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The
English Canadian Premiere of March 13 - 29, 2009 Praise for SOMEONE IS GOING TO COME: “21st-century
Beckett… played with creepy charm and impeccable comic timing.” “The
play is wonderfully creepy, the script a smorgasbord of poetry and
bleak humour.” “Keen
insight and superb acting!” "Kudos
to Seelig for bringing us intelligent writers virtually unknown in
North America." “An
intriguing glimpse into the genius of Fosse.”
Globe and Mail, J. Kelly Nestruck: Norway's Jon Fosse is one of the most produced contemporary playwrights in Europe, but the English-speaking world has been slow to catch on to his work, North America slowest of all. While Le Monde already claims Fosse as "the 21st-century Beckett," most of our theatres seem to be content to stick with the 20th-century Beckett, thank you very much. If you come across a 21st-century Shaw or Coward though, maybe you could send him their way. Adam Seelig, the director behind Toronto's One Little Goat, has a particular interest in Europe's modern poetic theatre, however, and he now brings us the English-Canadian premiere of Someone is Going to Come, a 1993 play of Fosse's that Seelig has newly translated with Harry Lane. She (Stacie Steadman) and He (Dwight McFee) - like most of Fosse's characters, they are nameless - have bought an old, dilapidated house by the ocean, far away from everyone and everything. The intergenerational couple - she's 30, he's 50 - have escaped something, or at least hope they have. "In this house we'll be together/ you and I/ alone together," says She. "And no one's going to come," says He. That's their repeated mantra, but, in fact, someone is going to come and both of them know it, perhaps from peeking at the title of the play. In theatre someone always comes - Godot being the exception that proves the rule - and in this case it is the Man, a swaggering thirtysomething played with creepy charm and impeccable comic timing by Michael Blake. The Man is the previous owner of the house, which he inherited from his grandmother, and he's dropped by to say hi. His grandmother, he notes pointedly to She, lived here all alone for many, many years after his grandfather. If She ever wants to grab a drink to learn more about that, he'd be happy to oblige. "You really wanted him to come," pouts He, after the Man leaves (for a while). "You just say you don't want anyone to come, but really there's nothing you want more." Someone is Going to Come, you may have figured out, is a parable about jealousy. Its characters are archetypes who speak mostly in simple, unspecific language - a style that has a certain poetic and aesthetic appeal. When She and He recite the story of their house and their aloneness over and over, they are trying to convince themselves of it. But the more they repeat it, the more doubt sets in, until their language actually inverts in meaning. They become like an anxious person chanting "I'm fine" over and over: The more they say it, the more it signifies the opposite. Seelig's production seems a touch too reverent to me, but in terms of introducing Toronto to a Fosse without jazz hands, I applaud him. With its new translation of Someone is Going to Come, now playing at the Walmer Centre Theatre, One Little Goat Theatre Company has done Canadians a huge service. It allows us to sample, most of us for the first time, the very special talents of contemporary Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, hailed by many as the greatest thing since sliced Ibsen. Translated into lyrical prose by artistic director Adam Seelig and Harry Lane, Someone Is Going to Come is a Pinteresque exploration of sexual jealousy, isolation and the ever-shifting sands of human relationships. With its repeated phrases and deft imagery, the dialogue is hypnotic, but it's what is happening between, and under, the words that packs the emotional voltage. A man and a woman, known simply as He (played by Dwight McFee) and She (Stacie Steadman), arrive at the old, dilapidated seaside house they have just bought. At last, they say, "we can be alone together, together in each other." But She immediately expresses fears that "someone will come." That someone turns out to be the young man (called Man and played by Michael Blake) who sold them the house, who is now rich and who lives nearby. In fact, as he is at pains to tell them, he is their only near neighbour. Sexual tensions begin to mount as the smiling Man insinuates himself into the household. He won't go away. The play is wonderfully creepy, the script a smorgasbord of poetry and bleak humour. Norwegian Jon Fosse, though hailed as “one of the world’s greatest living playwrights,” is seldom staged in North America. Toronto saw his Nightsongs (1997) as part of World Stage 2002. Now One Little Goat Theatre Company is presenting the English Canadian premiere of his first play Someone is Going to Come (1996). What has made Fosse so famous in Europe and what is so immediately apparent in Someone is Fosse’s uniquely minimalist theatrical language. Clearly influenced by Samuel Beckett, Fosse takes the language people might use in an ordinary situation and boils it down to its very essence. Like the music of a minimalist like Philip Glass, Fosse builds his play from the repetition of small significant phrases that grow with slight variations into larger structures. Confronted with a script consisting of very short, unpunctuated lines, many directors would blanch. Luckily, director and co-translator Adam Seelig understands this kind of text as his fine production of Thomas Bernhard’s Ritter, Dene, Voss showed in 2006. Two characters called only He (Dwight McFee) and She (Stacie Steadman) have bought an isolated house by the ocean deliberately to be “far from the others” in order to be “alone together.” Their few moments of happiness are shattered when She suddenly has a premonition: “It’s so empty here that someone’s going to come.” Indeed, someone does come, The Man (Michael Blake), whose grandmother died in the house the couple have bought. The paranoia of She grows as the extent of