Betrayal- some thoughts on a unique fashion and theatre collaboration.

There is a definite style of performance that gets summarized by writers with “in true Pinter fashion”. For performers and stage directors, certain of the British playwright’s stylistic gestures are completely name branded and recognizable- I learned the term Pinteresque at about 13 when my friend and her theater teacher mum were working with me on a skit for school and we were into making stoic dramatic pauses. Later, we wrote a 45 minute musical Macbeth, which rocked thank you very much, and instead of having characters leave the stage we just had them turn away from it, sometimes to turn back in as different characters. And we delighted in calling it ‘pinteresque, darling’. This simple, visceral stop and start of dramatic action works really well, when it works, making the energy of performance almost visible in it’s movements across the stage, pulling and cresting your gaze and attention to and from different actors on set. In a recognizable Pinter fashion, characters leave without leaving the stage by allowing their characters to disapear. Your eye quickly loses interest in the hilarious italian waiter when he drops his shoulders, clears his face, becomes still. You understand that he’s no longer there and that you should also be elsewhere with your focus. And it makes you very aware of class performance, and all the kinds of ways we fashion ourselves to suit our jobs, our ideas, our surroundings. It’s artificial in a way that rings true with real life social artifice - which is something well suited to exploration in the theatre, as well as in the world of fashion itself.

Betrayal is a play about memory and where your focus is. It’s about the misdirection, lies, and performances of a love affair. It’s a jumpy backwards and forwards telling of painful and passionate moments in the lives of people who use language like it’s quiet weaponry, tearing each other politely apart. I have seen Pinter performed badly, by folks who let the repetition and the pregnant pauses in the script roboticize them. This is not just boring but also infuriating to watch, because it suggests that someone, either the actors or the director, has never spent time listening to the way “sophisticated” people speak. Pinter on the page looks like circular, mechanical back-and-forth broken by disjunctive bits of conversation and wit. But in the hands of cool actors the repetition gets shaken out and livlified, turned with the thousand small shades of sarcasm, question, defensive delay, and restrained passionate parry that colour real life social discourse. Especially discourse between people who have known each other in a squash-games-and-lunch-and-sleeping-with-your-wife sort of way for a long time, but who have managed quite effectively to remain strangers. This is the story of Betrayal. (For another review of a staging of Betrayal that seemed to escape this Pinteresque danger, check this out.)

Because of the danger of bad and boring Pinter plays, I was trepidatious about checking out the staging of Betrayal that happened this week as part of Montreal’s fashion week. Trepidatious but fully curious and excited by the potential in the hybrid ground being mined by this very young company, Seditionaire; after all, as far and they or I can tell, what they attempted with Pinter this week is a fully new thing. There are nine relatively short scenes in Betrayal and for this staging each scene was given over to a different clothing designer, among them some of the biggest names in current Montreal fashion. Complex Geometries, Denis Gagnon, Fidel, Hastings and Main, Kamkyl, Kuskalla, Lydia Lukidis, Renata Morales, Pearls Before Swine, ReGen, Soku, Travis Taddeo, YSO…

The designers pulled from their current collection to dress the actors, or they designed new, unique pieces to suit the scene. The play is directed by the word-of-mouth-famous Jacqueline McClintock- who teaches exclusive acting lessons in Montreal, Toronto and Spain; and seems generally beloved by the actors who are electrified by the Meisner technique as she teaches it, despite the fact that they are sometimes critiqued in the press. Of course, they are also often award winning and praised, so what can you say. McClintock directs, but the fact of this collaboration and production is almost entirely indebted to the woman who also plays the only female character in the play, Lita Tresierra.

Tresierra gives the most intense and remarkable performance in the play, perhaps because she knows she has the most on the line. As artistic director she worked to forge a relationship between two art worlds- fashion and theatre- both of which are populated by some larger then life personalities, not to mention egos, and the combination is precarious and dangerous. The clothes could disrupt the chemistry of the play, draw too much attention away from the lives that are being delicately created, make the actors feel like clothespegs or dolls. The clothes could increase the sense of artifice and pretension that lurks in theatre and in the fashion world, making the play nothing but a big mess of rub-you-the-wrong-way-ness. If the clothes are too interesting, the play could fade away in contrast, and if the clothes are too ugly or uninteresting the play could become an unintenional farce. Fortunately, none of this is the case.

