theatre: SFU alumni bring lions to streets
Yuet Jinn, Peak Staff

David Gram fingers his unshorn face, his wire glasses barely peeping out, eyeing the room with an unassuming calm. Toni Rozylo carries swollen bags underneath her eyes, but her smile defies the burden. Paulo Ribeiro's deep set eyes and five o'clock shadow often meet with the Starbucks paper cup in his left hand. Sharon Taylor couldn't make it. She had other plans. We are in an empty room at the Roundhouse Community Centre on a drab Sunday afternoon with a tape recorder between us.

The trio before me represents three of the four co-founders of Shifting Point Theatre, an ensemble in the midst of preparing for their second production, Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets. They appear in need of rest, but there is an unmistakable energy in the room.

All four co-founders are SFU alumni. When asked of their memories of SFU's theatre program, they are nostalgic. They make no qualms about admitting the invaluable experience of Black Box theatre, and are quick to mention SFU theatre faculty members Marc Diamond, Penelope Stella and DD Kugler as mentors they remain in contact with to this day.

Gram quotes the unofficial axiom of SFU's theatre program: "to make our own work," and there is no doubt that SPT is doing just that. When Gram, the artistic director of SPT, first approached Rozylo to be an artistic producer and core performer in his theatre company his intent, as Rozylo tells it, was "to have a core group of actors that he would use consistently-an ensemble, something which is very rare in this city."

Ribeiro, also an artistic producer and core performer, believes that the "common vocabulary" that they share develops a certain rapport that the crazy in-out process of professional theatre fails to provide.

There seems to be a feeling of "us and them" in the industry, Gram argues. "It's about the emerging artist and it's about the professional artists," he explains. "And there's no bridge, and I don't know why. Maybe that's up to us to discover how to do that."

Rozylo sees SPT as a home base. "The world is dispiriting. When you get out there, there's a bazillion things you could do, there's a bazillion people you could meet, half the time you don't, and a lot of times as an artist you're alone...it's important to have a home base."

This is the very significance of what "the shifting point" means to Rozylo. Aside from its name-taken from a Peter Brook book of the same name-Rozylo feels that the name is "endemic to where we are as artists."

For Gram, "the shifting point" has a technical significance. In his book The Shifting Point Brook, a renown theatre director, explains that the 'shifting point' is "those moments on stage when there is a reversal that changes everything, or even a small thing in the play. It is also about presenting the audience with an idea one way and then giving it to them in another way."

Ribeiro's conceptualisation of the 'shifting point' is the "magic" of theatre. It's about the fact that in theatre you can "tell the audience that you're on a space shuttle, and you're on a space shuttle." It is due to the constant creation of a world, and the reality of that world, that Ribeiro admires his art form.

Inevitably, a serious theatre company must also treat itself as a business. Prior to the interview, Gram was hunched over media contacts and press kits, organising them with SPT's public relations, Melissa Shelast. But in the insane world of business, there is sanity to be had. Rozylo is reminded of SFU's constant "focus on making art rather than selling product." The "work" plays a heavy emphasis throughout the interview: making it, focusing on it, assessing what's in the best interest of it.

Gram talks about seeing Judith Thompson read at July's UBC's Booming Ground Writers Festival. "It was so inspiring. It was moving and it was funny, and her language is beautiful and raw and brutal. I had read Lion in the Streets a few years ago and I thought it was a good play, but it wasn't one at the time that struck a chord in me. She started reading from it, and I said, 'wow, maybe this is something I should go back and revisit'."

Gram spoke with Thompson after the reading and found her to be very receptive to his ideas. She signed his copy of Lion in the Streets and he recalls that when he got home he looked in his book to find that she had written "David, direct the Lion one day."

Rozylo and Erica Nasby, another actor in Lion in the Streets, will be performing A Sea between the War and Me about war brides during World War II. This play is currently touring people's living rooms. For more information, call Erica at 983-2181. Shifting Point Theatre presents Lion in the Streets Mar. 30, 31, Apr. 4-7, 11-14. Festival House, 1398 Cartwright Street, Granville Island. All take place at 8 p.m. Call 675-6233 for reservations. Tickets are $12 students/$15 general.

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