After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and lighting design Ami Farrow, Costume design Leona Brausen, multi-media design Matt Schuurman.
By Liz Nicholls,
After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, a new play by Michael Czuba premiering in the Shadow Theatre season, sets itself a fascinating challenge. It takes us behind the thick paint, the distinctive brushstrokes, the glowing light and swirling night skies of some of the world’s most celebrated paintings.
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It’s a backstage pass of sorts to the lives of the little-known supporting players in a famous, and well-known drama. They’re the uncredited ones, the ones who’ve always lived in the shadows on the world stage, where the troubled Dutch genius Van Gogh stars, painting a starry night sky, sunflowers and almond blossoms, card players and wheat fields, a cafe terrace at night. His is a tragic story that we all know: a brilliant artist out of his time, difficult to be with, tormented by madness and poverty, unrecognized and unvalued till after he met his tragic end.
The sharp-eyed Calgary-based playwright puts the spotlight on a woman whose name and story most of us didn’t know, Van Gogh’s sister-in-law Joanna Bonger. And as Czuba has discovered, hers is a story that counts as a bona fide contribution to the feminist re-examination of history, and the place of women in it.
Steven Greenfield and Lora Brovold in After Mourning – Before Van Gogh. Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Projections by Matt Schuurman, costumes by Leona Brausen
After the death of the artist’s brother Theo, Van Gogh’s art dealer sibling and sole means of support, the widowed Joanna, now a single mother saddled with 600 “worthless” paintings, took up Theo’s mission to make the world recognize and appreciate Van Gogh’s “modern” art. And this was a rocky, uphill road, and, as we learn in After Mourning, she met with resistance of every kind, artistic, sexist, domestic.
But Joanna persisted, with heroic stubbornness. And the stage itself, with Ami Farrow’s burnished wood set, dominated and glowingly animated by Matt Schuurman’s projections of Van Gogh paintings, in close-up and long shots, always in motion along with our optical distance, is a testament to the ultimate vindication of the crusader, an art suffragist if ever there was one.
The play takes up the theme of Joanna’s wilful persistence, culled from letters and amplified from art history, and imagines it as a love story, woven from present (1891) moments and flashbacks. We meet the naive young woman (Donna-Leny Hansen) who falls in love with Theo (Steven Greenfield), with occasional intrusions from his impossibly demanding artist bro (Andrew Ritchie as Van Gogh). The older Joanna (Lora Brovold) observes, as if her memory has come to life.
In a counterpoint of scenes between the older Joanna and her resistant brother (Fatmi Yassine el Fassi el Fihri), her now-grown-up son Vincent Willem (Andrew Ritchie), her second husband Johan (el Fassi el Fihri) as well as her continuing conversations with Theo from beyond the grave, a story emerges with a lot of obstacles and a strong feminist drive.
It’s an elaborate, intriguing, somewhat teetery, pattern of storytelling, to be sure. And the efforts to include a considerable load of exposition occasionally do weigh it down. What makes it work is the luminous presence of Brovold onstage as the older Joanna. She is one of our most expressive, emotionally available actors, and the flickers of regret, exasperation, sardonic amusement, skepticism that play across her face are insights into the narrative complications and stakes that require no explanatory text.
Lora Brovold in After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux
In Brovold’s captivatingly fierce performance, Joanna is a woman of heart, but not sentimentalism. When she finally garners some credit, from her brother and son, the compliment that she “saved a mad painter from obscurity,” she brushes it off. “I only created access,” she says, sounding a bit like a 21st century artistic director in an interview.
The writing for older Joanna is not without its witticisms (she evidently has an unusual talent for epigrams, like “he lost his mind and I lost my world”). But there are occasional jarring intrusions by an author from another age: “he showed me a vulnerability I couldn’t dismiss.”
In the production jointly directed by John Hudson and Lana Michelle Hughes, Hansen’s appealing performance as the younger Joanna, naive and in love, learning about art by experiencing it, captures the sense of toughness that will sustain her older self. And as Theo, warm-hearted and perpetually harried, caught between the conflicting demands of pragmatism and loyalty, love and recognition of genius, Greenfield thoughtfully negotiates a performance that speaks to contemporary issues of art and artists, and the unending quest, against the odds, to find champions with vision.
Andrew Ritchie, After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux
Those odds (and the price to be paid) are set forth tangibly in Ritchie’s capture of a mercurial genius, self-centred and maddening, driven not only by artistic inspiration but a sense of grievance, only very occasionally paused by gratitude. “For many days I have been absolutely distraught.” The characters of Joanna’s brother and her son aren’t fleshed out more than human obstacles for her to overcome.
Finding a language that’s both of a period (as in the letters between Theo and Van Gogh, and Theo and Joanna) and somehow contemporary is a tricky thing. It meets with variable success here. “Your reaction is exactly why we must write our own history. It can’t only be about the money. We can’t let anything distract from the art.” This isn’t easily digestible as conversation, to say the least, despite Brovold’ best efforts.
Steven Greenfield and Donna-Leny Hansen in After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
The sense in the story of a novice gradually learning about modern art and finding her own analogies, in sound and music, is persuasive, though. And Dave Clarke’s lovely sweeping sound score is a vital participant, along with Leona Brausen’s vivid period costumes. Lighted by Farrow, the latter enable the actors to create human stage paintings of their own in the production. The love scenes between young Joanna and Theo are set forth, on a spread-out canvas, like a 3-D Déjeuner sur l’herbe. “We went beyond the paint,” says Joanna.
And so does the story about, not an artist but a champion of arts who, against formidable pressures, stepped up to make a difference, for reasons of her own that gradually become broader in vision. “If I get too close to the painting I can still see the colour but I lose the image,” says Joanna the observer-turned-activist. There’s a lesson in that for all of us who are audiences, supporters, champions of art and its practitioners. When Joanna finally pulls off a big, important life-changing exhibition of Van Gogh paintings you want to cheer.
REVIEW
After Mourning – Before Van Gogh
Theatre: Shadow Theatre
Written by: Michael Czuba
Directed by: John Hudson and Lana Hughes
Set and lighting design: Ami Farrow; Costume design: Leona Brausen; Multi-media design: Matt Schuurman.
Starring: Lora Brovold, Fatmi Yassine El Fassi El Fihri, Steven Greenfield, Donna-Leny Hansen, Andrew Ritchie
Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.
Running: through April 9
