Up and Running!

After a fantastic night of 2 sold out opening night performances followed by too many celebratory drinksDebts is officially up and running. And tickets are selling super fast!

Here are some of the fantastic shots that were taken at the dress rehearsal by Adam Fedyck. I think they look like they’re from a movie.

Annie Darling terrified to go in to the house

The Scooby Doo Moment

Just straight up spooky shit

If you’re planning on seeing Debts be sure to book tickets soon as it will sell out quickly  http://brownpapertickets.com/ 

The Week before Opening

There is nothing quite like the rush a week before opening, especially on a site specific show. This is when problem solving becomes the term of the day. Things that should be simple never seem to work quite right and things that you never thought could work somehow fall in to place. There is always a flurry of emails and phone calls. Ideas get abandoned while other flourish. Everything really takes shape.

We have had many big problems to solve all along the way with Debts. How are we going to fit the audience in to these tiny spaces? How are we going to call a show on the move through a house? How are we going to transmit sound in to every room and outside? And on and on. With lots of creative thinking and loads of man hours we are finally finding concrete answers to those questions.
It’s a remarkable feeling to take a risk and trust that the impossible can be achieved. In my experience it always comes together in the last week. There truly is nothing like the feeling of accomplishment when those handsfree walkie talkies finally work, the audience fits in to the tiny room and sound fills the house, seemingly out of nowhere.

PS Debts is selling fast with Oct 20 sold out and 22 almost full. If you want to be sure to see the show book in advance through Brown Paper Tickets (http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/199800) as there will unlikely be tickets at the door.

The Haughty Mr. Poe

A guest blog post by Mr. Mack Gordon, Playwright and Director for Debts When approaching the stories of Edgar Allan Poe for adaptation, I came across a frequent stumbling block. His tales are rich in atmosphere and dense with theme but often have little to no narrative action. The Telltale Heart mostly revolves around a man explaining to us how sane he is and that he committed a grievous murder for reasons aside from his mental balance. The police show up, he hears a beating heart, and he reveals what he did. This is the ultimate action story in Poe’s oeuvre. The Premature Burial focuses squarely on the fear of being buried alive as opposed to actual events. Bon Bon – A Tale concerns a man conversing politely with the devil. The Oval Portrait tells of a fellow who swallows a little too much opium and reads an entry about a painting that sucked the life out of its subject. Nothing happens in The Raven at all.     ITSAZOO Productions has long been a company that focuses on storytelling. I’ve been around them for a while and was lucky enough to see shows like “Grimm Tales,” “Robin Hood,” and “The Canterbury Tales.” These productions have in common a similar formula: A guide, with his/her own objective, welcomes the audience and leads them on a journey. Along the way, we stop in to catch well-constructed vignettes that mirror the show’s subject’s work. There is often stylistic and thematic twists on these vignettes but they are almost exclusively stand alone stories.   I didn’t think this formula would work for Edgar Allan Poe. The show would be as static as promenade theatre could possibly be. That’s because Poe is less a story-teller and more a painter whose medium is the written word. That might sound haughty but, then, so is Mr. Poe.   So instead I decided to take his stories, his quotations, his moods, and use them as inspiration. I decided to use them as a springboard. Throughout the play, depending on your knowledge of ol’ Edgar, you’ll recognize a reference or a quotation or a plot twist in nearly every interaction. His ideas are infused into the characters. His set pieces are our climaxes. His names are our names and his atmosphere is where we’ll live and breathe. Instead of following a single host on a tour of Poe’s gallery we’ll take a hammer to the back of the poet’s head and climb into an approximation of what it might have looked like in his brain.

-Mack Gordon

If you want more Mack in your life you can follow him on twitter @Mackgord

 

Trusting Others

Up until now ITSAZOO has had a pretty concrete system when it came to producing shows.  Sebastien would write them, Chelsea would direct them and Colby, Sebastien and some of the other crew would act in them.  We have kept it very much in-house.  Debts is the first time that we have handed over the majority of the artistic control to other artists.

When we first decided to do this production Sebastien was in the midst of other things and couldn’t take on the task of writing it so we decided to ask Mack.  We felt he had the right voice as a writer for what we had in mind.  Then when it came time to stage the show I, Chelsea, had started the MFA program at UBC and couldn’t take on the job of directing the show so Mack stepped in and took on that job as well.  Since that time we have gathered an artistic team of people who we mostly haven’t worked with before.  It has been a great process for us to watch a thing that we have held so close be populated by a new community.

I am the production manager for the show and as such have been very much involved in the production but not in the fully immersive way I normally am.  I have been happy to relinquish some artistic control and gather a team of people we trust completely to create a show we are proud to call ITSAZOO.  We have grown as producers and have provided opportunities for others to grow as artists.  We have learned that choosing well and then trusting those you choose can lead to a whole new level of creation beyond what we could have envisioned.  We took a chance and are so glad we did.