ON STAGE: What You Won’t Do For Love
Where: Streaming at belfry.bc.ca
When: Friday through Sunday
Tickets: Pay-What-You-Want from tickets.belfry.bc.ca
The Belfry Theatre’s annual Spark Festival returns this week with the first of two weekends of film programming streamed on a pay-what-you-want model through the company’s website.
That’s a shift from previous editions, but there’s a distinct upside to the new direction, given the content being offered: What You Won’t Do For Love, a film about environmental activist David Suzuki and his wife, Tara Cullis, will be available to viewers Friday through Sunday this week; Acts of Faith, from award-winning playwright David Yee, tackles, family, religion and African culture in unique fashion and will be shown March 18-20.
The pandemic played a pivotal role in the creation of both films, especially What You Won’t Do For Love. Director Ravi Jain had originally planned to adapt facets of Suzuki’s life into a play, and an early version of it was workshopped to coincide with an expected 2020 première. But the production team at Toronto’s Why Not Theatre was unsure if or when it would be feasible to mount something of that nature on stage safely, so What You Won’t Do For Love was redesigned as part biography, part love letter and part performance piece.
“It would have never turned out this way if not for COVID,” said Miriam Fernandes, one the co-writers and performers in the film, which was shot at the Suzuki-Cullis residence on Quadra Island.
But that did not affect the focus of What You Won’t Do For Love, which is Suzuki’s relationship with his wife of 50 years and their relationship with the planet, she added.
“They have spent their whole lives trying to figure out if we can save ourselves from ourselves. We thought: ‘What if we could love the planet the way they love each other — would we change?’ When you love someone you’ll do anything to take care of them, to protect them. If we could extend that thinking to the planet, what could that mean?’ ”
Fernandes, who is the co-artistic director of Toronto’s Why Not Theatre, wrote the play with Jain after spending hours in conversation with Suzuki and Cullis, who also share a writing credit on the film. The piece is based on real life stories, shared while sitting around a table. Those conversations, which included two couples — Cullis and Suzuki, and Fernandes and her husband, Sturla Alvsvaag — are all that viewers will see, but it makes for compelling viewing.
Being given the opportunity to preserve something that would otherwise be site-specific was a rare treat, Fernandes said.
“As theatre artists,we always make something and it is ephemeral. To have something that you in Victoria are going to be able to experience is so cool. It’s not how we usually work.”
Fernandes said she is not ruling a return to the stage for What You Won’t Do For Love. No plans are in place, and considering that Suzuki is 86 years-old, and doesn’t love to travel, they may never materialize. But if the conversations never make it past the film format, that’s all well and good, she said. Suzuki needs no introduction to audiences, but she hopes Cullis gains a measure of exposure from it.
“Tara is a force of nature in her own right. She is the one who formed the David Suzuki Foundation, and is a huge part of all the action that they take. She has a strategic mind, and after spending all this time with the both of them, this theme of love emerged. It changed us, listening to these stories. That’s the core of what theatre is. The hope is that listening to stories can have an impact on how we think about the world, how we think about each other, and how we think about relationships.”
