Tiny Bear Jaws’ Elena Belyea takes the Greeks for a spin at the Fringe in a new version of The Oresteia: ‘gore (i want to disappear)’, Theater News

By Liz Nicholls,

“What’s something I haven’t tried before?” Elena Belyea asked themself a year ago.

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Now, there’s a question for Belyea to take to their seventh Fringe festival. They’ve written provocative dramas (Smoke, Cleave) and dark comedies, a site-specific teen house party (Everyone We Know Will Be There), an apocalyptic dance musical for a contactless world (I Don’t Even Miss You), a satire with bite, (Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable) — all for their 11-year-old indie theatre company Tiny Bear Jaws (with creative partner Tori Morrison). And they’ve acted in them, sometimes directed them, too. They’ve collaborated with theatres across the country. They’ve done stand-up, and a “stand-up hybrid” (This Won’t Hurt, I Promise); they’ve created and performed TikTok videos, and a live web series, for their queer sketch comedy duo Gender? I Hardly Know Them (with Sydney Campbell).

But they’ve never before tried an adaptation. Gore (I want to disappear), premiering Thursday midnight at the Fringe, is the first. And firsts are something the Fringe is for, as many a veteran theatre artist in this theatre town has discovered. What Belyea and their cast of four have been working on since last summer is Greek and ancient. The Oresteia by Aeschylus is a trilogy of linked tragedies that chronicles an extremely dysfunctional family, The House of Atreus, in all its violence, murder, treachery, vengeance, curses, sexual heat, weird dealings with the gods….

Belyea and Aeschylus go back. The former had originally gone west, as a college kid, enrolled in creative writing at the University of Victoria, and the latter was on a reading list. “I was convinced I was going to write fiction,” Belyea says. They lucked out with an inspiring theatre history prof (Dr. Jennifer Wise), and a playwright was born. Did you know, for example, that “an oracle predicted that Aeschylus’s end would come from the sky, so he spent the majority of life indoors,” till he stepped out one day “and got killed by a turtle shell dropped by a seagull”? Belyea remains struck by the bizarre combo of tragedy and dark comedy in this “not very epic way to die.” Nectar from the gods for Tiny Bear Jaws sensibility.

Belyea and the cast “would meet once a month to try scenes out, on our feet. And we’d go into a rehearsal hall once in a while to play with design elements.” It’s the long-form way to create work.

“I need more hats,” declares Belyea, who’s the producer, writer, director, and also production designer — assisted by technical consultation with the designer (and Tiny Bear Jaws partner) Morrison on “how to set up my tech system” to fit within the Fringe constraint of quick turn-around between shows. “A simple set,” as they describe the gore (I want to disappear) design: “a bunch of practical lights and plastic.”

“We have a generator that travels around the stage, hidden. Plus practical lighting like bike lights or LED fluorescent tubes we charge between shows; we can change colour by remote control.” Morrison also contributed a sound design that includes covers of songs “from artists I really love,” like Peaches.

Sarah Emslie, Autumn Strom, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Kristen Padayas in ‘gore (i just want to disappear), Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang

“There’s a lot of violence” in The Oresteia, as Belyea points out. After all, in the very first scene Agamemnon kills his first-born daughter Iphigenia on request from the gods, so his forces can secure a fair wind to sail to Troy and rescue his wife’s sister Helen. In Belyea’s version, none of the violence is depicted onstage in a naturalistic way. With movement designer Ainsley Hillyard, “we worked on different ways of (conveying) the inner world, and feelings, of the characters.”

The tricky thing about adaptations, Belyea has found, is to assess “what are parts of the story that need to be changed, because they bug me, or to be more complex and interesting?” and what are changes that would fundamentally alter the story?

Gore (i want to disappear) “takes place in ancient Greece, but they have phones and cars…. Die-hard House of Atreus fans would be ‘Hey, wait a second!’. But I’m OK with that,” they say. “I wanted (to explore) some of the questions I have about the world right now….” And the lens through which the story is seen is queer and trans: Orestes and Electra, brother and sister, “are both queer in some way … and Electra is trans.”

All four actors are double-cast, which makes for complicated logistics. “Each actor plays a Fury (one of the chorus of goddesses of vengeance) and two other characters….” In the same scene, Sarah Emslie plays both Agamemnon and the daughter Iphigenia he’s killing, simultaneously. “Wild to pull off!” Geoffrey Simon Brown plays both Cassandra the oracle and Orestes, who kills his mother Clytemnestra; Autumn Strom is both Electra, Orestes’ revenge-driven sister, and Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. And Kristen Papayas plays both Clytemnestra and Orestes’ gay lover Pylades, both soldiers back from the war “trying to re-integrate into a normal life.”

A central question that Belyea and the actors returned to again and again in rehearsal has a contemporary kick, too. “Being a person means we all go through a variety of challenging moments, moments and changes that shape us irrevocably. So what does moving forward look like if your idea of ‘forward’ has changed? When do we let ourselves be defined by an event? And when do we try to move past it?”

“So much of the play hinges on revenge!” Here’s the crux, says Belyea. “Something happens. What next?”

Gore (i want to disappear), starring Sarah Emslie, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Autumn Strom, Kristen Padayas, runs at the Fringe  (Stage 3, Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns) Thursday through Aug. 19. Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca.