Jan. 25, 2012 - Issue #849: Blind Date
Take a chance on Mimi
Blind Date pulls an audience member onstage—yes, maybe you—to be its hero
» Looking for love in clowny places / Greg Tjepkema
Blind Date
Created and performed by Rebecca Northan
Citadel Theatre, $40.95 – $67.20
It seems safe to surmise that, out of all the comic archetypes that exist out there—well-known and beloved, long-reviled and forgotten—the sexy clown is not one we're exactly familiar with.
Maybe there's a reason for that, but more likely it's because few comedians have given the idea a proper venture: most people write clowns off for their creepy undertones, which is something that Rebecca Northan, who's fused romance and red nose together, certainly understands.
"A lot of clowns are creepy," she states over the phone from Des Moines, Iowa. "Birthday clowns give me the heebie jeebies, for sure. But then, on the other end of that spectrum, I think Mump and Smoot are super sexy. That's not their goal; I think a really good clown done really well is like anything done really well: it's totally attractive."
Northan's created the attractive-clown anomaly in Mimi, a red-nosed clown in a matching crimson dress and french accent who pulls a man out from the audience to be her gentleman caller in Blind Date. Yes, that man could very well be you; in a mix of improv, comedy and voyeuristic intrigue, Mimi and her volunteer explore all the elements of a date together, including, if it goes there, some of the more intimate moments. (girlfriends and wives in the audience, take note: you can call for a time out).
Northan had zero clowning experience when she created Mimi, and Blind Date started out as a 10-minute bit as part of a burlesque show, she says. Northan had watched the other parts of the show, and together they struck her as "a very sexy circus," but in that regard, the missing element was a circus clown.
"I'd just become intrigued with the combination of sexy-funny, and why not?" she adds. "Why not try it? Everybody likes to laugh, everybody likes sexy, why not put them together?"
Northan did have plenty of improv experience, though, having honed her make-'em-ups at Calgary's Loose Moose theatre under the tutelage of improv guru Keith Johnstone. So early on she leaned heavily on those skills.
"I was a jackass," she laughs. "I just put on a red nose and a sexy dress, and went out and started improvising."
Even without clown training, the short was a hit, and Northan started to wonder about the idea's larger possibilities. After some actual lessons in clowning—with Mike Kennard and John Turner, better known as Mump and Smoot, including a stint at Turner's fabled clown farm in Ontario—she workshopped her idea in Calgary at the Loose Moose theatre, expanding it into what's now become the current, 90-minute version. Blind Date's already proven itself a curio success in Calgary, Toronto and, impressively, New York, a testament to Northan's ability to handle whatever gets tossed her way on stage; her stint down in Iowa is seeing packed houses, and through the course of it she's learned a lot about the idea of masculinity.
"Growing up an improviser, I've always hung out with guys," she says, "because the improv world is a guy world in a lot of ways. Especially when you start as a young improviser, there's usually 15 guys and one girl, right? It tends to even out as you get older, but ... so I've always been really comfortable hanging out with men, but Blind Date has really helped me to discover how amazing men are. And also how hard life can be for them. And yes, we hear tons of arguments about, like, men get paid more, and it's a male-dominated society, et cetera et cetera. But within that structure, there's a ton of pressure on men to act like they've got their shit together all the time. And no one does," Northan laughs. "So to sit onstage with a guy who's even minutely brave enough to laugh at himself, if that comes up, is like so refreshing and inspiring."
There is, of course, a carefully honed structure in place: to get a vibe for who is out in the audience, the show starts with a cocktail party in the lobby, so Northan can make her way around the crowd to introduce herself and to suss out potential volunteers.
"We want it to feel like you've shown up to a fantastic cocktail party, and there's guys in suits mingling around, and I mingle," Northan explains. "I just want to get to know everybody. And because we create this party atmosphere, I'm really just looking for someone that, if you were at a party, that you'd want to keep having a conversation with."
Mimi's only been turned down once, Northan notes (in Toronto!), and that fellow came up to her afterwards and told her that, after seeing the show, he regretted rejecting her. Everyone else has said yes, and run through the date's possibilities with her: depending on the fellow, it can go far in a different couple of ways, and perhaps take some leaps in time to see glimmers of a future together. But most important, Northan notes, is simply getting her date to open up and be themselves in front of an audience. She recalls an early version of the show that had her trying to leap through an entire lifetime with the person, right up to old age. But that sort of forced imaginging felt untrue.
"What I realized is that [leaping through time] put way too much pressure on the audience member to be creative, and make stuff up that wasn't true," she says. "So we just honed it in on looking for ways to activate that guy as the hero as the story, because, oh my God, he is the hero. As soon as you pull someone up from the audience, he is the hero representative of everybody sitting in the dark. Which is why they're rooting for him.
"My experience is that 99 percent of the time, the audience is absolutely for that guy. Like, totally. They fall in love with him."
Northan's a performer who seems to thrive on that sort of direct connection with her audience. Her partner, Bruce Horak, performs the acclaimed fringe hit This is Cancer, playing the feared disease and talking directly to its audiences (it ends with an audience member beating cancer with a pool noodle); Northan directed the show.
"The spontaneity of dealing with an audience is completely addictive," she notes about interactive theatre. "That's for sure. And I would say that in both of the shows—in This is Cancer and in Blind Date—part of the joy comes from just letting people be exactly who they are, and say and do the things they wanna say, and say, 'That's awesome.' You, being yourself, and telling us your stories from your childhood, I could never write anything as fuckin' cool, or as interesting, as what's happened in any one person's life."
That honesty is what's at the heart of Blind Date: every show really is different, after all, seeing a new stranger open up before an audience of peers. And in that sort of shared experience, we all walk away with a bit more insight than we had before.
"I think a great piece of theatre should unite the whole audience in that way, so that at the end of it we've had this experience where we've gone into a dark room with a bunch of strangers, but we come out knowing each other a little bit. And that's kind of cool, 'cause then we have a sense of community ... a sense of witnessing something special and unique on that given night—again, which is work that's always appealed to Bruce and I, which we put in both of the shows: asking real questions, and waiting for real answers." vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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