Opening tonight is One Reed Theatre’s play Nor the Cavaliers Who Come With Us, for which they have received The SummerWorks Spotlight Award for outstanding achievement, in addition to being crowned Best Young Ensemble in Now Magazine’s Best of Toronto. The play, produced in association with the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama here at U of T, is opening tonight and running until April 6th at Studio Theatre.

I caught up with the cast, consisting of Evan Webber, Marc Tellez, Megan Flynn and Frank Cox-O’Connell, and they filled me in on the details.

Q: What is the play about?

The play has two stories that interweave throughout the performance: one is the historical story of the conquest of Mexico with Cortés, his native lover and translator La Malincine, and his captain. The other is the fictional present-day story of a Canadian tourist who, unsatisfied with the political discourse in his community, goes on a quest to Mexico to find “an intelligent source of evil in the world.”

Frank: The tourist goes to Mexico to learn about this original story, to learn about the roots of his power as a white guy, and ends up realizing that things aren’t all that different, that this isn’t really a different story, and that the conquest he feels is a very distant thing is actually very alive and well.

When: Wednesday to Saturday, 8 p.m. Sunday 2 p.m. (until April 6th).
Where: Studio Theatre (4 Glen Morris Street). Click for map.
Details: Student tickets are $15 (Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday), $20 (Friday and Saturday) available at TOTix or The Studio Theatre (on campus). You can see the show multiple times with the purchase of a ticket! Thursday nights feature a question and answer period at the end of the show.

More questions and answers after the break!

Q: Your play is often described as taking place in a dream-like state. What does this mean?

Mark: The way the story unfolds is unconventional: it goes back and forth in time; there’s a lot of information to absorb in images, music and sound; and things develop a web of connotations rather than a strict interpretive ‘we see this, and that’s what it represents’. There are certain moments in the play that can connote very different things to different people.

Q: What is the purpose for making the play so ambiguous.

Evan: It’s not so ambiguous. It’s as ambiguous as it needs to be, to be useful. The narrower the focus of your statement, the more people you exclude… we’re trying to create a place where something can happen, we’re not saying what that thing has to be.

Megan: There’s this assumption that audiences need to be fed a story that is told in a certain way, so they can walk out feeling satisfied… [instead] we want to spark a fire for discussion about it…we open up a communication between us and the audience so we actually have a relationship with them and they have a relationship with us. We’re not just putting on an entertainment…”

Q: What is the reason for allowing audience members to return to see it again?

Mark: You wouldn’t see a painting once and say, ‘I’ve experienced that painting– I get it, I know what it’s about.’ For the paintings that are worth seeing, you look at them again, and say ‘oh I never noticed that was there’, and everytime you look at them again, the relationship changes.

Q: Is the journey ultimately fulfilling for the tourist?

Frank: Well, in the second last line of the play, the character asks him ‘You came here looking for something, you’re leaving because you found it or you didn’t.’

Q: So, that’s the second last line? How does the tourist respond?

The Cast: (laughter) We’re not going to tell you the last line!

Evan: By that point in the theatre experience, it’s not so much about the tourist’s answer to that question…

Frank: The best case scenario for us is a provocation more than a lesson… we are trying to provoke similar questions in the audience as we are posing… the questions [we raise] hold a lot more profundity than any answers we could lay out there in the last line of the play.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under Arts, On Campus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.