An XPress sit-down with NAC’s Peter Hinton
The Wrong Son begins with a floor – a beautiful, black, lacquered floor that seems to reflect the world like a dark and gleaming pool. It anchors the production, pulls together the simple black and stainless steel accents of the set with an elegance that, in its featureless simplicity, seems to echo all the deep-sea depth and implacable cool of “noir.” And terrifying things move in the depths of this sea.
The Wrong Son is a magnificent creation. It is utterly ambitious, stylish, sexy and innovative. This play is a homage to the noir aesthetic of the ’40s and ’50s, a meditation on essentialized humanity writ powerfully in primary colours by writer and composer Allen Cole, who has poured 15 years of his life into this project. Every aspect of this carefully designed play speaks to those hidden depths of human desire, passion and revenge: spotlights cut the air at odd angles, lighting the stage in disturbing planes; smoke creeps obliquely; characters rise and fall through the floor like apparitions. Told from the point of view of jazz pianist Ryle Rawlins, the whole thing seems to creep from his tortured mind. The demons of his insecurity and rage plague him in stark, black jazz garb while his angelic/demonic love life rise like alternating visions of pure light and depraved fire.
Even more ambitious than the dark, sexy style of this production is the content. The plot is a convoluted story of love, jealousy and moral failure in the face of overwhelming desire. And shockingly, magnificently, the entire play happens to music. Dialogue is set to a jazz recitative, and scenes are punctuated by arias. This is a jazz opera. The music itself happens live, courtesy of Toronto’s Array Music Ensemble, who linger on stage for the entire production, playing behind a glass window.
Now, this is not to say that this production is perfect. The plot meanders occasionally, dragging certain scenes longer than audience interest. And the sheer volume of music tends to dull the ear. But these faults are easily forgiven when compared to the absolute gusto of Peter Hinton’s debut production as artistic director of the NAC’s English Theatre. The XPress spoke with him the morning after the opening night of The Wrong Son.
XPRESS: Why did you begin the season with such an innovative piece? Is it a risk to present something so novel to this Ottawa audience?
HINTON: So what’s the alternative? We’re trying to create something beautiful; we could do it more naturalistically, but that would be a huge disappointment. This is a play that’s really worth staging.
X: The season you have planned for this year is filled with Canadian works. What inspired this choice?
H: We wanted to create a season that was not just for a middle-class, 40-year-old audience. I want to create a real artistic dialogue with this season, and I believe that Canada has the genuinely great works and the talent to do it with. Did you know the NAC is 37 years old, and has never performed a Canadian season? With a traditional survey season, you may see the great classics, but you will never create anything new.
X: This play is stylistically ambitious and extremely unique. What can you tell us about your directorial choices?
H: I really wanted to create a visual and physical world for this music to live in. A place for this music to resonate more easily with people. And this world is about dark things: On the surface things are secure and safe, but underneath it all lie dark desires. As a genre, film noir asks not only “What would you die for?” but more importantly, “What would you kill for?”
X: So tell XPress readers something about the rest of the season.
H: The theme of this year is “the artist in society.” And since this is the National Arts Centre, we plan on continuing to try to create a real artistic dialogue on the national level. Our next play is an absolute delight for the entire family, called The Bookshop. After that, fantastic Calgary troupe One Yellow Rabbit presents a psychedelic play inspired by the Beat movement of the late ’50s, called The Dream Machine. It is theatre like you’ve never seen before.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Sept 28, 2006
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=10448
