Electric Company Theatre draws modern tragedy into The Full Light of Day

Article en anglais

The Full Light of Day will rank as one of the most epic-scale plays staged in Vancouver in 2019. Featuring 14 live-streaming cameras and projections, the new Electric Company Theatre production features an all-star cast led by Gabrielle Rose, an array of technologies, and a series of short, virtual-reality films that screen in the lobby.

In 2016, Electric Company director Kim Collier scored a $280,000 New Chapter grant—a one-time project fund from the Canada Council to mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation—to stage Daniel Brooks’s play. But she had one big problem. There was nowhere with the space and the theatrical fly system needed to fully stage it—except the Playhouse, which had stopped regularly hosting productions of this scope when its namesake company folded in 2012.

“We had all this capital and art, and where were we going to do it in this city? We had this show under way!” the veteran theatre artist tells the Straight over the phone. “One of the things about building an incredible team is you need to be able to hold their schedules and that needs to be concrete. And it was very, very surprising that you couldn’t gather for a few weeks at the Playhouse.”

The good news is that the search for a solution has not only brought Collier’s ambitious project to fruition, it’s led to a revival of the Playhouse as a regular theatre venue.

Source: The Georgia Straight