There doesn’t seem to be much overlap between the works of 19th-century Russian writer Anton Chekhov and 20th-century American novelist William Faulkner – which is why Dean Gilmour thought he should stick to Chekhov in the first place.
Gilmour is the co-artistic director of Theatre Smith-Gilmour, a Toronto-based company that has performed numerous Chekhov adaptations in its 30 years. The Dora Award-winning company has an entire Chekhov cycle under its belt: Chekhov longs…In the Ravine, Dr. Chekhov: Ward 6, Chekhov’s Heartache, and Chekhov’s Shorts, the last of which played 22 sold-out weeks in six cities in 2000-2001 – a run that included Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre.
So when Gilmour first read Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying – the action of which is set in Depression-era Mississippi – he was deeply moved by the text. He just didn’t think it was stageable. The novel is a complex stream-of-consciousness tapestry, narrated by 15 characters over 59 chapters. There’s a river, a coffin, a flood, and an arduous journey over difficult terrain. “When we first read it, we didn’t think it was doable,” says Gilmour, on the phone from Toronto. “We had done a lot of work with Chekhov, and it seemed so far away.”
Regardless, As I Lay Dying “hovered around in the atmosphere” above Theatre Smith-Gilmour, until a few years ago, when Gilmour and co-artistic director Michele Smith finally went into a rehearsal hall to read Faulkner’s words out loud. “When you’re reading it [silently], it’s a tough read – it’s trying to figure out what’s happening from everybody’s point of view. But once we read it out loud, we realized that, in fact, there was such a compelling story underneath the stream of consciousness. Then we started to attack how we could tell the story on the stage.”
The result is an adaptation that wowed critics and audiences in Toronto (author Michael Ondaatje called it “a wonderful and vivid translation… [You] will swear you have seen live horses and rivers in flood and barns on fire as well as the strangest and most heartbreaking family”) and is currently in the midst of a national tour.
On January 19, As I Lay Dying begins its Vancouver run at the Goldcorp Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre, as part of a partnership between the Arts Club Theatre Company and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
As I Lay Dying follows the Bundren family as they embarks on a 40-mile funeral procession to bring their mother to a final resting place and fulfill her dying wish. From the press release: “Through their calamitous journey, each member struggles with the promises made to the departed, revealing secrets and confronting their own selfish desires along the way.”
Gilmour co-directs the production with Smith and appears as Anse Bundren, the Bundren patriarch, as well as several other characters; Smith portrays Addie, the Bundren matriarch whose death powers the narrative. Julian De Zotti, Nina Gilmour, Eli Ham, Ben Muir and Daniel Roberts round out the cast.
As I Lay Dying functions on several levels, says Gilmour: as a play, as a movement piece, as a meditation for its audience and players. “When we do a show, our goal is to mobilize the audience’s imagination.”
The company works on a bare stage, “and there are echoes of the world that we’re evoking, but we really want it to be evoked in the audience’s imagination. We don’t have a set that is the barn or the porch that they’re sitting on. We want the audience to dream and to remember, and we want to bridge that distance between their imaginations and the world that we’re evoking. It’s an actor’s theatre that we’re passionate about: the actors play multiple roles. We root our work in the actors’ ability to transform.”
Gilmour was struck by the similarities between the peasants of Chekhov’s fiction and Faulkner’s Rust Belt inhabitants. “Chekhov came from a peasant family and he knew this peasant mentality. And, interestingly enough, Faulkner is writing about the same thing: this peasant, rural life in Mississippi where he grew up, with the same ear for how people talk and how peasants think.”
The St. Thomas, Ontario, native also hears echoes of his own grandparents in As I Lay Dying (“It’s not exactly the same vocabulary, but you can hear this way of speaking and this way of thinking that is Middle America, and very rural”), as well as of present-day residents of the American South, which, in today’s highly fraught geo-political landscape, makes Faulkner’s Depression-era tale hella relevant. “It’s the South after the Civil War, and there are these whites who are disenfranchised all of a sudden, because of this huge shift in America between the North and the South,” he says. “I think the people who have voted for Trump are the ancestors of the Bundrens. I think that’s where they came from.”
As I Lay Dying runs Jan. 19-Feb. 12 at the Arts Club’s Goldcorp Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre (162 West 1st Ave.). Tickets at ArtsClub.com.
