SUMMERWORKS PREVIEWS

Family Album

maybe you can go home again, but beware the nightmares you bring with you.

Charles Picco's The Mourning follows the emotional lives of a Newfoundland family after one of two sons dies on a camping trip. It's a memory play, a well-crafted piece that allows journeys into the past for each of the living characters.

"I want my plays to feel like they're a dream, but the fact is that any good theatre enters the characters' subconscious," says former Newfoundlander Picco.

"I've always written subtextually, never wanting to expose the obvious about my characters. There's a lot that's unsaid between the words. It's a way of discovering another deeper truth. I believe that as long as a writer gives clues throughout, the audience can follow a story."

Picco is one of Toronto's little-known theatrical talents, a playwright who captures emotional nuance with ease. His initially ordinary characters become more fascinating the more we learn about them. He's done a few festival shows and spent last year in the playwriting unit at Theatre Passe Muraille, working on Men Of Good Fortune.

Like Dreaming Elsewhere, a previous SummerWorks show, The Mourning began life in Rhubarb!, and since then Picco's developed the relationship between the two siblings.

"Now there's more dramatic tension, more chance for each to push his brother's buttons. We're trying to keep the piece fluid, so it moves like dance rather than naturalistic theatre."

Jumpin' Jumby

in this life, mermaid lore and a spirit called the jumby haunt an old Toronto man born in the West Indies.

But that's not a bad thing, according to author Denise Barnard.

"My Antigua-born mother used to say to us children, 'You must be haunted,'" says Barnard. "By that she meant we were restless. We all know about that kind of figurative haunting. That restlessness is what my character faces when he's visited by a jumby who takes him back into the past."

A fiction writer, Barnard had a piece of dialogue between two men in her head and decided to experiment by translating it into theatrical form. The younger figure was inspired by a Guyanese folk piece about the growing closeness between a brother and a sister, while the elder is Barnard's own creation.

"I didn't want to cover old ground, about people who come from the Caribbean and their experience here, of belonging only tangentially in their adopted home," says the first-time playwright, who insists hers is only one voice from the diverse West Indian community.

"Instead, the play deals with the role that memory plays in our lives, with the loneliness we all feel, whether we're with someone or not."

She's appreciative that SummerWorks provides an opportunity for novice theatre artists.

"I usually appreciate the power of theatre by being a spectator. A festival like this allows me to move beyond a viewer's love and admiration to make my own work happen."

JK

Bronte Girls

does art have the power to heal? Young writers Emily Sugerman and Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman are finding out as they write and perform The End Of Pretending, one of the delights of last spring's Paprika Festival for artists under 20.

Then both 15 years old - they met in kindergarten - the two spent the summer of 1999 in Blyth, living with Corbeil-Coleman's dying mother, novelist Carole Corbeil. They began working on a play about their favourite writers, Bront‘ sisters Emily and Charlotte, authors, respectively, of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

"We began writing about the Bront‘s, whose names we share, but it was ridiculous to ignore what was happening to us as well," says Corbeil-Coleman. "The Bront‘s lost their mother to cancer and spent their isolated childhood creating incredible worlds and games that we related to.

"Our play combines their story, our fascination with them and our own feelings during a summer when we were growing up and losing our innocence - drinking at parties, learning to French kiss and dealing with my mother's illness."

The summer was wonderful in so many ways, she adds, that the pair didn't want the play just to be about sadness.

After presenting it in Paprika and the Tarragon Spring Arts Fair, Corbeil-Coleman admits she's just now getting to the point where she can distance herself from the material in performance.

"I want to find a place where it feels good to perform it and not have it be so draining," she muses.

"Next week we're living and rehearsing in the house where we spent that summer. I think that will help heal me, help separate me from the material. The play has been a real gift."

JK

Pursuing Pablo

the summerworks folks sure were surprised when Belltower Theatre's application showed up. What must have drawn their attention was the envelope, covered with a copy of Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.

The artist figures large in Ma Jolie, writer/director Alan Dilworth's music, dance and text piece that looks at the young Picasso and his friends, poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob.

There's a touch of magic realism, too. Remember the Greek myth about the statue coming to life in the hands of an artist? In Dilworth's version, Picasso's animated statue inspires him to cubist art.

The script might seem to echo Steve Martin's Picasso At The Lapin Agile, but Dilworth moves in another direction. For one thing, the real-life Jacob becomes a woman. For another, the author works in a moralistic Aesop fable to leaven the comedy.

"I knew there was a story I wanted to tell about the relationship among these talented, ambitious people," notes Dilworth, a Soulpepper Training Company grad who's one-third of Belltower. "What sacrifices did they have to make at the start of their careers, especially when they had to choose between friendship and artistic genius?"

With a bevy of real-life figures, Dilworth had lots of material to draw on, including Picasso's purchase of statues stolen from the Louvre.

"Picasso took what was happening in his life and injected it into his work. It's always a difficult balancing act, to be true to what's important in your life and what's important in your art."

JK

Mystery Town

kevin rees-cummings believes in getting theatre out of the audience's heads and into their guts.

He's sure hitting a nerve somewhere. Last year's SummerWorks jury liked his energetic skinhead play Rabid so much that they added a prize for it, guaranteeing Rees-Cummings a SummerWorks slot this year.

The new creation is Madder, about the disappearance of a teenager in a small town. Her vanishing isn't so much a mystery to be solved as the catalyst for the breakdown of various townsfolk and visitors.

Think a Canadian Twin Peaks, with the central focus the characters' emotionally twisted innards.

"I'm concerned with making theatre that has an impact similar to dance, which is why my work is often erratic and manic in its physicality," says the talented writer/performer, who created the piece with his cast.

"I don't think viewers have to make immediate or literal sense of what they see, and a performance affects everyone uniquely. That's what prompts conversations in the pub later."

Some people didn't know what to make of the excitingly high-energy Rabid, such as the scene in which one character breaks down and brays like a donkey.

"We try to be more normal in public than we actually are inside, for fear of embarrassment or looking uncool. I'm interested in the extremes of action, in the kind of abstract reaction people have to a real situation."

Madder, he adds, is more sedate than the punk-rock Rabid. But that doesn't mean the play or characters are comfy.

"I hate the idea that you have to be faithful to motivation, logic or style. How is art supposed to grow, change or comment on society if we keep politely opening doors and showing off our creations as nicely covered furniture?

"All I can think is, 'Yeah, I have a couch, too.'"

JK