Calgary’s Fire Exit Theatre shines spotlight on Rosebud residents

Times Contributor 

 

The new play Here Breaks the Heart: The Loves of Christina Rossetti will spotlight the talents of five Rosebud residents when it opens with Calgary’s Fire Exit Theatre, Nov. 6.

Mark Lewandowski, General Manager of Rosebud Centre of the Arts, is directing the play. Natalie Gauthier and Conrad Belau, Fellows of Rosebud School of the Arts (FRSA), are acting, along with John Moerschbacher, who completed Rosebud’s one-year certificate. Glenda Warkentin, also an FRSA, is designing costumes. Two Calgary actors will also perform.

The play was written by Canadian Diane Tucker in a playwriting class in Rosebud this spring. It was staged for Rosebud’s Budding Playwrights Festival, where Gauthier and Belau acted, and Lewandowski directed.

Lewandowski was so impressed with the quality of Here Breaks the Heart, he says he told Val Lieske, artistic director of Fire Exit Theatre, “I think you need to look at this play.”

And as he watched Gauthier perform the role of Christina Rossetti, he told her, “If I ever direct it, I want you playing this character.”

A few months later, his wishes came true. Lieske asked him to direct Here Breaks the Heart at Fire Exit Theatre – and Gauthier accepted the role of Christina Rossetti.

Here Breaks the Heart is “exploring Christina Rossetti’s life, but we’re doing it in a memory play or a flashback play,” Lewandowski says. “She’s older in life and she’s being proposed to, and she says, well, before I can accept this (proposal), you need to know this. And she starts talking about her life.”

One of the conflicts for Rossetti, now so well-known for her poetry, is that, “at that point in time, in Victorian times, if she’s going to become a mother and a wife, then she’d have to put away poetry,” Lewandowski says. “She says poetry is the way she connects to God, in her art. So what is God saying to her — that she has to be single?”

“And that’s the true line of the play,” he says. “There’s this guy who’s asking her to marry him … Is she going to say yes?”

“Natalie is an amazing actress,” Lewandowski says. “(She’s) just alive and interesting on stage. She inhabits the character and is thoroughly entertaining.”

Plus, Gauthier “really, really connects with Rossetti, with this idea of what is expected for an artist, particularly for a female artist,” he says. “And while (the play) is based on a real character and it’s set in the Victorian era, (Gauthier) just connects with it so intimately, that it really is a play for our time as well.”

Lewandowski hopes the audience will be entertained, but he doesn’t want it to stop there. 

“There are questions that are asked” in the play, and he hopes people will go away asking them. 

“Are these choices that (Rossetti) made valid?” 

And how do they apply to our lives now?

Here Breaks the Heart: The Loves of Christina Rossetti runs Nov. 6 – 10 at the Engineered Air Theatre. Tickets are available at 403-640-4617 or www.fireexit.ca.