Electric Company Theatre

BY GUNDRUN WILL

THE VANCOUVER COURIER, APRIL 11, 2004

HIDDEN BEHIND BUSY whiskers, Jonathon Young looked like he might have just spent a rough three months tramping along the Chilkhoot Trail. And so he should, because the Electric Company member is about to stage a solo theatre piece, at the Cultch from April to 17, that takes him into a northern heart of darkness: the Yukon bush.

Set in 1898, The Palace Grand tells the bleakly comic take of Walker, a mysterious writer who plans to set down his magnum opus while trekking into the wilderness north of Dawson City. It's also about the Tracker sent to find out what happened to him. Both stories are told through a down-trodden engineer who operates the various components of a tiny theatre. This mute individual conveys the two misadventures by morphing into both characters, helped by projected snippets from Walker's manuscript and recorded dispatches from the Tracker's journey.

Sound complicated? Well, it would hardly be an Electric Company show if it didn't have bags of tricks. And given that several company actors have spent summers performing Gold Rush vaudeville-style theatre from Dawson City tourists at the real, restored Palace Grand, it was only a matter of time before the sub-arctic territory found its way into one of their productions. Young and fellow Electric Company member Kim Collier even chose to get married in the tundra last year, an environment that has become a sanctuary away from the urban theatre season.

"If you go north of the town, the tree line fades away and you get into these incredible vast areas of gorgeous wilderness," says Young, taking a rehearsal break over black coffee and two cigarettes outside the UBC Theatre warehouse space on the former Finning industrial site. "The idea started to come to me there, this notion of a remote town, and these characters who have left everything behind to make this journey, searching for something. So at the core of the play is the writer who, in the act of trying to turn himself into a story, ends up isolated, cut off, doomed."

In contrast to the immensity of the Yukon wilderness, Young chose a deliberately cramped setting for his play, in part to emphasize "parallels between the cabin, the stage space, and the mind."

The set on which the team is rehearsing despite the ruckus made by BCIT shop students on the other side of the room, is extremely contained but has "tons of infrastructure" operated by Young and three stagehands. It consists of a 10-foot-by-10-foot stage "hovering in blackness," plus some made-to-measure crawl tunnels leading to a miniature furnace room, cellar and sound room.

Young, who wrote the play and helped design the set, merrily admits, "It's gotta be complex. It always seems good on paper." And judging by the rehearsal, it'll certainly be effectively dramatic.

As the team figures out glitches with falling curtains, lighting cues, and the difficulty of reliably holding a monocle in one's eye socket, Young scampers through the made-to-measure spaces, eerily slipping in and out of the character as he improvises scene details under Kevin Kerr's direction.

The creepiness factor of coarse, turn-of-the-last-century Yukon types is played up for laughs, but the truth is that many such men met sad and nasty ends. And so it is in Young's play.

"I hope it will be really fun to watch, even though it has this really dark and desperate finish," he says. "That land is so full of stories like that - the Mad Trapper of Rat River, the Lost Patrol. I read a biography called Into the Wild about this character who went into the wilderness and perished. I am fascinated by the nature of the Gold Rush, the obsession and madness that overtook so many people. So many men died alone, freezing, in tiny cabins. It's such an evocative and horrible fate."

That kind of madness is echoed in Walker's condition of cacoethes scribendi, the incurable passion for writing - and idea coined by Samuel Beckett. Young admits he was gripped by something similar while creating this play, helped along by the "strange energy" of the Yukon's 24-hour summertime daylight and the area's historic relics, such as the palace Grand Theatre (originally built in a steamship hull) and the old tin cans littering the trails heading north. "These little outposts surrounded by wilderness are like the kernel of an idea."