Shadow Theatre: Bless You, Billy Wilder
I highly recommend Shadow Theatre's current production of Bless You, Billy Wilder by David Belke.
Bless You, Billy Wilder is a play about storytelling, which makes it a good choice to mark the 20th season of Shadow Theatre and the 10th anniversary of the play itself. Belke spent a year and a half revising the play, and now Shadow Theatre's John Hudson has staged a fresh and thoughtful revival.
The comedy -- maybe more comedic drama -- is about Emil, a screenwriter who has put his own writing on the backburner and thrown all his time and efforts into restoring a 1924 silent film called Greed. Greed was famously edited down from 10 hours to 2.5 hours without director Erich Von Strohiem's consent.
Emil is so obsessed with restoring Stroheim's vision that he is constantly "working" on it. Actually, he hangs around the house in his bathrobe 24/7 and makes a lot of sticky notes about the film. Emil's agent tries to hurry things along by sending over a young artist named Patience to do the cue cards.
Patience grew up in an isolated religious community. She has never seen a film, so Emil makes it his mission to teach Patience the wonders of cinematic storytelling. (It really is that; there is nothing skeevy going on.) As Emil and Patience, Troy O'Donnell and Kendra Connor portray the development of a complex friendship very well.
If you're wondering about the title, Emil's favourite director is Billy Wilder, an Austrian like Stroheim, but also a kind of anti-Stroheim. To Emil, they are both cynical about the world, but where Stroheim was misanthropic, Wilder loved people, flaws and all. To quote the closing line of Wilder's movie, Some Like It Hot, "Nobody's Perfect."
The best lines of the show are Belke's own, particularly the lines that seem like toss-off jokes, but actually address the core questions presented by the play.
Right off the top, Emil goes to turn on his laptop. He says: "Man turns on computer. and waits. And waits. And waits." A couple of interesting things are happening here. First, he is talking as if he's writing a script about himself; secondly, he's waiting for the computer to come to life, so to speak, so that he can begin. It wasn't until later in the play that I realized how succinctly this bit of dialogue summed up Emil's character: his watching himself waiting for life to start.
More precisely, he puts his stories on the back burner while he tries to perfect another man's vision. Despite (or because of) his encyclopaedic knowledge of movies, all Emil can come up with now are cookie-cutter plots for his own scripts. With no preconceptions, Patience advises that, when he finds himself writing a cliche, he should "do the opposite." When we hear more about her life, we realize that Patience has done that for herself. Her life could have followed a cliched plot, but she chose to turn it around.
(Following her advice, Emil comes up with a movie plot that I personally would pay money to see: instead of the story of a cop who avenges the murder of his partner, a cop avenges the resurrection of his partner in the cop-zombie feature, "Code Red Undead!")
The past decade has been all about the importance of narrative. Advice on everything from resume writing to spiritual development has been along the lines of "tell your own story." Other people's stories inform our own stories, but it can be tempting to use an existing template instead of writing your own story.
Emil reminded me of Don Quixote, the iconic reader who would rather live out the life of a Romance novel character than to live his own life. Whether we read books or watch movies at home in our bathrobes, or go out to see a play or a visual art exhibit, art can extend our world and take us to places we'd never be able to go. But art is not reality. It has its own vocabulary and its own conventions.
For a guy like Emil, who spends more time in the world of art, the world of real people sometimes seems alien. Once again, Belke sums it up in a line of dialogue: "It seems the whole world is having a conversation I don't understand."
Despite that melancholy note, the play has a happy ending that's free of the unrealistic, high drama of Emil's crazier story ideas. Instead, it is a modest, perfectly imperfect moment.
