The Uterine Stage
Prodigy, an English World Premiere, by Nancy Huston
Sofia, with the gravel-aged voice and the rocking chair, hails from some trouble-spot in Old Europe - She has seen life, O has she seen life! Sofia's daughter, Lara, strives vainly to match her musical artistry, not to mention her expectations. Maya, their beloved daughter-granddaughter, the prodigy they are both awaiting - languishes agonizingly upon some metaphysical timeline as the embodiment of their joint will and desire, ambiguously alive, yet forever and ever unborn.
Novelist-playwright Huston performs an unexpected and delicate balancing act as she swivels between past, present and the 'unborn' future, coloured by hope and dread, in which Destiny itself is held hostage to that tenuous link in their feminine blood-line.
History meanwhile folds back onto itself - eerily and literally - for both Lara and Sofia. In one broad sweep, all husbands, fathers, in fact, the entire male gender is dispensed with, relegated to mere disembodied voices on the periphery of their enchanted feminine circle. Being men, it would seem they are reduced to no more than impartial or else judgmental observers of the REAL drama being enacted on stage: a once-indivisible female tripartite ironically divided by family bonds and bondage and a conflicted passion for art.
Lyne Paquette's stage setting is sober and non-distracting, a mingling of dark and light and elemental red, the shade-colours of life itself. A 'super-size' piano dominates this intimate theatre space, appropriately symbolic of the drama that unfolds.
Lara, the apparent lynchpin of the three, upon whom the uneven burden of events must fall, expresses each demi-note on the spectrum of emotion from prosaic to sublime, from blissful to enraged, from resentful to vacant, from impassioned to inert. Stechysin's is a trained and subtle voice, delicate, precise, an emotional voice of breath and colour, pitch and tone that truly captures the imagistic rhythm of Huston's poetics, newly adapted to the stage. Physically, too, Stechysin has the ease, grace and adroitness of a gymnast. It is she who continually - and in the end tragically - treads those accursèd high-tension lines between Sofia who declines and withers, whilst super-gifted Maya flowers into life.
by Christina Manolescu
Invisible Cities Network
http://www.invisiblecitiesnetwork.org
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006
Sofia, with the gravel-aged voice and the rocking chair, hails from some trouble-spot in Old Europe - She has seen life, O has she seen life! Sofia's daughter, Lara, strives vainly to match her musical artistry, not to mention her expectations. Maya, their beloved daughter-granddaughter, the prodigy they are both awaiting - languishes agonizingly upon some metaphysical timeline as the embodiment of their joint will and desire, ambiguously alive, yet forever and ever unborn.
Novelist-playwright Huston performs an unexpected and delicate balancing act as she swivels between past, present and the 'unborn' future, coloured by hope and dread, in which Destiny itself is held hostage to that tenuous link in their feminine blood-line.
History meanwhile folds back onto itself - eerily and literally - for both Lara and Sofia. In one broad sweep, all husbands, fathers, in fact, the entire male gender is dispensed with, relegated to mere disembodied voices on the periphery of their enchanted feminine circle. Being men, it would seem they are reduced to no more than impartial or else judgmental observers of the REAL drama being enacted on stage: a once-indivisible female tripartite ironically divided by family bonds and bondage and a conflicted passion for art.
Lyne Paquette's stage setting is sober and non-distracting, a mingling of dark and light and elemental red, the shade-colours of life itself. A 'super-size' piano dominates this intimate theatre space, appropriately symbolic of the drama that unfolds.
Lara, the apparent lynchpin of the three, upon whom the uneven burden of events must fall, expresses each demi-note on the spectrum of emotion from prosaic to sublime, from blissful to enraged, from resentful to vacant, from impassioned to inert. Stechysin's is a trained and subtle voice, delicate, precise, an emotional voice of breath and colour, pitch and tone that truly captures the imagistic rhythm of Huston's poetics, newly adapted to the stage. Physically, too, Stechysin has the ease, grace and adroitness of a gymnast. It is she who continually - and in the end tragically - treads those accursèd high-tension lines between Sofia who declines and withers, whilst super-gifted Maya flowers into life.
by Christina Manolescu
Invisible Cities Network
http://www.invisiblecitiesnetwork.org
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006