The Belfry Theatre’s SPARK Festival opens tonight, promising “some of the best work that’s happening in Canada at the moment.”
What: SPARK Festival Where: Belfry Theatre When: March 9 to 26 Tickets: $10, $30 (250-385-6815)
Sometimes, a play is sparked by a 75-cent book from a garage sale. Or the moment when your mother awakens from a vegetative state to become fleetingly lucid.
These were inspirational experiences for Hannah Moscovitch and Brian Linds, two playwrights featured at the Belfry Theatre’s SPARK Festival. Opening tonight, the festival shows more than 80 theatre artists from the local and national theatre scene.
“The mandate is to bring to Victoria some of the best work that’s happening in Canada at the moment. The best work and the most exciting artists,” said Michael Shamata, the Belfry’s artistic director and curator of SPARK.
Brian Linds is a Victoria actor, playwright and sound designer who has created Reverberations. His play, receiving its world première, takes place in five rooms of a house near the Belfry. The private home is a house-concert venue that has previously hosted John Mann of Spirit of the West and Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies.
Performed by five actors including Linds, Reverberations is an exploration of his family memories. There’s a special emphasis on sound. Audience members, who at the outset are separated into different rooms, wear headphones.
One memory is about Linds’ mother. With Alzheimer’s, she was in a “vegetative” state for years. Then, after falling in the shower and knocking her head, something miraculously loosened up. “My father said: ‘Brian, go see mom. She’s talking.’ And she hadn’t spoken for four or five years,” Linds said.
Listening to a radio announcer, his mother was able to repeat the words she heard. She also told Linds that she knew who he was — despite feeling as if “in a fog.”
Reverberations explores other powerful memories. There’s the time a 12-year-old Linds was tricked into kissing the prettiest girl in town. And there’s a story about how a cassette-tape documenting his bar mitzvah was stolen after being posted to his sister in Africa.
What a Young Wife Ought to Know is a newish play by Halifax’s Moscovitch, a Siminovitch Prize finalist who’s widely regarded as one of the country’s finest dramatists. Her play was inspired by a book she found in a garage sale, titled Dear Dr. Stopes: Sex in the 1920s.
The book is a compilation of letters written by ordinary women to Dr. Marie Stopes, a famous advocate who founded the first birth-control clinic in England. Moscovitch was surprised by how frank these letters were, given most books of the 1920s avoid explicit discussions of sexuality.
“These women are talking about sex [with] their husbands and birth control and infanticide and adultery and labour. I’d never heard anything like it. It was totally unique,” Moscovitch said.
“It’s reminiscing, like: ‘I have eight children living, three I’ve buried, four stillborn, two miscarriages.’ It doesn’t compute with my experience. It’s pre-birth-control.”
She wrote What a Young Wife Ought to Know for 2B Theatre, the Halifax company (Moscovitch’s husband is the artistic co-director) presenting the play at the SPARK Festival. It’s about Sophie, a working Canadian mother in the 1920s, who seeks answers about marriage and contraception. One critic wrote that What a Young Wife Ought to Know exemplifies Moscovitch’s skill at pairing the “ugly and the comedic.” The playwright acknowledges this is indeed part of her artistic sensibility.
“I’m interested in complexity. And there is something complex about the pairing of the dark and the funny to me. It feels like life to me. It feels authentic.”
One of Moscovitch’s new projects has the working title Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story. It’s about her great-grandparents, who escaped a Russian pogrom to immigrate to Canada in 1908. “It’s kind of a musical,” she said. Other highlights of the SPARK FESTIVAL are: BlissKrieg, a new musical by Atomic Vaudeville; SPIN, Evalyn Parry’s show about the first woman to ride around the world on a bicycle; This Is Not a Conversation, a play about Palestine/Israel politics by Itai Erdal, Dima Alansari and Ker Wells; and Joan, a play by Theatre SKAM about Victoria eccentric Joan Mans. Full details are at sparkfestival.ca.