Oct. 20, 2010 - Issue #783 : Falklands

Prevue

What dreams may come

Any Night divides the waking and dreaming world

The truth is, we don't know much about our sleeping lives. It's still a mystery, for example, what function a dream has—a random firing of neurons? The brain categorizing information from the day? Messages from the spiritual world? Repressed desires?—or the point of sleepwalking, the strange affliction of rising from bed while still subconscious and physically engaging in activities, some as harmless as wandering the house, or some as deadly, in the case of Ken Parks, as attempted murder.

In 1987, Parks got up in the middle of the night, drove to his inlaws house, and attacked them with a kitchen knife, murdering his mother-in-law and wounding his father-in-law. In court, he was found to have been sleepwalking and was acquitted.

His story, and another, more local case, form the spine of Any Night, a psychological thriller about love and somnambulism.

Director Ron Jenkins remains tight-lipped on the details of that other story—"It gives away a bit too much," he explains—but, whatever the case, it's a tale that intrigued him, alongside Edmonton theatre expats Daniel Arnold and Medina Hahn—best known for their breakout Nextfest hit Tuesdays and Sundays—who approached Jenkins to direct and dramaturg the script. That was in 2007; this actually marks Any Night's third run, (the script has already been published), but Jenkins notes they're still tinkering with the script, getting deeper into the tale of a love that blossoms between a dancer and the boy upstairs upon her arrival to the basement suite below. But strange, violent things start to happen at night, and polarizing conflict is established between the waking and sleeping worlds.

While the three of them were crafting Any Night, they traveled to UBC's sleep lab to research the causes and effects of the subconscious.

"There was a psychiatrist there that we worked with while we were making the play in the early days. We went and saw him and the lab tech there, and spent a day and a half at the sleep lab, learning the lingo," Jenkins recalls. "He was terrific. It was kind of the bullshit meter for the script, too; we'd go, 'Is this possible?' And he'd go, 'Absolutely. This is absolutely possible.' He ... took us through the mechanics and the logistics of how someone would go to the sleep lab, and what's done there, and what kind of treatment is prescribed afterwards."

And after they had the science, Jenkins found that they soon found the hearsay, too: once word got out about what kind of story they were developing, friends started coming forward with their own tales. One told Jenkins about an episode he had on a boat: he woke up on the backboard of the boat, ready to dive off into the Great Barrier Reef in the middle of the night. Another would cook entire meals in his sleep, and then go back to bed.

"That kind of shit ... you go, 'What?'" Jenkins says. "So all of these kind of sleepwalking stories, and night terrors, have come out of the woodwork. [In their sleep], they do the most amazing things." V

Thu, Oct 21 – Sun, Oct 31, (8 pm)
Any Night
Directed by Ron Jenkins
Written and Performed by Daniel Arnold, Medina Hahn
TransAlta Arts Barns (Westbury Theatre), $19 – $23 vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus