Bannerman Bloggination Triplex

Let the countdown begin! Tonight marks our third-last performance of MISSING -- the antepenultimate show!

Given the smooth way we slipped into this final week, the run almost seems too short. Tuesday our show took another step forward, with a warm and encouraging audience drawing confident, expansive performances from us. The highly disciplined circumstances of our production's making kept us all respectful and carefully accurate -- now we can carry all that, and ALSO add what we have learned from our performances of the last three weeks.

Major help in this regard was provided by our student audiences and talkbacks. I've already mentioned the great questions from our audience of Brampton students last week. Last Saturday night, our playwright, Florence Gibson, announced that she would be addressing drama students from Fanshawe College, London, after the show. Others would be welcome. Several of us joined Flo on stage for a revealing session.

Hearing her speak reminded us of some of the special challenges of MISSING. Unlike the usual aim of laying out a story step by step, MISSING celebrates a world of ambiguities -- uncertainties that seem to spread through the story like expanding wave circles on a pond, colliding with each other and changing with each interaction.

One amusing note occurred early in the following question period. The opening of MISSING includes a time of darkness when only night sounds are heard, many of them created vocally by the actors. "We were doing those animal sounds in class just the other day!" enthused one of our students, obviously delighted that these apparently childish games had a place in real theatre. Of course, such devices are an essential part of this sort of storytelling, childlike elements that manage to convey a more sophisticated message. If you can feel the night around you through these simple means, your susceptibility to the atmosphere of the play has been established before a word of text is spoken.

What's interesting in MISSING is the wide range of atmospheric effects employed. The guidelines set by director David Ferry are very broad. The actors create some relatively complex sounds using vocalizations and/or props. including the scraping of a restaurant grill, the sound of French fries in a deep fryer and (a group favourite) the boiling-over of a pot of vegetables. But some effects are recorded as sound cues -- car motors, barking dogs, telephones on a rural party line. The soundscape even includes non-realistic background sound as well. A multiplicity of means are used to convey these sounds to the audience. The preshow music (selections from Canadian 'seventies bands) is played through several small, wired portable radios, fixed with duct tape at various points around the theatre space, while "regular" sound cues can be heard through backstage or upstage speakers.

The variety of these approaches, I believe, again reinforces the spine of a play that deals with ambiguities, where rules and conventions are constantly called into question. In a similar way, lighting cues are sometimes realistic, with shadows apparently thrown through doors or Venetian blinds, and sometimes emotionally based, as when two married characters quarrelling are seen within a pattern of (prison?) bars.

Questions in audience talkbacks about these elements remind us how much support, both naturalistic and subliminal, our sound and lighting designs provide for the themes of our play -- not to mention the beautiful woven-wire sculpture that dominates upstage centre!