This year’s Festival TransAmériques features six world premieres.
Be warned. Premieres, by definition, are a gamble for the theatrgoer as well as for the creators of the show.
Thus far, I have seen two out of the first three FTA premieres: Nella Tempesta, from Italy, created by a company called Motus, and Trieste, created by Quebec performance artist and actor, Marie Brassard.
Neither one of them had yet reached their potential. And in the case of Nella Tempesta, I doubt that it ever will. Trieste, in its present state, is a multi-media mood-enhancer in search of a play.
Nella Tempesta, starts out brilliantly (with a snapping sail to suggest a shipwreck), then loses its way as it skips from one iconic scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to another, using borrowed blankets as props and begging for audience participation that never gets worked into the fabric. Prospero has gone missing in action, represented at first by a light beam, later by a disembodied voice. Ariel (Silvia Calderoni) rules. Caliban is the only other character given a bit of scope. Perhaps this tactic was inspired by Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Or not.
Marie Brassard’s Trieste is essentially a love letter to a city that makes use of eerie music and colour-deprived high-tech imagery as Brassard tells her tourist tale and reads from the works of Marguerite Duras and Rainer Maria Rilke. Fortunately, Brassard has a voice that enthralls no matter what she says. (Some of us would gladly listen to her read a shopping list.). But Trieste is essentially a prolonged, melancholy preface that never leads to a play, although it does awaken interest in its chosen destination.
Both Trieste and Nella Tempesta have their final performances at the FTA tonight, Monday May 27.
Tonight’s FTA theatre opening is Winners and Losers, from Vancouver, directed by Chris Abraham and starring James Long and Marcus Yousseff, playing more or less themselves. Happily, this is not a premiere. So the show may be audience-ready. We hope.
Marie Brassard, writer, director and peformer of Trieste at FTA
