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Tami Dixon, who portrays Frieda Mannheim, enjoys her time at the clock shop in "The Clockmaker" at City Theatre.
Time is of the essence in "The Clockmaker," playwright Stephen Massicote's fast-paced play in which wit and wordplay, situation and setting, imagery and memory build to conclusions about ... well, all in good time.
Massicote, whose "Mary's Wedding" was a highlight of City Theatre's season last year, kicks off 2010 for City with the U.S. premiere of "The Clockmaker," which won Canada's Betty Mitchell Award for best new play of 2009.
Dialogue and setting allow the audience to gather clues to the fates of the clockmaker, Heinrich Mann; his new friend, Frieda, who brings him a broken clock; and her husband, Adolphus. The play opens with the only other character, Monsieur Pierre, interrogating Heinrich in a way that lets the audience know that there's a mystery afoot.
"The challenge for me is making sure that the story, because it is so fragmented and a puzzle, is being told as clearly as possible, so that the mystery is kind of tantalizing and not annoying," director Tracy Brigden said as she prepared for her first full rehearsal last weekend.
In "Mary's Wedding," the challenge for City was helping the audience make the transitions as actors changed characters, time and place on a dime. In "The Clockmaker," time and place are clearly delineated on the page but become a matter of interpretation for the production team.
"As we begin to fill in the image, and you begin to realize where they are and how it's shifting back and forth, it sort of tumbles into place in the second half of the play," Brigden said.
The company's job is to portray the truth of the characters and "let the play shine through."
As we get to know Heinrich (played by Harry Bouvy), we find a man who has aspired to be the world's greatest clockmaker but has been settling for repair work. He is newly inspired by Frieda (Tami Dixon), the victim of an abusive relationship who finds a timeout from her troubles with the friendly clockmaker.
Together, they transition back and forth from their everyday lives to an otherworldly place, where memory is fleeting or erased. Heinrich, in particular, strives to regain his past, while Frieda, who has endured countless beatings and reconciliations in her married life, is more content to live in the moment.
As we move from the violence perpetrated by Adolphus (Joel Ripka) to the serenity of a sheltering tree in the rain, the audience has to decipher what is real or memory -- or something else? Brigden drops clues along the way; for example, a sweater left at the clock shop by Frieda is seen again only in that inviting place where memory has failed her.
"The play is kind of a fable. [The violence] has to be real and it has to be difficult to watch, just in the way a fairy tale, where little children get baked in an oven, you've got to have the really ugly stuff so the beautiful stuff pops in relief," Brigden said. "So you have the ugly side of the world, and the beautiful side of the world."
On the beautiful side are four clocks created by Heinrich -- or in this case, props master Louise Phetteplace and set designer Jeff Cowie, who have had to figure out how to integrate them into the action.
"It's really fun to create the decoration of them," Brigden said. "The challenging part is that they have to go off at the right time onstage. That's what we're really working on, how can the actor trigger this onstage, how can the sound designer put something in so it sounds like the sound is happening at just the right time. All that theater magic that's really fun to do, but it's challenging at the same time."
Making all that work "is kind of what we all live for."
It would be unfair to say much more about "The Clockmaker," because part of the fun is enjoying the snappy dialogue and picking up on the clues along the way.
"The thing about a little bit of a complicated play like this, there are a lot of audience members who want to know the right answer, what they should think or feel," Brigden said. "In a good play, the answer to that is, what did you think?"
The themes and metaphors become pretty clear, she added, if you take some time to think about them.
