And the rest is silence: a study of loneliness in Request Programme at Northern Light, a review

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

You won’t see a more devastating study of chronic loneliness than the solo play that’s the finale of Northern Light Theatre’s 50th anniversary season.

The woman we meet in Request Programme doesn’t explain herself. For one thing, there are no words in this 1970s performance piece by Franz Xaver Kroetz. So we’re free to let our thoughts gather up the minute particulars of the woman’s evening after-work routine in her solitary studio apartment, and focus where we will.

They seem to add up to a life lived in an inner way, alone save for a nightly radio request program, with songs and the host who introduces them. Is hers one of those “live of quiet desperation” Thoreau was talking about? Hard to say; yours to ponder. This is a show that sneaks up on you, and kind of works on your natural tendency to penetrate mystery and find the story.

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On Friday night I saw Vanessa Sabourin in the role, one of our most emotionally available and expressive theatre artists. She’s the second of 16 actors, all with Northern Light credits in their resumés, whom director/designer Trevor Schmidt has assembled for the run of the show. So it’s bound to add up differently every night before Request Programme reaches its heart-ripping conclusion.

The woman we met Friday, in Sabourin’s performance, arrives home with a big shopping bag, apparently tired after a day’s work, to an apartment that’s as tidy and well-ordered as a hotel room (designer Schmidt even includes a hotel-type painting). A place for everything and everything in its place. Her routine after that is orderly too. She puts away her unexceptional groceries — a dozen eggs for the fridge, a loaf of white bread for the bread box, a juice box for the cupboard — one by one. Even her cupboards are immaculately organized, with the labels facing out.

When she takes off her sweater she hangs it up right away (who does that after work? or am I talking about myself?). When she makes herself a sandwich, she screws the lid back onto the jar of the spread. When she eats half of it at the table (this is not someone who eats standing up at the counter to save time), she puts the other half in a ziplock baggie that she puts it away immediately. Even her cutlery is quiet. When she changes her high heels for slippers, she meticulously puts the shoes away; she’s not a kicker-off of shoes. When she takes off her stockings, she’s rinses them out and hangs them up. When she goes to the bathroom, she uses bathroom spray while she’s still sitting there.

The woman returns again and again to the window, a dominant feature of Schmidt’s design, and fiddles with getting the sheer under-curtain just right. The oblique street lighting (beautifully conceived by Liam Weeks), and the distant urban street soundscape (horns, sirens) of Dave Clarke’s score that wafts lightly, like a scent through her apartment, suggest a world out there from which the woman is sealed, or has sealed herself, when she’s having an at-home evening.

She smokes. She flips through a magazine without reading. She turns on the TV news and shuts it off right away. She works on a jigsaw-in-progress, and carefully puts it back in its proper place after inserting one more piece. In retrospect, I’m thinking (and keep thinking) about the way the woman’s attention isn’t really held by anything. Is it secret preoccupation, is it boredom, is it living in a world of inconsequential clutter? There’s an exception, though. The other location to which she returns regularly is a small mirror, to squint and apply stuff to a little spot on her face. It’s something out of place, I guess, in an orderly existence.   

Meanwhile the woman has turned on a nightly radio request show. And Sabourin’s almost imperceptible responses to the songs requested by listeners are telling — especially in the absence of words from the woman herself. Clarke has created a striking, and carefully calibrated, concert of songs from 10 Edmonton singer-songwriters (apparently an earlier translation of the title is Request Concert). It’s a terrific selection, starting with Patricia Zentilli singing “I’ve learned to let him go,” and including, from Lindsey Walker, the termination not to give up, despite it all. The last of them is Dana Wylie, who sings “nothing left to do….”

The concert is much more than than a backdrop, judging by Sabourin’s subtle responses. The host (one of those glib sotto voces designed to be soothing) reads and comments on letters from listeners before introducing songs of lost love, truncated lives, lingering grief. Edmonton is home to a startling selection of musical artists of the theatrical stripe who write songs with powerful and poetic lyrics. And this is a dramatic way to feature them.

I don’t want to tell you more, not least because the actor will be different at the performance you catch. It’s definitely a reason to see Request Programme more than once. My takeaway from the show I saw it is that, left to our own devices, we create meaning, of necessity. We fortify it, with the humdrum building blocks of habit. And in endless routine, meaning gradually leaks away and dwindles to nothing. Is the woman camouflaging something big and dramatic? Or is she killing time? You’ll wonder, and then reassess.

It’s powerful, mysterious, and memorable.

REVIEW

Request Programme

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Franz Xaver Kroetz

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: One actor per night: Nadien Chu, Patricia Darbasie, Beth Graham, Linda Grass, Sue Huff, Cheryl Jameson, Kristin Johnston, Janelle Jorde, Namet Kanji, Larissa Poho, Vanessa Sabourin, Nicole St. Martin, Davina Stewart, Melissa Thingelstad, Michelle Todd, Holly Turner

Singer-songwriters: Alex Dawkins, Ellie Heath, Andrea House, Marissa K, Holly Sangster, Cayley Thomas, Lindsey Walker, Kaeley Jade, Dana Wylie, Patricia Zentilli.

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through May 16

Tickets and full schedule of actors: northernlighttheatre.com (ticket-buyers can access $10 tickets for subsequent performances).

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