Rose Napoli’s play Lo (Or Dear Mr. Wells) plays until February 24th, 2019 at Neptune Theatre’s Scotiabank Studio Theatre. I had the privilege of chatting with Celia Koughan, who plays Laura, and Josh MacDonald, who plays Alan (Mr. Wells), and Annie Valentina, the director of the play, during a break in rehearsals last Tuesday afternoon.
The play was first produced at the Streetcar Crowsnest Theatre in Toronto, co-produced by Nightwood Theatre and Crows Theatre, in the Fall of 2017. Celia Koughan tells me that Neptune’s Artistic Director, Jeremy Webb, saw that production and how “at the season launch, when he was announcing the show, [Jeremy] was describing his experience watching the play… and he said that when he left the theatre he walked for a couple of hours back to his place because he just needed to process it all. He knew he needed to do the play here [in Halifax]. I think this play does such a great job of starting these conversations that have been started with the #MeToo Movement… which I think is amazing because we need to talk about this stuff that we don’t always want to talk about.” Josh MacDonald adds, “I think it’s a very progressive piece of programming for Jeremy to have done, as well. The Studio is usually where the plays have a little bit more daring to them than the crowd-pleasers in the Main Stage, but even in terms of the Studio, this one is maybe a little bit more daring than usual. The play is frank and fierce, and it is beautiful, and it is scarring and, like Celia is saying, it is conversation making.”
Director Annie Valentina describes the play thus, “The play is a retrospective of Laura’s experiences when she was fifteen years old. She’s now a twenty five year old writer and when she was fifteen she had a relationship with her high school teacher. It basically takes us back through the memories of that relationship as it unfolded over, I think, a six month period. It goes very quickly from being… two people who are intellectual equals, even though there’s a huge age gap, they’re both in a place in life where they need a friend, and someone to champion parts of them that have gone unloved for a very long time, and so they fill this need in each other’s lives. It’s beautiful. And then it takes a turn, and it’s interesting, it’s so well written, the playwright has done such a fantastic job of showing us the inner workings of that relationship that we really buy into it, and so we feel this incredible empathy for both characters, and we feel really connected to them, and almost kind of rooting for them because we see how happy they make one another, and then of course we realize what we’re watching… that this is an impossible relationship- it’s not a relationship that can be, nor is it one that should be, but you’re so involved in seeing it come about that you sort of forget that, and then as it begins to unravel things go darker and darker, you sit at the end with this really uncomfortable feeling of having really rooted for these people and also feeling broken for them, because of course those events are going to impact who they are for the rest of their lives. Laura, being the protagonist, we see the story through her eyes, we see her as a young woman having grown up and come of age in the aftermath of this relationship, and trying to make sense of everything that happened. So, it’s a really strong story. It really lets you in and takes you to those uncomfortable places.”
Since the audience sees Laura as both a twenty-five year old and a fifteen year old Koughan adds, “as [Laura] has grown older, over the past ten years, she has learned things about that experience, and herself, and [she’s] learned things about the connection that she had found with [Mr. Wells] that she, maybe, didn’t quite know at the time. As [a twenty-five year old] she’s taking her power back, and she’s speaking out about an experience she’s held onto for a really long time.” MacDonald says, “There’s nothing very cut or dry about the play, although its final statement is, I think, very clear. The person that Laura has become and Laura’s reflections on what was wrong about what happened in the past are very, very, clear, but, I still think that the play does make for a very interesting and challenging #MeToo and #TimesUp conversation starter. Laura is only fifteen for the bulk of the show, so I think it’s an important piece for even very young people to see… from Junior High on up. The challenge of it is exciting. There’s something thrilling about a play that is this complex, a play that is this lovely, and a play that demands this much of Celia and I and the whole team. It is a special and ferocious kind of experience to work on for actors.”
