Electric Company’s Brilliant! gets recharged at the Belfry

BY AMANDA FARRELL

MONDAY MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 12, 2008.

It all started with a story about electrocuting animals. Kevin Kerr, one of the founders of Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre, came across the anecdote about Thomas Edison’s cruel attempts to discredit Nikola Tesla’s alternating current electricity and the sparks that ignited Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla flew.

“Edison realised the tide was beginning to turn towards this new system and he had this monopoly on direct current and was hoping to be the one and only dude, so he started electrocuting animals to show how dangerous alternating current was. It was a low point for Edison, I think,” explains Jonathon Young, another of Electric Company’s founders and its current artistic director. “That tweaked Kevin because, first of all, he was so surprised to hear this, and then he’d never heard of Nikola Tesla.”

The more they learned about Tesla, the more the folks at the then-unformed Electric Company Theatre (rounded out by Kim Collier and David Hudgins) became fascinated with the character: a man whose contributions to the fields of electricity and wireless communication still shape the world today, but whose eccentricities and wild claims later on in life had him pigeonholed as a mad scientist and led him to die poor and virtually forgotten.

“I think part of the initial thing that really grabbed us was this man, who was at the height of popularity in his day, could become so forgotten, and that his work is so ubiquitous and pervasive and yet his legacy went into these strange conspiracies and science-fiction stuff,” says Young. “So many of the people that still knew him clung to his legacy because of his more bizarre proclamations, like that he was in contact with a civilization on Mars. By the ’90s, he was attracting a completely different kind of people—not what you would call the intelligentsia.”

The fascination turned into a play, and in 1996 Brilliant! premiered at the Vancouver Fringe and Electric Company Theatre was born. A dozen years later, the show is still the most in-demand of Electric Company’s award-winning productions and set the foundation for a theatre company known for its innovative and all-encompassing style. The Belfry’s production of the show, which will be Electric Company’s Victoria premiere, has zapped some new life into Brilliant! by adding a new set design, revamped video work and a five-person chorus to round out the cast of four. Collier says that while the company always makes an effort to add something new to the show every time it is produced (they didn’t stop revising the script until 2003), this version is particularly refreshing for them.

“It’s old and new at once, because we’re doing things here at the Belfry we’ve never done before. So although the project has a really long legacy, we’re excited to be doing this new version,” she says. “I think it’s special for us that we were able to do this one last step at the Belfry. We’ve been thinking for awhile that we wanted to try a more epic version.”

The addition of the chorus, made up entirely of Victoria performers, has been particularly fun, says Collier. Since Brilliant! marries several kinds of theatre—physical, comedy, musical, multimedia—having five people has made the production more flexible.

“It allowed us to cast differently, so instead of casting someone who could fill every single portion of the play, we were able to cast some very fine dramatic and comic actors with them not having to fulfill some of the other stuff,” she says. “They don’t have to know how to tap dance. That allowed the project to grow in new ways.”

Young, who plays Tesla, says the show tracks the rise and fall of the Croatian inventor who travelled to the United States, where he found his fame and ultimately experienced his fall from grace. Also portrayed in the play are his rival, Thomas Edison, and his two closest friends, Katherine and Robert.

“They were a couple until he came along. It’s a classic triangle,” says Young. “They were historically his closest friends and went on the journey with him, supported him, were inspired by him and ultimately were broken apart by him.”

Because of the controversy that surrounds Tesla to this day, Collier says the show’s audiences are always a mixed bag.

“You get the science/electrician folks coming out, you get all the wingnuts and they’ll corner you in the lobby,” she says. “Then you get the really hyper brains. When we were performing it in California, we had all these gentlemen from NASA come out. Then there’s the Serbians. You can tell when they’re in the audience, they sometimes all come on the same night, and when there’s a Serbian swear word you can hear it ripple through the crowd. Then you get all your average theatre folks.”

Young says a lot of people come out to make sure the play isn’t too one-sided as well. “There’s a sense of pride and protectiveness, too, about who he is and his legacy because so much harm has been done to Tesla’s reputation,” he says. “In so many circles, he’s considered a freak and a madman, so many people are coming out to see if we’re doing the story justice.”

So, are they? “I think we are,” says Young. “We ride a fine line. The play is not about his craziness, it’s not about his more bombastic characteristics, it’s about his journey to an idea that was too big for his time. It was his devotion to that idea that brought him down. The world wasn’t quite ready for it.”

Luckily, the world is more than ready for Electric Company’s version of Tesla’s story, as packed houses all across the country can attest.