realized that I don’t need to do this, be an actor myself. An actor gets to be out of control, as far as he can go, with the director setting the limits. I’m not naturally attracted to that state.”
Relationship trauma is everywhere in Closer, which is, as she points out, “quickly becoming a contemporary classic.” But Brown Forsyth, who’s spent much of the last five years closeted with experimental, non-linear new work, finds it a break: “It’s a play that’s all about the actors, with high emotional stakes.” She grins. “Hey, it’s also done, a finished script. You never have a discussion about dramaturgical choices, or the next draft. That’s a luxury for me!”