And Slowly Beauty: a script to make the audience ponder the meaning of their own lives. Haunting and inspiring.
Photo of Michael Shamata.
As much a love letter to the power of theatre as an exploration of life’s passing, sometimes mundane and often heartbreaking beauty, director Michael Shamata’s And Slowly Beauty…spins a story at once incredibly complex and devastatingly simple.
The play, originally a collaboration between writer Michel Nadeau and his Quebec collective, Théâtre Niveau Parking, is currently showing as a co-production of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, B.C. and is emotionally rich and intense. It is the story of the average middle-aged Mr. Mann, played by the brilliantly talented Dennis Fitzgerald, who wins tickets at a work draw to see Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. The play, about sisters living in a provincial Russian town and longing to return to Moscow, is also a story of unfulfilled dreams, the fruitlessness of continually chasing something, and the beauty which is sometimes lost in everyday life. Mr. Mann attends alone and in the process finds himself shaken to his core and suddenly awoken to the dreariness and emotional isolation of his own situation. Cekhov’s play is henceforth intertwined throughout the events happening to Mr. Mann.