An irritated wife looking to trade her live dove for a dead one. An atheist offering his pet care services to Christians after the Rapture. A woman attempting to give away a series of hats worn by her recently deceased cat Snowman.
All these characters and countless others made brief, but memorable, appearances onstage for the Nov. 12 National Arts Centre (NAC) performance of “Do You Want What I Have Got: a Craigslist Cantata.”
Composer Veda Hille with playwrights Bill Richardson and Amiel Gladstone collaborated to create the play. It presents real Craigslist ads and “missed connections” through monologues, songs, and dances performed by four actors, a piano player, and a drummer.
Actor Dmitry Chepovetsky offers to “pay you pay you pay you,” $1 to sit in a bathtub of noodles. Qasim Khan requests a male companion to “drink coffee and hug in our underwear . . . I’m not gay,” he insists.
The ensemble collectively asks questions like “did someone see me today?” and “do you want what I have got?” Items they offer include “one children’s guillotine, only used once,” a dead moose, and a potato cannon.
While the requests of the characters range from absurd to desperately lonely, Gladstone, who also directed the show, said the play does not make a mockery of them. He said he continually told the actors to give even the strangest characters dignity.
“We’re not trying to make fun of them, we’re actually trying to present them in a realistic way,” he said.
“That’s when the show feels the most honest and heartfelt and when it connects with the audiences the most,” he said.
Actor Bree Greig said she’s grown to care about the characters she portrays.
“I always had a soft spot for the penguin girl with the 300 penguins,” she said.
Greig also portrayed a woman with “lots of headless dolls,” decapitated by her daughter.
“The therapist says we should let her so we do, we do, we do,” she explains in a song.
Greig said it was hard and “confusing” at first to create these characters based on only their Craigslist ads.
She said Gladstone’s ideas about giving the characters dignity helped her with her performance.
She said the music also helps create the characters.
“It really gives each piece, each little vignette—it personalizes it and even makes the character, if you will, become more realized through the music,” she said.
“I love Veda’s writing,” she added.
The writing is quirky, Grier said. She said the musical was challenging to learn because it isn’t what she was used to hearing in traditional musical theatre or contemporary pop music.
While the play has no overall narrative or plot, Gladstone said recurring characters and themes help tie it together. He said the play was written to evoke an Internet search.
“When you’re surfing the Internet you’re not looking for stories . . . [moving from webpage to webpage] kind of creates your own narrative as you go,” he explained.
“Do You Want What I Have Got?” runs at the NAC until Nov. 22.
