Stage Notes: The Mountaintop, Wonderful Joe, The Pillowman

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John Dinning, set and props designer for the Citadel Theatre production of The Mountaintop, sees his job as being a historian almost as much as an artist.

“In this job, we’re kind of a little bit of everything,” says Dinning about his work on the play, which imagines the night before the assassination of the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he retires alone to room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in April of 1968. “I like doing the research and I did quite a lot of research on this particular room.”

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Awash in symbolism, Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop posits a late-night visit to King by a mysterious woman named Camae. First staged in London in 2009, the play made its way to Broadway a few years later with Samuel L Jackson and Angela Bassett in the main roles. The Citadel production sees Patricia Cerra as Camae and Ray Strachan as King, with Patricia Darbasie directing.

Dinning’s work on the set has to not only take into account historical accuracy, but the stage in which the production takes place as well. As he notes, when you’re attempting to reproduce a room of such significance the layout can often interfere with authenticity. There’s also, of course, the matter of dramatic and artistic license; Dinning has the room itself in warm colours, while the exterior is cool and blue.

“I wanted to have strong clouds outside so that we can get a sense of the turbulence that’s happening around him,” says Dinning. “Not just the weather, but also society and the way people are reacting to him. There are two towers on another side of the room which have papers that are falling, like from heaven, and then as they come halfway down you’ll see they start to have writing on them. There are journals and newspapers and photos of his life, his books and Bibles, clipboards and FBI files. I expect that people will walk up to take a look at them.”

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The Mountaintop
When Until April 21
Where Citadel Theatre, The Maclab, 9828 101A Ave.
Tickets $35 and up, available in advance from citadeltheatre.com

Wonderful Joe

With his newest production, Ronnie Burkett feels as though he’s put the band back together.

“I built three shows during the pandemic,” says the Toronto-based puppeteer and playwright about the gestation of Wonderful Joe, which premieres at the Roxy Theatre on Thursday night. “So I built a very, very small show that I could put in a car and set up by myself and do all by myself. There was a Shakespeare show called Little Willy, and now Wonderful Joe, which is much bigger. The old team came back to help me to build it.”

Burkett feels that Wonderful Joe, which follows the adventures of Joe and his loyal dog Mister after they lose their home, couldn’t have been staged until now.

“When I first was building work during the pandemic I spoke to a number of presenters and pitched it but they all said ‘could you please give us something that could bring audiences back to the theatre, to just have some fun and laugh?’ So I postponed Wonderful Joe and went with Little Willy. I wouldn’t say Wonderful Joe is a sad piece, but it’s lyrical and thoughtful. There’s certainly lots of humour in it and very funny characters, but the thrust of it is a very small story about an old man and his dog. I think it’s time to do it now.”

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Joe and his companion aren’t the only characters in the play. The duo’s adventures in the neighbourhood see the two running into such notable figures as Mother Nature, Santa Claus, Jesus, and the Tooth Fairy. Burkett happily acknowledges how absurd this is, but notes that Joe’s story is the main focus.

“Joe has the ability to make things real because he believes,” says Burkett. “He sees them, so they exist. Joe and his dog are really only walking around the neighbourhood, but for him that’s a grand adventure. So Wonderful Joe is about home, and issues of homelessness. In retrospect, it probably needed time in my brain to sit for a while, which is good because I certainly spent more time at home than I ever have in my adult life during the pandemic. And I spent that time with a very old dog, so in a sense I was doing research unbeknownst to me.”

Wonderful Joe
When April 4 to 21
Where The Roxy Theatre: Nancy Power Theatre, 10708 124 St.
Tickets $23.50 to $57, taxes included, available in advance from theatrenetwork.ca

The Pillowman

With the production of The Pillowman, Theatre Yes is keeping to its credo of making big shows in very small spaces.

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“My wife Ruth Alexander and I ran a theatre company In our native UK for many years where funding is scarce and hard to come by,” says Max Rubin, co-artistic director with Alexander of Theatre Yes.”So we spent years and years looking at ways of doing things so that we can make a big impact without having a giant budget. The Pillowman is mainly made up of sort of conventional, naturalistic scenes, but interspersed with these are stories that need to be animated. So we’ve put in quite a lot of energy into finding unexpected ways to animate those stories.”

Written by British-Irish playwright and director Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin; In Bruges; The Beauty Queen of Leenane), The Pillowman is a disturbing and horrifying story set in an unnamed police state. The police have arrested the writer Katurian, who has published a number of stories that feature violence against children. There’s a resemblance between these stories and a recent spate of child murders, which leads detectives Ariel and Tupolski to interrogate the writer.

Between the intense cross-examination scenes, there are re-enactments of Katurian’s stories, which are not for the faint of heart.

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“It’s a difficult and challenging play,” Rubin acknowledges. “But I think the real challenge for people coming to see it is that it challenges their own values in a way that many plays do not. It never allows you to know which side you’re on with the characters, all of whom sometimes say beautiful things while other times say terrible things. It kind of lulls you in so that you think you know how you ought to feel about the characters, but as the play goes on your expectations are completely subverted and it leaves you feeling exposed. McDonagh’s writing is such that he gets you laughing at this lovely, really human moment between two humans and then he just rips the cut of the rug from under you ruthlessly. That’s so exciting to work with, and an audience member coming to see a conventional play will find this to be really exhilarating.”

The Pillowman
When April 11 to 21
Where The Pendennis Building, 9660 Jasper Ave.
Tickets $25.63, including taxes, available in advance from theatreyes.com

Candy & The Beast

Speaking of bloody-handed murders, Trevor Schmidt’s Candy & the Beast also sees one running around the town of Black Falls. As if that wasn’t enough, wild wolves are howling at the edge of town, and local dogs are starting to disappear. Cue Candy Reese and her little brother Kenny, who decide to take matters in their own hands and find the killer.

Candy & the Beast runs Friday, April 5 to April 20 at Studio Theatre inside the Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave. Tickets are $38.85, available in advance from northernlighttheatre.com

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