The University of Winnipeg’s Department of Theatre and Film closes its season with Will Eno’s absurdist love song to the mundane ecstasy of human experience, Oh, the Humanity and Other Good Intentions, directed by UWinnipeg alumna and Theatre Projects Manitoba Artistic Director, Suzie Martin. The show runs at the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film from April 2 to 6, 2024.
In Oh, the Humanity, the six-person fourth-year Honours Acting ensemble plays nine characters across five stand-alone scenes. This artfully crafted chamber play deftly weaves form and content together to face the humour, beauty, and pain of the thousand natural shocks that happen in life.
“The people of this world seem unrelated—just a series of unremarkable people in their unremarkable lives grappling with their various longings and uncertainties,” said director Suzie Martin. “What unites them is their burning need to communicate, to understand themselves and their circumstances. They pour out oceans of language to reach across the infinite space between self and other, but somehow all that language serves to obscure rather than reveal—or creates rifts rather than building connections. Eno offers us a theatrical world where the borders literally shift, the technology betrays us, words fail to communicate, where beauty cannot offer meaning, and the very fabric of reality seems unreliable.”
Martin is a graduate of UWinnipeg and the University of Alberta, and is the Artistic Director of Theatre Projects Manitoba. She recently directed among men (in co-production with Royal MTC) where UWinnipeg alumni Eric Blais and Tom Keenan shone. In 2020, she was directing People Places and Things for the Department of Theatre and Film when the pandemic shut everything down. Martin is delighted to be directing with UWinnipeg again and getting the play to the stage this time.
Student designers Alyssa Jackson (set), Amelia Carlson (costumes), and Lovissa Wiens (lighting) bring Eno’s nostalgic strangeness to vivid life in a dynamic production design that includes moving walls, otherworldly costumes, and video elements (edited by design professor Adam Parboosingh). The rest of the production team is made up of senior production students.
Performances are Tuesday, April 2 to Saturday, April 6 at 7:30 p.m. at the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film (400 Colony St). Admission is free, but reservations are recommended. To reserve, please visit UWinnipeg’s Department of Theatre and Film website at theatre.uwinnipeg.ca or call the 24-hour Reservation Line at 204.786.9152.
Content warning: This play articulates descriptions of plane crashes, illness, and sudden death. There will be camera flashes.
