Diego Matamoros in Aleph.Cylla von Tiedemann
The newest play from Soulpepper Theatre toys with some of the largest concepts imaginable: infinity, existence, truth and relativity - but it does so on a curiously small scale.
The Aleph is a one-man show created by three local heavyweights - actor Diego Matamoros, playwright Daniel Brooks and designer Michael Levine - and adapted from the short story of the same name by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It's also the first creation in Soulpepper's new Lab Series, a play-development program that pours big money into a low-key workshop model.
The Aleph is a point where a person can see and understand the whole universe in a single moment. In Borges's tale, a self-absorbed writer discovers the Aleph and tries to convince the narrator - named Borges - of its existence. The Soulpepper version features only a single character, Diego, played by Matamoros, who tells the audience a story.
"It's me. Well, it's a character called me," Matamoros says.
The play starts autobiographically, but strays, blurring fact and fiction. Both Matamoros and Brooks were fascinated by Borges's habit of inserting himself into his stories, and Brooks's goal is "to have the show come from Diego as much as possible." But both have carefully guarded the show's secrets, including how they handle the Aleph itself.
"[In]Gustave Doré's illustrations of Dante's Inferno, his big challenge was: What was he going to draw when he got to heaven? And what he decided to do was to leave the page blank … so, if that gives you any idea …" Brooks says, trailing off.
Central to the play are fundamental questions: How do we frame time and space in relative terms? What do we and don't we believe, and why? And what is real?
"All the major authors dealt with that: illusion and reality," Matamoros says. "Northrop Frye … said a really civilized life is understanding that there's an element of illusion to reality and an element of reality in illusion."
Very real are the faith and the cash that Soulpepper artistic director Albert Schultz has put into the Lab Series, in part to keep Soulpepper's repertoire from getting stale. "The notion is to bring significant resources to a project that is experimental in nature and takes the pressure off the process of having to present a fully-marketed production at a certain ticket price," Schultz says.
Audiences pay a third of Soulpepper's regular ticket price and are invited to after-show discussions with the artists. Some shows will go no further, while Schultz hopes others will become the company's next hot ticket. But in every case, he will spend big, relative to the shows' smaller scale.
"It gets everyone thinking in a more adventurous way," Schultz says.
Play-development programs are increasingly common. For decades, CanStage has had a program focused on getting new Canadian works to its stages. Internationally, California's La Jolla Playhouse has a Page to Stage program which solicits audience feedback and makes constant changes to works as they develop. And for Brooks, who spends most of his time steering Necessary Angel's continuous lineup of original works, the model feels familiar.
"You work on a piece and continue to work on it. And if you like it, you try to keep doing it and keep making it better until people really do want it," he says.
But the funding model for the Lab Series is notable. It relies on the Garland Schultz Artistic Development Fund, a $1-million challenge gift from philanthropists Roger and Kevin Garland that has drawn another $500,000 in pledges. Sitting separate from general revenues, it's a spend-down fund: Soulpepper uses a certain sum each year, regardless of its returns, and will eventually exhaust it, meaning Schultz will one day need new supporters.
Since Matamoros devised the idea with Levine and Brooks some five years ago, the program has paid for a dozen or so scattered weeks of studio development. All that remains is to see whether it survives the crucial test.
"In the end, the world will tell you whether to put it away, or whether 'We still would like to see that.' That's not my decision, right?" asks Matamoros.
"An Aleph is a tiny thing within a big thing. We can make big things into tiny things, but we can also make tiny things into big things."
The Aleph continues at Soulpepper until March 20.