Have you ever seen Toronto Island in the winter? The lack of human activity is to be expected — no yachters or cyclists, no kids riding a miniature train, no nude sunbathers — but the sheer solitude is not. When I visited in mid-February, even the local fire station looked deserted. A thin film of ice covered the waterway; aside from the occasional bird or small plane, nothing broke the hushed lull. With people and animals both seemingly absent, one could hear Lake Ontario moving nearby. The city was still in sight across the water, but after a few minutes the silence began to feel disquieting.
That desolate setting turned out to be fruitful for Shary Boyle and Christine Fellows. I arrived at Artscape Gibraltar Point earlier this month as they were staging the first rehearsal of their new show, Everything Under the Moon. The Toronto artist and the Winnipeg musician have collaborated on similar shadow plays several times before, but this production’s scale is unprecedented: “musical theatre, sung narrative,” in Boyle’s words, not just her hand-painted and hand-animated projections accompanying existing songs by Fellows. It was their first time working in script format together, and perhaps also their first time making a top-hatted spider puppet. Fellows deadpans: “Everything was created specifically for this…which is why it’s so terrifying.”
They’ve known each other for almost a decade now, ever since the geographically prolific artist spent a time in Winnipeg: “[I’d] never been to the Prairies, why not go to the Prairies? It’s right in the middle. Winnipeg is a medium-sized town. I heard that there was cheap rent. And that’s all I knew about it.” There was a book club founded by the writer Alissa York, where they both read Atonement, but they didn’t really get to know each other until after Fellows played at a mutual friend’s wedding. She did the same at a launch for Boyle’s first book Witness My Shame, and then they performed across Canada, casting shadows from Dawson City to Guelph. Boyle had never gone on tour with a musician, and she took to it: “When I perform I can actually hear people’s response right there in the moment. You can feel the tenor of the audience. Are they with you? Can you get them with you? Can we all be in this thing together?”
Several other collaborations followed, including 2010’s The Monkey and the Mermaid, a one-night event for the Images Festival. One senses that Boyle and Fellows felt a rapport from the start: they’re both around 40, two women with singular aesthetics yet complementary sensibilities, and senses of humour that delight in the peculiar. (Fellows’ is goofier, while Boyle tends to be more biting.) But each new production made their friendly collusion increasingly symbiotic. As Fellows half-jokes: “I’m not a very visual person in that way, and for me to see things interpreted visually, and taken to another level — I think it changed the way I write… I’m always thinking of Shary and her vision when I’m working now, it’s kind of creepy. You know [how] you have the good Fred Flintstone and the evil Fred Flintstone telling you to do stuff? That’s Shary Boyle, for better or for worse.”
When Harbourfront’s Fresh Ground program announced a commission for unusual all-ages theatre, aimed at artists from other disciplines, the duo applied; they’d been hankering to work on such a project. Boyle and Fellows have also been worried about the slow-motion extinction of some favourite species, and so Everything Under the Moon begins with two bereft critters, the little brown bat Limbertwig and the honey bee Idared, flying off on a quest to save their kin. The adventure is fable-like, but it’s a buddy story too, and never a Captain Planet episode. Those ideas only inform the musical, a narrative haunted by death and loss. “The saddest part is the apathy that happens,” Boyle says, “because people feel unable to change anything. So it’s that kind of collective helplessness… But then you can make that into more of a micro-story where it’s just about getting old and dying, or getting sick and losing family, or not feeling like you fit in, not knowing how to find a new family.”
These themes aren’t typical of performances that offer discounted kids’ tickets. They resonate strongly with Boyle’s individual practice, which warps various mediums into otherworldly representations of sexuality, violence and mutant femininity. (“Gender horror is what I like to call it,” she laughs. “My genre, my speciality.”) I was wondering if any of that had made Harbourfront nervous, but it seems they remained supportively distant: “We’ve kept our creative process pretty private, so they didn’t have a lot of room to comment on what were gonna do.” And Fellows notes that the original commission requested challenging work for young theatregoers, ones often underestimated or undercut. Not that they’re the only intended audience: “This is a show about misfits,” Boyle says, “and that includes people that might not breed. So it’s kind of a show for children, about people that might never have children, by people that may never have children.”
There were some musical changes. Fellows normally writes compositions on an acoustic piano and plays them live on a grand, but securing the latter is a hassle and a “huge expense.” This time she and Boyle knew that they wanted to employ “our physicality, a little bit of choreography, using our shadows,” so she wrote the score for nimbler instruments: xylophones, a ukulele, wurlitzer. She altered her lyrical approach as well. Fellows’ songs are often portraits of ordinary people, and as a lover of musicals — when I bring up Sondheim, she spontaneously belts out a few lines from “Every Day a Little Death”— she realized that this show would demand more plot movement than her characteristic character studies. “It’s like a novel as opposed to the short form. It surprised me, how hard it was, and how strange I feel about it right now.” That didn’t dilute her casually irreverent voice. At one point in the rehearsal, I watched its protagonists, holding spider-spun embroidery, ask: “What’s the deal with the doilies?”
A few days after visiting Boyle, Fellows and their assistants at Gibraltar Point, I went to see the premiere of Everything Under the Moon on the opposite shore. During the early sequence where Idared and Limbertwig meet inside an abandoned tin can, each first sees the other as monstrous and alien. Their creator’s opaque hand removes layers of transparencies until the fangs and compound eyes become anthropomorphized familiarity. Boyle and Fellows are not their characters; I doubt either felt any fear when introduced via an Ian McEwan novel. But that moment is still a thrillingly fluid illustration of what can happen when two idiosyncratic people conspire together.
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Everything Under the Moon continues at Harbourfront Centre through Thursday evening, but every performance sold out by the time the first one began, so…let’s hope there’s a remount?
Chris Randle is the culture editor at Toronto Standard and is in love with Shary Boyle. Follow him on Twitter at @randlechris.
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