Drama. Karen Hines
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DRAMA
PILOT EPISODE
KAREN HINES
Coach House Books | Toronto
copyright © Karen Hines, 2012
first edition
For production enquiries, please contact Perry Zimel ([email protected]) and Karen LaRocca ([email protected]) at Oscars Abrams Zimel and Associates Inc., 438 Queen Street East, Toronto, Ontario, M5A 1T4
[no image in epub file]
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Hines, Karen
Drama : pilot episode / Karen Hines.
A play.
ISBN 978-1-55245-256-1
I. Title.
PS8615.I44D73 2012 --- C812’.6 --- C2012-900246-1
Drama is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 309 4.
for Gordon W. Tisdall
Production Notes
In the pages of this book, there are some stage directions one might describe as impossible stage directions for an imaginary production. They owe their sensibility to neo noir, to television procedurals and to the graphic novel more than they do to the technology and budgets of most actual theatres or to the laws of physics.
Descriptions of rain and snow, glowing body parts and live animals and insects came into being along with the world of this play as it emerged, and seemed an integral part of its atmosphere throughout the play’s development. My collaborators, Blake Brooker and Vicki Stroich, and I decided to keep some of these stage directions in the production script because, while totally improbable, they have informed the production in some way. My editor, Alana Wilcox, thought to keep some of them in the book, and I am happy to see them here.
Setting
The play takes place in an Alberta boom town at the peak of the next boom. The city is not unlike Calgary, though it sits nearer to the foot of the Rocky Mountains and gets much more rain. Most of the scenes in the play take place in or near the Hotel Nakwaga, a boutique hotel/condo/commercial hybrid.
The Set
The action of the play takes place in at least a dozen locations: office suites, cocktail lounges, a bedroom, a lobby, as well as in some less earthly locales. While I would be curious to see a production that realized each space, our first production was in repertory with two other shows and set on a thrust stage. Such variety was impossible. So our director, Blake Brooker, and designer, Scott Reid, devised staging and a unit set that was modular, minimalistic, stylish and wild. The following detailed set description is not meant to be prescriptive, but it may help the reader to imagine possible geographies.
The stage is a thrust with a tall proscenium arch at the upstage end. Wooden floors are stained the dark espresso native to many if not most boutique hotels. Two soaring light columns flank the proscenium and suggest everything from interior lobby lighting to condo towers.
Four Chinese red leather-upholstered benches or chaises longues (each about the length and width of a low twin bed) and one low table are the only furniture in our production. They are streamlined enough not to suffocate the playing area, but substantial enough to be stood upon at times, as secondary stages of a sort. They are moved occasionally and function as everything from cocktail lounge banquettes to psychiatric sofas to poolside hotel deck chairs. Sleek and attractive, inspired by hyper-contemporary design aesthetics, the pared-down set has the effect of ‘disappearing itself’ such that light and sound and the actors ultimately define each location. Scene changes can be brief, and the very human performers and stagehands who shift the furniture remain the driving forces onstage. The dense text and layered realities are given room to breathe – yet all the while, these elegant red chaises never give up quietly iterating and reiterating the boom town’s boutique aesthetic.
The other central component of our set emerged from a stage direction that described ‘a fireplace over top of which there hangs a huge cowskull, which is actually attached to the entire cow’s skeleton, which is nailed to the wooden beams and wide planks.’ Director Blake Brooker (who had long been bent on the idea of bison skulls featuring in the set, and who inspired me to write them in the first place) mused aloud to designer Scott Reid about how great it would be to actually have a cow skeleton onstage. Scott thought it no joke: he immediately set about finding one and swiftly had it shipped and assembled and hung, nine feet in length and six feet from the ground. It is spectacular, beautiful, horrific, very real, and informs to greater or lesser degrees, every scene of the play.
There are also three large bison skulls suspended high above the stage. They are raised and lowered, very occasionally.
The juxtaposition of these elements – the animal bones and the boutique design aesthetic – creates a tension that is in sympathy with similar tensions in the script and supports the interplay between various layers of reality and levels of existence.
Props
A red flocked bust of Freud is the icon around which the action swirls.
Other props are minimal and limited to necessities: food that is eaten, water that is drunk, psychiatrists’ notepads, cellphones, as well as eusocial creatures, from time to time. All props are meant to carry some significance beyond their utility. The glasses of water described in the script have been replaced in our production with tiny plastic bottles of Evian, for safety. Either way works as long as the presence of water, and its container, are meaningful to the performers.
Staging
The stage at ATP is set in the thrust configuration and it has both prescribed and inspired Blake Brooker’s staging that sets the action deep in the upstage distance, boldly centred or practically tipping into the audience’s lap. Mr. Brooker describes his staging aesthetic as favouring ‘economy, relaxation and precision.’
Furniture moves are rare but they are executed by humans – performers and our ninjas (a.k.a. our stage management team). Transitions are highly theatrical and feature everything from line dancing to oyster-swallowing to a shadowy, naked dream-woman shooting the bust of Freud with a ladies’ revolver. Characters may crawl, gallop or apply lipstick as they move from scene to scene – but their moves are always logical, whether the logic is Jungian or empirical. In this way, the story keeps being told by the performers even as rolling benches thunder around them.
Again, the minimalism of the set has made way for a rich dreamlike scenography that pops out from it and which is in tune with the play’s playful psychiatric references, as well with as the bald theatricality that lies at the core of the play’s title.
Lights
Psychological horror is nothing without its dark shadows. David Fraser has tapped deeply into the noir aesthetic, preserving the classic graphics of the Nigerian blind while updating the whole with film loops and moving lights that slice through a misting of haze for fog (which nicely disorients those of us who know how arid these parts actually are). Projections have been eschewed in favour of less literal effects that create images one might encounter in a nightmare or a dream, and yet the look is in keeping with the most sophisticated of television procedurals. Saturated hues play on the cow skeleton and bison skulls from time to time and vivify the glorious ex-beings. Spirits and ghosts come and go via beams of eerie, beautiful light.
Costumes
Costume Designer April Viczko has used graphic novels and stylish television dramas like Damages as her guide: real clothes from actual stores, looks that are ‘on trend’ but not trendy. She has favoured classic lines: nothing that has come violently into fashion or that threatens to go violently out. The look skews oil town – lots