Heist, Grand Theatre, set by Beyata Hackborn, costumes by Jessica Oostergo, lighting by Siobhán Sleath, projection design by Corwin Ferguson. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The play that starts previews this weekend at the Citadel defies the laws of probability, or teases them, in all kinds of ways.
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Heist, as you can’t not know from the title, is a crime caper, an impossibly ingenious robbery pulled off against long odds. The latest from playwright Arun Lakra takes the complications of a heist, whose natural home is on screen, witness films like Ocean’s Eleven, into the 3-D world of live theatre. Which ups the ante and the challenges, dramatically, since everything onstage happens before our very eyes.
And then, as Lakra explains on the phone from his Calgary home base, Heist adds “a whodunnit element so the audience is also engaged with a mystery: double-crosses, who’s done what, a trail of breadcrumbs along the way.…. I self-indulgently call it “a heist whodunnit.”
There is, as well, a certain long-shot improbability built into the double-optic career of Lakra himself, the rare, and possibly exclusive, occupant of the theatre subset of ophthalmological surgeon-playwrights. Lakra, genial and amused in conversation, calls himself, modestly, “the accidental playwright.”
The last time Edmonton audiences saw a Lakra play, Sequence at Shadow Theatre in 2014, we found ourselves watching an award-winning “science thriller,” two stories intertwined in an ingenious double-helix wrapped around ideas about probability, luck, random chance, coincidence. In one, a professor urgently researching the genetic code for her impending blindness is visited by a student who has managed, against formidable odds, to get every answer on a 150-question multiple-choice test wrong. The other strand of the play’s DNA concerns an improbably lucky author who’s predicted the Super Bowl coin-toss 19 years in a row.
playwright Arun Lakra, whose latest play Heist runs at the Citadel in a co-production with the Grand Theatre.
And speaking as we are of unlikely double helixes, there was the way Lakra managed, in a time-management coup, to divide his week between medicine (his ophthalmic specialty: refractive surgery) and “creative days.” He wrote short stories; he wrote screenplays, songs, novels. And he “stumbled onto playwriting…. I had this idea for a story, but didn’t have the first idea about playwriting; I had to learn the craft.” And he gives the Calgary theatre community credit for that. “I was surrounded by people who were encouraging and supportive.”
“I still dabble in other forms of writing, screen and prose. To my naive eye, it’s all about the story…. I try to let the story dictate the medium.”
”Three years ago, Lakra’s delicate three day/ two day balance changed suddenly. “I’d been dealing with a chronic medical condition,” he says, “and it started to affect my hands…. My hands are important for my medical job, so I had to make a pretty quick, and jarring, decision to close my practice. By default I had see if I could make a go of it as a writer. No more excuses; I tried to look at that as a silver lining.”
“Abrupt, yes. But it’s given me time and energy for the creative side of things,” says Lakra. “I’m still trying to figure out what this new phase looks like…. I’m so happy to have something I feel passionate about!”
Sequence, which won both the Alberta Playwriting Competition and the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Drama Prize, was, amazingly, Lakra’s second play ever. Since then, Heist, an improbable hybrid born of “a stage and screen duality,” has been workshopped at the Citadel, it’s had a staged reading in the Collider Festival, it premiered in 2024 at Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre. And now, ramped up in scale, budget, and high-tech accoutrements — lasers, drones, projections, guns, live video, an aerialist (!) — in the production directed by Haysam Kadri, artistic director of Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects, it’s on the Citadel mainstage after a run at the Grand in London, Ont.
The Grand Theatre cast of Heist, a co-production with the Citadel Theatre. Set design Beyata Hackborn, costume design Jessica Oostergo, lighting by Siobhán Sleath, projection design Corwin Ferguson. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
“Sequence was quite cerebral, a play of ideas,” says Lakra. “This one is popcorn. It isn’t going to make anyone want to ponder the big existential questions of our time…. Although they’re quite disparate in subject matter and intention, in a strange way, they were equally complex to write.” He laughs, “it’s taken a fair bit of brain power, and not only my own; it’s taken multiple brains. We want to be smart and ahead of the audience.” He and Kadri and an entire team of technical whizzes have “gone through the exercise of trying to assess at every moment what the audience could be thinking, and surgically directing that.”
Heist came about, as Lakra explains, during the pandemic when Chad Rabinovitz, the artistic director of Indiana-based Constellation Stage and Screen, “knocked on my door with a proposal: could I write for him a theatrical version of a heist? Can we take something that’s traditionally a cinematic genre and tell the story onstage in a way that is equally satisfying?”
Heist, Grand Theatre co-production with Citadel Theatre, Photo by Dahlia Katz. Set design Beyata Hackborn, costume design Jessica Oostergo, lighting design Siobhán, projection design Corwin Ferguson.
Lakra was intrigued, but he initially had his doubts. “I can’t figure out how to make this work. There’s a reason heist stories haven’t been onstage! There are things you can do in film: camera angles, flashbacks, what you’re focussing on, what’s you’re not show showing the audience. You can steer the audience towards and away from what you want them to see.” In theatre, “this was the challenge: how can you fool an audience? surprise an audience?”
Lakra persisted. And in this, he explains, he was partly motivated by the perpetual parental quest to find something that his family, including two teenage kids, could all enjoy, together. Not easy, as every parent and every kid knows. “The one thing we could all agree on was the Ocean movies.”
”I started this adventure thinking that although we’re constrained in theatre — we can’t tell the audience what to watch and what not to watch — we also have certain opportunities with a theatrical heist that we don’t have onscreen,” says Lakra. “We have to stay ahead of the audience, to end up having them be surprised and satisfied.”
And he’s been gratified by the response. “Somehow I’ve stumbled on this thing that attracts a young crowd, in their teens and 20s, and a new audience, people who don’t traditionally go to the theatre.” He laughs. “Teenagers can be picky (laughs) especially when they’re your own. And this does seem to appeal to a younger generation, with its fast pace and high-tech.” After the Vertigo premiere, Lakri’s son paid him a moment-to-cherish compliment: “Dad, I didn’t hate it.” Then he brought his friends.
Currently, among other projects Lakri is working on a Sequence companion piece, Consequence, as part of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre playwriting unit. He’s pondering his film version of Heist (ironically, “I’m not sure it will translate,” he says).
And meanwhile, there’s the theft of a very very expensive jewel to enjoy. With its array of theatrical challenges and technical complications, Heist is, par excellence, a vindication of the theatrical principle of creative collaboration. “We’re all exercising muscles we haven’t exercised before, collectively, figuring things out on the fly. It’s been quite an adventure!”
PREVIEW
Heist
Theatre: Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre
Written by: Arun Lakri
Directed by: Haysam Kadri
Set design: Beyata Hackborn; Costume design: Jessica Oostergo; Lighting design: Siobhán Sleath; Projection design: Corwin Ferguson
Starring: Alexander Ariate, Belinda Cornish, Devin MacKinnon, Callan McKenna Potter, Gillian Moon, Priya Narine
Running: through April 13
Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820
