Oedipus Evolving
Here’s a wonderful Calgary Herald article that hit the stands this Mother’s Day morning. Steve Hunt spent hours and hours over the course of the whole project, coming into rehearsal to get to know the participants and our process. It was a avery unique experience to have a journalist become invested in a project, and it’s a real testament to how addicting working with this population can be.
For homeless actors, drama onstage and off
BY STEPHEN HUNT, CALGARY HERALD MAY 8, 2010
Oedipus Evolving runs at Epcor Centre’s Motel on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Pay what you can.
Two Saturdays before opening night, Nigel Kirk has a meltdown.
It all starts in the Philosophy Cafe, at the Mustard Seed’s creative centre.
When Kirk perceives the moderators of that day’s event ignoring the rules — Kirk says they refused to listen, told speakers they were wrong, and played devil’s advocate — Kirk who has been homeless since 2007, expresses what they call non-productive behaviour.
He doesn’t do much, really — slams a door so hard it breaks a wall — but he knows it was not his best moment.
“Yeah, that was part of my anxiety disorder,” Kirk says. He’s been diagnosed with anxiety, post-traumatic stress and depression. “That’s part of the reason why I can’t work right now, because doctors are afraid I’d eventually hurt a person and not just a wall.
“(But) the staff understands it’s part of my mental illness and want to work with me to help me get better and get better medical services.”
In these early days of May, however, Kirk has other, far more theatrical, things on his mind.
Things like learning lines — a lot of lines — blocking, rehearsing, and the history of ancient Greece.
Those are all part of the variables involved in putting together a play starring six homeless actors — Kirk, Pat Joly, Sherry Love, Barclay Wolfchild, Miroslav Ludva, Marc Saurettev and Sheehan Herlein — which co-directors and project organizers Col Cseke and Aviva Zimmerman have been doing five nights a week since the beginning of April.
And not just any old Neil Simon romantic comedy, either. The Mustard Seed Drama Club is endeavoring to produce an updated version of Oedipus called Oedipus Evolving, an ancient Greek classic tragedy of truly epic proportions.
It’s the legendary story of Oedipus, the man who meets an oracle who prophecies that he will one day kill his own father and fall in love with his mother, and then, when he sets out to avoid just that, stumbles into doing it all anyways.
While that might intimidate the most classically-trained actor, Kirk, a smart, quick-witted 25-year-old guy who has been studying acting since junior high, is excited about doing a Greek classic.
“I love Greek literature,” he says. “I’ve read all three of the plays in the trilogy.”
While earlier similar projects, such as the City of Calgary’s This is My City project, dealt with themes of homelessness, this time around Cseke and Zimmerman wanted to do something far removed from the day-to-day grinding reality of their acting company’s homeless stars.
“It’s one thing for them to tell their own stories, but it’s totally another to get to play kings and queens and all this high tragedy and stuff,” says Cseke.
Zimmerman thinks classics stretch the imaginative boundaries of the cast members.
“Something that really touched me, a quote I heard a while back, is ‘The first step to implementing a better reality for yourself is to imagine it,’ ” Zimmerman says. “And that was the idea behind this play: having characters. We’re separating ourselves from our self — creating the separation so we can imagine this other world.”
While both are experienced in this type of work, Cseke and Zimmerman understand that every day brings the potential for high drama — and quite often, personal and emotional catastrophe for someone in their unique, brittle group.
“In past projects, people have gone to jail before a project,” says Zimmerman. “People have gone to rehab. People have been barred from the shelter, or have fallen off the wagon and they’re coming back wasted and aren’t allowed in. That’s the volatility of what goes on.”
That said, it’s closing in on and opening night and all six cast members keep showing up.
Zimmerman, who has been working with the residents of the Mustard Seed since late 2008, sounds as if she almost can’t believe it.
“This is the biggest project that I’ve done,” Zimmerman says. “I’m crossing my fingers and my toes and I don’t know if everyone will make it to performance.
“But there’s also a moment,” she adds, “A threshold when they buy into it. They see the value and they get really excited and they want to be here.”
On the streets for over a decade now, Kirk left an abusive home at 14. He has battled drug dependency, and admits to illegal behaviour to pay for those drugs, but has been sober for five and a half years now.
His doctor has diagnosed the trio of mental problems, but despite them, Kirk is also focused and meticulous. He carries a brown briefcase everywhere, writes essays about homelessness and is writing a one-man show (he studied playwriting with Eugene Stickland) that was read by Cseke at the homeless cabaret at the downtown library in late February.
Despite his stage experience, Kirk has never played the lead before.
“During the rehearsal, the audience isn’t there,” he says. “And as far as I’m concerned, (during the performance), the audience isn’t really there either. I just keep telling myself that. I think of myself,” he adds, “as the heterosexual, male, kd lang of the theatre.”
