Edmonton Journal Feature On Bretta
March 2011

Ten days ago. In tall lace-up boots and leggings, Bretta Gerecke sprints out of her office -- a chamber of sunlight, books, easels, brushes and, well, unidentifiable stuff in the farthest dark corner of Edmonton's Catalyst Theatre.

That's where one of the country's hottest theatre designers has been holed up, dabbing black blusher onto the cheekbones of a startlingly large white face with a silver-lipped grimace.

In Gerecke, we're talking star, not diva. Even by the normal labour-intensive standards of "small theatre," where creativity is a multitasker, Gerecke is an energetically hands-on collaborator, an inveterate experimenter who flings out whole sun-showers of what-ifs at a time -- and then grabs a glue gun. "I have to get my hands on stuff, physically," she grins. "That's how I visualize."

Take the disembodied masks that will leer out at audiences during the Feast of Fools scene in Hunchback -- Catalyst's biggest production ever, commissioned by the Citadel Theatre (where it starts previews Saturday night). They're an ingenious Gerecke reinvention of layer upon layer of masking tape on cardboard, lacquered; the lips are muffler tape.

They're bigger, more grotesque versions of the masks that leered at the good burghers of Fort McMurray a few weeks ago for a debut Hunchback run there. Along with director/ playwright/composer Jonathan Christenson, her Catalyst co-creator and kindred spirit, Gerecke has been tinkering ever since.

"There's rarely ever a moment when I get it right the first time," she says, strapping on a giant skinny hand, and giving the claw-like fingers an appraising wiggle. "To make sense onstage, these need to be even bigger," she figures. "We're not designing costumes or props here; we're designing the body."

It's the body, in this case, of a crazed old crone, mad with grievance. Nearby is the body, or at least part, of Claude Frollo, the murderous priest of Victor Hugo's epic tale, including a bendable skirt skeleton of wire wrapped with strips of landau foam.

The characters are big -- driven by what Gerecke calls "obsessive mad destructive love, dreamy fantasy love." And Gerecke, typically, reacts in a big, emotional way to them. "I work in an environment with very few rules. ... Really, the only one is that we have to feel something, we have to be passionate."

It's been a year of splashy, high-profile international validation for Edmonton's Catalyst Theatre, in theatre strongholds here, across the border and abroad: Nevermore at the Barbican's LIFT Festival in London, the New Victory Theatre on Broadway in New York, the Vancouver Olympics, and Calgary's elite High Performance Rodeo; Frankenstein in the mainstage season of Toronto's biggest theatre, CanStage.

And beyond Catalyst, when you hire Gerecke at the Citadel, Theatre Calgary, Calgary Opera, the Vancouver Playhouse, the National Arts Centre, CanStage, you're hiring an original thinker and collaborator, by no means a decorator of givens. Not even close.

As the rest of the country is discovering, on stages large and small, the Gerecke specialty is a highly unusual marriage of vision, bold theatrical instinct and unfailing inventiveness with unconventional -- "and cheap!" -- materials.

"It's never off the rack," she says. "We invest in people's hand-crafted stuff."

For Hunchback, Paquette's claws are made of wire painstakingly poked through dissected strips of a cheap signage material called Coroplast, "like a giant twist-tie." In the theatre lie wholesale rolls of German-made industrial webbing called Contra, unexpectedly elegant, shipped from the U.S. for Gerecke to sculpt Hunchback's frockcoats and gowns.

And then there's the effervescent Gerecke herself, a lithe, blond, sunny sprite of a woman, just 40, with an epic-scale laugh -- and a taste for the nightmare, the macabre, the dark. A slender long-distance runner who could probably jog around Paris with Quasimodo on her back, no sweat. Who loves to cook (specialty: rack of lamb) and drink red wine of the full-bodied kind. She looks New York, but her "favourite shopping" is Rona, garden discount centres, architecture clearing houses and packing supply outfits.

Her theatre origins and home base are in the small, weird and intimate new works in which the play and the way it looks onstage are inseparable.

But her resume now includes mainstage Broadway musicals ( Cabaret, West Side Story, Grease), new musicals (Theatre Calgary's multicultural Haida exploration Beyond Eden), avant-garde dance ( One Pure Longing, commissioned by Toronto's Luminato Festival), Shakespeare both indoor and out, in Edmonton and Toronto -- and the largest-scale art form of them all, opera. Massive premieres like Calgary Opera's The Inventor, radical reinventions of staples like Rigoletto and Don Giovanni, the list goes on.

Gerecke says, laughing, that sometimes a producer will warn her, "We're not Catalyst-izing this ... meaning not weird!"

"You have to keep test-driving materials," she says. "If I'm driving out of town and see those bales of hay, wrapped like giant marshmallows, I'm thinking, 'Hmm, large quantities of water-resistant plastic that's probably not too expensive and stands up,' " laughs Gerecke, who always carries a Staples ink pen in her purse in case she has to sketch out an idea. "I hang out at buildings under construction, for their tarps, their tape, their plastic."

She loves plastic, for reasons both economical and esthetic. For The House of Pootsie Plunket, one of Catalyst's first shows to tour internationally, Gerecke quilted the mock-epic prairie "Greek" tragedy in industrial strength bubble wrap. For Frankenstein, Gerecke fashioned everything, stage environment and costumes, in paper, sculpted into extravagantly stylized shapes with flex-glue.

