When Port Coquitlam actor Andrew Gordon started daily rehearsals for Neworld Theatre’s production of King Arthur’s Night — to be presented at Vancouver’s PuSh Festival from Jan. 31 to Feb. 4 — he hadn’t run his lines since last June but he nailed them on his first reading.
Gordon and several other members of the production’s cast of 35 performers have Down syndrome.
And their remarkable capacity for remembering and routine is one of the life lessons learned by Neworld’s artistic director and the play’s co-creator, Marcus Youssef.
“Our expectations of the things people can do are totally wrong,” Youssef said during a break from rehearsals at Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre in advance of the production’s Vancouver premiere at the Frederic Wood Theatre. “It’s possible to create another space where our perceptions are not the only ones.”
Youssef’s creation of that other space started several years ago when he collaborated on another play for the PuSh Festival, Peter’s Panties, with Niall McNeil, another actor whose life includes Down syndrome.
In 2012 the creative duo were approached by the Down Syndrome Research Foundation in Burnaby to talk about their next project and how they might be involved.
A year later McNeill and Youssef started writing King Arther and conducting acting classes at DSRF with the hope of building a troupe of actors who could perform in the production. “We invented a way to work together to work with people with Down syndrome.”
Gordon said he was immediately bitten by the acting bug. He loved the improv sessions based on Beauty and the Beast that sometimes went on for up to 40 minutes of seamless riffing. “I liked Gaston and Belle, and Marcus played the Beast,” Gordon said, adding that taking on different characters was like climbing into the video games he so loves to play.
More importantly, the group was becoming friends, building a community.
That growing bond became especially important when everyone involved in the formative production went to the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for a two-week rehearsal residency last spring in advance of its world premiere at Toronto’s Luminato Festival and at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa for Canada 150.
Now they weren’t just working together, but also living together as they put the final touches to what Youssef describes as a mash-up of different cultural references from video games to Lord of the Rings with the legend of King Arthur that includes several improvised scenes, a goat army and a choir of 16 that belts out more than a dozen songs written and composed by Veda Hille. “It’s exactly what they’re good at when they’re mashing up things,” Youssef said. “There’s no boundaries, no preconceived idea that things must be separate.”
Gordon plays a Saxon warrior, a role he said he relishes because he gets to unleash a loud, fearsome yell — even if it does strain his vocal chords from time to time.
“I’m the assassin,” he said.
And it’s a nice break from his day job at the Edgewater Casino in Vancouver, where he cleans dishes and “scrapes all the crumbs.”
Youssef said he hopes audiences will see the actors’ abilities and the connections they’ve forged as artists. “The show is not about people with disabilities,” Youssef said.
“Through having common purpose, those very big labels do disappear.”
• For tickets, visti pushfestival.ca, which — among its lineup — also includes Joseph Keckler at the Anvil Centre in New Westminster on Jan. 26 and 27.
