‘Acting from the neck up’
Tarragon Theatre’s elaborate pivot.
Nearly a year into the pandemic, performing artists and audiences won’t be sharing space inside a theatre anytime soon. And due to the most recent additional lockdown precautions, artists can’t even share space with each other.
But some theatres in Toronto are pivoting yet again, in a number of innovative directions, from delivering shows online to transforming them into publication projects.
This week, Tarragon Theatre is producing the world premiere of Rick Roberts’s play “Orestes” as what Tarragon is calling an “epic, interactive storytelling experience” that takes place entirely online. The show was intended to open the theatre’s 2020-21 season last fall and, given its subject matter — it’s a political satire about an online poet who’s been banned from internet use — it made sense to transpose the material into digital form. “I did think, if any play could make a transition to online this would be it,” said Roberts.
Roberts and director Richard Rose (also Tarragon’s artistic director) had been developing the “Orestes” project together for several years and, when working on its live stage version, had found themselves particularly challenged by how to depict material that takes place on the internet. “And then the question flipped,” said Roberts, when the decision was made to bring the project online.
As pivots go, this was an elaborate one, which involved Roberts rewriting much of the script, and Tarragon bringing on Frank Donato (originally meant to be the live show’s projection designer) as video and stream designer along with the immersive media company toasterlab, which undertook the virtual theatre design.
The production starts with the whole audience in a single digital space and then allows audience members to follow different characters’ stories. As Rose described it, “when you branch off, you’re actually going into the bedrooms and the backrooms, the personal story behind the political story in the main room.” For those who might feel less comfortable adventuring into a breakout space, there will always be action happening in the main room — a tactic that Rose has retained from his staging of the groundbreaking environmental theatre piece “Tamara” 40 years ago, in which live audience members followed actors around a house.
Krystin Pellerin, who plays Orestes’ sister Electra, said she was “relieved and overjoyed” when Rose called her to let her know that the show was not cancelled and was happening in another form. Acting on Zoom, as Pellerin described it, is a particular challenge — it’s certainly not acting onstage, “because you’re in extreme close-up all the time and acting from the neck up,” but it’s also not exactly like acting for TV or film either, because it mostly involves looking right at the computer’s camera rather than at the other person in the scene. “It’s tricky for sure,” said Pellerin. “But Richard’s approach has kept the integrity of the characters and the relationships.”
Meanwhile, non-traditional productions have required even more drastic interpretations for the COVID era.
“February: a love story” was originally co-created by actors Ellen Denny and Emilio Vieira as a COVID-era romance to be performed in an outdoor courtyard this month; while outdoor theatre is a tradition in the summer, this was a rare intervention to bring it to performance-starved audiences in the colder months of the pandemic.
Alas, the show’s producers have had to transform the play into a film, which is available to stream online with the same opening night as originally planned: Valentine’s Day.
The Rhubarb Festival, an annual two-week collection of experimental performance at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, goes against trends in its very nature. So when festival director Clayton Lee had to reimagine it without any public interaction, he resisted any digital intervention and instead went analogue.
The 2021 edition of the Rhubarb Festival is a 168-page book, printed in a limited one-time run of 888 copies, featuring more than 20 artists and available for $20, the same as previous festival tickets. Some “performances” are in print, some have been done upon the physical book, some are brought to life by the reader and their household, and some exist only in the audio version.
“All the artists who replied, half of them had no idea what we meant by ‘a book,’ ” Lee told the Star. “There was a process of artists wrapping their heads around the thing, but once they got past that they were really able to imagine the possibilities and play with the constraints of this new — well not new, the opposite of new — format.”
Performance artist Louise Liliefeldt has created line drawings from her performances that are now colouring pages. Local artist Ishan Davé created ink from the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre building’s dust and fragments, which cover the pages of the book. These projects and more are now a physical document of a very specific (and painful) time for artists in Toronto, instead of a product that’s caught up in the traditional professional theatre world — in which the goal of a Rhubarb performance is sometimes to get picked up by a bigger company for further development and a final debut. “February: a love story” streams Feb. 14 to March 7 for a pay-what-you-can fee. Find it at februarytheplay.com. “Orestes” has preview performances Feb. 3 to 4 and runs Feb. 5 to 14. Tickets at tarragontheatre.com. The Rhubarb Festival is available for preorder and will begin distribution on Feb. 10. Copies can be purchased at buddiesinbadtimes.com.
Projects are a physical document of a very specific (and painful) time for artists in Toronto