Mote tips its hat to Psycho
Mote Theatre: Blarney Productions Written by: José Teodoro Directed by: Wayne Paquette Starring: Twilla MacLeod, Luc Tellier Where: La Cit francophone, 8627 91st St. Running: through May 17 Tickets: Tix on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)
Watching a movie that watches back: It’s a creepy proposition that slides into Mote like a knife into ... Wait.
In any production where the playwright’s official program thank-yous include nods to Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, it’s impossible for the suggestion “you might want to take a shower,” tossed off by a lonely motel clerk a long way from anywhere, to be anything but unnerving.
That’s the symbiosis between Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho and Mote, the enigmatically named latest from playwright/ film critic José Teodoro.
It premières in an atmospheric Wayne Paquette production that appears on the entire ground floor of La Cité francophone’s theatre, like a vision at the bottom of a vast black lake. We sit up in the gallery in a single row on three sides, looking down. The playing space, backed by a multi-storeyed screen of flickering murky light, is where the audience usually sits. And since another of Mote’s propositions is that watching a movie is like catching a glimpse of your reflection in a looking glass, it’s an invitation to conjure Psycho and attach memories in every scene.
Mote speculates about famous characters attached indelibly to a story we all know very well; it catches a ride on the indelible events at the Bates Motel. And it becomes a kind of insideout thriller, a fantasia spun from alternative possibilities. In a curious way, this takes the Psycho narrative from the cinema and gives it to the live theatre where Marion, Norman, the detective, and the rest have pasts and futures, the maybes that the movie didn’t provide.
When she arrives at the Bates Motel, Marion has vanished from her job at a real estate company and absconded fatefully with $40,000 en route to her married boyfriend. The what-if? that Mote offers is the mysterious landscape of human motive. Twilla MacLeod’s lovely performance, which has a seductive and uneasy reserve about it, gives us a character steeped in uncertainty from the start. She gives off the eerie sensation of someone watching herself, as in a suspense movie, but unsure about whether she’s the pursuer or the pursued.
What Marion finds in a pale, nervous motel clerk is someone whose loneliness and love of secrets resonate at the same frequency as her own. Luc Tellier as Norman discovers a kind of haunted innocence and sympathy for a fellow traveller in a famous portrait of psychosis. “I’m nearly invisible,” he says to Marion. “That’s my special skill. ... I can help you disappear.” She is receptive. Tellier is scarily poignant, if that isn’t an oxymoron.
The notion of disappearance, the sheer relief of vanishing as one person to reappear in another life as a different person — “I’m driving into a second chance” — is where Mote insinuates itself into the Psycho story. And the other characters are all about reinventing the self, too — all perhaps except the career detective Arbogast (Brian Dooley). He’s spent his “whole life looking for clues” and he clings, against increasing odds, to his assertion that “nobody walks so lightly their steps can’t be retraced.”
Along with Dooley, Morgan Smith as Marion’s conventional sister Lila and Chris Schulz as her louche lover Sam are excellent. Director Paquette and lighting designer Scott Peters have characters appear out of outsized blackness into noirish pools and geometric shapes of light, then disappear back into a kind of void. The stagecraft creates a moody ambience that’s an allusion in itself. And it’s assisted materially by Jonathan Kawchuk’s thudding music and smoky jazz, Megan Koshka’s ’50s costumes and Max Amerongen’s projections.
The script, and the performances, are for the most part expert at making thinking and dreaming aloud seem contiguous to speaking to other characters. It’s a spooky feeling that makes theatre exactly the right medium for reconsidering a movie celebrated for its suspense. It’s clever and absorbing, and leaves a tingle along the back of your neck.