Ottawa’s Odyssey Theatre turns 25
As she tells it, Laurie Steven was sitting in Nate’s Deli 25 years ago this year when she decided to start a theatre company. Fresh from Toronto, the trained director was living through a round of “fairly massive budget cuts across the country.” With everything around her being slashed and burnt, Steven realized, “If I wanted to work in theatre, I’d have to found a company.” Noting that Ottawa was replete with parks, greenery and an abundance of outdoor space, she found her niche in the artistic landscape and founded Odyssey Theatre, one of Canada’s few open-air theatre groups, and one of Canada’s only masque theatre groups.
Of course, it’s never that simple in the arts. “The first 15 years were brutally difficult,” admits Steven. “We got some small grants from the city to begin with… and it takes time to slowly build the funding, and very slowly build the programming.” Today the company has a City-designated performance space in idyllic Strathcona Park and has seen not only a growth in its audience, which happened with the “mushrooming of summer festivals,” but also a “kind of growth in appreciating the art form.” They’ve also partnered with Kathy MacLellan’s famed puppet troupe Rag & Bone for their summer season in the park, and, thanks to an Ontario Arts Council grant, they’ll get to keep her as writer-in-residence next year.
For a quarter-century Odyssey has been putting on shows inspired by what Steven calls “fairground entertainment”: puppetry, clowning in the classical sense and a highly stylized form of performance called commedia dell’arte. Commedia is Italian street theatre comprised of stock comedic archetypes and is best known for its use of caricature half-masks. It was a raucous, bawdy shtick that made fun of sex, greed, money, poverty… basically the gamut of human frailties. Odyssey’s first ever production was a play by Carlo Goldoni, and there’s a sense of completion in coming back to him in their 25th year. His play The Fan is said to be a near-perfect farce where, in Steven’s words, “small events ripple out to the length of life.”
For Steven the style of masque theatre represents a sort of liberty to create an entire imaginative world. “It’s very visceral and very joyful,” she explains. This sort of deep-in-the-belly joy is something you see watching the actors, who between scenes seem to laugh and joke like kids on a field trip from school. “I just fell in love with the art form” admits actress Alix Sideris, “the gift of masque is that is uses all your gifts… It’s a piece of paper on your face, right? So you have to become an incredibly adept manipulator and technician.”
Andy Massingham, who was part of the cast of the very first Odyssey show 25 years ago, found it equally memorable. “It feels like yesterday. It’s funny… I’ve done a million shows in between, but there are some you remember.” And 25 years later the company that Massingham started out in has become entrenched as a ritual in this city. “It’s ‘that summer show in the park’… It’s become a part of the landscape for people whether they go to it or not.”
Main Stage:
The Fan
by Carlo Goldoni
Directed by David Craig
July 21 to August 21
Youth Matinee:
The Flying Canoe
Kathy MacLellan and John Nolan
July 27 and August 3, 10 and 17 only
As seen in the Ottawa XPress, July 21, 2011: http://ottawaxpress.ca/2011/07/21/odyssey-theatre-written-in-the-stars/
