Alice Nelson’s physical theatre approach to storytelling keeps the narrative moving along in varied, interesting and unexpected ways.

Braden Griffeths and Julie Orton perform a scene from Mockingbird Close (Photo Courtesy Colleen De Neve, Calgary Herald, 2012)

David Lynch meets the Brothers Grimm — or more specifically, the Blue Velvet of Twin Peaks meets Hansel and Gretel — in the production that completes Lunchbox Theatre’s current mainstage season. The play performed is Mockingbird Close by Edmonton playwright Trevor Schmidt, which Alice Nelson selected as the vehicle for her debut upon completing Lunchbox’s 2011-2012 RBC Emerging Director program.

Nelson has fun with her choice.

And so, happily, do we.

The show is a poetic, moody little thriller-with-a-twist about a young suburban couple played by Julie Orton (Iris) and Braden Griffiths (Hank) who seem to have lost their son and don’t know where to find him. So they end up looking in all the wrong places — which in this case turn out to be the houses of secrets that comprise the rest of their cul-de-sac, Mockingbird Close.

We know we’re in weirdsville right from the start, because we get back-to-back conflicting accounts from Iris about the kind of day it was when the little guy disappeared, and Hank — a Mad Men type in an orange-y suit who says stuff like, “You can rely on the routine because it happens all the time” — angrily snaps at her, “No, that’s not the way it happened.” Uh-oh.

Once the two begin ringing doorbells and canvassing their neighbourhood, ingeniously conveyed by a big pull-toy string of houses and the suspended white pickets of fences,we meet an amusing assortment of misfits, ranging from a perv with something going on in the basement, to a desperate housewife and a boy who likes to dress like his mother.

All are played with undistracting comic appeal by Orton and Griffiths — who also play the famous brother and sister lost by their parents in the grim Black Forest tale, which is interwoven with Mockingbird Close.

Everything about this production of a satirical fable of loss is fresh, inventive, well thought-out — and inviting.

Nelson’s physical theatre approach to storytelling keeps the narrative moving along in varied, interesting and unexpected ways.

She rarely loses track of the light in the darker moments, or the darkness in the lighter ones, so there’s almost no sense of shifting gears between what’s cheerfully sinister and what’s sinisterly cheerful.

Review

Lunchbox Theatre presents Mockingbird Close by Trevor Schmidt to Saturday. Tickets: Call 403-265-4392. Rating: Four stars out of five

bclark@calgaryherald.com

FIVE FACTS ABOUT

Alice Nelson is the Emerging Director for Lunchbox's 2011-2012 Season (Photo Courtesy Alice Nelson)

Alice Nelson

Published by Jon Roe on Jun.01.2012

The RBC Emerging Director at Lunchbox Theatre gets her chance in the director’s chair with Mockingbird Close.

1. Before the Emergence  Nelson was the assistant director on four productions this season with Lunchbox, and got a taste of the style of three different directors: Eric Rose, Pamela Halstead (also Lunchbox’s artistic director) and Kelly Reay. Nelson says assistant directing is like being a fly on the wall. “There’s a part of you that’s like, ‘Oh, I want to be able to say something. I want to be able to take part in all this stuff,’” she says. “Holding back and absorbing everything was pretty paramount to actually now having to step into that role.”

2. Doing Her Homework Before she was even selected as the emerging director, she started the process of looking for a script to direct by canvassing friends and scouring libraries. “I tend to lean towards more surreal or darker stuff,” says Nelson. “A lot of that doesn’t go great with lunch.”

3. Mockingbird Close She settled on Mockingbird Close, Trevor Schmidt’s story of a suburban couple in the 1950s who discover their son is missing and go door to door in their neighbourhood trying to find out what happened.  “I read (Mockingbird Close) one night and as soon as I was done reading it, I started reading it again. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s a sign.’”

4. Send in the Clowns Nelson attended Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in California and her training shows through the stylized movements of the characters in Mockingbird Close. It was at Dell’Arte that she first became involved in Clowns Without Borders, a charitable organization which brings laughter to children affected by crisis in developing countries.

5. And on to the Next One Later this month at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival she dons the clown makeup once again in Raunch, her two-woman show inspired by the book Female Chauvinist Pigs. But before that and right after Mockingbird Close closes, she is holding auditions for her new musical-comedy-in-progress, Keep Sweet: A Polygamy Musical, inspired by the fundamentalist colony in Bountiful, B.C. Oh, and she directs The Boys Own Jedi Handbook at the Empress Theatre in Fort Macleod in July. It’s a busy summer for Nelson. “It’s nice I have a directing job right after so I can keep growing,” she says.

Read More from SwerveMagazine

Grand Prairie native Alice Nelson discovered her love of clowning at an early age. Saturday Night Live performers like Bill Murray and Robin Williams dazzled her with their brand of physical comedy; later, a performance by renowned Canadian “horror clowns” Mump and Smoot sealed the deal.

“It was when they did Flux,” she says. “I made my parents go see it, and I said, ‘This is what I want to do!’ And they were like, ‘Really? How about an Ed. degree?’”

Instead, she obtained a degree in drama and then a masters in “ensemble based physical theatre” — not quite what her parents advised.

Since then, she has clowned around the world in independent and professional productions, and even volunteered in South Africa with Clowns Without Borders.

Nelson is now the “emerging director” at Lunchbox Theatre. After assistant directing the company’s season of plays, she takes the director’s chair for Mockingbird Close, which opens this week.

The play tells the story of a ’50s-era couple whose child disappears; as they knock on neighbours’ doors in search of their child, they discover the dark underbelly of their pristine suburb.

Directing a play is a new hat for this clown. Despite her love of ensemble-based clowning and collaboration, Nelson found that a lack of direction sometimes diminished concepts and impacted productions. She realized a director is necessary to provide focus to the creation process.

“An ensemble can create a ton of really fantastic material,” she says, “but in the end, you need a director to rope it all together, to pull it in so that it appears like there’s one perspective on the show.”

While Mockingbird Close is an emotional, dark drama that seems dissimilar from the physical comedy Nelson loves, she insists that clowning continues to inform much of her directing style. Rather than orchestrating blocking and other creative choices, she encourages the actors to offer their own input, improvise and play, which generates innumerable ideas — her role as director, she says, is to choose the best and most cohesive ideas. This process led to some frolicsome rehearsals.

“We jackass a lot,” she says. “It’s a lot of productive jackassing.”

Because Mockingbird Close addresses numerous heavy topics, Nelson considers this “jackassing” important in finding moments of light. After the first run-through rehearsal, she realized, “Whoa. We need to find some laughs.”

“What informed this production, for me, has been my training in movement and melodrama. I realized we needed to use a lot of gesture and a lot of physical playing. And, because these characters go to very extreme emotions — it does have a sense of melodrama to it — it’s been a really good opportunity to articulate to the actors how to play those different extremes.”

Read More at FFWDWeekly

Directing is latest eclectic role for Alice Nelson

Lunchbox Theatre’s Emerging Director Spreads Her Wings with Mockingbird Close