Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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by Carol Healas, directed by Kim Selody
Presentation House Theatre, Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
March 5-30, 2014;
NAC, Ottawa, May 9-10, 2014
“A Show Where We Are the Wild Things”
If you would like to expose your children to the kind of theatre where they will become totally involved in the action, you can do no better than Where the Wild Things Are now playing at Young People’s Theatre. This production by Presentation House Theatre of Vancouver literally engages the audience, both children and adults, in the physical telling of Maurice Sendak’s classic 1963 picture book. The two actors, Linda A. Carson and Raes Calvert, do not act out the story for the audience as one might expect so much as facilitate the entire group’s telling of the story for themselves.
Upon entering the upstairs Studio Theatre at Young People’s Theatre, you will see that the risers for seating have all been pushed to the wall allowing for a large opening area. In Linda Leon’s design “seating” for youngsters is divided into three coloured mats called “islands” – red, green and blue – situated around the main playing area painted as a Sendak-like picture of a jungle filled with vines and flowers. Behind each of the islands are chairs for adults or “big people” as they are called in the show.
Seated on a box in the centre of the jungle area is Linda A. Carson who introduces herself as the Storyteller. She wants to tell us the story of Where the Wild Things Are, except she keeps getting interrupted by violent shakings coming seemingly from the box. She has to hold tightly to the box and sit on it to keep the “wild thing” in it inside. Thus, before the story has even begun, Scottish adaptor Carol Healas, has introduced the central theme of the story – the necessity of self-management or responsibility to get along in the world by keeping the “wild things” in oneself under control. Perhaps even the Mayor of Toronto could learn something from this story.
First, the Storyteller encourages the audience to let out their “wild things” though gnashing their teeth, clawing the air, roaring and standing up (though she notes that wild things always stay put on their own islands). After practice in how to be frightening, the Storyteller asks us to put our “wild things” back in our head and wait for the time in the story when we have to take them out again.
At this point Raes Calvert enters through the theatre door as if he were a child who is late. While the storyteller takes out Sendak’s book and starts to read, he disobeys all the rules we have been given and strays off his island and has to be reprimanded to return, much to the youngsters’ delight. This strategy already identifies the children with the Storyteller and not with the disobedient newcomer. Soon Calvert pulls on an eared hood and pills out a bushy tail to reveal himself as Max from the story. He roams the stage while Carson is reading and in an instant transformation Carson becomes Max’s mother who chides him for all the damage he has caused that day and sends him to bed without his supper.
Then Carson switching back to the Storyteller asks Max to describe the changes he experienced in his story. In the clever little bedroom set Leon has created, flowers burst through the door and window and the bedposts turn into trees, two of which the Storyteller carries out to the far corner behind the audience. What Max says he remembers most are the vines that covered everything. At this point a “big person” has to help Carson with a “vine” made of soft rope that is passed hand by hand through all three rows of seating on all the islands. When Max mentions that he saw a vast ocean, the Storyteller considers how we can represent that and finds three long blue cloths. Youngsters placed at the ends of each seem instinctively to know what to do to make the cloths into billowing waves that Max, now in his little red boat can sail through while all the rest of us, as directed by the Storyteller, make wind noises of various intensities.
After that energy has been expended, the Storyteller has us note that Max is not happy and asks us to suggest reasons why. Much as Max enjoyed being King of the Wild Things, he is still hungry and he misses being with someone, like his mother, who loves him. So he journeys home, this time without waves, and is pleased to find a dinner waiting for him, still hot.
The late Carol Healas’s adaptation from 1998 is still remarkable because it does not merely involve the audience in telling the story but also teaches through example how to dramatize a story effectively. The play, while nominally about Sendak’s book is thus also a hugely enjoyable course in how to adapt a book into a play, and, by extension, how to make theatre in general.
Carson with her gentle manner and soothing voice is somehow able to receive permission from the youngsters as an authority who by giving them rules will also increase their enjoyment. Calvert is wonderful as both a childish and a childlike Max, whose broad reactions to our engagement only help encourage us to play our roles the best we can.
It is no wonder that this delightful show sold out when it was last here in 2005. It’s an enormous amount of fun and, what’s especially good, the big people are not exempt from participating. We become a de facto community bound together as one by our act of telling a story we all know. A play that is as much a story as it is a game and that secretly is a lesson about theatre is really an ideal entertainment for kids aged 3 to 7 over March break – or indeed anytime during its nearly month-long run.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Raes Calvert as Max travelling;Raes Calvert as King Max. ©Chris van der Schyf.
For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.
2014-03-05
Where the Wild Things Are