her isolation dawns on her, and so does the jealousy of He versus The Man. Key phrases take on increasingly chilling overtones with every repetition. “Alone together” starts to represent the plight of humanity in general — individuals using a set of phrases as a kind of mantra to explain the world to themselves without truly communicating with each other. We may be together but each of us is alone. None of this would work without Seelig’s keen insight or the superb acting of his cast. Steadman and Blake are particularly expert in making Fosse’s repetitions sound absolutely natural and imbuing them with complex connotations. When McFee laughs bitterly at the conclusion, seeing suddenly how this story will play out, so, with a shock, do we. We must be grateful to have a company in Toronto like One Little Goat so willing and so able to take up the challenge Fosse presents in showing characters whose inarticulateness expresses all too well the void they sense both within and without. Classical 93.6 FM, Paula Citron: People are either going to love or hate Jon Fosse’s Someone Is Going To Come. I don’t see how there can be any middle ground. Fosse is a Norwegian writer of note whose short, clipped, repetitive dialogue is in the style of Pinter, Beckett and early Mamet. His school is Theatre of Menace which is writ large by director Adam Seelig. In this play, a couple known as She and He, performed by Stacie Steadman and Dwight McFee, buy an isolated house by the sea. They are escaping from an unknown trauma. Into their lives comes The Man, played by Michael Blake, who sold them the house. The play revolves around the paranoia that moves back and forth between He and She caused by the presence of The Man. I found the shifts intriguing, and kudos to Seelig for bringing us intelligent writers virtually unknown in North America. Fosse, a Norwegian playwright whose work receives its English Canadian premiere by One Little Goat Theatre, under the direction of Adam Seelig, the company's Artistic Director, is not widely known in Canada. The playwright has been compared to Pinter, Ibsen and Beckett, which is no mean company to keep. In Someone is Going to Come - translated by Seelig and Harry Lane - Fosse is more lyrical than Beckett in his one hour play about a man and a woman who retire to an isolated home by the sea they've just purchased and anxiously await "someone" who is "sure to come. " For a play written in 1993, so many years after the absurdist wave conquered the international and North American stages, Fosse has mastered the sparest of language to illustrate a singular emotion: the underlying and destructive jealousy that overtakes a man when he realizes that his wife is attracted to "someone", who seems to come out nowhere, in this case an insouciant stranger who has invaded their sanctuary. In fact the stranger, simply called The Man, was the owner of the house that the couple have bought, inherited from his grandmother, and is just stopping by to see how things are going. He's breezy, muscular and good looking and Michael Blake's charismatic stranger fills the stage as soon as he enters. It doesn't help that The Man lives somewhere in the area, just another uncomfortable warning bell to the other man, whose wife is considerably younger than he is and has had doubts about their retirement from social intercourse. We only know them as He and She, the occupants of their newly bought home. They're played and played well by Stacie Steadman and Dwight McFee who are called upon to use Fosse's sparse dialogue and the all the inflections they have in their arsenal to depict the anxiety, hope, fear and promise that they're feeling with their retreat. "In this house we’ll be together - you and I - alone together" she says with forced cheer, but the wariness begins to set in when she realizes that it's all different, it's empty, there really is no one but them, alone together. "I never thought it would be like this," she says slowly. And when The Man, enters their life, suddenly, without warning, the good neighbor with his own welcome mat and his own casserole of ebullience, things change, slightly, but surely. He, the husband, tries to revive the couple's constant mantra of their happiness to be alone, together, to rely on their dependence to no one except each other. Except things have changed. The house begins to smell old, to smell of death. Perhaps the previous owner has died in the house. He and She try to find their purpose again: to find peace in each other. But in the end, something has come between them. The Man knows it as well. "You know where to reach me now." he says to the woman confidently. "And I’m sure you’ll call". Director Adam Seelig, a playwright and poet himself,
whose One Little Goat theatre company was founded with the mandate
to present contemporary poetic theatre, will always be out on a limb
in presenting unknown works that asks an audience to appreciate the
unusual and avante-garde in contemporary works. Someone is Going to
Come fits squarely into that category and those that are going to
come will find the play an intriguing glimpse into the genius of Fosse. ANTIGONE November 9 – 25, 2007 PRAISE FOR ANTIGONE! NOW!
Magazine (four stars)
RITTER,
DENE, VOSS The press is raving about Ritter, Dene, Voss: Newcity
Chicago's #1 production
Scathing Psychosexual
Comedy by Leading European Playwright Thomas Bernhard to receive English-language
World Premiere
Media contact for high resolution
photos, etc: YEHUDA AMICHAI RADIO
PLAYS
"A success!
It certainly provoked me (and hopefully others) into learning more
about this thoughtful, profane writer." More: "Intro
to Killing Him" "Killing Him complete recording" ALL IS ALMOST STILL
"A truly
admirable play - the themes, once one catches on, are fascinating,
the trio of actors wonderfully done, and the traces of the Jacob story
very well modulated." Adam Seelig
is "one of the brightest directors on the theatrical scene." |
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...TOWARDS
A POETIC THEATRE... |
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(photographer: Lauren
Stryer)