Given the intimate and sensitive nature of the material, and also in light of Kristin Booth, Hannah Miller, Diana Bentley and Patricia Fagan courageously shining the light on workplace sexual-harassment and abuses of power at Soulpepper, Neptune Theatre has hired an Intimacy Director, Amanda Liz Cutting, for this production. Koughan relates, “The rehearsal process was really challenging. But, we had such an amazing team to work with. There wasn’t a moment where anything ever felt unsafe. We have an amazing Intimacy Director, Amanda Cutting, and she was so, so beautiful at articulating, very clearly, each movement and the intention behind it. In everything we did, [things] that we both felt, maybe, a little bit nervous about doing, she made us both feel so comfortable, and so supported. It really was an intense experience, but a really great one.” MacDonald agrees, “Amanda kind of looks at [staging the intimate scenes] in both very pragmatic ways, so that Celia and I begin to get acclimatized to these moments in the script as dance or fight choreography, akin to those things, so it’s very marked and very built, very structured, so we feel some safety in it, and yet, she’s also very, very committed to story. Amanda works in conjunction with Annie, our director, and Andrew [Chandler], our Assistant Director, to make sure that these things also are telling the right story and… it’s a real tightrope walk of a play, where the team is trying not to expressly make value judgements about what happens in the show, although, ultimately its cumulative power is about Laura’s coming to power, like Laura’s origin story, how she became the adult she is and the writer she is, forged out of some of the damage of the past… You meet two souls who sort of think for awhile that maybe one another are the puzzle pieces they need. Ultimately, the show is about the impossibility of consent when the age difference and the power dynamic between us is as profound as it is. But, I think when you watch the show, Amanda also helped us make it a show that looked like, in some peculiar way, it’s maybe a romance for awhile, as opposed to the transgression and the violation that, of course ultimately, you understand. Amanda has helped us find a way to walk that tightrope walk. It’s a tough one. It’s been an intense couple of weeks of rehearsal process, but very rewarding. It’s a beautiful play.”
Cutting has also been invaluable for Lo’s director, Annie Valentina, “The nature of the piece is that a lot of challenging things will come up and, for all of us in the room, there have been moments doing table work or whatnot, that just felt so personal because we have had a connection to a story that was similar in some way [to the play], not necessarily in the extreme ways, but there was an emotional connection. So, having someone in the room whose job, outside of the choreography of the physical intimacy, is to keep us safe through that [is very beneficial]. To make sure we were communicating about it in safe ways, we built a number of little rituals to be able to shake off the day and the moment in rehearsal, and to connect with each other as ourselves, there were a lot of mechanisms that were built into the process to ensure that we could create a safe space where we could tell dangerous stories.”
I mention that I noticed during the Media Call that Koughan and MacDonald were giving one another what looked like high fives before and after each scene. “They are a check in that Amanda built in,” Valentina explains, “which is basically any time before you go into a scene you look each other in the eye and you take a deep breath together and then you touch hands and you do that at the start and at the end to bookmark- that now we are separating ourselves from the work mode- and that’s also something we all do at the end of the day when we leave the rehearsal hall. When you do a lot of emotionally demanding work, even when you have a lot of personal ways of separating yourself from it and you have your professional toolbox as an actor/director, our bodies are still going to soak up some of that stuff because we have muscle memory, and so bodies will take that in whether or not your mind helps. Those are ways to keep that in the rehearsal room…I feel like I’ve learned so much working on this piece and working with Amanda.” Valentina says it’s also valuable to have someone else in the room who exists outside of the hierarchy that inherently exists between the actors and the director, “The Intimacy Director isn’t the director, so that power dynamic does not exist with her and the actors. She is equally as much a part of the team as anyone else, but as far as the actors go, she’s sort of on their team. And she’s also on my team… and that has been really helpful.”
Valentina echoes MacDonald in stressing that this is a play that doesn’t rely on the dichotomy between victims and villains, “I think this is an importance piece,” she says, “I think there’s two things that make it very important to me, and one is exactly what we were just touching on, for building safer practices for doing difficult and challenging work in theatre, because I think the answer is not to do less of that work. The answer is not to stay away from topics that we think are uncomfortable. We want to be able to really dig in there, and bring these issues to the surface, but we want to do it in a way that’s socially responsible, and responsible to the actors. On the other side, as far as the story goes, there’s nothing really interesting to me about telling stories about bad people who do bad things. We want to hear stories about good people doing bad things. Because then we can really take a look at the phenomenon of these things. Instead of being able to step back from the story and to say, “Well I don’t know anyone who would do that” or “I’m not a bad person [like him]:” how can we meaningfully have a conversation about the acts that can happen without looking at people as villains and victims? That’s to me the biggest conversation in this piece.”
Lo (or Dear Mr. Wells) by Rose Napoli plays at the Neptune Theatre Scotiabank Studio Theatre (1593 Argyle Street, Halifax) until February 24th. Performances are Tuesday to Sunday at 7:30pm and Saturday and Sunday at 2:00pm. Tickets can be purchased online HERE or by phone at 902-429-7070 or toll-free 1-800-565-7345, or in person at the Box Office (1593 Argyle Street).
You can find Neptune Theatre on Social Media: Facebook. Twitter. Instagram (@neptunetheatre). YouTube. The hashtag for the show is: #HFXLo
