Electric Company Theatre

 All of Granville Island is a stage for the outdoor show The Wake

BY COLIN THOMAS

GEORGIA STRAIGHT, 1999.

Kevin Kerr, author of The Wake, the Electric Company’s new show, had no trouble identifying his greatest fear regarding the production.  “Drowning actors,” he said, his laughter almost covering his anxiety.  “I’m having nightmares about it.  I really am.”

Visiting the site of the company’s rehearsal, I found it easy to understand both Kerr’s joy and his nervousness.  Posing for publicity shots, a half-dozen young performers mugged shamelessly as they sat – or shakily stood - in a little fleet of rowboats moored to the dock near the False Creek Community Centre.  The Wake is a processional piece, which means that the audience will follow the play's action to a number of sites on Granville Island.  Staging the whole play outdoors and some of it on the water has made for challenging – and wet – rehearsals.  That cool, rainy day, the folks in and around the boats either were shivering in head-to-toe rubber or had become sodden sponges of wool and fleece.  But every one of them was grinning ear to ear or seemed about to break into that kind of smile.  The scene was a picture of the communal joy one can find working in the theatre; it was all about a bunch of talented friends attempting something ridiculous and loving every minute of it.

The Wake will run weekends from Friday (May 28) until June 13 and use the False Creek Community centre as its starting point.  Interviewed in the Playwrights Theatre Centre’s library – true to the nomadic nature of The Wake’s rehearsal process, even our meeting place had to be improvised at the last moment – Kerr had nothing but praise for the cast.  “There are 12 of them and they’re all fabulous,”  he said.  “They’re sitting out there in the rain in these boats for hours – boats that are taking on water – and they’re going, ‘No, no.  We’re fine.’”  Kerr mimed bailing and laughed again.  “The conditions are crazy.  We’re rehearsing in the parkade over by Performance Works, doing choreography from the song-and-dance numbers, and cars keep driving in, so every often somebody yells ‘Car!’ and we’ve got to pick everything up.”

The Wake tells the story of three generations of women who live on Granville Island (or Industrial Island, as it was once called) and spans the period from 1916 -- when the fishing ground and home to the Squamish people was transformed into a white-owned industrial centre – until the Second World War.  “It’s the story of a family secret that must be told,”  Kerr said, and he drew a parallel between his fictional family’s veiled past and Vancouver’s: “I don’t know if it’s part of our city’s youth, but everything here gets covered over, bulldozed very quickly.  So although the history of our city isn’t very long, it’s also not very apparent.”

Kerr’s artistic history, on the other hand, is readily available and its influences are easy to trace.  He and the three other core members of the Electric Company – Kim Collier, Jonathon young, and David Hudgins – come by their interest in processional theatre honestly.  “I’m from the Interior,” the rumpled, boyishly handsome 30-year-old offered.  “I grew up in Kamloops.  Kim’s from Kamloops and Jonathon is from Vernon.  So we all grew up with the Caravan Farm Theatre and their shows.”  The Caravan Farm Theatre has been producing processional plays on its land outside of Armstrong for years.  “And, although David is from Toronto,” Kerr continued, “he founded the Mount Royal Shakespeare Company in Montreal years ago.  That’s a processional theatre that does Shakespeare on Mount Royal.”

Kerr did a couple of years of college in Kamloops, finished his BA in theatre at UBC, and then went to Langara’s Studio 58, where he met Collier, Young, and Hudgins.  But he dropped out of Langara after completing two-thirds of the three-year course of study (“My life was in shambles at the time, which wasn’t helping me at school”) and headed to the Yukon for a two-year stint, during which he coordinated a program of historical theatre at the Dawson City Museum.  “We wrote shows in which we tried to do some different things with the local history – different from the Pierre Berton version of Dawson’s past, which is very one-sided, very much the white-male approach.”

Kerr’s major claim to fame, though, is his credit as cocreator of the Electric Company’s only other show to date, Brilliant!, which tells the story of Serbian inventor Tesla.  That piece, which started as a Fringe production by a bunch of unknowns, went on to sweep the small-theatre categories at the 1998 Jessie Awards, winning five of the bronze statuettes, including those awarded for outstanding production and original play or musical.  “That whole experience was kind of hard to fathom,”  Kerr admitted.  “We were really charged when we were creating it, but every so often, we’d stand back and go, ‘Is anybody actually going to come and see this thing?’  So when people came out and liked it…”  His sentence trailed off into amazement.

Having been so richly rewarded for their innovation the first time out, Kerr and his cohorts were more than willing to hurl themselves into the unknown once again.  Once they had agreed, at Collier’s urging, that they should do an outdoor show, the core members of the Electric Company decided to choose their site first and let it inspire the script, as opposed to writing a play and then trying to force it to fit a location.  They checked out Crab Park, an area under the Burrard Street Bridge, and the huge, mostly empty lot across from the Playhouse Theatre’s rehearsal centre before stumbling upon Granville Island.  “Kim and I were just walking along,” Kerr remembered.  “I don’t even think we were scouting.  And it just suddenly snapped out.  There was this dock and the bridge and the boardwalk  and the amphitheatre.  It just seemed like such a great place—so dynamic, so many levels and playing spaces and textures.  The whole area has all of these qualities of nature and industry.  It’s even got tennis courts – another great stage that’s already lit!”

Though the company started planning a year ago, Granville Island was already heavily booked for its 20th–anniversary celebrations.  The Electric Company grabbed three of the few remaining weekends, then was informed by the weather bureau that on those dates, there’s a 42-percent chance of rain.  “So it could be wet,” Kerr admitted, returning to the theme of watery nightmares.  “If that happens, we’ll just have to count on the die-hards to come out.”  Besides, weather’s part of the outdoor package.  Kerr harked back to the Caravan shows: “When you get out there with all those people, you feel like you’ve had a common experience, even if it’s just the rough road coming in.  Outdoor theatre is just really thrilling for the audience.  In a way, there is a sense of personal risk for everybody; you’re outside and anything could happen.”