Stage Door News
Stage Door News
– Necessary Angel is excited to present A City, written by Greg MacArthur (The Toxic Bus Incident, Snowman, Recovery), and directed by Necessary Angel Artistic Director Jennifer Tarver, on stage March 14 to April 2 at Artscape Sandbox in Toronto.
Presented as a gallery installation or tableaux vivant, A City is an intimate, personal study of four artists/friends, who tell the story of a famous friend who died under mysterious circumstances, and how he transformed them. The story is revealed through direct address in a disarmingly casual atmosphere, as if the audience were eavesdropping on a personal conversation.
Based on the members of a real indie theatre company in Montreal (Sidemart Theatrical Grocery), A City is inspired by documented stories, recorded text, confessional monologues and fictional writing. An intimate, painfully funny testament to a time and place, it is about the end of a friendship and a shifting world.
The piece is the second in a trilogy of plays by playwright Greg Macarthur that play with the boundaries between truth and fiction and are inspired by real life collaborators in three different Canadians cities. The first in the trilogy, A Man Vanishes, presented at Videofag in the spring of 2016, was loosely based on the acclaimed 1967 film of the same name by Shohei Imamura, which starts out as a documentary about a missing Japanese man but increasingly creates uncertainty about the nature of the story being told, and also inspired by the Videofag co-creators William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill. The play starred the two artists as exaggerated versions of themselves, and the Toronto Star called the play “ <a> slippery Escher painting of a theatrical construct” and “a metatheatrical confection.”
“As the verbatim theatre movement rose, I became intrigued by the idea of using that methodology as a starting point to blend fact and fiction and to challenge the audience to question the importance of whether it is true or not,” says Macarthur. “The stories are inspired by real artists - collaborators and friends of mine - and there are a lot of true anecdotes in the plays but with some pretty significant fictions mixed in.”
“In terms of A City, this piece really looks back at the time I spent in Montreal, which was kind of a mythical experience for me. It was a transformative time – a time in my life when my friends and I felt golden, beautiful, and vibrant – and when it started to come to an end, I felt this magic starting to crumble away. It was like the end of a civilization.”
Jennifer Tarver adds, “I am really excited about how this work will play on the audience. They will be right there with the performers in an intimate art gallery setting, the fourth wall really stripped away. And they’ll experience a period in time that everyone has in their lives at some point – those golden years when everything feels full of promise, when you and your friends are invincible – while also having all their expectations of performance and storytelling challenged.”
A City features Amy Keating as Gemma, (TomorrowLove, Outside the March); David Patrick Flemming as Graham, (Bunny, Stratford Festival); Justin Goodhand as Andrew (Arcadia, Citadel Theatre); Cole J. Alvis as Paddy, (Body Politic, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.)
A City will be on stage in Toronto from March 14 to April 2, 2017. (Opening night: March 16). Tickets are available from $20 to $40 by phone at 416-703-0406 xt 2001, online at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2858434 or in-person at Artscape Sandbox Box Office during showtimes.
Necessary Angel sponsors: BMO, Norton Rose Fulbright, Business for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.
Twitter: @necessaryangel
Hashtag: #ACityThePlay
A CITY:
March 14 –April 2, 2017 (Media night: March 16)
At the Artscape Sandbox, 301 Adelaide Street West
Featuring
Amy Keating as Gemma
David Patrick Flemming a Graham
Justin Goodhand as Andrew
Cole J. Alvis as Paddy
2017-02-08
Toronto: Necessary Angel presents "A City" by Greg MacArthur March 14-April 2