AJAX and LITTLE ILIAD created and performed by Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O’Connell (World Stage/Harbourfront Centre). At the Enwave Theatre (231 Queens Quay West). Opens Wednesday (April 4) 8 pm, and runs to April 8, Thursday 7 and 9 pm, Friday 6 and 8 pm, Saturday 4 and 8 pm, Sunday 2 and 4 pm. $35, some discounts. 416-973-4000. See listing.
Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O’Connell give a whole new meaning to the term theatre of war in their one-act plays Little Iliad and Ajax.
The first tackles a story drawn from a lost fragment about the conclusion of the Trojan War the second transports the audience back to an early performance of Sophocles’s play Ajax, another tale of that epic battle between Greece and Troy.
You might have caught an earlier version of Little Iliad in Free Fall 2010 it later went on to play in Ottawa and at the Dublin Fringe. The companion piece, Ajax, receives its premiere as part of World Stage.
“Little Iliad is based on conversations between two old friends,” says Webber. “I was thinking about how, despite their sharing a close childhood relationship, they made such different life decisions when they grew up. One became an artist, the other became a soldier.”
There’s a touch of autobiography here, but Webber also wanted to “look at storytelling and how people tell stories, in particular where the fork is in the road for the two characters: what kinds of relationships are there between storytellers and people in the military. Frank and I wanted to challenge our own assumptions that politically, socially and ideologically the artist is so very different from the soldier.”
The narrative is played out as a Skype conversation between characters called Evan and Thom, the latter about to ship out to fight in Afghanistan. The two haven’t seen each other in a decade and Thom, knowing that Evan is involved in theatre, sends him a copy of Sophocles’s play Philoctetes and asks for any insights the artist has about the script.
The reason? An American group called Theatre of War uses the play to help soldiers deal with post-combat fatigue and stress disorder.
“We wanted to find a thematic metaphor for the feeling of the conversation,” recalls Webber, “a radical separation between the two characters. The result is turning Evan into the only character immediately present in the room Thom is present as a recorded projection.
“It was a technical challenge to place both live and manipulated figures and voices in the same world. The means of presentation says something about people trying to reach out of their isolation to connect with each other.”
Add another layer of distancing here: the audience of 30 listens to all the dialogue through individual headsets, watching and listening to their own mini-play.
Ajax, the companion piece, turns Little Iliad’s theme of distancing around: instead of using “technology-mediated isolation,” Ajax does its best to bring to bring audience and performers together in a complicit fashion.
Here Cox-O’Connell and Webber are Greek soldiers attending a performance of Sophocles’s Ajax and the audience becomes the play’s silent chorus.
“Most people don’t know that Sophocles was a military general as well as a playwright,” says Webber. “Since he was, I believe, as much caught up in his responsibility as writer as he was as a soldier, I see the plays exploring the relationship between the needs of the individual and that of the community.
“There’s a historical relationship between the artist and the warrior, and these two linked plays are ways to explore some of the links. In the past, the warrior did the deed and the artist told its story. Today the function of media is so connected to the political that the artist is often cut out from critiquing what’s happening that’s why a lot of contemporary political art is impotent.
“What we’re doing here is trying to restore the possibility of criticism of violence, making political theatre meaningful again.”
A talkback follows the performances Thursday at 9 pm and Friday at 8 pm.
