"Kim Collier questions the relevance of Jean-Paul Sartre's view of humanity"

BY COLIN THOMAS 

GEORGIA STRAIGHT, MAY 1, 2008.

In director Kim Collier’s vision of Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic No Exit, a minor character called the Valet will try to convince the audience that the play is no longer relevant.  At least that was Collier’s plan when I spoke to her recently over lunch.

Her radical reinterpretation of No Exit is being produced by Electric Company Theatre and the Virtual Stage.  It will run from Saturday (May 3) to May 10 in a space called the Hangar, which is part of the Center for Digital Media at Great Northern Way Campus.

In Sartre’s script, which was first produced in 1944, three characters arrive in a vulgarly decorated ante-chamber of hell.  The journalist Garcin (played here by Andy Thompson) used to humiliate his wife by bringing his sexual conquests into their home.  During wartime, he also proved to be a coward.  The beautiful Estelle (Lucia Frangione) committed a horrific murder that drove her lover to suicide.  And Inez (Laara Sadiq), the man-hating lesbian, seduced her cousin’s wife, setting off a string of nasty deaths.

Collier said that her first thought about the play was: “I’d really like to see those characters alone.  I’d like to put them in a room by themselves and figure out how the audience can participate.”  In the Hangar, the Valet (Jonathon Young) will escort the three damned characters past the spectators and into a concrete bunker.  Audience members will watch their interactions on four screens fed by seven cameras situated inside the bunker. 

Besides exploring the interaction of film and theatre, Collier is asking questions about the ongoing relevance of Sartre’s brand of existentialism. 

“When your face is going to be six feet tall,

a twitch of the mouth could take somebody’s head off"

BY MARY FRANCES HILL

THE VANCOUVER SUN, APRIL24, 2008.

As the philosopher and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre noted, hell is other people. This notion, expressed in his one-act play No Exit, has kept its currency, entering the lexicon of popular culture (CSI, Beetlejuice and Futurama have all played with the phrase). Since it was published in 1944, No Exit has returned in countless theatre productions and at least two film adaptations.

“It picks up on the fascination we have in the present-day media of torture and being nasty with each other. It’s about human nature and how we destroy each other. Sadly, that’s pretty universal,” says actor Lucia Frangione, who stars in the Virtual Stage/Electric Company Theatre co-production of No Exit.

While the script is its one constant, it took the energetic Kim Collier — co-artistic director of Electric Company Theatre, and director of ECT productions The One That Got Away, The Fall, and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands — to add another thematic layer to No Exit. In the Electric Company’s control, the play turns into a meditation on how cinema and live theatre intersect.

ArtsAlive.ca interview with
Jonathon Young
Actor, Co-Artistic Director of Electric Company Theatre

National Arts Centre
March 2006 (Ottawa, Canada)

AA: Could you tell us about The Electric Company Theatre?

JY: We formed in 1996 as four theatre students having recently graduated from Studio 58 in Vancouver: Kim Collier, Kevin Kerr, David Hudgins and myself. Kim was especially interested in forming a company and began talking with Kevin Kerr about the idea of creating a Fringe show for that fall and that's how we got together. Three of them had been in class together; I was one year behind them but I'm also married to Kim now, so that was how I got in on it. The first show that we came together to do was a play about Nicola Tesla which we named Brilliant! and we had to register a company name and we thought Electric Company would be appropriate and that's how it came about. Now, here we are at the NAC ten years later doing Brilliant! and it's a very different show now but it was the story that we formed around.

AA: What was the attraction of the Nikola Tesla story?

In researching his new play, Kevin Kerr developed a darker picture

of famed 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge

BY COLIN THOMAS,

GEORGIA STRAIGHT, JAN12-19/2006

In a series of still images, a naked middle-aged man with bushy white hair and a powerful physique walks in black space that white lines divide into a grid. The erotic invitation to gaze at his body collides with the implicit admonition to regard him as a specimen, an animal: animated meat. According to Vancouver playwright Kevin Kerr, the tension between the two impulses produces a particularly modern form of nausea. For these shots, late-19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge is his own model. Kerr, who has taken Muybridge as the subject for his latest play, says it's as if the artist is trying to dissect not just his own body's movements but his body itself, to slice it into so many pieces that it can no longer overwhelm him with its instincts and emotions.

Kerr won a Governor General's Award for Unity (1918), his lyrical and nightmarish evocation of the Spanish flu epidemic, and he has created another epic work in Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge. The Electric Company Theatre's multimedia coproduction with Theatre at UBC and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival opens on Tuesday (January 17) and runs until January 29 at the Frederic Wood Theatre. As we speak, tucked into a corner of the campus venue's lobby, Kerr describes Muybridge as "a man lost, a ghost in a machine of his own making," a flesh-and-blood creature trapped in a world of atomized knowledge.

Muybridge, who was a celebrated landscape photographer before he embarked on thousands of movement studies involving both humans and animals, is still most famous for the series of photos he took of a horse galloping. Using technology that was state-of-the-art in 1878, Muybridge proved that there is a point at which a galloping horse's hooves are all off the ground at the same time-although it's when the legs are contracted, not when they're extended as some previously claimed.