A dramatic skyline stretches past the actors and into the audience, pulling the audience into what is about to unfold onstage: a powerful tale of resilience set behind and outside the doors of a residential school in Northern Ontario.
Children of God, performed to First Nations-inspired music has been called gorgeous and provocative and plays out on a stage designed by Williams Lake’s Marshall McMahen.
It’s his latest set to be put onstage at Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops March 29 through April 7.
McMahen, a professional production designer based in Vancouver, got his start in theatre acting as a member of the Williams Lake Studio Theatre and through the many shows put on by Williams Lake Secondary School.
While McMahen initially went to school for something else, he found he was spending more of his time on theatre than his courses. After discovering the theatre design and production degree at UBC, he switched and graduated from there.
For the past nine years, McMahen has worked in theatre production. His sets have graced stages across British Columbia, from Kamloops and the Okanagan to Vancouver, and across Canada, where McMahen was presented with the Ottawa Critics Circle Award for his work on Children of God showcased at the National Arts Centre.
When commissioned to design a set, McMahen said he starts with the director’s vision.
“Sometimes people think ‘Oh don’t you think it would be more fun to just have total freedom where you can do whatever you want,’ but I find the most rewarding ones are the ones where there is a really clear goal with the whole piece, so you really know what you are trying to work towards. Then you can use the design to tell the story in a clear and interesting and hopefully beautiful way,” he said.
“Sometimes the director will have a really clear and strong direction they want to go. For me, the most important part of the set is that it is supporting the show and supporting what we want to convey with the show,” he said.
With Children of God, some of that work came at the beginning. McMahen’s partner, Corey Payette, is Indigenous and wrote and directed the play, and the two spent time travelling through B.C. and visiting former residential school sites. They also spoke with residential school survivors, elders and even people who worked at the schools and workshopped the play at the Chief Louis Cultural Centre in Kamloops.
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“Any time you are working with people’s real stories and real lives you have such a duty to listen to them and make sure you are representing things in a way that honours their experience and their stories. In the case with Children of God, the characters are fictional. They are a compilation of so many different experiences layered together, but they are all based on real events and real things and it was important to us to make sure we are telling that story in a way that felt truthful to people’s experience.”
After visiting a number of schools, McMahen said they realized they wanted the show to be able to get away from the idea of a building.
“It wasn’t about the building it was about the structure of the institution and the system of the whole thing and people’s experiences within that,” he said. “We decided to move away from the literal representation of the school and go into a much more psychological portrayal of it and what that lead me to is this enormous sky.”
McMahen used a photo from Williams Lake of ominous clouds gathered over the lake as his go-to reference for the sky.
“It was just so evocative and the more I looked into it being the set, we realized it was giving so many opportunities to create different moods and spaces that we wanted. I think sky is something we can all relate to so easily without even thinking. It can be big and expansive or welcoming and open or it can also be so dark and formidable.”
The set breaks the fourth wall and extends into the audience as well, almost including them in the show.
“We wanted it to be less us and them: the people listening and the people telling the story. We wanted it to be more of a sharing space,” he said.
“The show is a play, it is a musical, but it is also opening up a dialogue, and opening people to come and talk about it and share.
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McMahen said for many of his sets he will draw inspiration from the mundane details of things found around us, like water stains underneath a fridge.
Sets act as an environment for actors, said McMahen.
“So much of how a story gets told comes through how a space is used by the actors and the director working with the actors.
“I go back to what kind of flow and what kind of movement do we want to see. How much movement is there? Is it free for people to move around and use it as much as they can or is it tight and cramped? Does it stay the same the whole time or is it always shifting? What is the relationship between the theatre and the people in the space?”
Sometimes a challenge comes when a set needs to represent several different places through the course of a play.
“Those are some of the most successful designs in the end because you do have to be creative and the solution invites people to bring their imagination to it and asks people to engage with it and fill in the blanks with their own experiences and ideas. That ends up being a more powerful experience for people when they feel they can invest in it and can bring themselves to the experience of watching the show because we can fill it in more than we ever can with three walls of a room.”
McMahen’s sets are often metaphorical, and require the audience to use a little bit of imagination when they are watching.
In the future, McMahen said he’s hoping to do a bit more work in TV and movies, where things are often always hyper realistic, opposite to many of his sets.
Still, McMahen suspects some of his favourite projects will come from the theatre.
“I like to think of the audience, how do they relate to it all and what is the connection between not just them and the play, but what is the physical space we are sharing?”
Children of God will be in Kamloops March 29 through April 7 and McMahen is also working on a second production with Payette called Les Filles du Roi that is set to open in May at the York Theatre in Vancouver.
To see more of McMahen’s sets, check out his website at www.marshallmcmahen.com.