CANADIAN THEATRE MAGAZINE #70 Spring 1992
THE HISTORY CYCLE: THE PARODIC SEEN / THE PARODIC SCENE
By Michele White

For playwright Michael Hollingsworth history is a visual experience. He attributes the genesis of his multi-part play cycle The History of the Village of the Small Huts to a single still image, the photo of the Queen handing Canada’s patriated constitution to Prime Minister Trudeau in 1982. In Hollingsworth’s view, it is the moment when Canada acquired nation status.

The scenographic process begins when the writer combs through The Dictionary of Canadian Biography and related documents for characters and plot. From these he sifts out the adjectives which describe his characters and adds an inventory of visual references – everything from period genre paintings to the portraits of prime ministers on our paper currency. For the satirical voice at the heart of the entire epic project, he invokes Monty Python, the Goon Show, and the British television puppet show “Spitting Image”. Hollingsworth’s use of an exaggerated visual and character style, which is also common to these sources, amplifies the puffed-out proportions of his plays’ language.

The VideoCabaret production team carries out its role in a process which blends with the playwright / director’s vision through what he describes as a kind of political alignment. There is an implicit compatibility with the sensibilities of his scenographers which allows Hollingsworth to give the visualizers scope with the text. The designers, including Shadowland Productions and guests such as Teresa Przybylski, add dimensions which he finds he rarely has to alter.

Evident throughout is the Shadowland visual style which turns party favour materials, such as plastic leis – the sorts of things with which a high school gymnasium would be decorated – into an elaborate arrangement of overskirts and underskirts for the character Madame Pean, a political machinator / queen of the prom figure from The British. The aesthetic is part arte povere, part the English theatre collective Welfare State International’s community-based improvisational techniques, and part Trinidad Carnival. It seamlessly partners Hollingsworth’s contemporary media sources for reference material.
The visual style is key to the works’ presentation because in the Histories’ first five parts Hollingsworth has eliminated scenery, stage furniture, and every other physical reference to time and place on the stage.

The other key collaborator, Jim Plaxton, created the original set space which has been the Histories’ home. Starting with Hollingsworth’s prescription and his own dictum that “where there’s a light, there’s a stage”, Plaxton has built a black box punctured with light in which the director positions scenes and players in tableaux vivants, sculpting them as units which become moving and still visualizations of the text. The device allows Hollingsworth to realize his requirement of hundreds of blackouts, framing innumerable scenes peopled with dozens of characters, and dispensing with conventional stage machinery.

The blackouts surround scenes of mere seconds’ or a few moments’ duration in which the stage box is illuminated by parallel and intersecting pinpoints of light from outside and behind. Eliminated is the spill of theatre lights the designer cannot control. The resulting chiaroscuro focuses attention solely on the characters. This is the light of small huts. The action is borne out of the murky darkness of a small interior space where the performers speak their pieces briefly and fade out in a wash of blackness. Significant moments are frozen in a fading spotlight. Intermittently the room is opened up with light and then closes back in on the performers, or a pattern of squares and rectangles washes over the box to break out of the claustrophobia of the chamber.

The presence of technology as a premise of the VideoCabaret company style is evident through the performance ritual. Against a black void the performers, in an exercise of sheer precision, align themselves with thousands of computerized lighting cues. They act out the hyperbolic facial and body gestures which the lighting technique and absence of physical location demand of them. In body language created almost entirely from their heads and trunks, and in their overblown physical attire, the performers must signal to the audience all the energy and sense of historical place which the test requires.

Appropriate to the VideoCabaret idiom, the effect is, variably, that of the first cinema machines, or of film noir clips looping through a projector, illuminated for seconds and then gone, heightened by the film score of Brent Snyder’s music and moving with the pacing of television.

Hollingsworth has eliminated…scenery, stage furniture and every other physical reference to time and place on the stage.

The dramatis personae are a raggle-taggle band of anti-heroes, vile and greedy, stupid and self-interested but never, ever boring in the way that we may have come to imagine them through the normal channels of absorbing Canadian history. In parodic form, they leap forward from the sanctified linear engravings and drawings of C. W. Jefferys and Charles Manley MacDonald that school children inherited as the visual key to Canadian history. Larger-than-life sized wigs, exaggerated costumes coloured in vibrant primaries vivid against the enveloping blackness, overblown two-dimensional props and the white-face make-up of the mime whose features must be expanded to express any dimension, parody the source materials.

