THEATRE OF WISDOM
Clare Coulter, left, Brenda Robins, Maria Vacratsis and Kyra Harper perform in Escaped Alone. Each of the leads in the Toronto play are older than 60.
Veteran female cast shares the benefits of experience in ‘dazzlingly inventive’ play,
With Escaped Alone, British playwright Caryl Churchill was declared by the New York Times “the most dazzlingly inventive living dramatist in the English language.”
The play, which premiered in London in 2016, is evidence of its 80-year-old writer’s intelligence and the wisdom that comes with age, wisdom that is matched by the cast of four women over 60 in the Toronto production that opens this week — an occurrence that is still, sadly, rare on local stages.
The Toronto theatre season has seen an influx of young women in its programming, but that still leaves room for women “of a certain age” like the cast of Escaped Alone, some of whom have known each other for almost 40 years.
Clare Coulter, Maria Vacratsis, Brenda Robins and Kyra Harper have approximately 15 decades of stage and screen experience between them.
All of them have greatly participated in the birth of Canadian theatre, from Vancouver to Regina and London, England, to here in Toronto.
In fact, three of the four previously performed in Churchill’s best known play, Top Girls, when it premiered in the 1980s, winning Coulter a Dora Award and launching Robins’ move from Vancouver to Toronto. Vacratsis is the only cast member to be doing her first Chur- chill play, though her history with the playwright includes “wanting to be in that 1985 production of Top Girls and not being allowed. And being rather pissed off about it.”
The unmistakable actor with thick brown hair, a raspy voice and the driest sense of humour got her castmates laughing with that, and that laughter lasted through most of the conversation that the Star had with the cast of Escaped Alone, in which four British women share tea and discuss the end of the world.
In the spirit of the play, which asks audiences to listen to the warnings of older women, these are condensed excerpts of that conversation, in the actors’ own words.
On what it’s like performing Caryl Churchill’s famously enigmatic text:
Clare Coulter: Caryl’s words are like an engine inside of you. You pull the string and all of a sudden, you’re going. Brrararrrr!
Maria Vacratsis: It’s very powerful no matter if you’re doing it, seeing it or just reading it, or even if it’s just the idea that this woman is making this. She was 79 when she wrote the play; a vital woman with vital ideas and all those years of experience and that wisdom. I mean, you feel yourself sort of tiring out … Her engine just keeps getting stronger. Like Louis Armstrong, as he got older he could play one note instead of 30 notes that would say so much more. She packs much more into four words than some playwrights can pack in four paragraphs.
Kyra Harper: It feels like a warm sweater somehow when you put it on, I find. When it works, when we slip into those scenes and they just tick along, they’re like this comfort food. There’s something so warm about them because they’re so recognizable. Brenda Robins: For me … I didn’t find that was necessarily evident on the page. Just reading it to myself I thought, “Ah, I can’t imagine how this is going to work.” So it was scary and intimidating. That’s a good reason to do theatre at this point in your life, right? On how the play and its portrayal of a global environmental apocalypse is infiltrating their daily lives:
MV: There’s this image of cities migrating. Then you watch the news about the tsunami in Indonesia and you see that building move two kilometres. All sorts of them and they just keep popping up in the news and it’s not as farfetched as we think it is.
CC: I find it so upsetting, even being involved in the thoughts of the play. I’m finding myself thinking, OK, you do understand you’re not doing this anymore. You can’t do it, you can’t take it. You’re gonna promise yourself never to do another play again or you’re gonna end up in an insane asylum.
MV: I’m also thinking of what is going to happen to the planet and how are we going to be living? My husband and I thought about that when we were moving. We don’t want to live too close to the water because levels are rising. How quickly can you get out of town if there’s a disaster? Yeah, we’re gonna get a generator, that’s a really good idea. The play speaks to me louder than I wanted it to.
KH: I don’t know why, but it also makes me value my friendships even more. Especially the women in my life. And maybe that’s because I’m of a certain age, but I appreciate having those connections so much. Because there was a time in my life when I didn’t necessarily have them, so to have them now is precious. It really means something, hold on to them. Now.
MV: Then the run will be over and she’ll never call us again! On the chance to work with a cast of older women actors:
MV: Just the idea of four women of a certain age — geez, I hate that, but — four old women sitting around and written by Caryl Churchill, by this woman who’s been around for a long time … Suddenly, I feel like for the first time in a while that somebody’s actually speaking from my point of view.
KH: I think there’s a great deal of love in the play and love between the women, and I think that’s just there. That’s a given.
BR: Although it happens to be a play about four women, I would say that less do I feel like it’s investigating sexism as it is ageism. I read the other day that someone turns 65 once every seven seconds. Coming into this room feels like I’m presented with a piece of theatre that is speaking to me as a wiser, older member of the population as much as I am a woman. I guess it would be a very different play if it was four men.
MV: It would be completely different. Different conversations.
BR: I hope somebody writes it.
CC: I’ve made my finest friends in theatre, but from my early days I’ve always felt that this work actually requires us to be alone in a very intense way. And Churchill’s plays are sympathetic to that sense. All her characters, they live as individuals with strong connections to each other, but there is a solo aspect. And I would say that is her intellect. It cuts through everything and organizes everything.
The play is evidence of its 80-year-old writer’s intelligence and the wisdom that comes with age