Ambitious play offers double the theatrics

With pandemic lessons of togetherness recklessly abandoned in the rearview mirror, halfway past a ditch filled with sloppily “made,” soullessly “created” AI junk, a city-based theatre company that’s devoted itself to new Prairie works since 1990 is doubling down on humankind.

Announcing its next calendar of new work — the organization’s 36th season — Theatre Projects Manitoba’s artistic director Suzie Martin is promising something “ambitiously human.”

“It’s about a company of actors at a fictitious theatre putting on a production of Romeo and Juliet, but the gag is that we have both an onstage and backstage world that are happening,” says Martin, who will direct September’s world première of R+J: Closing Night.

Theatre Projects Manitoba calls it “an immersive love letter to the theatre and the people who make it mean something.”

It’s essentially two plays taking place concurrently, with actors moving between the onstage and backstage worlds and switching between Shakespearean roles and the fictional characters playing those roles; the audience also switches locations at intermission.

Traversing provincial borders, the production has been in the works since 2022, when Martin was invited to Alberta to workshop the latest meta-theatrical piece with Edmonton’s Fox Den Collective, a trio of Martin’s University of Alberta alums founded in 2016 by Carmen Osahor, Jessy Ardern and Sarah Feutl.

“Then I went, ‘Oh, I really want to do this show (at TPM),’” recalls Martin, who was hired there in 2022, succeeding Ardith Boxall, who led the company for 15 years.

But Martin, who was familiarizing herself with the budgetary constraints of post-pandemic theatremaking, understood the two-show show would not come cheap.

So the Foxes, as they call themselves, brought their portions of Canadian and Edmonton arts council funding to the potluck.

“It was one of those things that felt so big only a tiny theatre can do it,” Martin adds.

Over the past four seasons, while collaborating with exurban theatremakers on workshops and community-oriented storytelling, TPM served as co-producers on Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre productions including David Yee’s Among Men, Armin Wiebe’s The Recipe and Trish Cooper’s Holland.

Audiences who saw Cooper’s latest this past season are familiar with Winnipeg’s Ardern.

The actor’s turn as a harried parent at odds with inequitable social-services systems was a season highlight, and her 2024 show Prophecy — a tour-de-force solo piece directed by Martin — should assure audiences that they have no idea what will happen next in Closing Night.

About two weeks after Closing Night closes (it runs Sept. 8 to 20 at PTE), Ardern’s reimagining of Cyrano de Bergerac will open RMTC’s season on the John Hirsch Mainstage. (Oct. 7-31), co-starring Winnipeg’s Stephanie Sy as Roxanne.

The Edmonton Journal called the show’s recently wrapped run at the Citadel Theatre “easily” the company’s “best show of the season.”

For R+J, the cast is a mixture of Albertan and local talent, featuring Manitoba’s Arne MacPherson, Gwen Collins, Alissa Watson, Jack Maier, Sam Benson, Chael Donald and Laurel Fife.

Joseph Abetria is designing the costumes, with Jamie Plummer designing props and sets. Robert Mravnik is on lighting, with Ash Au — the artistic producer of the upcoming Cluster Festival (May 27-30) — handling the sound.

For more information about the project — which Martin calls TPM’s most ambitious ever — visit theatreprojectsmanitoba.ca.

winnipegfreepress/benwaldman

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