Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver – Vancouver, BC
The One That Got Away
A new play by Kendra Fanconi
Produced by Electric Company Theatre and The Only Animal
In partnership with CHUTZPAH! Festival
World Premiere: Feb 29-March 17, 2002 - Norm and Annette Rothstein Theatre Theatre, MST Territories/Vancouver
Come on in, the water's fine
The One that Got Away is staged in a pool. It’s a play about submerged Jewish identity and the story is a liberal mix of fact and fiction inspired by Hassidic folktales, the Kabbala, and a passage from the Song of Solomon. It has an ancient theme: that love is as strong as death and that many waters cannot quench love and neither can the floods drown it. It is a descent into the truth behind a dying man’s life of lies and it answers a quest for identity for a young woman who shares her life with strangers.
You enter the building and in a sunken stairway you find a hospital room. You meet Hannah who has a fish where her heart should be – a heart that keeps getting away from her. Her grandfather Victor is on his death bed. Victor is a man of extremes: millionaire, pauper, sage, addict, exile and married seven times. He steals Hannah’s heart and takes it with him when he dies. Pursued by Victor’s seven widows, they descend from his deathbed into a watery purgatory, to a Russian village lost in a flood where Victor finds redemption by revisiting the tragedy of his youth.
The watery stage of The One that Got Away becomes the shifting, transformative world of the afterlife where underwater choreography, floating set pieces and haunting songs of Victor’s Russian homeland bubble up from his memory. Victor’s seven vengeful widows arrive in the underworld and descend fully clothed into the pool, swimming like aquatic furies toward him. At Victor’s funeral, singing mourners barge his candlelit casket along its watery course. Light casts phosphorescent ripples and shimmers onto the ceiling and walls, transforming the aquatic facility into an intimate space. And with refracting rays underwater, a magical, Atlantis-like third dimension is created below the performers.