Bless You, Billy Wilder is at the Varscona Theatre until 20 November 2011
http://www.shadowtheatre.org/index.php/bless-you-billy-wilder
Liz Nicholls wrote a great article about John Hudson and David Belke for the Edmonton Journal:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/Edmonton+Shadow+Theatre+celebrates+years+with+Bless+Billy+Wilder/5647767/story.html
Bless You, Billy Wilder is a play about storytelling, which makes it a good choice to mark the 20th season of Shadow Theatre and the 10th anniversary of the play itself. Belke spent a year and a half revising the play, and now Shadow Theatre's John Hudson has staged a fresh and thoughtful revival.
The comedy -- maybe more comedic drama -- is about Emil, a screenwriter who has put his own writing on the backburner and thrown all his time and efforts into restoring a 1924 silent film called Greed. Greed was famously edited down from 10 hours to 2.5 hours without director Erich Von Strohiem's consent.
Emil is so obsessed with restoring Stroheim's vision that he is constantly "working" on it. Actually, he hangs around the house in his bathrobe 24/7 and makes a lot of sticky notes about the film. Emil's agent tries to hurry things along by sending over a young artist named Patience to do the cue cards.
Patience grew up in an isolated religious community. She has never seen a film, so Emil makes it his mission to teach Patience the wonders of cinematic storytelling. (It really is that; there is nothing skeevy going on.) As Emil and Patience, Troy O'Donnell and Kendra Connor portray the development of a complex friendship very well.
If you're wondering about the title, Emil's favourite director is Billy Wilder, an Austrian like Stroheim, but also a kind of anti-Stroheim. To Emil, they are both cynical about the world, but where Stroheim was misanthropic, Wilder loved people, flaws and all. To quote the closing line of Wilder's movie, Some Like It Hot, "Nobody's Perfect."
The best lines of the show are Belke's own, particularly the lines that seem like toss-off jokes, but actually address the core questions presented by the play.
Right off the top, Emil goes to turn on his laptop. He says: "Man turns on computer. and waits. And waits. And waits." A couple of interesting things are happening here. First, he is talking as if he's writing a script about himself; secondly, he's waiting for the computer to come to life, so to speak, so that he can begin. It wasn't until later in the play that I realized how succinctly this bit of dialogue summed up Emil's character: his watching himself waiting for life to start.
More precisely, he puts his stories on the back burner while he tries to perfect another man's vision. Despite (or because of) his encyclopaedic knowledge of movies, all Emil can come up with now are cookie-cutter plots for his own scripts. With no preconceptions, Patience advises that, when he finds himself writing a cliche, he should "do the opposite." When we hear more about her life, we realize that Patience has done that for herself. Her life could have followed a cliched plot, but she chose to turn it around.
(Following her advice, Emil comes up with a movie plot that I personally would pay money to see: instead of the story of a cop who avenges the murder of his partner, a cop avenges the resurrection of his partner in the cop-zombie feature, "Code Red Undead!")
The past decade has been all about the importance of narrative. Advice on everything from resume writing to spiritual development has been along the lines of "tell your own story." Other people's stories inform our own stories, but it can be tempting to use an existing template instead of writing your own story.
Emil reminded me of Don Quixote, the iconic reader who would rather live out the life of a Romance novel character than to live his own life. Whether we read books or watch movies at home in our bathrobes, or go out to see a play or a visual art exhibit, art can extend our world and take us to places we'd never be able to go. But art is not reality. It has its own vocabulary and its own conventions.
For a guy like Emil, who spends more time in the world of art, the world of real people sometimes seems alien. Once again, Belke sums it up in a line of dialogue: "It seems the whole world is having a conversation I don't understand."
Despite that melancholy note, the play has a happy ending that's free of the unrealistic, high drama of Emil's crazier story ideas. Instead, it is a modest, perfectly imperfect moment.
Bless You, Billy Wilder is at the Varscona Theatre until 20 November 2011
http://www.shadowtheatre.org/index.php/bless-you-billy-wilder
Liz Nicholls wrote a great article about John Hudson and David Belke for the Edmonton Journal:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/Edmonton+Shadow+Theatre+celebrates+years+with+Bless+Billy+Wilder/5647767/story.html