DalTheatre explores the affairs of the heart

William Wycherley’s The Country Wife rounded out DalTheatre’s 2010/11 season, which took audiences “Through the Looking Glass” to gawk at their distorted reflections in plays like Sondheim’s Into the Woods, Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and Jacques or Obedience, and Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot.

Now, audiences who spent the summer catching their breath can be thrust into an even more dangerous realm – that of (true?) love.

DalTheatre’s 2011/12 season is entitled “The Marriage of True Minds,” and it deals with affairs of the heart in all their complications. The heading comes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, which begins “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”

“We were thinking a lot about this question of relationships, of love and of sex,” says Roberta Barker, chair of the theatre department. ”I think that the Shakespeare sonnet… lays out this question that’s kind of never disappeared across time of the longing of a love that’s meant to be."

Timeless questions of young love

The plays which make up The Marriage of True Minds explore “the possibility of a perfect marriage of minds and souls and bodies between people,” continues Dr. Barker. “Can this happen? In what conditions can it happen, and what is the fallout if it does happen?”

Such immortal questions will be addressed by the theatre department’s stagings of While We’re Young (Don Hannah, 2008), Blood Wedding (Federico Garcia Lorca, 1932), La Ronde (Arthur Schnitzler, 1900), and Lady Windermere’s Fan (Oscar Wilde, 1892). At a glance, the four plays seem to have little in common, but as Dr. Barker puts it, they are “four plays that all, in different ways, explore the modern age… the world being young, as well as people being young.”

While We’re Young, penned by Canadian playwright Don Hannah for the students of the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta, sheds light on youthful love affairs from Confederation to the 21st century.

“The experiences of young people are timeless and recur… eventually the stories start coalescing,” says Dr. Barker. Such timeless stories include cultural and religious conflict (keeping lovers apart since Romeo and Juliet and Tony and Maria), as well as the spectre of war (Passchendaele in one case, Afghanistan in another).

Seduction and lust

Blood Wedding was “written by Lorca in Spain just before the Spanish civil war, exploring the traditional life of Andalusia… it’s very elemental, poetic… literally, much of it written in poetry.” The play relates the story of a young woman called only ‘The Bride’ (a cue picked up years later by Quentin Tarantino) and her paramour, who are kept from following their passions by a “very rigid… very violent society.”

Of La Ronde, Professor Barker says, “this is kind of the play that asks the question, ‘What are we really in search of when we’re in search of love?’ Sex? Do we want to play games with the other person?” Schnitzler’s play follows a falling-domino series of seductions between a prostitute and a soldier, then a soldier and a parlor maid, then a parlor maid and young gentleman, and so on through a number of other couplings before ending up nearly where it started at an encounter between a count and a prostitute.

“La Ronde and Blood Wedding are a really great back-to-back pairing,” explains Dr. Barker, “due to Blood Wedding’s focus on obsessive love and La Ronde’s quick changes between partners.”

The last show of the DalTheatre year is usually a period piece that showcases the skills developed through the year by all theatre students, including those in Dalhousie’s unique Costume Studies program. Lady Windermere's Fan fits the bill.

Oscar Wilde is back due to popular demand; a number of people submitted requests that a Wilde play be performed in the upcoming season. According to Dr. Barker, Lady Windermere’s Fan is “a combination of late-19th century melodrama with wit… it explores the classic melodrama question: the woman with a past, who is she? But it’s couched in the Wilde repartee”.

Exploring extremes of genre

While the excitement over “The Marriage of True Minds” is already palpable in the Dal Arts Centre’s nooks and crannies, Dalhousie’s theatre community is also still basking in the glow of its most recent season.

“What I think I was particularly proud of in this [past] season was the great work of the students,” says Dr. Barker. “We explored extremes of style last season…I think in this coming season, we’re going to explore extremes of genre.”