The Rouge Laurier, dressed in brilliant red against a pasty complexion, is reminiscent of Tenniel’s drawings of the Mad Hatter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He reads a giant copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, more a metaphor than a prop. His mistress, Emilie Lavergne, practices her self-satisfied ambition in Jello lime green chiffon dancing with polka dots. Feathers and pleats, flounces and ruched sleeves, honeydew melon breast plates and a head of carrot red curls, telegraph her character and raise the insanity quotient when she interacts with her lover.

The costumes have crisp, hard shapes and the static, strong delineation of engravings, daguerreotypes, and toy theatre. They evoke sources such as James Gillray’s clever political cartoons and caricatures, engraved and hand-tinted in glowing colours. The more familiar historical figures are instantly identifiable through the gross caricatures of their hairstyles and the exaggerated cut of their jackets. They spring out of the tradition of satirical social and commentary in the visual arts of the periods in which the Histories are set.

The dramatic tableaux the director sets up on stage frequently draw on the devices of two-dimensional visual representation. Frozen framed scenes signal references to paintings and turn the live action back into a page from history before the viewers’ eyes. Bourget, the monstrous book-burning Bishop of Montreal, draped in blood red satin streaming with ribbons and cast in dramatic chiaroscuro, lies in his death scene like a perverse parody of Caravaggio’s painting of Christ’s deposition or, a modern-day equivalent, an Evergon photograph which itself parodies art historical visualizations.

The parody runs very high in the costumes throughout the Histories. In Part One – New France, a courtesan, attired in more wig than costume, wears pink bloomers, ribbons and stockings and a flounced skirt, circa 1700, which is in fact a hooped mechanism made of a transparent plastic shower curtain. The headdresses worn by native characters are full-length, papier-mache and fun-fur wolf and bear masks replete with bulbous, blood-shot eyes and bear-trap teeth. A nun in white face with hideously pronounced eyes wears twigs wound round her head in an approximation of a crown of thorns with red ribbons as drops of blood. On her chest a three-dimensional red satin heart, bound in wire with more red ribbons dripping from it, is pierced with the same kind of twig with a little mirror shard on the end as an arrow-head.

The playwright also takes a parodic approach to the theatrical formats which he styles into his writing. These formats provide the sense of time where the lit and costumed actors provide location. Calling up the mystery plays of the Jesuit priests performed for Native peoples and the commedia dell’arte format adapted by Moliere, Part One: New France begins the cycle. Part Two: The British is a satirical comedy of manners set in a period opera house.

Part Three: The Mackenzie / Papineau Rebellion traces the historical thread through Punch and Judy show format, the most popular theatrical form of the time. The analogy of the players to puppets is unavoidable. The piece acts as a parody of puppet theatre where the actors perform within the box like marionettes and emphasize the political machinations behind the scenes. The device, like many others Hollingsworth employs, signals the artifice and illusion of theatre and history simultaneously. The self-consciously contrived theatricality, overblown and played for the extremes, creates associations with historical entertainments devised to communicate basic notions of good and evil to an illiterate audience. It thereby alludes to a contemporary widespread and prevalent ignorance of Canadian history, which the cycle is designed, in part, to address.

Part Four: Confederation and Riel mixes Victorian melodrama with Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Part Five: Laurier moves from melodrama in the first act to farce in the second, the popular theatrical formats of the era it spans. The stereotyped characters and extravagant exaggeration of the farce format, played out through clowning, physical comedy, and caricature, all surface exuberantly in Laurier. The figures of Canadian history are made over into the figures popularized by Feydeau – cuckolds, silly wives, foreigners, the aged and the deformed – delivering their performances at a rapid-fire pace. The visual style of the acting is inextricable from the overall visual styling of these productions.

