Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff, photo by Dahlia Katz.
By Liz Nicholls,
You go through life accumulating stuff, you know you do. Stuff that looks as innocuous as a tea cup or a broken toaster but comes wrapped in emotional ribbon. Stuff that connects you to people or moments, or selves, you’ve lost.
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What are you supposed to do with all the stuff?
To toss or not to toss. Big Stuff, officially opening in the Citadel’s Highwire Series next week, is all about that. An original combination of storytelling, memoir, and improv interaction with the audience, it’s the bright idea of the Toronto-based married Canadian comedy duo Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram (who’s from Edmonton), along with director Kat Sandler, a playwright herself. They arrive in Baram’s home town trailing raves from a premiere run, twice held over, of Big Stuff a year ago in Toronto, and three weeks at the Segal Centre in Montreal.
The theme that comes up right away, and lands lightly in conversation with this funny and thoughtful pair, is loss. Zooming in from New York (and a two-night showcase for potential producers), Snieckus and Baram trace the inspiration for Big Stuff to the loss of the last of their parents four years ago. “We became a really tight family in the pandemic,” says Baram, whose parents had been gone for many years before that. “We quarantined together at our little cottage up north, and became really reliant on each other…. In some ways for me, losing (Naomi’s dad) Vic was a harder loss than my own father, hard as it is to admit…. When he passed we were left with a lot of responsibility to take care of their stuff.”
“I already had my parents’ stuff, which I couldn’t throw away because Naomi wouldn’t let me,” says Baram. “Naomi had her grandmother’s stuff. There was our stuff, a truck full, from L.A. and the five years we lived there going back and forth to Toronto…. I wanted to leave it there; Naomi disagreed.”
Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz
They’re award-winners for sketch comedy and improv who regularly work in TV and film, who met at Second City in Toronto. Edmonton audiences have seen them in action (with Ron Pederson) when The National Theatre of the World has touched down here: in Impromptu Splendour, they improvise an entire play, the one a celebrated playwright like Ibsen or Tennessee Williams somehow forgot to write. For a couple of graduate theatre school actors (U of A for Baram and the former Ryerson now TMU for Snieckus), couples’ friction about stuff, and what stays vs what goes, pointed to live theatre — of a particularly interactive kind.
“Universal!” says Baram, “what to do with the stuff that’s left behind.” And “everybody’s got their stuff — in a basement, a closet, a drawer…” says Snieckus with a sympathetic shrug. Improv is here and now, “ephemeral” in Baram’s word. “We don’t have kids; what are we going to do with all our stuff?” says Snieckus puckishly. “Who’s going to inherit this play?” There’s a flurry of brainstorming; they can imagine Mark Meer and Belinda Cornish having a go at it….
Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
Anyhow, the universality of stuff and its emotional hold on us is how we get to be involved in Big Stuff. “It’s the collaboration with the audience that’s important to us,” says Snieckus of their unusual blend of storytelling and improv. When we enter the theatre, there’s a card on every chair. “We’re asking people for an object that reminds them of someone or something of importance to them…. And it’s part of the storytelling. Through the show we find ways of integrating those objects into the play.” You can join in by contributing stories about your stuff. Or not.
There’s no template for building a theatre piece like Big Stuff, as they describe. “We made jokes, we did stand-up together. And we started writing a lot,” says Baram. And writing, for them, usually starts in improvising. As Snieckus describes, “we’d record scenes on our phones and transcribe. We’d send audio from the cottage to Kat,” who was busy in Stratford working on her hit version of Anne of Green Gables. “Sometimes we’d write monologues about our folks, and bring them back together and read them.”
“Saving marriages,” he says, joking about Sandler’s multiple contributions to the production. “That ‘other voice’ is so key when working with a couple. So we don’t have to have those conversations with each other about what stays what goes…. It’s so close to us, to our parents. What story can really incorporate a person?”
What stays what goes…. ah, there’s a question that applies in an uncanny way both to writing plays and to the subject at the heart of Big Stuff. Snieckus, whose own Firecracker Department podcast series interviews female and non-binary artists across the continent, says that in the end, she and Baram “chose objects that were relevant to the show,” as the first priority. Your dad’s jacket didn’t make it into the show, even though it’s (signature) him,” she says to Baram. “Or my dad’s pen holster…. A fine line between finding objects that fed the story but also represent the people. (The objects) had to serve two masters!”
“And it had to be equal,” says Baram. “We couldn’t have an hour and a half on (his dad) Harvey and just touch on (Snieckus’s mom) Anne….” Snieckus smiles. Right. Each of our parents actually deserves their own hour and a half.”
As described by Baram and Snieckus, I’d say the double family dynamic has TV series potential, too. Baram senior was “a showman himself,” says his son, whose Edmonton genealogy is blue-chip. Harvey’s Corned Beef Palace, off Whyte, was his dad’s first deli. “And together my parents ran my grandparents’ burlesque club, Blue Danube, across from the Strath. “They were carneys; for years they had The Snackery on the midway at K-Days.” Baram’s brothers went into the biz, “but I just didn’t have it in me.”
And how’s this for historical antecedents? One of Baram’s early gigs was stocking the shelves at his mom’s smoke shop in Webber Motors on the Calgary Trail, right across from Allard Way where SCTV got shot. “That’s where John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin got their smokes.”
“The wild trajectory of life” that returns Baram to Edmonton for a run of Big Stuff at the Citadel has another bonus. “I am going to see the Oilers play,” he declares emphatically. “I grew up in the Glory Years; I’m part of that generation desperately trying to relive their childhood.”
Snieckus, who left home in Kitchener-Waterloo at 17 for theatre school in Toronto, is a first-generation immigrant. Her mom was a Brit; her dad, an organic chemist prof at Queen’s, was Lithuanian. “Both my parents loved Second City. So when I started doing shows there they were ‘aah, NOW we get it!’”
“Acting as a goal of improv is important to Matt and I,” says Snieckus. “We always called it ‘grown-up improv’ because we didn’t want to be bar-provisers. We wanted to do theatre work that just happened to be improvised.” Says Baram, “our whole intention as a company is to being those two worlds (improv and theatre) together. And it’s happening more and more,” as we know in Edmonton, an improv-crazy town where the top improvisers are stage actors.
“People,” Snieckus thinks, “want their theatre to be more spontaneous, more interactive. And that’s what we’ve tried to do with Big Stuff…. It’s not us presenting; it’s us and the DNA of the day.”
Says Baram, “we tell them our stories; we listen to their stories. It’s a conversation…. There really isn’t a better way to meet a community, to learn about them.” And the live-ness of it all makes Big Stuff “A.I. proof,” as Snieckus put it, “every step of the way…. And in a world where so much isn’t hopeful, this is a hopeful thing.”
PREVIEW
Big Stuff
Theatre: A Baram and Snieckus Production at the Citadel
Created by and starring: Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus
Co-created and directed by: Kat Sandler
Running: Oct. 18 through Nov. 9
Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820
