Kafka’s stories fuel Flee

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      Jonathon Young has come home.

      He’s sitting in the theatre at his alma mater, Studio 58, having just wrapped rehearsal for the day on Flee, the wonderfully weird new collaboration between his former school and the company he cofounded shortly after graduation, the award-winning Electric Company Theatre. Though he’s one of the city’s most exciting actors, this time around Young is staying behind the scenes, having written Flee with David Hudgins and Peter Anderson, with original music by Peggy Lee. Young is also directing the unusual live-theatre/live-music hybrid himself.

      “Flying solo is a new experience,” Young admits with a grin. “With so many bodies and a band and a new show. And my old acting teacher. Yeah, we’re all out of our comfort zone. It’s a big little experiment.”

      At its most basic, Flee is about Archibald Twill, a down-on-his-luck watchmaker whose fortunes change when he discovers talented fleas on a stray dog’s back. He sets up a flea circus in a flophouse and Caprice, the singing flea, becomes his muse and breadwinner. But when the circus becomes a literal cult hit, attracting followers called Fleaks, an infestation breaks out and havoc ensues.

      “A man turns into a bug for no good reason other than just to alienate himself from the world,” Young explains, starting with the Franz Kafka story The Metamorphosis. “In our case, it’s a metaphor for the transformation that occurs in the world of the theatre.”

      “A Hunger Artist”, Young says of another Kafka work, is about a guy whose only trick is to sit there and not eat, and the strange fascination that casts over audiences until people get bored and move on. He points to some of our fruitless preoccupations, how we attach a “great deal of significance and interest to something that is ultimately totally insignificant and just a waste of time”. Not unlike the relationship, sometimes, between performers and audience, Young says.

      “We can devote ourselves to a practice which ultimately causes us to waste away and disappear or just become less than we were before we started this thing,” he says.

      “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” is about a mouse who sings for her people. It’s all from the point of view of the mice. Her singing is nothing special, Young recalls, and yet all the mice are rapt with attention listening to it.

      “There was something that was really moving and haunting and small about this story,” he says. “That informed the world of this play.”

      Those themes resonate with Young personally, too, which perhaps makes Flee all the more a work that has pushed him outside his comfort zone.

      “Nowadays, I find with making new work, even though I’ve been doing it ever since I got out of fucking theatre school, more and more I have to sort of manage a lot of anxiety about it,” Young says. “And I also have to continually keep reminding myself why it’s worth doing. But then again, when we’re in here in the room and we’re making this thing and we’re talking amongst each other and figuring it out, I find it a very natural place to be. It’s the push-pull of that.”

      Studio 58 and Electric Company Theatre present Flee at the Fox Cabaret from Thursday (November 26) to December 6.

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