THE BIG SMOKE by Amy Nostbakken and Nir Paldi, directed by Paldi, with Nostbakken (Theatre Ad Infinitum Canada/Why Not Theatre). At Factory Studio (125 Bathurst). Previews Tuesday (February 21), opens Wednesday (February 22) and runs to March 4, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2:30 pm. $25, stu/snr $18, Sunday pwyc ($15 sugg). 416-504-9971. See listing.
The Big Smokes takes the theme of depression to a new level – a musical one.
The show, written by performer Amy Nostbakken and director Nir Paldi, grew out of the duo’s interest in creating a sung show with a single female character. They met at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris and are two-thirds of British-based Theatre Ad Infinitum, the third partner being George Mann, whose solo version of The Odyssey played Toronto last year.
Nostbakken and Paldi had just finished a two-hander at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe, and, given the performer’s vocal strength, knew that a sung show was the next direction to take.
“At the first rehearsal, Nir asked me to sing him a fairy tale we realized then that the whole play could work as a sung piece. Initially I wanted to have some instruments and other vocals, but we realized that the more we added, the more we lost in other ways.
“What we’ve done is go for the pure and honest strength of one woman’s unaccompanied voice.”
Then they had to find the show’s subject matter. A talk with a friend who’d lost a baby led to thoughts about female strength in the face of tragedy.
“We all have to deal with tragedy and loneliness, feeling foreign in supposedly comfortable surroundings and not right in our own skin,” says Nostbakken. “We aren’t, though, always able to talk about it. I thought about writers like Virginia Woolfe, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, their ability to go directly to the blood and guts of their feelings. Much of their work, especially the confessional poets, is a dance around death.”
Nostbakken points out that all three were forced into “an iconic woman’s place, told what she should want, what success should be. None of them felt satisfied or complete in this box of what it meant to be a woman.”
Out of these thoughts, the performer created her central figure, Natalie, a young, bright, talented, gifted, Canadian artist chosen to take part in a competition at London’s Tate Gallery. Over the month of the competition, we watch her fall apart.
“At the start, she’s the kind of woman people would want as their best friend. The contest is a great opportunity for her, but we discover that she doesn’t really know what she wants or how to define herself.
“That feeling of being lost, numb and frozen is something with which the audience can relate. I’ve never performed a show where the reactions are so personal and overwhelming.”
And the music?
“The underlying style is jazzy, with different characters and Natalie’s shifts in thought defined by specific melodies and musical styles. The sex bomb of the piece sounds like Peggy Lee, for example, while Natalie’s mother has a Beatles feel. You’ll also catch echoes of Thelonius Monk, the Police, Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell.
“I like the fact that when I perform I can relax into my voice and completely control it. There are no bells and whistles in the show, no sound cues. Because it’s all created in the moment, I get to react differently with each audience and become intimate with them. It’s a little scary and also exhilarating metaphorically, you’re 100 per cent naked onstage.”
Nostbakken compares the award-winning hour-long show to a sung poem.
“Our company’s known for finding new ways to tell a story. Given the show’s subject matter, the tenderness and poetry of music make the best tools.
Presented in association with Why Not Theatre, The Big Smoke marks the debut of Theatre Ad Infinitum Canada, a branch of the British troupe. Nostbakken, Canadian-born, has just moved back home this is the first time she’s presenting her own work here.
