MONTPARNASSE by the company, with Maev Beaty and Erin Shields, directed by Andrea Donaldson (Groundwater/Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson). Previews begin tonight (Thursday, March 17), opens Tuesday (March 24) and runs to April 2, Tuesday-Saturday 7:30 pm, matinee Saturday 2 pm. $30-$35, previews $15, matinee pwyc. 416-504-7529. See listing.
Montparnasse captures the joie de vivre of 20s Paris through the period’s painters and writers as well as their muses.
Especially their muses, often models who bared all for art.
“It was an amazing time in Paris,” says Groundwater Theatre’s Erin Shields, who performs alongside Maev Beaty, with the collaboration of director Andrea Donaldson. “Something magical happened, an explosion of life, creativity and allure.
“People wanted to put the war behind them and enjoy life. It was a time of permissiveness and sexual liberation, when people like Joyce, Hemingway, Stein and Picasso socialized and jazz was a hot item – American black musicians found a new freedom.”
“It marked the birth of the modern age,” adds Shields’s husband, Gideon Arthurs, the company’s producer. “Paris became the lightning rod for experiments in ideas and lifestyles.”
Montparnasse’s central characters are two freedom-seeking women from Toronto. Mags (Shields) becomes an artist’s model and entices Amelia (Beaty), a painter, to join her in the City of Light.
Soon both are disrobing to inspire such real-life artists as Chaim Soutine and Jules Pascin. The women’s lives lead to a discussion about the relative importance of artist and muse.
“Mags felt put down by Protestant Toronto, she never lets her freak flag fly until she gets to Paris,” smiles Shields, author of the Dora-nominated If We Were Birds. “It’s only when she starts modelling that she realizes how much she craves liberation. As a model, she says, her life can be more than just standing still.”
We first see Mags, in fact, posing in the nude and reflecting on her life in Paris.
And how does it feel to be so exposed?
“I’ve always been comfortable with it,” admits Shields, who performed an earlier version of the show, in SummerWorks 2009, when she was three months pregnant. “After the run, both Maev and I realized how beautiful it is to see naked bodies onstage, not the kind of manufactured models you see on TV or in magazines.
“‘Go ahead,’ we invite the audience, ‘we’re cool with it, look to your hearts’ content.’ I don’t even mind being nude with my post-partum, nursing body.”
Arthurs has no problem with viewers checking out his wife.
“Nudity always elicits a reaction,” he says. “When I assistant directed Wallace Shawn’s A Thought In Three Parts, the nudity was intended to be shocking, abrasive and violent. Here it’s a calming breath in the room.
“There’s something in both characters’ relationship to art that suggests they are modern women who control how they show their bodies.
“Montparnasse has been created by women, and I see both its nudity and its creative process as active ways of reclaiming female power. The women – both the characters and the theatre artists – are the masterminds of the creation, not the servants of others.”
The two actors also conjure up a host of figures who, as Shields says, “bubble out of life in 20s Paris.” One is Henry Miller, presented by Mags from a female perspective. “That might seem impossible, since he’s so masculine a writer.”
“But,” argues Arthurs, “it’s my favourite part of the writing. It’s raunchy, visceral and sexy, and flips our sense of the macho virtuoso by making Mags the seducer.
“It has the only swearing in the show,” admits Shields, “with Mags as the aggressive female hunting Miller. Simultaneously, the audience watches the shy, vulnerable Amelia do her first nude modelling.
“That kind of contrast is the essence of Montparnasse.”
jonkap@nowtoronto.com