Kirk doesn’t get banned from the Seed for damaging the door, but five days before opening night he receives bad news: his bid to get in the Mustard Seed’s Step Up Program, in which he would have his own apartment, is denied.
Kirk sounds demoralized, even though he once gave up the same apartment on a matter of principle when he felt the Seed mistreated a friend.
“I’ve been clean and sober, I’ve been working on my goals, I’ve been working on my mental health, I’ve gotten connected with a better doctor,” he says. “It kind of gets frustrating.’
What’s interesting about a project like Oedipus Evolving is that it has brought a lot of disparate souls together in a project that appears to be bringing out the best in everyone.
“A lot of homeless people, especially when they’ve been on the streets for months and months, their pride, their self-esteem dwindles,” cast member Herlein says. “Even for the set designers who are gonna be doing this, they even have a ton of pride, because they’ll see how their sets and props actually fit in.”
It’s still two weeks to opening night and there’s agita in the air. It’s a night without Zimmerman, who is more or less the den mother of the group. While Cseke also has the trust of the group, on this night, it’s a challenge to get everyone to focus. There are the personal dramas, some bad — Herlein is venting about getting the runaround for six hours at the local walk-in clinic because they suspect him of being a pill chaser — some good — Joly getting accepted into a YWCA carpentry apprenticeship, or Ludva getting a job interview at the University of Calgary. Either way, the wild energy these life-swings generate can derail a rehearsal in a hurry.
Cseke gets everyone to gather in a circle and conducts a warm-up, then gives the cast an exercise: he wants them to go through their dialogue and verb it — assign an action word to each line of dialogue so that the text will have some levels to it.
Nearly an hour after it appeared things might be falling apart, the entire cast sits at a long card table in the middle of the Burning Bush Room, verbing their scripts.
It could be any community hall conference room in the city. There are tinderblock walls and an air of general drabness. On the wall, Zimmerman and Cseke have hung various banners, dealing with the qualities an actor must embody (“Teamwork,” “Staying in the moment,” Trust”, “Confidence”) and the themes explored in Oedipus Evolving (“Pride,” “Revenge”).
You could be anywhere, except for the telltale sight of a carry-on luggage bag sitting on two wheels in the corner of the room, next to a blue backpack: a pair of cast members’ life stories.
It’s dead quiet, except for the occasional action word. This is the sight of everything working right.
Later that evening, Cseke is delighted with the way things turned out. “The fact that they could sit down and do book work just blew me away,” he says Cseke. “That was definitely I think the most challenging night I’ve had on the project so far, but also the most rewarding.”
EPILOGUE: OPENING NIGHT AT THE SEED
On Friday, after Alberta Ballet’s world premiere of a ballet about Elton John, two small chalkboards set up outside on either side of the Mustard Seed complex on 11th Avenue advertise a more humble world premiere.
Tonight: Oedipus Evolving! the sign reads, 5:45 p.m. in the Burning Bush Room. Doors open 5:30.
Outside, a few men linger, smoking cigarettes and thinking about dinner.
Upstairs on the second floor of the Mustard Seed’s Creative Centre, there’s a packed house, waiting to see a troupe of homeless actors tackle their first Greek classic, a 3,000-year-old tragedy about a guy who kills his father and sleeps with his mother.
It takes quite a story to make homeless guys think someone’s life is messed up, but none of them can top the tale of Oedipus.
Finally, it’s showtime.
Five weeks after rehearsals started, everyone who signed up enters from stage right and takes a chair. Through the good weeks and the not-so-good ones, they all made it to opening night. That’s worth four stars right there.
Kirk lies on stage, wrapped in a white duvet, white gauze wrapped around his eyes to indicate his blindness, while Saurettev, the black-leather hatted former trucker booms out the show’s introductory notes.
The show itself is a cross between a Greek tragedy and a multimedia, 21st century wink at the idea of tragedy.
After a few anxious moments early on, the cast settles into their parts. Wolfchild is hilarious as Creon, Oedipus’s brother-in-law whom he suspects of plotting to bring him down. Herlein, Joly, and Saurettev all provide terrific cameos, while Kirk grows progressively more distraught playing the tormented king Oedipus.
And then it ends. Lights up.
Behind me, two Mustard Seed residents stand and gather their things. Time for dinner. Maybe time to grab a quick smoke too.
“That was awesome,” one guy says to the other.
Outside, 20 minutes later, Kirk stands, having a cigarette with some women who saw the show. (“My last addiction: nicotine,” he says).
“If you’re coming to see this play, leave homelessness at the door,” he says. “Because this play is not about homelessness. It’s about Greek tragedy. It’s a normal, professional theatre piece put together by high quality actors who just happen to be homeless.”
The photo’s above are from a Calgary Herald photo gallery by Gavin Young, check out the whole gallery here.
