Andrew Shaver Talks About SideMart Theatrical Grocery and The Mark of all Genius

When I was a kid, the worst feeling in the world (apart from cranging my head into my knee while jumping on the bed) was thinking that I’d disappointed my parents. It was OK if they got mad at me (and they often did - they loved that damn bed) but when their feelings went from anger to disappointment (or worse, skipped anger entirely), my heart sank and I lost my words.

A full childhood, a stumbling adolescence and a whole decade of grownupness spent actively evading these scenarios hopefully contributed to some pleasant aspects of my personality, but it also hollowed out a space for some ridiculously deep-rooted sensitivity. And it was into this painful abscess that a horrible, blinding, sickly, flashbacky type of light was shone earlier in January during a laboratory-style creation experiment in Montreal.

My name is Andrew Shaver and I’m the Artistic Director of Montreal’s SideMart Theatrical Grocery, a group which has the great luxury of being the Company-in-Residence at the Segal Centre’s Studio. This relationship allows SideMart to use the Studio twice a season however we wish, which, for the past two years, has been for full-scale productions.

 We inaugurated the space in December ‘07 with the Canadian premiere of Mark Doherty’s wickedly funny Trad, continued in May ’08 with an award-winning musical adaptation of Derek McCormack’s Haunted Hillbilly and this past September we presented the English-language World premiere of Gerard Vasquez’s OOOO!  It's a testament to the teams that we assembled that these shows were both artistic and critical successes (watch yourself tricksy 'financial success' -- your time will come).

Then we broke from tradition. SideMart was born as an actors’ ensemble and until this year we’ve focused on written scripts that have pushed us into new modes of performance expression. It wasn’t until we adapted McCormack’s novella Haunted Hillbilly that we ventured into play creation. The success of that adventure, coupled with nudges from the other half of my artistic life (10 years with SaBooge, an all-out creation ensemble) had me thinking about a whimsical creation for the bleak days of January. An experiment that would engage the entire artistic team in all aspects of the creation. A study in playing styles, in writing styles and in set, lighting and sound designs. Ultimately, a study in justifying nonsense and striving for emotional truth in silliness. Borrowing a little from Wittgenstein, who we quoted in the program, we implored our audience to come down from the barren hills of cleverness and come play with us in our valleys of silliness.

So, when at the talkback of January 21st, 2009, I introduced myself as the director of the preceding 35-minute experiment (entitled, wait for it…Mark of all Genius) and an older gentleman in the front row sat up and asked incredulously, “You directed this crap? This nothing?” I instantly felt 11 years old again.  He then pointed his finger at me, “You are SideMart Theatrical. What was this?” I felt like doing his dishes, wiping the counter and making him a pot of Earl Grey tea like I would for my mom in the hopes that he might then forget his growing disappointment in us.

I knew that we hadn’t exactly hit an artistic home run with our latest creation, but we weren’t purporting to have. I thought we had laid it on our sleeves: 15 days to create a 35 minute-PWYC-talkback after every performance-4 night experiment in style, process and story.

Most people got it, evidenced primarily in the nightly talkbacks, but, let’s admit it, also by the relatively low turn out. Thinking that may have gone: “Cool, a new SideMart show. Oh no, it’s just a laboratory, whatever that means. It’s too cold to head out for that. Plus, the Habs play tonight.” Fair enough. As for those who came, I figured they must have been interested in being part of the dialogue with us as we experimented, regardless of the cold (or the Habs). This I thought was a perfect situation.

Unfortunately, our friend in the front row came from an hour away on a snowy Montreal January night expecting to see a polished front-to-back SideMart show in the lineage of our past work.  We didn’t give it to him.

For the next 15 minutes I tried to communicate what I had failed to communicate before he trekked out to the show, that it was a laboratory. It was a space to experiment with an interested audience.

“Do it at home. This is not for anyone but you.”

Artistic success or failure aside, I realized that we had failed to clearly articulate the experiment’s purpose and to then communicate that to our audience before they arrived.

But then, one by one the rest of the audience cleared their throats and started to fight our battle for us, or perhaps, more to the point, for themselves as willing participants in the evening. Which was a good thing; I was being swayed.

The conversation continued for another 40 minutes (making it almost twice as long as the show itself) and included a local playwright earnestly laying out for us the building blocks for good drama, the original voice of dissent positing that we hadn’t the collective experience to make this kind of work interesting and a fed up veteran actor losing his cool and marking his exit with signature wit and mellifluous poetry.

Toward the end, a critic from one of the weeklies, mostly silent throughout, asked why theatre is so often denied the freedom of presenting in this context; why, as soon as there’s an audience are things automatically judged as a finished product? The reality is that a new play can only really start to live once it’s in front of an audience of new people ready to be surprised, delighted, alienated, frustrated. Maybe we’d all come to the ends of our ropes, but this resonated. We all agreed to wrap our faces in scarves and toques and furry hoods and head back out into the cold and continue our solitary pursuits after an evening spent in, well, communion.

I saw our dissenting gentleman later that same week at another SideMart production at the Centaur (it was busy month for us). I expressed my surprise that he was back for more. “I see all your shows. I will always come.  But what I saw last week was crap.” He asked me if we were going to keep working on it. I told him we hadn’t decided. “Please don’t. I’m an old man, I can only take so much disappointment.”

SideMart’s new musical Haunted Hillbilly: The Hyram Woodside Atrocity will run again in the Segal Studio in Montreal in December ’09. Andrew is also an Artistic Director with the Montreal/Brooklyn based touring ensemble SaBooge Theatre, who are currently developing a theremin-fueled radio-inspired stage play Speak Easy. He’s off to Stratford for the ’09 season performing in Macbeth, Cyrano de Bergerac and (most excitingly) Zastrozzi.

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