Sometimes a play is sparked by an idea of creating change. Like Joel Bernbaum’s play, Home Is a Beautiful Word, for instance, which came out of talks with the Belfry Theatre’s artistic director Michael Shamata about homelessness and will be debuting at the aptly titled Spark Festival.
Bernbaum’s verbatim theatre piece was written based on feedback from hundreds of local Victorians on the issue of homelessness.
“Shamata wanted to address the issue of homelessness because it’s a prominent and important issue in our community,” explains Bernbaum. “We collaborated on other projects before and when I got my master’s in verbatim theatre we decided that verbatim would be a great way to address this issue and would convey local ideas of homelessness accurately.”
Verbatim theatre is a type of documentary theatre where plays are created by journalistic interviews directed towards a certain topic.
“To me, one of the most interesting and compelling things about verbatim theatre is that we don’t really know what the play will be about until we go over the content of the interviews,” says Bernbaum.
Bernbaum conducted interviews with a wide range of people in Victoria. He interviewed people walking down the street, went door to door in a wide variety of residential communities, interviewed lawyers, doctors, senior citizens in old folks’ homes, and students in grades 3, 4, 11, and 12.
“I have a team of transcribers from UVic’s department of applied theatre working on all the data collected,” says Bernbaum. “Theatre has always been a team sport, but it’s been very evident in this project between the interviewees, transcribers, and creative team.”
Bernbaum hopes to convey a holistic view of homelessness in Victoria and is excited for people in that community to see their input on stage and how he presents their ideas to the public.
“Like any good piece of theatre, I think experiencing the range of perspectives is important,” he says, “because the conversation post-play is important to try and take people further down their paths and provoke their thoughts.”
SPARK Festival
March 12-25
$15-74
belfry.bc.ca