The so-called “American dream” is at the heart of Theatre Junction’s new creation Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.
“The American Dream is kind of an idea that was sold to us as what we should aspire to be as an individual and as a society” says Mark Lawes Theatre Junction artistic director and one of the show’s creators. “We bought this dream where we believed that success material goods wealth the economy — all of those things were the things the dreams which drew people to North America. This pursuit has led to a disconnection with each other and the destruction of the environment. We have become disenchanted with this dream that we had.”
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere is the second chapter in the Supernova saga that Lawes calls “a research on the notion of identity and territory” following on the heels of the first in the series Sometime Between Now and When the Sun Goes Supernova.
Raphaëlle Thiriet one of the creators of the new show says it explores themes surrounding where we are today and who we can be 50 years from now. “Both pieces talk about a world when we’re in-between times” adds Lawes. “How do we form our collective society when it’s becoming more and more fragmented?”
The show takes its name from a Neil Young song in which Young wrote about his disenchantment with Los Angeles and his desire to return home to Canada. The cast takes on a variety of different characters throughout the piece. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere opens with a man doing a standup comic routine in which he talks about all the stuff he has. When audiences see him next he’s in the desert “trying to make sense of where he is and trying to answer some questions” explains Thiriet.
Other characters drift on and off the stage in something of a ghost-like fashion. They are all connected to him through his past history and have all scarred him in some way. “By exploring his own past on the smaller scale he’s trying to explore what happened in the world as a whole” says Thiriet.
Religion is also explored according to Lawes particularly when it comes to the domination of human beings over the rest of the world as suggested in the Bible.
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere incorporates a number of multimedia elements including dance live music and video. The primary piece of scenography is a large empty billboard that is used for projected video imagery.
“My idea behind this is that all the things that sell us the American dream are on those billboards. Advertisements sell us what we should think. But this billboard is empty. We have the ability to project our own dreams our own ideas of the world on this billboard rather than other way around” says Lawes who designed the set for the production.
Thiriet says the piece is in some ways a call-to-action and the show’s final lines reflect that: “What do we want? We are what we desire. Our desires engender action. What do we want? What do we want?”
EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE runs from February 27 to March 7 at Theatre Junction Grand.
