Taking in the scene

Valentine's Day came and went with an excellent concert in the park downtown. A couple workmates and I headed down to the waterfront and took in a couple hours of the Phoenix Foundation. It's a local band, reminiscent in some ways of the Tragically Hip - a definite jam band feel but with enough indie-rock vibe to keep things interesting. A little electronica here and there, some fun with robot voices... it felt a little like home.

The park set-up was fantastic - we were in a sort-of little basin, so well protected from the wind, and the terraced bowl set-up made for ample seating.

I wonder if the band gets their name from MacGuyver's employers...

Tonight I splurged and went to the theater, something I haven't done in ages and eons. The play was called Paua, and was all about abalone poachers in the thriller/murder mystery genre. The set-up wasn't the classical stage in front, audience facing them. Instead the audience is seated around the edges of the theater facing a boat set above a hole in the floor. As the play continued, bits of the room were shifted, passageways revealed, and the play took place around the audience: under the floor, in the rafters, in the doorways, in the balconies. For a thriller it made it even more tense, especially toward the end of the play when actors all in black were running around with laser-sighted guns, popping out of trap doors above your head and dropping down zip wires.

The writing had some dark comedy to it, but the audience's reaction to one scene really surprised me. The premise of the play is that a serial killer is taking out paua poachers systematically with poison darts made from a shellfish - a tidy bit of ironic ecoterrorism. In one scene a cop gone wrong is holding a poacher captive. As the scene progresses you begin to realize that he's about to torture the man with a drill. Seeing this sort of thing in the movies is one thing, but live and in person and five feet away from you is quite another. I was in knots, feeling ill, but other audience members were laughing. The theater goes dark as the drill approaches the bound and gagged man and screaming commences, but there were still members of the audience tittering as if it were a joke. It left me feeling pretty unsettled, though I've laughed at my share of black comedy. It's hard to know where the line is between funny and frightening - I'm not sure if I understand how we perceive that, or how it works.

Anyway, the play was really excellent. There was a great twist at the end - the writing was well done. It was a thorough exploration of an issue without being preachy or condescending, although everyone did receive any anti-poaching pamphlet as part of the performance. The way the minimal space and cast was used for multiple purposes did require the audience to pay attention, but sitting in the middle of the action made that automatic. Afterwards the folks I saw it with were all commenting that the mental transitions between spaces were really easy to make, because the play led you to use the space in your mind in such a way that the shifts in set and character didn't disrupt the suspension of disbelief.

The weather's shifting here, and the wind and the rain might signal the end to summer. How strange, to have autumn in March...