The Detention Printmaking studio is full of artistic hum when we come in a bit early to get pictures of the set. Ludwig is perched above my front row seat poking at a projector, and Benjamin is in the back with video camera, cd players and a mixer, preparing to record the performance as well as provide the sound. He comes over to say hello, and with a glint of delight quietly mentions that, though hospitalized for appendicitis and unable to compose unique material for the play, he did find time to record felt - yes, felt- to get the exact scratching sound he wanted, and to layer jazz played backwards into pieces that will be played during scene changes when we are going backward in time. Both Benjamin and Ludwig are glowy with happiness over their participation in the play. Before it starts, I ask Ludwig if the fashion becomes like a character in the play and he says no, but that it intensifies the feeling of being in different places in time. It also slows down scene changes a bit, despite the dressers backstage, which he likes actually, because it gives people permission to talk both about the play and about the clothes during the breaks.

It’s interesting that when so much theatre has gotten tangled up in echoing filmic conventions- speeding up scenes, staging quick movie-like cuts between them- adding fashion artists to theatre slows it down, and draws deeper attention to the body. The living body breathing, sweating and passing time being someone and somewhere else while right in front of you is perhaps the only thing that uniquely characterizes theatre. How interesting that fashion, when included in a precise an well conceptualized way, could return some of that disjunctive magic to the stage.

According to Lita Trisierra, this collaboration works because the play is based on three strong characters and one strong theatrical story line. Pinter lends itself to this added fashion focus because it is so resolutely actor and text focused. Betrayal is carried by the language and the unfolding of love betrayed. With strong characters at the core, and very clean blank-canvas-esque stage design, the changes in fashion can add without taking away. Beckett or Ariel Dorfman (Death and the Maiden) could also be meaningfully challenged by a similar designer infusion, suggests Trisierra, again because the plays are so actor focused. (ps- Lita: I want to audition if you do Beckett. Seriously- I don’t care what the Beckett protection society will say, I’ve been wanting to do Godot with women and the tatters of beautiful clothes for years. Sign me up!) A Comedy of Errors, on the other hand, which is driven by kooky plot mishaps, might find the fashion too much, making an already colourful play garish. It’s a good point and I think she’s right- this staging works because there are a small number of people to keep track of on the stage, because there are large gaps of time between scenes, and because the play is just about one thing- betrayal. Everything else can swirl around that anchor of dirty despair and wasted years and subtle pains. It also works because Tiesierra, Ken Leonard, and Lief Anderson- the 3 main actors- carry off the play with emotional intensity and hysterical wit and little boy sorrow over screwed up friendship, crackling close beneath a thin surface of social banter and, there is no more apt word for it- fashioned distraction. And Rolo Zuniga- the waiter charicature- is funny, well timed, and believable, which is hard to do when you’re the the only character from another world in a scene or play.

The collaboration was organized in this way: Trisierra staged a reading of the script and invited the designers she wanted to work with to come. She had spent some years working in fashion while studying theatre- she’d gone from working retail to helping a friend with a boutique (Fly) find new independent designers to spotlight, and so she’d been able to drop hints to the right people in the fashion scene and make sure the folks she wanted to work with would show up. After the reading, the designers claimed the scenes they wanted to dress, drawing straws for scenes that were contested, until everyone had one and was satisfied. Then, for the most part, the designers did not see the play again until they came to see it staged. They gave their focus to what they knew of the scene- either it was at party, or it was in a love nest in Italy; either the characters were dressed for holiday casual, or for shock and awe (as the designer from Fidel gigglingly insisted). Whatever the case, the clothes for each scene had a distinct individual designer’s focus, which is sometimes lacking in the theatre. And the characters were consistently dressed in a manner exactly suiting their economic class- this is a story about book publishers and other high-end hard-lifers, after all. Rather then the fashion detracting from the scene, it largely serves the opposite effect, giving it a spin of realism.

Theatre is mostly made by folks who are broke, and so costumes are often at best scraped and sewn together from thrift stores and what the actors already own which is what they can afford. Sometimes this works to brilliant effect, but sometimes not. When there is a costume budget, the emphasis is usually put on getting the period right, often in a simplistic or sterotyped way- bell bottoms to signify the seventies, etc. What this staging of Betrayal gets right is that the highest classes are always existing on another fashion plane where time is more disjunctive. Because they can afford to dress ostentatiously, thoughtfully, referentially, the fashion forward often seem unstuck in time, wearing doublets and knickers, and then chains and leather, and then fluffy raw silk bustles (like on the back of the Hastings and Main dress- man I wish I had a picture of that. beautiful and cool.) With people used to using fashion to communicate at the helm of costume direction, it becomes possible to make more decisive choices with the clothes, rather then make clothes that are intentionally unobtrusive, as is sometimes the default choice for costume for theatre. The multi-costume author effect loses the coherency of a single costume designer, but few lives are coherent. so it’s ok.

(in an upcoming post i’m going to break down the mini collections of clothes presented in each scene of the play and provide links to find out more about designers. all photos of this event were taken by Tristan Brand, and he’s got some more I want to include and when I get ‘em you’ll see ‘em!)