Ramshackle Theatre presents the West Coast premiere of Tombstone: A Cardboard Western at the rEvolver Festival at The Cultch. For more information visit upintheairtheatre.com/2017-shows.
How much emotion can you get out of a piece of cardboard?
For those seeking an answer to this essential question, Ramshackle Theatre’s Tombstone: A Cardboard Western might be just what you’re looking for.
The Whitehorse-based production, written by Ramshackle’s Brian Fidler and Edward Westerhuis, is receiving its Vancouver premiere at this year’s rEvolver Festival.
Luckily, there’s still time to catch this lovingly touted piece of experimental theatre before it wraps up.
Westerhuis describes Tombstone as a “mythical, Wild West amusement park town filled with cowboy-robots and adventure.”
Sounds fun. But more than that this is a production that will appeal to adults, children, families, contemporary theatre lovers, and B-movie film buffs alike.
The intricately designed set pieces and puppets were created by Westerhuis and other collaborators, who wanted to combine a strong handcrafted element with technology.
“In this show, we kind of bridge together a live video performance and a small-scale puppet show,” Westerhuis explains. “It’s almost like two experiences in you: If you look up at your screen you can kind of see a movie unfold in front of your eyes and all the characters in the show are the puppets.”
Westerhuis says executing a puppetry display alongside a strong film component was a challenge to pull off, but one that seems to delight audiences who are taken aback by the production’s charm, complexity and strong homage to spaghetti westerns and other genres.
“I think one of the base inspirations for the project is looking at old sci-fi movies, where it’s very evident that the asteroids are made of tinfoil or that you can see the string on the rocket ship and somehow seeing that artifice makes it even more enjoyable,” he says.
Tombstone’s story follows its heroine, Petal, a young cowgirl who has big dreams of having her own acrobatic show.
“It’s about her quest for that, but then she becomes injured and she becomes a cyborg and she’s kind of caught in a love-triangle with a cowboy-robot and cowboy from the plains,” Westerhuis says.
Petal’s identity crisis – is she a robot or is she human? – informs the play’s inner tension. It’s part of Tombstone’s attempt to generate as much emotion as possible from a piece of cardboard and in the process get the audience to really connect with the characters, Westerhuis explains.
He also describes the production as a “whirlwind of stimuli,” which is probably an apt description of this year’s rEvolver Festival as well.
In addition to Tombstone, this year’s festival will feature nine main stage productions of eclectic pieces from across Canada.
Now in its fifth year, Daniel Martin, the festival’s co-artistic producer, says he’s happy with the festival’s distinctive place in Vancouver’s theatre ecology.
“The reason that we launched the festival was because there wasn’t really anything existing in Vancouver that supported companies in the phase between doing fringe shows and then being picked up by a big venue,” Martin says.
rEvolver Festival is arguably Vancouver’s premier experimental showcase, offering contemporary performances that focus on artists who are trying to push artistic boundaries and doing interesting things with style and form.
“We do not do really your regular kitchen sink drama,” he explains. “We’re really looking for shows that are going to connect to people. We’re looking for shows that are entertaining, that are humorous, that are surprising, and that’s a really core curatorial value that we have.”
Martin says he’s excited for all of this year’s productions, which also include pieces like Spawn and Last Train In.
Spawn is a Toronto-based production that features the character Theresa, who is haunted by the traditional story of the salmon spirit and the death of her mother who drowned in the Pacific. Martin says he’s excited about Spawn in large part because of its design choices, such as incorporating traditional materials into the production.
“Not only costumes, but also using them in the projections – overhead projection and lighting – so I’m really excited to see that piece, I think it’s going to be really beautiful,” he says.
There are also some festival-firsts this time around, including rEvolver’s first ever dance production in (i·m)position, as well as its first off-site production in All the Way, being performed at the Russian Hall instead of the usual venue of The Cultch in Vancouver.
Ramshackle Theatre, who are known for their puppetry work, are being reverently peddled as well.
Its previous production, Sci-Fi Double Feature, was performed at the first rEvolver Festival five years ago and was a huge hit. Festival organizers have been trying to get Ramshackle back ever since.
“They’ve been working on the form for five more years, so we’re expecting it to be even better,” Martin says.
Catch all this year’s rEvolver Festival offerings until June 4 at The Cultch. For tickets, visit thecultch.com/tickets.
