Praxis Theatre

Laura Mennell plays the mysterious Mila Brook in The Electric Company's Tear The Curtain. Photo by Brian Johnson.

by Michael Wheeler

One of the unconventional things about this residency is that unlike a traditional curriculum that would begin with basic fundamentals and conclude with something grand and complicated, I am taking the best opportunities I can get when they are available. This approach led me to begin my training program by participating in the first half of a 3-week film shoot for The Electric Company’s newest production – Tear The Curtain, commissioned by The Arts Club Theatre Company to open at The Stanley Theatre in Vancouver in early September 2010.

This meant my cross-Canada study of the relationship between direction and design in theatre began with a crash course in how to direct a film. It took me a couple of days on set, and a couple of reads of the integrated script (which overall is formatted as a film not theatre script), to fully appreciate the magnitude and ambition of what I had gotten myself into.

The story operates on two levels: Plot-wise it is a film-noir styled story set in a semi-fictional Vancouver full of gangsters, tycoons, a secret cell of revolutionaries and double-crossing vixens. Fundamentally it is a narrative that will entertain.  Thematically, it attempts something very complex and intricate by centring the plot around an embittered theatre critic in an era where film is becoming the dominant medium. The lead character is both fighting this shift, in part to keep his livelihood, and searching for the reason he was so enamoured with theatre to begin with.

Jonathon Young plays critic Alex Braithewaite. Photo by Brian Johnson.

This is not just an intellectual existential problem for the lead character to be considered by an audience. The show is a combination of both mediums. The Stanley Theatre – where the show will premiere – was once a movie theatre that has been transformed into a theatre theatre. All of the filmed sequences have been shot with in the Stanley Theatre and many of the shots are from the audience’s POV of the stage – or acknowledge in some way when that they were shot in the same room where the audience will experience the performance. Experientially – the line between film and theatre as mediums will be blurred as the same actors from the filmed portions will also tell the story through live scenes.

Still with me?  Also, all of this was happening in the heart of Vancouver in the middle of the Olympics. Not too many of the huge crew of people that were working three weeks of consecutive 12hr days seemed all that aware of snowboard cross, curling or the luge – even though the Olympic village was around the corner.  We had important things to do! (Not entirely true: Managing Producer Nathan Medd scored last minute tickets with his family to the Opening Ceremonies and came back with some impressive photos on his iPhone.)

My role was to observe – and occasionally be a sounding board for – director Kim Collier as she tore through an ambitious and demanding shooting schedule. Although I have been on film sets before, I have never considered each day and shot, from a director’s perspective, as such the learning curve was both steep and fascinating. One of my first realizations was that a production that used a large number of professionally filmed segments like this had only recently been made possible, or at least economically feasible, by new technology.  The film sections are not actually shot on film; a RED One high-res camera was used. This is considerably cheaper than shooting on film and allows all of the information to be stored digitally and viewed immediately.

This technology is not flawless.  RED One cameras are a little too good – they can show too much detail and not have the pleasant hues that come from shooting on film. To combat this effect – and to contribute to a film noir-ish feel throughout, there was a single person whose only job was to keep a thin mist of haze circulating whenever camera was rolling. Keeping this haze perpetual and consistent was a major battle throughout each day, but was key to both the atmosphere and continuity of the material being filmed.

Kim Collier (foreground right) directs while a Red One camera is operated by a RoboCop-like suit wearing cameraman. Photo by Tim Matheson.

A second element that jumped out at me as a theatre director learning to direct film was how little time there is for experimentation or mistakes. In theatre I think our creative process often leads us to take time feeling our way into things, trying different approaches, and sometimes using good ol’ trial and error. This is not even remotely a possibility on a film shoot – not only do you have to know exactly what shot you want ahead of time, but exactly what you want from each of your actors and your DP for each individual shot well ahead of time. Certainly you can make adjustments on the fly and always keep your eyes open for discoveries and opportunities – but time is money and a professional film crew is a lot of people’s time.

The biggest day of the shoot was my last one, when a huge number of extras were used to create the crowd shots both of the audience filling the theatre and of a party in that occurs in the lobby of the theatre. On that day over seventy volunteer actors (myself included) showed up at 8am on a Saturday to be dressed in high fashion of the 1930s and strike a number of sophisticated poses and while feigning conversation throughout the day. Most ingenious use of the RED One Camera occurred at the end of this day when the seventy actors were shuffled to completely fill small sections of the 600ish seats the theatre with the camera “locked down”. Later in the editing room these multiple iterations of ourselves will become citizens of the same time and space filling the entire audience in a single shot.

I am already looking forward to returning to Vancouver to join the theatre portion of rehearsals for Tear The Curtain leading up to an early September opening night. The whole company has been awfully nice to a guy from Toronto whom they’d never met before, and it was awesome to be included in this ambitious process. I’m looking forwards to learning the process by which The Electric Company and Director Kim Collier integrate the filmed and live materials both in the rehearsal hall and in tech at The Stanley Theatre. Next post – Michael Healey’s Courageous arrives at The Citadel Theatre in Edmonton.