The Big Sheep

At the Bluma Appel Theatre Thursday night, Electric Company presented a "multimedia" stage production called Tear The Curtain! Set in 1930 Vancouver, it used the conventions of film noire including a Girl Friday, a femme fatale, gruff newspaper editor, cynical journalists, and cagey mobsters to explore the competition between venerable theatre and the emerging upstart cinema.

Instead of being a gumshoe detective, Alex Braithwaite (Jonathon Young) was a theatre critic who lamented the "dumbing down" of audiences with the imminent arrival of talkies, or movies with sound. He accidentally ran into a man who resembled Stanley Lee (James Fagan Tait), a playwright long presumed dead, leading to an increasingly wild investigation into the stranger's identity. Meanwhile, theatre actress Mila Brook (Laura Mennell) was torn between the theatre and the newer "moving picture", as well as Patrick Dugan (Gerard Plunkett) and Max Plamponi (Tom McBeath), two mob bosses who were fighting a turf war over the construction of a new arts venue. Alex began to doubt his senses and sanity as he and his secretary Mavis (Dawn Petten) tried to solve the mystery of Stanley Lee and his connection with a shadowy 3rd group, with mysterious ties to Mila, who were also keenly interested in the new space.

The play transitioned between live theatre and the same actors acting out scenes on film. These were projected either on a front scrim or directly onto the set. Sometimes the actors acted or spoke the same lines along with the cinematic close-ups. The set, an outline of a building, was the inside of the newsroom, the homes of Dugan and Plamponi, and the exterior to Braithwaite's apartment. He was often seen on the second floor in his lit apartment, with the rest of the 2nd floor exterior being often lifted away, revealing a cutaway of the building's hallway where our "good guy" would received troubling calls on the shared phone.

The scrim and film clips allowed for a dizzying number of scene changes, unlike a typical play, and more reminiscent of a movie. Other movies were also seen including scenes from the mainstream Gillian Gish talkie "The Swan" and the avant-garde Le Sang d'un Poete by Jean Cocteau. From a technical viewpoint, Tear The Curtain! was spectacular.

As a play, it engaged intellect more than emotion, partly from its mystery-puzzle premise and partly from its philosophical arguments regarding art, memory, and the unconscious. Its implicit stance for the intimacy of live theatre, because we were in fact watching a play, was gently undermined by, as previously mentioned, the full embrace of the language of cinema in its art direction and plotting.