One Little Goat Theatre Company

"Toronto's enterprising One Little Goat Theatre Company"[1] is North America’s only theatre company devoted to modern and contemporary “poetic theatre.”[2][3] Founded by poet, playwright and director Adam Seelig in New York City in 2002, and based in Toronto since 2005, the company is distinguished by its highly interpretive, provocative approach to international plays. The company takes its name from the ancient Aramaic folk song that traditionally concludes the Passover Seder.

Poetic Theatre

Producing, developing, defining and redefining “poetic theatre” has been One Little Goat’s mandate since the company’s inception.[4][5] While the term is open to interpretation, One Little Goat’s Artistic Director, Adam Seelig, outlines key elements of the company’s aesthetic in an essay for the Capilano Review entitled “EMERGENSEE: GET HEAD OUT OF ASS: ‘Charactor’ and Poetic Theatre”.[6] These elements include "charactor" (Seelig’s term for combining an actor’s onstage persona with their offstage nature), the "prism/gap" (between actor and audience), and ambiguity. The essay also traces the influences of Sophocles, Zeami, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and others on One Little Goat’s dramatic approach.

“Poetic theatre attempts to find clarity through ambiguity. It’s not verse theatre or prose theatre or journalistic theatre. It’s theatre that treats the text as a score [...] and treats the gap between actor and audience not as an obstacle to bypass, but as a medium through which multiple meanings can emerge. There’s a difference between shining a light directly into the audience’s eyes, and having it pass through a prism.”[7]

One Little Goat’s “definition of ‘poetic theatre’ is a work in progress” and the company’s artistry is practical before it is theoretical: “doing the plays comes first; theory and definition follow.”[8]

Production History

Ubu Mayor

Overview: Alfred Jarry's merde-filled masterpiece of 1896, Ubu Roi, meets the internationally renowned antics, absurdities and obscenities of Toronto's mayor and brother, Rob and Doug Ford, in One Little Goat's first play to feature live music. [9][10] Ubu Mayor involves a mayor (Ubu) whose wife (Huhu) is having an affair with his older brother (Dudu). Ubu wants Huhu to love him again; Ubu wants what's best for the city; but both his love and political ideals are foiled by brother Dudu's machinations.

Publication: Ubu Mayor: A Harmful Bit of Fun is published by BookThug (Toronto 2014).[11]

The Charge of the Expormidable Moose

Overview: Widely considered to be Claude Gauvreau's masterpiece, The Charge of the Expormidable Moose (La Charge de l'orignal épormyable, 1956) revolves around a poet who is envied, plagiarized, mocked and ultimately sacrificed by his fellow housemates - or are they fellow inmates? Playful and surreal, as the play's bizarre title suggests, yet equally poignant and tragic, the play's four acts combine the absurdity of Ionesco with the cruelty of Artaud to create an extraordinary drama.[12]

Publication: The Charge of the Expormidable Moose is published by Exile Editions (Toronto 1996). Act One is available on Google Books.[13]

Like the First Time

Overview: Like the First Time revolves around Fulvia, a woman torn between her current life as a single woman and her past life as a wife and mother. On the one hand there is Marco, her latest lover, while on the other there's Silvio, her former husband, who wants to reclaim her as his wife and mother to their now-teenaged daughter. Complicating all this is the daughter's belief that her mother is long dead. Which direction Fulvia's life will take remains uncertain to the play’s very end.

Like the First Time is modeled on Nobel Prize Winner Luigi Pirandello’s 1920 play, Come Prima Meglio di Prima.

Adam Seelig has written Like the First Time without punctuation so that the actors may choose how they emphasize the text. The ample spacing on each page of the script is generated by the vertical alignments of certain words in order to create a circumscribed “tonal universe” for the dialogue. This marks the first time in the history of dramatic literature that a "drop poem" technique has been used to write an entire script. (Seelig first employed this technique for his poem/novella, Every Day in the Morning (slow).[14]

Publication: Like the First Time is published by BookThug (Toronto 2011).[15] In the spirit of Charles L. Mee the full text is available freely online.[15]

Ritter, Dene, Voss

Overview: In Ritter, Dene, Voss (named for the three actors - Ilse Ritter,[17] Kirsten Dene[18] and Gert Voss[19] - who premiered the original 1986 production in German), Thomas Bernhard explores sexual repression and sibling rivalry with characteristic tenacity and wit. The play involves two sisters – both actresses – and their attempts at reintegrating their volatile brother into their home. The brother, a tormented genius (loosely based on last century’s great, idiosyncratic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein), has just returned from a mental health institute, complicating the dynamics between the three siblings.

