Wellington Oracle

By Heather Marie Scheerschmidt

For most of us, the subject of airport security is all too familiar: the little plastic bags for liquids and gels, the ever-changing rules about carry-on luggage, lining up to go through metal detectors, being questioned by stern looking security officers, having bags opened and inspected, and these days, even full body scans. Hardly a week goes by without an airport security issue in the news. And the fear those stories produce means we put up with delays and inconveniences because we understand the system is in place to protect us.

But are we actually any safer?

That is the question raised in “Airport Security”, a new play from indie theatre company Gruppo Rubato.

Hot on the heels of his RBC Emerging Artist of the Year Award, Patrick Gauthier wears the playwright, producer, and director hats on this project. The last show he directed, “Countries Shaped Like Stars” for Mi Casa Theatre, recently took home “Outstanding Fringe Production” and “Outstanding New Creation” at the third annual Les Prix Rideau Awards. “What’s beautiful about using the topic of airports and airport security” Patrick tells me, “is that everybody has a story connected to it…so you can draw on that energy in the rehearsal hall but you can also then draw on that energy from the audience. Everyone has a story, and everyone’s interested in it.”

Gruppo Rubato is a company Patrick founded with Tania Levy and Gavriella Silverstone in 2002. Local actor Kris Joseph joined the company in 2004, and to date they have produced seven original shows – including 2007’s Fringe Festival hit, “Churchill Protocol” which won the Rideau Award that year for “Best New Creation”. The idea for “Airport Security” came during that tour, when they were spending a lot of time in airports, dealing with all of the inconveniences of air travel and watching the experiences of travellers around them. “Airport security is designed to do two things,” Patrick states, “it’s designed to actually make us safer, but I think it’s primary design is to make us feel safer; which I call the pageantry of security.”

This notion of safety versus the illusion of being safe, and the absurdity of extreme safety measures that may or may not actually be effective, is a subject rife with material for the theatre. Patrick has spent the last three years gathering and sifting this material, and developing the piece that will premier at the Irving Greenberg Centre on June 4th.

The three year development process for this script has included most of the current cast. “Everyone in this show was in the July 2009 workshop, and some were involved before that, so everyone has at least a three draft history with the play,” explains Patrick. Because of this history, the production is evolving out of a kind of shared creative memory. “What’s strange is that it makes the project feel enormous…we feel like it’s overwhelming because we all have a memory of scenes that have been cut, and scenes that have been filmed,” Patrick continues, “I’m credited as the playwright, but the play has really been created by this company.”

The audience for “Airport Security” has also been invested in its development. Through things like public readings, sneak previews, a fundraising party at Club Saw, web content both self-generated and aggregated from other sources, Gruppo Rubato has been building awareness around the subject matter and themes of “Airport Security”. At the centre of these community engagement initiatives, is company member and performer Kris Joseph: “If you’ve got something you want to say, and you want to get people involved with it, then you’ve got to open the door and let people in to see it.” A key part of the development process has been about creating the world of the play, and sharing that world with potential audiences. As Patrick explains, “we’ve been referring to this as the airport security project. The play is the main course of the project, but the webisodes are hopefully one hell of an appetizer, right? Then you’ve got the rest of the web content, the news aggregator; a constant stream on Twitter of news stories on this subject.” “For me,” Kris adds, “the world of the play is about how do we open up this process and say, yeah there are some questions we want to ask and a discussion that we want to have; but we don’t own this discussion…we don’t own the debate, and we don’t own the questions.” This approach is really important to the company, a core value that Kris describes this way: “In order for theatre to survive, to grow, it has to exist outside of the walls of the theatre, and there are easy and cheap ways for us to do that.”

In the play, airport security is used as a metaphor to explore issues around safety and individuality. As Kris explains, “ultimately “Airport Security” is a play about the balance between what is public and what is private; what is personal, and what is communal… there are questions about why these security systems exist, and then there are some questions about whether the fears, and some of the responses to those fears, are in fact rational.”

The script follows five main characters, who are unnamed as if to suggest their individuality has already been taken from them. It’s a fragmented narrative, in that we see pieces of these people’s lives, just as you would if you encountered them in an airport. People in airports are judged on fragments of their lives, just as these characters will be judged by their audience, based on what they see. “A lot of my plays end up being identity plays,” says Patrick, “and identity and airports are so intertwined – you have to have photo identification ready at a moment’s notice. You can disappear in an airport in the sense that you become one of the masses, one of the travellers, but you can become an individual in a second. You don’t want to be an individual in an airport. You want to go about your business unnoticed.”

As Kris points out, “on one level we’ve got a play about a bunch of people who are trying to travel; on another level there are questions that this play raises that are applicable to Facebook, they are applicable to government, they are applicable to skepticism about capitalism, world trade issues, hypocrisy and policy discussions – and that is, do you believe that what you’re being told is factual?”

Gruppo Rubato literally means a group who moves out of step with the beat. The company mandate: to present politically charged new work, aimed at a young urban audience. The fact they choose to focus on original creation, rather than interpreting existing plays, does set them apart from a lot of Ottawa theatre companies. And it makes sense, in the context of airport security, for Gruppo Rubato to explore the issue by asking what it means to stand out, to be different, when we are constantly being told that in order to be safe we must conform.

“One of the challenges of creating the piece is: tell me something I don’t already know” says Patrick, “what’s interesting to me is how you can take airport security, something that is universally understood, and use it as a metaphor; place it over other issues…I hope that people see this as a play about security and privacy in general, not just a play about an airport.”

After three years and countless drafts, “Airport Security” will finally premiere in Ottawa this week. “I see this production as the next step in the project, in the process of this show,” muses Patrick, “it’s funny to think of this as the end of the process. I think this is where it gets really interesting: where we get it up in front of an audience and see what happens.”

Airport Security features Ottawa actors Simon Bradshaw, Kris Joseph, Catriona Leger, Tania Levy, and Kate Smith. The show runs June 4 – 13 at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre Studio Theatre. For tickets, call the box office at 613.236.5196 and for info please contact info@rubato.ca