By Diane Peters
When the play Sky finally hits a leaf-covered stage at the Tarragon Extra Space this week, it will conclude a two-year process.
Sean Reycraft and Krista Jackson first considered doing the play in 1993 while doing a workshop with Peter Hinton at Ryerson. Hinton mentioned Sky to the two students and offered to direct a production of it.
It was January of 1994 when Reycraft and Jackson conceived of the Coping Stone Theatre Company and began applying for funding.
“Not many theatre companies have their first production this way,” says Jackson of the three government grants they received. “We got so much funding totally because of the people brought on board.”
The established professionals that Peter Hinton brought to the production, like actors Frances Hyland and Amanda Smith, must be paid union salaries, so the play needed a large budget. The funding also allowed for five weeks of rehearsals and set designer Cecile Belec’s transformation of the stage, complete with back-lit paper walls and leaves all over the floor.
It is not just the talented, experienced people on the production that make it work for Reycraft and Jackson, but also the quality of Canadian playwright Connie Gault’s text.
“It’s not so much about being Canadian as it is about human beings, it makes it a great play,” says Reycraft.
Reycraft and Jackson say Sky should not be considered part of the Canadian gothic genre associated with farm settings in the west, but as a distinct play that blends reality and memory.
The play is about Blanche, an old woman who remembers the traumatic beginning of her arranged marriage to Jasper. Frances Hyland is the silent old Blanche, while Jackson is the remembered young Blanche and Reycraft is Jasper.
“Blanche is so full of anger that she hides away from herself. Jasper tries to find himself in other people,” says Reycraft.
“The two characters are put together in the play and at the end they end up with themselves,” says Jackson.
The complex emotional terrain of memory that the play deals with provides a challenge to the young actors.
“It demands emotional specificity and emotional commitment and consistency,” Jackson says, “the play is very bare and full at the same time.”
The bareness of hte text is a result of a two-day workshop with the playwright last fall. Gault took out most of the exposition in the two hour play and cut it out to 80 minutes.
With the intent of keeping themselves acting and producing Canadian drama, the founders of Coping Stone Theatre Company already have plans to produce a play with former Ryerson classmates based on the life of Clara Schumann, wife of composer Robert Schumann.
Sky is playing at the Tarragon Extra Space from February 18 to March 5.
Leave a Reply