tiny, a co-production between Zuppa Theatre and Eastern Front Theatre, in association with Vertical City Performance and the Glenbow Museum, is the third Zuppa show I have seen that explores immersing an audience in an interactive space, with varying degrees of theatrical elements existing all around them. For me, as someone who likes to be able to direct her attention thoroughly to one thing at a time, I found tiny to be my favourite of the three because it allows and encourages you to sit and focus exclusively on the actors’ storytelling, but there is also time to engage with the larger community museum-style exhibit surrounding you at your own leisure.
Like 2017’s The Archive of Missing Things tiny creates a world for us that is adjacent to our own, and we are presented with histories, both in artifacts and video broadcasts, that may make us question what is real, or how much is true, or whether that matters. The audience is given a headset, all the audio for the performance piece is transmitted through the headsets, the crux of the story is available on all three channels, but there are times when the audience can choose their own adventure based on which channel they would like to listen to. The show was written by Bruce Barton and Zuppa Theatre, and was directed by Alex McLean. Ben Stone plays the Volunteer, a character who hosts and helps the audience navigate through this world with poetry and charm.
In the first performance piece we are introduced to a young girl named Celia (Ursula Calder) and her grandmother, Adelle, (Shelley Thompson). Celia is learning about knitting, patience, and work ethic as they sit on sturdy rocking chairs listening to a large old-fashioned radio. The music suggests the 1930s or 40s, and suddenly the broadcast is interrupted by ominous yelling in German, further indicating that the scene is set during World War II. At first Adelle and Celia speak to one another in ways that one would expect, the young girl asking if it’s really necessary to fix a stitch that no one except her will know is wrong. Then, Celia asks Adelle about something unexpected, and we begin to realize that the world they live in, although familiar, isn’t entirely the same as our own.
In the second scene Celia is the young mother of a boy named Cedric (Stewart Legere) and they are in the kitchen making sourdough bread. Once again, the older family member imparts knowledge of domestic life on the younger in a way that is almost universally understood, and again, the conversation shifts. It becomes more and more clear that in this adjacent world there are certain people who have special, magic abilities, known as “supers,” and that while their existence can be very advantageous to humanity, the majority of the population grows more and more suspect of their existence, and thus, they have become more and more marginalized and threatened. By the time Cedric is grownup and sees evidence that his niece, Janine (Anika Riopel), is also a super he warns her to do everything in her power to conceal her abilities completely. When we see Janine as an adult in what looks to be the present day, it’s impossible to tell that she is a “super,” and when she meets a teenager named Lake (Thompson) it’s unclear whether Lake has any of these special powers or not either. This speaks to the power of assimilation and repression. Yet, despite the fact that these grandiose “world changing” powers cease to exist, the focus shifts instead, as the title suggests, to the tiny ways that the people in this world and ours can make changes just as meaningful without superpowers- whether by helping someone with their phone, or taking responsibility for past terrible behaviour, taking care of one another, listening to each other’s stories, or being in a room together. tiny doesn’t ask us to mourn the lost magic, but to rediscover it in every tiny nook and cranny we can.
The actors all give really beautiful, nuanced performances. In a space where so much emphasis is placed on the authenticity and realness of what we are seeing, the actors perform with such realism that we really do feel like voyeurs peaking into tiny slices of everyday life, where characters really do speak to one another and not to us, so we have to piece together elements of the conversation ourselves in order to figure out what is being referenced or alluded to.
What I loved so much about tiny was how it told the story of four generations and the ways that they intersect with one another. In the age of #OkBoomer it feels so important to remember that no generation exists in a bubble, from birth we have all been influenced and taught by those who are older and those who are younger than us. Everything we know is informed, for worse, but also for better, by what and who has come before us. The magic exists in the stories our grandparents told us, in the recipes and skills passed down to us, sometimes for centuries, and the magic is also inherent in the young who ask unending questions, who are filled with visions of the world that are pure, idealistic, and truthful, and it’s also in their penchant to speak this truth to power.
One thing I thought would make Zuppa’s world richer here was if the cast was more racially diverse. The surrounding exhibit did make reference to supers of colour, but I felt like more diversity was needed in the central story as well, especially because the marginalization of this imagined group mirrors the history of marginalized people in the real world so closely.
In order to create an alternate world you need a large team of players and tiny benefits from the lighting and prop design and stage management of Jess Lewis, the video design by Anna Shepard, the costumes by Leesa Hamilton and the sound design and music by Stewart Legere, which all create an ambiance of faux reality that sets the audience just a little bit off kilter and encourages them to have a truly unique theatrical experience.
In all tiny has the same expansive scope as This is Nowhere and The Archive of Missing Things, you may, like me, feel overwhelmed at the prospect that there’s not enough time to look at and read and watch all the things that the Zuppas have presented to you in copious detail, but it also more firmly directs the audience’s focus toward something smaller and roots us back into the communal shared experience of sitting together in a theatre. These are just some of the ideas and themes that I felt tiny explored, I could go again and write a completely different review, and you may go and see ten entirely different things than I did. That’s part of the magic.
tiny is a co-production between Zuppa Theatre and Eastern Front Theatre and it plays at Scotia Square (the old NSLC location at the back of the food court; 5201 Duke Street, Halifax) until November 17th, 2019. Shows are at 8:00pm, and there is also a 2:00pm show on Saturday November 16th. Tickets are $25.00-$30.00 (plus fees) and are available HERE.
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You can follow Eastern Front Theatre on Social Media: Facebook. Twitter. Instagram (@easternfronttheatre).
