Greek tragedy and Renaissance masterpieces reimagined for Heart Of The City Festival

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For playwright Kevin Kerr, Electric Company Theatre’s Epigone grew out of personal tragedy. His sister died in 2021 from the toxic drug supply, prompting him to revisit Sophocles’ Antigone, in which a woman defies the authorities to give her brother a proper burial.

“I had been thinking a lot about the challenges of navigating that sense of loss, but also the complications around ritual,” Kerr says.

The play follows a man sorting through “all the detritus of his sister’s life” in a rundown northern mobile home. An unexpected visit from a younger cousin complicates matters, particularly as he attempts to conceal the circumstances of his sister’s death.

“She provokes questions around what a proper rite of passage might look like,” Kerr says. “She’s also a kind of witchy character, so there’s a bit of magic there. That’s where things get going.”

Founded in 1996, Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre has built an international reputation for visually inventive, unconventional productions. Epigone reunites two of its founders: Kerr, a Governor General’s Award-winning playwright, and director Jonathon Young. Young’s collaborations with choreographer Crystal Pite include the Olivier Award-winning Betroffenheit.

Featuring acclaimed Vancouver stage veteran and multiple Jessie Award winner Colleen Wheeler, Epigone premieres as part of this year’s Downtown Eastside Heart Of The City Festival.

Kerr says the play is the most personal work he has written. While his previous plays have often been set in other eras or realities, Epigone is firmly rooted in the present. Nevertheless, it retains Electric Company Theatre’s characteristic elements of spectacle, magic and surprise.

The playwright, whose company has offices near Main and East Hastings, sees a natural connection between the production and the neighbourhood.

“It’s a reality that screams for action, and yet the layers of complexity that intersect here can often cause confusion or paralysis,” he says.

Another festival event, Reimagining Justice: The Circle Project, features three video installations created by artists Adad Hannah and Jin-me Yoon in collaboration with people with lived experience of incarceration.

Hannah worked with 14 women on What Fools These Mortals Be, a riff on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and nine men incarcerated at William Head Institution on Vancouver Island on Harlequino’s Folly, inspired by Commedia dell’Arte.

Both works employ Hannah’s signature tableaux vivants, or living portraits, in which performers pose in elaborate scenes filmed and projected at life size.

“People realize that these are living masterpieces, because the people are blinking or swaying ever so slightly,” says Brenda Morrison, co-creator of The Circle Project and director of SFU’s Centre for Restorative Justice.

“We wanted the people that we’re working with, coming out of carceral systems, to reimagine themselves, to step into a masterpiece and co-create something that’s beautiful together.”

The third installation, Time Freed (Beyond Capture), co-created by Yoon and 15 women, features ghostly figures dancing and moving through a landscape in a celebration of life and freedom.

Morrison says the project has had a lasting impact on participants, particularly the women involved.

“Each of the participants would describe the process as transformational. For the women in particular, that has helped create a sisterhood. It’s that community of care that has held them strong and allowed them to reconnect with family and find amazing job opportunities.”

For Kerr, the hope is that Epigone will resonate with others who have experienced grief.

“If folks in the audience find a moment of kind of communing with those people that they loved and have lost or have gone before them, then that would be perhaps something that it could offer.”

When: Oct. 30 to Nov. 7

Where: Various