The last leg of the cycle is planned as a five-hour event staged over two nights next year. Projections of vintage photographs and early film will be used to create the effect of Cinema Lumiere for Part Six: The Great War. Parts seven and eight, The Roaring Twenties, The Dirty Thirties, and World War Two will draw upon farce and satire again in parodies of and homages to the formats of expressionistic music hall, Noel Coward, Brecht, Artaud, and Theatre of the Absurd. Part Nine: The Global Village will be a full scale multi-media event culminating with the CBC’s The National broadcast live from the stage. Staged as a VideoCabaret production, a format influenced by Hollingsworth’s interest in the work of Marshall McLuhan, it will utilize the video technology which is associated with the company but which could not be summoned for the pre-20th century histories. The format is equally built on a hybrid performance-art-rock-and-roll mix which Hollingsworth developed with Deanne Taylor, the Hummer Sisters and other company members.

Characteristic of VideoCabaret and Shadowland productions is the placement of the audience inside the performance spade or the cutting out of the play area from within the crowd. While the projected plans for the upcoming 20th-century Histories allow for a return to a more interactive environment, the early Histories black box picture framing device deliberately distanced the audience from the performance to present a kind of moving comic strip. But in Laurier the stage is expanded into the audience space through interjected, kinetic, cardboard silhouettes of bowing musicians. For Part Two: The British Jim Plaxton transformed Theatre Passe Muraille into a tiered 18th-century opera house with boxes, four-foot chandeliers, frescoes and Italian drawn plush red curtains, all built out of painted cardboard. Signaled are the artificiality of the theatrical formats employed, the flatness or lack of depth of our vision of Canada’s history, and the illustrated pictorial history magazine approach which with the Hollingsworth imbues the first five parts of the cycle.

Hollingsworth and VideoCabaret are structuring a theatre borne out of historical precedents and contemporary influences – a vast web of sources which includes Milton and Led Zeppelin, as Hollingsworth would frame it. Less a process of appropriation than a synthesis of sources, it rises out of a generations collective experience. In the art / music production of the Queen Street West area of Toronto, where VideoCabaret is quartered, the use of parody as form and irony as voice is dominant. The use of different formats to express a consistent and evolving content is characteristic of contemporary art production: the artist ranges back and forth between historical precedents and the forms of the immediate present, often sharply juxtaposing them, in an attempt to house the concept in a way which both serves the idea and which will resonate with the projected audience. It is also a method of hedging against the marginalization of alternative art production in Canada.

Hollingsworth uses parody to pack in centuries of historical fact and personages for present-day consumption. Concerned that insufficient national self-esteem could not sustain an audience throughout the cycle without resorting to humour he has pulled out all the stops to entice viewers.

Frozen framed scenes signal references to paintings and turn the live action back into a page from history before the viewers’ eyes.

unfamiliar with the basic facts. Calling upon the Roman definition of satire as “truth in the guise of humour” and using parody as a critical tool, the playwright sets the present in relation to the past, to both recall it for the purposes of comparison and create distance from it. When Hollingsworth puts the audience into the middle of the language rights, separatist, federal / provincial powers and free trade issues of Laurier’s day, his ironic commentary forces us to associate it with the same issues as they face us now.

VideoCabaret epitomizes the position of Linda Hutcheon describes in her book, A Theory of Parody, where “modern artists seem to have recognized that change entails continuity, and have offered us a model for the process of transfer or reorganization of that past. Their double-voiced parodic forms play on the tensions created by this historical awareness.” They have a “desire to ‘refunction’ those forms to their own needs”.

In a shock of recognition, VideoCabaret has understood that there is little or no context against which to set their contemporary theatre. There was no distinct historical precedent in Canada such as there was in Europe, in either content or form. Out of this grew the parodying of European theatrical formats, in part as a commentary on the Canadian capacity to embrace the creativity of other cultures without developing or trusting it’s own. It this context, parody becomes both a symptom and mode of critique. It’s “not a matter of nostalgic imitation of past models; it is a stylistic confrontation, a modern recording which establishes difference at the heart of similarity”, to draw further on Hutcheon’s thesis. By calling the past into the spotlight or making it a mirror to the present, the Histories attempt to make us see that history is repeating itself to the distinct disadvantage of the nation.