Page 4 - 2018 Festival Edition

The season’s other musical, The Rocky Horror Show, also embraces a will to be free, exploring, as Cimolino said, “the freedom to be yourself.”
“It’s set against this American Gothic and sense of traditional values that serve as shackles, and
into this world come aliens,” Cimolino said about the Feore-directed production. “It’s a story about a couple of innocents who meet a group of vulnerable people. So even though it has fishnets and all sorts of outrageous activities, it’s actually a very simple and innocent kind of story.
“There’s a sweetness to it. It’s about living life in freedom ... and not hurting others as you do that. ... I felt if we were doing a season on the will to be free, this had the right spirit to it.”
Directed by Miles Potter, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a sometimes uncomfortably personal play that examines the dispiriting “patterns” of familial dysfunction and the attendant strains of guilt and bitterness.
“It’s about how we can escape the prison that we put ourselves in because of the way we interrelate with each other in the confines of a family dynamic,” Cimolino said about Eugene O’Neill’s masterwork.
In An Ideal Husband, one of the final plays penned by Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, the main character also feels trapped – but more by politi- cal intrigue than any familial burden. Blessed with a reputation as the only honest man in politics,
Sir Robert Chiltern is haunted by a secret that, if revealed, could destroy him.
“An Ideal Husband is about our own personal traps. The husband is not able to be honest with his wife and family – about what is going on his life,” Cimolino said. “...What happens when it all comes out? What am I going to do? Will my wife be at my side? Will she sympathize with me?
The Lezlie Wade-directed production also touch- es on the rigid class distinctions within England at the time.
“It brings together those worlds, the personal and political,” Cimolino said.
This season’s production of To Kill a Mockingbird was prompted by the surge of overt racism fostered by the troubling rise of the "Alt-Right" movement, Cimolino said. A story about Tom Robinson, a falsely accused black man defended by a white lawyer with a fervent belief in “moral courage,”
THE WILL TO BE FREE
To Kill a Mockingbird remains sadly relevant decades after Harper Lee’s original novel was first published.
“This is a story we need to be telling again,” Cimo- lino said about Christopher Sergei’s dramatization. “I think there was a sense, a number of years ago, with Mr. Obama as president that race relations had taken a di erent turn. ... instead, we need to still be hearing this message as a white majority.”
While, again, there’s a yearning for a literal free- dom in this Nigel Shawn Williams-directed produc- tion, there’s also a yearning for a freedom from that learned prejudice.
“I wanted to make sure the story was told with an understanding of how things have changed since this book was first written and from a perspective that went beyond that of a white writer,” Cimolino said. “It’s a beautiful story, it’s a moving story and it’s one, I’m sad to say, that’s more resonant than ever.”
A world premiere commissioned by the Stratford Festival from award-winning playwright Jordi Mand, Brontë: The World Without is “a story of three sisters yearning for a way to break out of the walls of their lives.”
Living in poverty with an ill father and a de- bauched brother, the sisters begin to write “to find escape, to earn money and they begin to compete, so the writing both brings them together and drives them apart over time. They go through episodes where their love is tested.”
Another Festival-commissioned play, Erin Shield’s theatrical adaptation of Paradise Lost rei- magines John Milton’s epic poem about Adam and Eve’s fall from grace as an “ultra-contemporary new drama.”
“How do we go about squaring our desire to be free with the existence of God, who is all-powerful,” Cimolino said. “In this insightful and irreverent exploration of the epic poem, Erin makes Satan a female who has just had it with the muddling (patri- archy) without dealing with the practical realities of what it means to live in this world and be flesh and blood.”
The final comedy of the season, Eduardo De Filippo’s Napoli Milionaria!, is a bit of a passion project for Cimolino, its director. Telling the story of a Neapolitan family that profits from the black market during the deprivation just after the Second
World War, Napoli Milionaria! manages to find the humour during a dark time in human history.
“It was comedy but it dealt with very serious subject matter,” Cimolino said. “... People look at what’s been done, the horror that they’ve gone through – the inhumanity – and they say, ‘what are we doing?’”
Despite almost being ruined by their greed, the characters at the heart of Napoli Milionaria! redis- cover the freedom that comes with rediscovering the value of community, Cimolino said.
Regardless of our station in life, we crave personal freedom but, as this year’s Stratford Festival reminds us, that freedom can sometimes come with a heavy price.
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THE BEACON HERALD | 2018 FESTIVAL EDITION