Discovering Age of Arousal in Calgary
By Walter Bilderback, Dramaturg

This March, I had the opportunity to attend the Enbridge playRites Festival in Calgary, Alberta.  New play festivals can be an important avenue for discovering new work because you meet the plays in what should be their true element, the stage, rather than on the page.  Many plays read very well and play horribly; others do not read well but sail in performance.  playRites is the foremost new play festival in Canada, and I was invited because of the Wilma’s history of producing plays by Canadian writers, plays such as Patience, Perfect Pie, Love and Anger, and Cherry Docs.  I met the festival’s charismatic Artistic Director Bob White years ago, and I have wanted to see the work playRites does since then.

Calgary itself is a rapidly growing metropolis on the eastern edge of the Canadian Rockies with a skyline dominated by new buildings, including the Epcor Centre, a lush multi-venue arts center downtown funded by revenue from the province’s vast oil reserves.  The main pedestrian mall is full of regional art galleries and restaurants whose cuisine (and prices) would be at home around Rittenhouse Square.  playRites has taken pride in presenting challenging new work in the middle of the northern prairie winter.  However, while there was a lot of snow in the city parks, the temperatures for my visit were in the balmy 60s under sunny, clear skies.

The festival presented five new works by established and emerging playwrights in fully staged and rehearsed productions.  Play festivals are always a roll of the dice: you sometimes find a gem, but one learns to expect that many or most new plays will be underwhelming, you’re at least as likely to feel you’re watching mud settle.  Considering the possibilities, playRites was remarkably pleasant.

The first event I attended was a reception for the French Ambassador to Canada.  He was present for the publication of a book of contemporary French plays in English translation (by Canadian playwrights), a collaboration between the nearby Banff Writing Center and playRites.  The opportunity to discuss energy issues with the premier of Alberta on the same trip was an added incentive of course.

The “hit” of the festival was The Knowing Bird by Ron Chambers.  A pleasant comedy about a morbidly overweight father and his struggle to protect his daughter from becoming the Canadian version of a grasping careerist, it was marked most by the sight of the lead actor, a deservedly popular local comic actor named Brian Dooley in an immense fat suit and its inherent Canadian decency.  While the Canadian audience loved it, The Knowing Bird is thoroughly “Canadian” in topic and sensibility that I suspect it would be almost incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t, like me, grown up on the border, with Canadian television and camping trips on the northern Great Lakes as formative experiences.

Another piece was a dynamite cabaret revue, This is Cancer!, created by Bruce Horak and Rebecca Northan, which I hope American (and Philadelphia) audiences get a chance to enjoy.  The idea is that Cancer is trying to entertain us, the audience, and let us know he’s not such a bad guy.  Bruce Horak dancing and playing a guitar in a giant tumor suit  was truly one of the oddest sights I’ve experienced in the theater.  I went in expecting little but found myself captivated: the piece was hysterically funny, but also had most of the audience in tears at the end without resorting to cheap sentimentality and rescued the over-used term “life-affirming” from the Slough of Cliché.  Unfortunately, the work requires an intimacy and level of audience interaction (as well as five minutes in total – total – darkness) which did not seem as if it would work well in our theater and the context of a subscription season.

The last play, however, was a different story (it was actually the first I saw, but always save the best for last).  Linda Griffiths’ Age of Arousal knocked my socks off.  Ross Manson, who played the Pope in The Life of Galileo this season, knows Linda Griffiths well from Toronto.  He describes her as a sort of “living legend” of Canadian theater, and the response from the Canadian attendees bore out that judgment.  Linda also presented a late-night performance of her one woman autobiographical piece The Last Dog of War, and the entire conference lined up a half hour before the doors opened to get the best seats.  Bob White’s introduction was a simple “Ladies and gentlemen, Linda Griffiths.”  In the U.S., Linda is best known for her work as an actress, playing the title character in John Sayle’s early film Liana.

Age of Arousal is a true rarity: a play possessing both a clear plot and a vibrant theatricality, not just conversations overheard.  The words were clearly intended to be spoken and heard, not just read.  Although the play was brimming with ideas, they were the characters’ ideas, not just the playwright’s.  Rarest of all, it was a play full of characters whose arcs could not be foreseen by the end of their first scene.  The playwright describes them as “explosive and contradictory,” and she is accurate.  It was entertaining, surprising, genuinely sexy and romantic, full of contemporary resonance even though set in Victorian London, and funny to boot.  Linda Griffiths took her characters and her basic plotlines from The Odd Women, a major Victorian novel by George Gissing.  She calls the play “wildly inspired” by the book: having now read the novel, this is accurate.  Age of Arousal is not a “stage adaptation” in any sense of the word.  It is a fully-realized new work written by an author with a very distinct voice, in the same vein as Sarah Ruhl’s revamping of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Another advantage of new play festivals is that you have the chance to meet the playwright (if you like the play, otherwise it can be a major disadvantage of festivals).  I spoke with Linda Griffiths and got her to send me a copy of the script to share with Blanka and Jiri.  My hope was to convince them to do a reading of the play this fall for consideration in the following season.  To my surprise, both were able to find time to read it within a week, and both agreed immediately that it was a real “Wilma play,” and to produce it as soon as possible, allowing Philadelphia audiences to enjoy it nearly at the same time as its Toronto premiere.  If you like surprises, you can’t afford to miss Age of Arousal.