Theatre review: Me & the Forest prefers profound pondering to straight-ahead storytelling
Boca del Lupo and ArtstageSAN’s outdoor show at Granville Island’s Ron Basford Park is more of an immersive experience than a plot-driven play
Me & the Forest
Boca del Lupo and ArtstageSAN presented Me & the Forest as part of the Vancouver International Children’s Festival, which took place on Granville Island from May 25 to 31. Performances continue at Ron Basford Park to June 14
YOU SEE HIS HEAD first, appearing just past the rise of the hill at Ron Basford Park. Well, his top, at any rate; being a tree, Mitig doesn’t have a head, although he does have a face, one that’s as ancient and inscrutable as you might expect a tree’s face to be.
Soon enough, the rest of Mitig appears as he crests the hill and heads ponderously down toward the audience. At some five metres tall, he cuts an impressive, even awe-inspiring figure, and as he ambles about, you hardly notice that his every movement is controlled by a team of five talented puppeteers working in seamless union.
Actually, there was one moment during the opening performance of Me & the Forest—a coproduction of Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo and South Korea’s ArtstageSAN—when the illusion was broken. Mitig’s leafy crown was snagged on a tree (a real one, perhaps out to prove some sort of point) and had to be rescued.
Otherwise, the Vancouver International Children’s Festival show played out with nary a hiccup, which was a feat in itself, considering everything from the uneven terrain that the puppeteers had to navigate to the technical aspect of having the audience experience all of the audio aspects of the show—including Pietro Amato’s music, Carey Dodge’s sound design, and Mitig’s dialogue as spoken by actor Hiro Kanagawa—through wireless headphones.
Me & the Forest is more of a immersive performance piece than a plot-driven play. As conceived by Boca del Lupo’s Jay Dodge and brought to life in collaboration with director Sherry J Yoon, writer Yvette Nolan, and puppet designers Ru Ji Yun and Jo Hyun San, the show imagines a first dialogue between humankind and this giant emissary of the woods.
There is, naturally, an environmentalist message at the heart of the performance, but it is never delivered in a heavy-handed or clumsy way. Our symbiotic relationship with trees is expressed elegantly through Mitig’s spare, evocative reminder: “You breathe out, I breathe in; I breathe out, you breathe in.”
At one point, the show’s only other character, a forest spirit named Sol (a smaller puppet operated and voiced by Randi Edmundson), asks Mitig, on behalf of the audience, why the trees have only just now begun to talk to humans.
“We’ve been talking for a long time,” he responds. “You haven’t been listening.” This is show is also frequently funny, especially in a recurring bit of business in which Mitig’s body tries to root itself in place any time he stays in the same spot for too long.
It’s aimed at children, but Me & the Forest never talks down to its audience. Instead, it hints at very profound questions without spelling them out, which is a bold approach that assumes the viewer will be savvy enough to get it. This is also precisely why the show works so well for adults, and might very well spark some fascinating intergenerational conversations.
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