By Vanessa Broadbent (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 8, 2014
Theatregoers, expect something completely different the moment you walk into the UFV theatre department’s production of Birdsong.
Rather than preparing and warming up backstage as usual, actors will be doing this on stage as the audience is being seated. Actor Courtney Kelley noted the choice is a unique way to set the scene.
“It’s very odd to be onstage when the audience is coming in, but it sets the mood immediately. It shows them that this isn’t a show that you’ve ever seen before,” she said.
Director Raïna von Waldenburg explained why she chose to begin the play this way.
“I do not want to create any illusions. I want everyone who is working on the play to be onstage at all times. Stage manager, sound, all actors, there’s no one behind stage, they don’t disappear. We see the putting on of the play and the machinery in front of our eyes,” she said.
This breaking of the fourth wall doesn’t stop once the play starts, but continues the whole time, with assistant stage manager Geneva Perkins narrating the play.
“In war there is always someone running the machine and calling the cues,” von Waldenburg explained. “She’s a storyteller telling the story. It’s not the actors telling the story by becoming characters, because they don’t. The story is told through the action that is told aloud [by the actors],” she said.
The most notable adaptation von Waldenburg made is that actors do not play specific characters. By taking a surrealistic approach rather than realistic, the actors become disembodied from the characters, sometimes resulting in multiple actors playing the same character at the same time. “I felt that the story is so beautiful and romantic. My fear was that by mounting a production in a conventional, realistic manner that the romanticism would take over, and therefore the audience would get attached to those specific characters as if the story belonged to just [them],” she said.
Von Waldenburg’s approach to acting really shines through the performance of her actors.
“Acting is pretending to be someplace that you’re not. What I ask actors to do is to be where they are in their non-fictional reality while saying their lines, while executing their choreography,” she said. “The smashing up of these two opposites creates what I think is a really dynamic performance.”
The actors in Birdsong are enthusiastic to be part of such a unique production, which is also its Canadian premiere. Kelley explained that playing multiple characters is another choice which functions well.
“It’s definitely different and unique. I’ve never done anything like it and it’s really weird to have that disconnection, but it absolutely works,” she said.
Performances of Birdsong start October 15.
