FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS
New play to debut at arts festival
There’s a world where books open — along with imaginations — and birds fly out and build nests in trees. And it’s just up the road on the banks of the mighty Sturgeon in St. Albert.
That’s where, by no coincidence, the 35th anniversary edition of The International Children’s Festival of the Arts is waiting in the wings to play with your notion of possibility — and of childhood for that matter — for five days starting Tuesday. And that’s where you’ll find the world premiere of a new play by the much-awarded author of the much-travelled Hana’s Suitcase.
Emil Sher’s The Book of Ashes is inspired by the true story of a remarkable Iraqi librarian who defied extraordinary odds to save 30,000 books in the national archive — many of them ancient beyond any North American sense of that word — from certain destruction as British and American forces stormed the city of Basra in 2003. “Every book is a story. But not every story is a book . ... We must protect what we love.”
Bravery in a time of extreme danger, says Sher of this act of cultural preservation. And it’s a reminder that “the wages of war, the human costs, go beyond the body count ... to do damage to a country’s soul. A reminder of what it means to be human.”
It was director Tracy Carroll who brought the story to the attention of the Toronto-based playwright who’s always been drawn to making theatre in the dark currents of history.
She knew he’d be receptive; “I love swimming in these waters,” says Sher. “True stories in fictional worlds.”
His Mourning Dove, for example, produced here by Kill Your Television, was inspired by the heartbreaking story of Robert Latimer, a father who made a terrible decision about his disabled daughter. Boy in the Moon is spun from journalist Ian Brown’s real-life chronicle of life with his severely disabled son. And in Hana’s Suitcase, based on Karen Levine’s book, a class of Japanese school kids follow the trail of a mysterious suitcase back in time to its owner, one little girl lost in the vast tragedy of the Holocaust.
It’s kids’ theatre of the most challenging, mind-expanding kind, resistant to a Disneyfied ending.
There’s a certain irony in Sher’s choice of theatre and not, say, a novel or a short story to conjure a world of books, and the relationship between a 10-year-old boy and a librarian who mobilizes a community in wartime to save them.
“The notion of a book coming to life, literally, with puppets” captivated him.
“We inhabit other worlds when we open a book .... There’s something inherently theatrical about this story.”
“Theatre,” says Sher, who taught in Botswana for a couple of years, “can be a reminder of the beautiful complexities of the world... It’s unlike any other art form.” The Montreal-born writer, who’d originally planned to be an actor before writing captured his imagination, says “I tend not to distinguish the ages of audiences .... Six to 60, you deserve the best.”
Everything about the Kids Fest premiere — “our first go at creation” as festival coordinator Stephen Bourdeau puts it — is unusual, including its gestation. Originally commissioned by Seattle Children’s Theatre, The Book of Ashes has been shaped by two years of input from festival audiences of kids and parents in St. Albert, who saw staged readings directed by Carroll in 2014 and 2015.
Curiously, The Book of Ashes isn’t the only Kids Fest offering, among eight mainstage shows this year, to find its inspiration in words on a page.
In Love That Dog, the Dutch company Theatergroep Kwatta, you’ll find a boy who discovers his own voice, and the key to his heart, in the magic property of words, as he learns to express himself in writing.
As in The Book of Ashes, the source material is, you’d think, a challenging fit for theatre: an award-winning book by American writer Sharon Creeh that unfolds in poems, one on every page. Kwatta director Josee Hussaarts had discovered it, in a Dutch translation, in a bookstore in Nijmegen, the company’s home base near the German border. And she was instantly inspired by theatrical possibilities for puppets, music, beautiful language, video, reports, says Agnès Bergmeijer, one of the quartet of actors in the cast of Hussaarts’ 2010 Kwatta production that alights in St. Albert as part of a 10-week North American tour.
“We created it together, a page a day,” she says.
“The story is the boy’s resistance to poetry as something for girls, and very slowly his experience of being inspired by all the poets his teacher introduces him to try his own poems. To express himself. To put his feelings in words. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be simple.”
That’s how the show works, says Bergmeijer.
“So simple, but so many layers. Deeper than you think at the beginning. I really like that a lot, the images, the nice words, the way it’s funny and sad, you laugh and cry.”
Bergmeijer says the show works best for a mixture of adults and children; “they like it in a different way.” Kids, she says, should be six and up since words get projected. “You have to be able to read.” In an age of digital clips and fingertip relationships with 2-D screens, don’t you find it just a little heartwarming, that words are life-changers?