What: Castle in the Sky
Where: Belfry Theatre studio
When: To April 29
Rating: 3 and a half stars (out of five)
A intriguing little play that deserves an audience just opened at the Belfry Theatre.
Castle in the Sky, presented by the Castlereigh Theatre Project, is a 70-minute one-act drama about the horrific murder of a Medicine Hat family in 2006. A mother, father and eight-year-old boy were stabbed to death. Two people went to jail, the couple’s 12-year-old daughter (never publicly named) and her 23-year-old boyfriend, Jeremy Steinke.
The play, by Sidney writer Francesca Albright and her brother Jude Thaddeus Allen, is verbatim theatre. Each sentence uttered comes from 200 hours of interviews the creators conducted with friends of the victims and the killers as well as politicians, reporters, policemen and citizens.
These are exact words, right down to pauses and occasional awkward syntax.
It’s an ambitious project – and the results are rather impressive.
A talented young cast of six leapfrogs nimbly from one character to the next, about 20 all told. Castle in the Sky benefits especially from Britt Small’s deft direction. Shifting screens and black-and white-projections (images of Medicine Hat) are used cleverly.
The characters address the audience directly; however, the potential stagnation of a “stand-and-deliver” structure is sidestepped by Small’s insistence on a brisk pace and ever-changing visuals.
In a technique similar to a collage, Albright and Allen cut-and-pasted interview samples to create a whole. The results are impressionistic but reasonably cohesive, although quick character changes sometimes make it difficult to figure out who is who.
Overall, the audience experiences a twisted Romeo and Juliet tale gone terribly wrong. In Castle in the Sky, the girl (referred to as J.R.) appears to have coaxed Steinke to kill her family. Although her motives are never fully explained, it seems in part to have been because her parents disapproved of him. Incredibly, the young man (a fan of the film Natural Born Killers) was sufficiently maladjusted and impressionable to agree to her plan.
One of Castle in the Sky’s strengths is that so many people offer views on what happened (the killers were not interviewed). In particular, we get a powerful sense of small-city teen-land. Albright and Allen portray a disquieting subculture populated by the disenfranchised that is shot through with do-or-die melodrama.
Yet this relentlessly multi-voice approach is also one of the play’s weaknesses. In terms of story-telling, because so many people chip in (sometimes just for a sentence or two at a time), it’s hard to fully engage with this piece. Focusing on one or two characters might have solved this.
Still, it’s a remarkable – and certainly singular – piece of theatre. The hardworking cast, each of whom has strong moments, is: John Han, Ellen Law, Griffin Lea, Sarah Murphy, Vaughn Naylor and Cate Richardson.
Those interested in this notorious case will likely find this an interesting night out. If you’re easily offended, be forewarned that some graphic details of the murder are described.
