“Don’t ask me what FLEE is about,” warns Jonathon Young as we walk together down a hallway at Langara College. “I won’t be able to tell you.”
“Why?” I ask, playing along. “Because it’s so complicated?”
“Because it’s so profoundly simple,” he counters with a mischievous grin.
We duck into an empty room within Studio 58, Langara’s professional theatre training program, joined by third-year theatre student Lucy McNulty. We only have 20 minutes before Young has to head into a production meeting for FLEE, the second show of Studio 58’s 50th anniversary season, but there is a lot of ground to cover.
For the past few weeks, Young and the Studio 58 crew have been working on this darkly humorous song and dance number, making its world premiere at the Fox Cabaret on Nov. 26. Set to original music by Vancouver composer Peggy Lee, the play centres around performing fleas and the awful story of how they came to be.
FLEE marks the first time Young, a Jessie Award-winning actor, playwright and Studio 58 alumnus, has taken the reins as sole director. It’s also the first collaboration between Studio 58 and Young’s wildly innovative Electric Company Theatre, which he co-founded in 1996 with fellow Studio 58 students Kim Collier, David Hudgins and Kevin Kerr.
FLEE was created by Hudgins, who now serves as the associate director of Studio 58, as well as Young and FLEE lead Peter Anderson, in partnership with Barking Sphinx Performance, the Elbow Theatre and the Arrival Agency. It also stars Studio 58’s artistic director Kathryn Shaw, veteran actors Lois Anderson and David Peterson, a live band, and 10 senior Studio 58 students.
As he helps Studio 58 ring in its 50th year, Young has nothing but praise for the program that helped him find his way professionally.
“I think [Studio 58] is still where most people look for actors who are graduating ready to work. Actors who excel at rehearsing, who come prepared, who bring ideas. And also bring three years of experience at technique and craft,” says Young, whose recent credits include The Waiting Room (Arts Club), Hamlet (Bard on the Beach) and the upcoming Betronffenheit collaboration with acclaimed dance company Kidd Pivot.
Young entered theatre school straight out of high school, and while the magnetic performer makes it looks effortless now, he admits the early years were rocky.
“I wasn’t really ready to go into post-secondary education,” says Young. “So I left for a year after that. And then I came back from travelling and being a bum, and I still wasn’t really ready. But I did a couple more terms and then I repeated a term, and then things started to happen. I started to figure out how to use the school to my advantage – I just clicked into that the whole point was process, not product. And then I just started to use it as a big experiment.
“I had basically spent the whole first half thinking, ‘Well, I’ve lost whatever [talent] I had,’” he continues, earnestly. “But I guess that’s the ideal training journey.”
Seated next to him, McNulty watches on intently as he speaks, nodding in agreement. The young performer has had the chance to work with Young twice before, but says this show is giving her unprecedented insight into the creative process through watching Hudgins, Anderson, Young and Shaw bring it all together.
In FLEE, McNulty plays Fleak No. 6, a half-formed performer in the Fleak chorus. The Fleaks have something to say. What a Fleak is, though, remains inscrutable.
“We’ve never really answered that question yet,” says Young with a laugh. “Are they fleas? I think the answer is no. They’re more like student actors.”
“With flea-like qualities!” McNulty pipes in.
Whatever they are, they’re trapped in this flea circus of a story, which sees destitute watchmaker Archibald Twill living in a low-rent hotel on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Madame Renard runs the so-called flophouse while The Old Hand lurks further east with his sideshow. Oh, and in this fictional past, fleas are almost extinct. Fortunes and fates seem to change when Twill comes into the possession of Caprice, the singing flea. Eventually, though, reality bites and FLEE becomes a grotesque tale of exploitation, obsession and self-preservation.
Set in a fictional hotel on Powell Street, FLEE never overtly references the issues of addiction, poverty and homelessness that surround the Downtown Eastside, but Young says the play inherently mirrors some of its rhythms.
“I think some of the themes of the show lent themselves to the low-rent flophouses down there that are teeming with life. The point of focus in a lot of those places has a consumptive quality,” says Young. “Even though there’s a lot of life force, it’s staying in the same place, it’s not moving forward, and I think that our show lives in that kind of cyclical predicament.”
FLEE also draws heavily on the novels and short stories of Franz Kafka, ranging from The Metamorphosis to A Hunger Artist, to some of his lesser known works.
“There’s a short story by Kafka called Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk. I mean, what an awful title,” laughs Young. “But she’s a singing mouse, and her song, to hear it as a human, is no more than just a plaintiff squeak. But, as Kafka was able to, if you burrow down into the very minutia – the very small and the banal – there’s something very profound going on there.”
So there you have it. Profoundly simple, indeed.
•FLEE (19+) runs Nov. 26-Dec. 6 at the Fox Cabaret (2321 Main). Tickets start at $10; Studio58.ca
