Ottawa Fringe 2011. Old Legends

A sweet moment of storytelling and a play about “memory”,   written and directed by James FitzGerald and featuring Emma Godmere.  It takes place  in one of the most awkward fringe venues (I hear that the basement of the Royal Oak is THE worst) because when the room is full you can’t see the acting area beyond the fourth row unless you happen to be over 6 feet tall. . Our colleague Patrick Langston has all the luck!

I made myself little in the first row where I always prefer not to be, because I don’t want to risk disturbing the actors with my scribbling.

Emma becomes Tara Thomas.  She is sorting out and packing up all the belongings of her mother who has recently passed away. The old house is on the east coast somewhere where oral Celtic tradition is very strong and ghost tales and traditional stories are an essential part of their history.   Tara comes across objects that used to belong to her mom or that belong to her own childhood, reminding her of moments in her troubled family history.  As the memories flood back, she tells us all her stories. The interesting thing about this FitzGerald’s text is the the way it Intertwines questions of memory, and ghostly tales. The stories she and her sister used to hear when they were young are transposed by Tara/ FitzGerald through the reality of her childhood so that we feel the memories, transformed into ghostly presences that echo through the old house.  All those memories becoming very palpable in that acting space.

The writing is quite interesting – especially the mixture of normal speech, narrative, and verse. The text does ramble a bit, and those rambling moments seem to interrupt the “ghostly” atmosphere that weighs very heavily on this tale. Atmosphere is essential here and that did not materialize as it might have for this and several other reasons.

There was a much too timid use of lighting. Sometimes the lights blinked delicately, or just dimmed, suggesting the eerie presences that were supposed to be invading the stage but we wondered if maybe someone was tinkering with the lights.  However, it was especially Ms Godmere’s performance together with the rather bland direction by FitzGerald that was the undoing of this piece.

There was much wide eyed enthusiasm, and sincere feeling on the part of the actress who speaks well, who has certain possibilities as a story teller but little experience, so it would seem. However, the keen eye of a sharper director would have modulated her performance a lot more.  Story telling has a lot of performance strategies that would have brought all this to life in a much more concrete way. She spoke rather quickly; she did not hear all the emotional possibilities in the text…something that the director should have pointed out. She did not vary her rhythms enough, she didn’t know when to pause, she did not build up any emotional tension which was in the text and which could have produced a much more creepy event on stage, bringing it to a moment of epiphany when she discovers the truth about her mom, buried away in those   remnants of the family past. 

Let’s just chalk this up to a moment of stage experience at the Fringe, which is also what the Fringe is all about.