Theatre Gargantua goes down the rabbit hole of human genetics in Imprints.
When you name your independent theatre company “Gargantua,” after Rabelais’ rampaging giant, you’re either joking or issuing a challenge to yourself. Or possibly both.
“It was completely ironic,” claims Jacquie P.A. Thomas, founder and artistic director of Toronto’s venerable Theatre Gargantua. “We didn’t have 200 bucks for our first show.”
“But we like to be too big for our britches,” counters Michael Spence, Thomas’ husband and the company’s resident playwright/actor/set designer. “We like to take a big idea that’s well beyond our means and find a way of getting it up on stage.”
Big ideas, outsized physical theatre and expansive preparations have characterized Theatre Gargantua’s work ever since it strode onto the Toronto indie scene in 1992. Its latest show, Imprints, is no different. Two years in the making, it explores ideas around genetics and ancestry, as seen through a lens tinged with the fantastical whimsy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The play, which was written by Spence, concerns Lily (Stephanie Belding), a young woman with an incurable disease who is undergoing an experimental cryonics procedure. But as the freezing takes hold, her mind becomes besieged with ghostly remnants of her forebears, who turn out to be embedded within her genetic makeup.
“I’ve always been really interested in DNA coding,” explains the rugged, blond-bearded Spence during a rehearsal break in Factory Theatre’s downstairs studio space. “Michael got the idea that it’s not just our hair or eye colour that we get from our ancestors,” adds the brunette Thomas, “but also these instincts and stories hidden within us.”
Spence, a Lewis Carroll fan, makes Lily a bewildered Alice figure who has accidentally descended to her genetic roots. “There was something about that familiar story of going down a mysterious rabbit hole that was a nice structure to latch onto,” he says. The piece is riddled with allusions to Alice, including three quarrelling ghosts that could be a Tweedledum and Tweedledee trio and a verse-spouting spectre who resembles the Mad Hatter.
Like other Gargantua shows, Imprints is highly physical—Lily’s ghosts always seem to be on the run—and employs a striking design. Although Spence, Laird Macdonald (lighting) and Cameron Davis (projections) are the show’s official designers (with Sheree Tams, Michael Laird and William Fallon), Spence is quick to point out that everyone involved in a Theatre Gargantua production has input into the look and text of a play. The company creates each new work in two-year cycles and the actors get involved in the development process early on. The company’s last production, 2008’s energetic fIBBER, incorporated a jungle gym of rope netting. Imprints achieves an ethereal effect by projecting video onto mosquito netting and silk. “You’re able to carve the space with those materials,” Spence says, “and yet when the light of the projection disappears, so do they.”
Theatre Gargantua’s own genetic traits—the collective creating, the long gestation, the emphasis on visual and physical components—originate in Europe. Before starting the company, Toronto native Thomas spent several years studying there with experimental companies like Poland’s Gardzienice Theatre. “I built my own hybrid of these experiences, made out of the stuff I thought was exciting,” she says. Spence, a University of Guelph alumnus, initially joined her new company as an actor in 1994.
Over the years, their work has earned Dora awards and nominations, and caught the fancy of the Mirvish organization, which gave the company’s internet-themed show e-DENTITY a commercial run at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in 2007. For Theatre Gargantua, it was a huge profile boost. “And it certainly was very different for your average Mirvish subscriber,” says Thomas.
But in two decades, Theatre Gargantua’s bold theatrical mutations have already left an imprint on a younger generation of playgoers. Recently, Thomas says, “there was a teacher who called us and said, ‘I saw you when I was in high school and you changed the way I thought about theatre. Now I’m a drama teacher and I want to bring my students to your show.’”
