Page 32 - 2018 Festival Edition

“For me, what was important was to imagine what paradise would be like, and to me, paradise is one in which men and women are completely equal. So Adam and Eve before the fall are these charac- ters that can almost finish each other’s sentences. They’re completely equal and there’s no status di erentiation. And then when the fall happens, that’s when you get the real sort-of separation of the sexes,” Shields said.
While Eve is punished for her apple- eating sins through her subservience
to Adam and the pain and su ering of childbirth, Adam’s punishment upon leaving paradise is divinely imposed hardships in his agricultural endeavours.
Shields also reframed the Garden of Eden itself, lifting the events that took place in Milton’s poem and placing them
squarely in the northern Ontario wilderness.
“I spent most of my summers in northern Ontario, and I feel like in many ways
we are living in paradise, and we’re almost completely ignorant of the paradise in which we’re living,” Shields said. “We’re isolated from almost every other country. We share one border, which people have started to cross illegally only recently. So there was an interesting piece in that as well, in terms of where we are in the socioeconomic landscape at the moment.”
Though bringing a northern Ontario Eden to the stage at the Studio Theatre is by no means insurmountable, depicting the battles of Heaven and Hell, as writ- ten by Milton, may well have been. In tackling this issue, Shields took a novel approach in telling the story of Satan’s rebellion against God and her ultimate
exile to Hell.
“There are three books in the middle of the poem that are devoted to explain-
ing the war on Heaven,” Shields said. “... So there’s this incredible description of this war on Heaven. I didn’t want to lose that, but I didn’t really know what to do with it.
“... I turned it into sort of a play within the play, where God asks the angel Raphael to explain the war in Heaven to Adam and Eve. To do so, he stages a play for Adam and Eve, which is kind of fun.”
For Shields, one of the toughest parts of bringing Paradise Lost to the stage was figuring out how to write for God. While writing for Satan came easy – it’s very clear she wants revenge and how she feels along the way – writing for God was another story.
“To try to take on the notion of God and what God is - there are so many di er- ent views of God from every religion. Even in the Bible, the Old Testament God is a wrathful, angry God, while the God of the New Testament is kind and gentle and full of grace. So that was really a challenge,” Shields said.
While contemplating God and how to portray the deity onstage, Shields reached out to her old University of Toronto professor, Paul Stevens, to see if he could provide any insight into her conundrum.
Stevens, who will be giving a lecture on Paradise Lost for the Stratford Festival at some point during the play’s run, suggested to his former student she take a more focused approach to the all-knowing, all-seeing deity.
“He sort of released me in some ways from trying to do everything. He told me to think about who I want this God character to be. (In the play and in the poem), God is (portrayed) in the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. So it’s in their conversation that God lives. He’s sort of represented through two characters and their interactions with one another,” Shields said.
Directed by Jackie Maxwell, and featuring Lucy Peakcock as Satan, Qasim Khan as Adam, and Amelia Sarigsson as Eve, Paradise Lost will hit the stage for its premiere performance at the Studio Theatre on Aug. 17. Having already been extended, the play will run until Oct. 21.
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THE BEACON HERALD | 2018 FESTIVAL EDITION