Guns, beer and blood

Ottawa Chamber Company puts on an intriguing local theatre experiment

Laflamme: "Theatre is about connecting with an audience"

The Elmdale House Tavern isn’t a place I’ve ever seen in the afternoon. It’s a dusty, old, yellow-painted landmark bar deep in the heart of Hintonburg. The kind of peaceful harbour with the timeless charm of high ceilings, old linoleum and beer in quart bottles. The kind of place you go to drink a broken heart to silence. Hardly the place you’d expect a room full of people to sit on a Sunday afternoon for a couple hours of lively, sudden and violent theatre. The Ottawa Chamber Theatre Company is a relatively new and lesser-known theatre troupe performing in local spaces around the Hintonburg area. Producers Donnie Laflamme and Lisa Zanyk call it “found space theatre.” “The point of this business,” says Mr. Laflamme, “is to create something that no one else is doing. Not to preach an idea to the audience, but to connect with them.”

This community-building ethos pervades the whole show. In the back of the pub, a local restaurateur sells authentic Lebanese food to the audience. The program is filled with the biographies of amateur local performers and musicians. After the show the performers drift back into the room and out into the audience, looking for a chair, a beer, a conversation. “The great experience we’ve had in these local spaces,” says director Dave Samojlenko, “makes everything feel surprisingly authentic.”

And this particular kind of environment lends itself to a very particular selection of plays. Classical theatre begins as an empty space, as formless, as a world within a box in which life can be iterated again. This kind of theatre is firmly anchored in the here and now, in the very setting of our everyday life: in this case, in this very particular space where we drink our problems away. Keith Reddin’s All the Rage fits the setting precisely. It’s intimate and violent, and grabs your attention with a series of savage and ominous scenes that rotate quickly between bizarre characters: desperate murderers, oversexed women, violent psychopaths and blunt-nosed detectives. The whole thing unfolds with the entertaining immediacy of a hard-boiled television show. “Theatre is about connecting with an audience,” Laflamme explains. “More people watch a television show, or a hockey game in one night, than attend the theatre in an entire year. You have to take a cue from that.”

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Apr 03, 2008
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=14337