Up the antique steps of Emmanuel College on the third floor in the chapel, a group of campus thespians rehearse for their play, which will open in less than a week. Director Sarah Pearson clears up a couple of pre-rehearsal issues, while sifting through a pile of potential costumes for one of the characters. Surprisingly, there’s no anxiety noticeable on any of their faces. In fact, there’s an air of calm in the room. They are ready to perform.
Before they begin the practice, their fearless director gives a pre-rehearsal spiel on projection, character development, line delivery and how they should treat this as a normal run-through, ignoring the theatre critic sitting in on the rehearsal. The cast and crew listen intently to all her directions and get into place for the opening of the show. At just after 4 p.m., the house lights go down and the stage lights come up on a bar, the Lapin Agile.
Written by funnyman Steve Martin (who also happens to have a successful career as a writer), the play is a fast-paced, quick-witted comedy, which plays out the hypothetical situation of Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein bumping into one another in a bar before they had become famous.
The play takes place at the beginning of the 20th century, but Pearson warns us that she “[hasn’t] taken a lot of the history too literally. I don’t think that this play is very strict about being historically accurate. I feel that the 1904 setting in Paris is just a suggestion.” So don’t expect to see a biography of these two great figures of the modern era.-it is a Steve Martin comedy, after all. With that in mind, be prepared to engage yourself mentally as some of the cleverly written dialogue requires a cerebral playback to be certain you’ve captured all the philosophy and satire that Martin packs into a line or two.
The cast is fortunately able to pull off majority of these lines quite well. The most noteworthy performances definitely come from the lead male roles: Picasso (Luke Reid) and Einstein (Johnny Walker), who not only are delightfully enjoyable as individual characters, but in contrast to each other, their bantering chemistry is only that much more heightened. But of course no play can be carried simply by the leads-rather, it’s truly the ensemble that makes a play a gem. This is definitely the case here, where the intimacy of the cast is obvious, especially in terms of comedic timing and pacing.
Getting such an intellectually intense production off the ground successfully is no easy feat. Picasso marks Pearson’s directorial debut, and the third-year Philosophy and English major says, “it’s been a huge learning experience.” She advises that anyone planning to direct a student production should go into the process with this mindset. She feels “the mandate of student theatre is to give everyone as great an educational opportunity as possible.”
With her background in theatre mainly from experience in high school and university extra-curricular activities, Pearson was chosen from among a handful of students who applied to direct this show for the Victoria College Drama Society. After responding to a call for directors sent out to the VCDS mailing list, she soon found out she would be directing her first play-an exciting thought, but also often overwhelming at times.
“I’m not the kind of director who has a specific vision right away and wants to actualize it according to my ‘set plan’,” she explains. “I discover the play and [realize that] everyone brings something different to [the process] and my job is to see how we’re going to fit everything together-[how we can] fit everyone’s flavour into something that will taste really yummy.”
The challenge Pearson finds most important to accept from the beginning is “realizing that though I’m in a position of leadership, I’m still in a position of leadership among my peers… I’m not more qualified than anyone else to do this. We’re all in this together and we’re all learning-and we all have to learn from each other.”
Not only has she learned plenty about directing, but she finds that it’s taught her a lot about acting: “I have a huge respect for acting right now and it makes me really nervous to go back to acting after this,” she notes.
In Pearson’s opinion, the audition process was probably one of the greatest hurdles she needed to leap. “I found it difficult to try and give every single person an equal chance,” she says. “I wanted to be diplomatic. What was difficult was choosing callbacks, but in callbacks it was very clear [soon enough] who I wanted. I found the perfect cast.”
Fortunately, she was able to find a cast who she quickly bonded with, since one of her pre-audition fears was “working with people who resist listening to you and being co-operative because theatre is such a team effort.”
The play hasn’t even opened yet, and already Pearson is thinking about her next project, which “will be catching up on my classes and passing my third year,” she jokes. “I would love to direct again, but probably not with VCDS. I want to give other people the opportunity to direct.”
VCDS’ production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile runs opens this Thursday and runs until Sunday at the Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles St.) at 8 p.m.
