With fresh adaptation (a) Winter’s Tale, two well-known theatre talents launch The Ecstasy
Colleen Wheeler and Moya O’Connell have gathered a crack team of actors for micro-sized Shakespearean shows at the City Centre Artist Lodge—and this is only the beginning
Colleen Wheeler and Moya O’Connell
The Ecstasy, in association with The Search Party, presents (a) Winter’s Tale at the City Centre Artist Lodge December 11 to 13 and 18 to 20. All shows are sold out
WITH THEIR FIRST show selling out almost immediately, two celebrated Vancouver Shakespeare veterans can see signs that their new theatre project, The Ecstasy, is onto something.
Colleen Wheeler and Moya O’Connell are set to stage a bold new adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale for audiences of just 25 people at the funky City Centre Artist Lodge (the former Main Street motel converted by the Narrow Group).
Their aim is to give the Bard’s work a fresh intimacy and immediacy, with a cast studded with big local stage names and live music composed by Stars’ Torquil Campbell. Perhaps most compelling of all, the adaptation, called (a) Winter’s Tale, has new parts by Daniel Handler, beloved American author of the gothically wonderful children’s books A Series of Unfortunate Events. As in, Lemony Snicket.
Wheeler and O’Connell are used to working in big theatre venues: the two are well-known actors at Bard on the Beach—both have even played Lady Macbeth at the fest. Wheeler has taken roles at spots like the Arts Club and the Belfry, while O’Connell was a long-time ensemble member of Ontario’s Shaw Festival and directed the critically praised The Dark Lady at this year’s Bard on the Beach fest.
“We were really excited by the idea of the audience sort of being two feet away from the actors’ faces, and being able to say that beautiful language that is so big, and sort of bring it down a little bit and really tell the story in an intimate way,” Wheeler says in a call with Stir. “As well as that, the audience can experience an intimacy with actors they've seen for a long time.”
The idea had its roots in a play-reading group started by the long-time friends. Staging something themselves seemed like the right next step. “We knew we wanted to do The Winter's Tale, but we wanted to give it a contemporary sort of sensibility,” Wheeler explains. Look no further than the show’s promo poster, which features not actors in Tudor costumes amid wintry sets, but instead a close-up of a woman biting down on a giant ice cube.
The Narrow Group’s City Centre Artist Lodge on Main Street.
The pair started putting out asks—and some of the city’s best-known Shakespearean forces responded. The cast now includes the all-star team of Craig Erickson, Megan Leitch, Jennifer Lines, David Marr, Jeff Meadows, and Meg Roe—names well known to local theatre fans and together bringing what The Ecstasy duo reckons is roughly 250 years of experience between them. Some of the cast’s own kids—a next generation of theatre talent—join them onstage, including Ellington Campbell, Jude Mangan, and Ida, Alma and Otto Roeliani.
“So we not only get to watch our friends work, who we admire and have known our whole lives, but we’ve watched their kids grow up, and now we get to see them work onstage, too,” Wheeler says. “and we’re sort of ushering in their generation in the love for the theatre. And it’s really special—we’re sort of pinching ourselves.”
Those lucky enough to have grabbed tickets will move between two spaces at the City Centre Artist Lodge, including the retro building’s art-gallery-lobby. Wheeler and O’Connell first saw the spaces through artist friends and their play-reading group, and Wheeler can’t say enough about the welcoming crew of David Duprey’s the Narrow Group (one of the organizations now in the running to help create an arts and innovation hub on Granville Island). “He’s allowed our friends to rent two of the studios under market value, and they’ve shared those studios, in turn, with us, who have not a lot of funds to put on this show,” Wheeler explains. “So we’re able to create art with his help.”
The unexpected performance space, the acting team, and the fresh adaptation have the duo feeling, well, ecstatic. As for their equally unexpected name? “It feels right in the sense that it’s sort of throwing it out there and taking a risk. And we were so surprised at how many beautiful things came back at us,” Wheeler says, pulling out the dictionary. “Here’s what it says is the ‘ecstasy’ definition: ‘overwhelming feeling of happiness, joyful excitement, an emotional frenzy, trance-like state, an experience, self-transcendence’. So those are all things that we just thought were really cool.”
Wheeler can’t say exactly what The Ecstasy’s next project will be, but it’s safe to say that it will stick to small-scale, high-quality work, with limited tickets that go fast.
“We’re just sort of concentrating on the joy of all of this,” the actor says. “What we’ve really learned from this experience is that we’re just so enjoying sort of doing it ourselves, and going back to the way we used to do things when we were younger—you know, equity co-op. Just grab a group of people. We’re all older, and I think it’s invigorating Moya and I to go, ‘Okay, what do we want to do next?’” 
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