Talking Masks (Oedipussy)

Overview: Talking Masks (Oedipussy) involves a son, two mothers and an absent father who, in exploring the intertwined fates of their family, fuse two of the world’s most enduring myths: the tragedy of Oedipus, and the harrowing tale of half-brothers Isaac and Ishmael. What unfolds is a wild progression of rapid-fire interactions that expose as much as they mask about the “charactors”.

Publication: Talking Masks is published by BookThug (Toronto 2009).[20]

Someone is Going to Come

Overview: Jon Fosse's provocative and primal three-person play involving sexual jealousy is featured in a new English translation by University of Guelph Professor Harry Lane, and One Little Goat’s Artistic Director, Adam Seelig. Someone is Going to Come involves a man and a woman who move to an old, run-down house in the middle of nowhere in order to be alone together. From the beginning, however, they grow anxious that “someone is going to come”. And sure enough, someone does come, someone whose presence unleashes hidden jealousies that threaten to shatter the couple’s relationship. This all unfolds through Fosse’s distinctively austere lyricism.

Antigone : Insurgency

Overview: Antigone : Insurgency presents a provocative, post-9/11 reworking of Sophocles' masterpiece from the fifth-century BC. Drawing intriguing parallels between the original Greek tragedy and current global politics, the production explores the socio-political repercussions of combating insurgency.

Radio Plays by Yehuda Amichai

English Language World Premieres, 2003–2006, various venues including the 92nd Street Y and Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, Miles Nadal JCC in Toronto, and in a podcast for Poetry magazine.[21]

References

  1. ↑ New York Times, 1 October 2010
  2. ↑ "He, She and the Man make for a Seussian tale," Globe and Mail, 16 March 2009
  3. ↑ "Play about national security, civil rights raises questions," Canadian Jewish News, 8 Nov 2007
  4. ↑ One Little Goat Theatre Company website
  5. ↑ "Hysteria, Histrionics, Hypocrisy: The Theater of Thomas Bernhard Comes to New York City," Jonathan Taylor interviews Adam Seelig, Emdashes, September 13, 2010.
  6. ↑ Capilano Review, “Poets Theatre” issue, Spring 2010
  7. ↑ nytheatre interview with Adam Seelig
  8. ↑ George Hunka interviews Adam Seelig
  9. ↑ "Entertaining, topsy-turvy romp of political shenanigans & scandal in Ubu Mayor," Life With More Cowbell, September 13, 2014
  10. ↑ "Time on his side: Seelig stages Ubu-clever Rob Ford satire," Martin Morrow Reviews, September 13, 2014
  11. ↑ Ubu Mayor: A Harmful Bit of Fun (BookThug, Toronto, 2014)
  12. ↑ The "Charge of the Expormidable Moose: A terrific introduction to an unjustly neglected work," Globe and Mail, May 13, 2013.
  13. ↑ http://books.google.ca/books?id=yDoMosgMerMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
  14. ↑ Every Day in the Morning (slow) (New Star Books, Vancouver, 2010), ISBN 9781554200511
  15. 1 2 Like the First Time (BookThug, Toronto, 2011)
  16. ↑ Histrionics: Three Plays, Thomas Bernhard (University of Chicago Press, 1990)
  17. ↑ Ilse Ritter on Wikipedia Deutsch
  18. ↑ Kirsten Dene on Wikipedia Deutsch
  19. ↑ Gert Voss on Wikipedia Deutsch
  20. ↑ Talking Masks: Oedipussy (BookThug, Toronto, 2009)
  21. ↑ "Killing Him: A Radio Play," Poetry Magazine publication and podcast, summer 2008

External links

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