It's been nearly 15 years since Christenson and Gerecke took us on a bizarre field trip to the fictional prairie town of Abundance, Alberta, to meet eight solitary human "exhibits," each in a wooden crate. There we were, in Catalyst's Strathcona warehouse theatre, trudging through hay to gawk at the human specimens who'd fallen through the cracks in the Alberta Advantage. By Abundance III, we found ourselves sitting on sawed-off logs, on either side of a gravel road, as grotesque people emerged from a dozen old fridges.

"Emerge" doesn't seem quite the right word for a risk-taker as bold and original as Gerecke. She seems to have hatched, fully formed and dazzling, into the Edmonton theatre scene, after graduating in theatre design from the University of Alberta in 1996. She doesn't see it that way. For one thing, theatre wasn't the original plan. The Winnipeg native, who has a degree in interior design from the University of Manitoba, wanted to be an architect. Her dad, a city planning professor, was "an expert in sustainable economies, green spaces, walkways, a visionary ahead of his time, a Utopian," says Gerecke, who counts him as a major influence. "He founded a national journal, City Magazine. He was into that 100-mile radius thing before its time; he never bought anything that wasn't Canadian-made. His standard question was, 'Why would you not make better the place you live?' "

It was an artistic, book-and talk-filled "household of ideas" in which Gerecke grew up. "We drew; drawing was a big deal in my house. We read. We had to defend our choices. Very left-y .... My father was very concerned about how big events like the Olympics affect a city when the circus leaves town." Her mother was a political organizer for the NDP. "She even worked one campaign in Alberta: now that's hard work!"

Her father died before Gerecke opted for theatre over architecture, and brought architectural notions of space and light along with her, to Edmonton and her new life in theatre design. "Is he spinning in his grave? Am I changing the world?" Gerecke laughs, thoughtfully.

"Theatre is so immediate; the architecture process is so prolonged. By the time the building happens, you've moved on." True, Catalyst doesn't operate in a conventional theatre way; they constantly rethink and retune the pieces in its repertoire, sometimes for years at a time -- and Gerecke loves that. Still, you can't do that with a building.

"Actually, theatre, musical theatre, was my first love," she says. This may have been genetic. "My grandmother and her sister were vaudeville tap dancers. My mom and my aunt were all dancers. So, tap and piano, completely obligatory. Yes, it gave me a certain love for ... boots (she hoots). Then I moved along to jazz. And I loved it, the performative nature of musicals." Her first performance? A musical version of The Shooting of Dan McGrew.

"Short-lived," says Gerecke, cheerfully, of her treading-the-boards period. "I just don't think I was particularly talented. Now, clearly, I'm on the right side of the stage."

From the start, Gerecke's sensibility, rooted in architecture, was outside the standard theatrical blueprints. She cringes slightly, though, remembering her first student project at the U of A, Strindberg's Miss Julie. "I came from the world of the real, and the transition was tricky," she says, over snacks in a Strathcona bar. "I figured I had to literally change the actual floor plan every time the scene changed. I didn't realize you don't have to rebuild the theatre 40 times to define the space! You can do it with light."

Originality with light and unexpected light sources continue to be a Gerecke signature, on display as well at her downtown loft (full of Sterlings, the local theatre awards), where she so rarely is ensconced these days. Gerecke works in the literal world, too. She's been illustrator on archeological digs in Greece and Italy. A decade ago, she designed a glowing sunlit prism of a summer house on Devil's Lake for Catalyst administrator Brenda McNichol.

It was at the U of A where she met a young director with the same kind of bold, indie thinking as her own. Christenson's strange, deconstructed Macbeth happened on a strict geometric grid, stunningly lit, with a quilted backdrop Gerecke peeled back to give us a glimpse of the skeletal infrastructure behind. A creative partnership was born.

And, though Gerecke was instantly busy in other theatres around town, she and Christenson, often with playwright/actor Joey Tremblay, mounted shows of startling originality under the reborn Catalyst imprint: Elephant Wake, with its papier-mache village; Carmen Angel, with its flickering memory landscape, Elektra, and the rest. "I thought all creative relationships would be like that. I was totally spoiled," she smiles.

"Those early days were so formative," Gerecke sighs, over a glass of shiraz, her favourite relax beverage. At work, incidentally, she never touches tea or coffee, sticking exclusively to "fizzy drinks," so one is tempted to draw some parallel with Gerecke's oxygenating effect on other people.

"I was thrown into the deep, dark unknown. ... I found no prototype, no. Crazy times! Lots of 4 a.m. painting, applying rubber cement to things and sticking on straw. In my underwear, I might add."

As word about the designer has spread across the country and beyond, what Gerecke has discovered is that "all creative partnerships are different. There's no formula." She's designed at the Citadel a lot, starting with artistic director Bob Baker's production of the queasy, violent Popcorn. Baker finds "Gerecke an absolute joy to work with ... courageous, fun, original, the extreme collaborator, who completely invests in the process, generously and without apparent ego." Her first mainstage Citadel show was a gorgeous Midsummer Night's Dream, for which she bought and spray-painted 1,500 plastic hydrangeas, and banked them asymmetrically. Her first big Citadel musical was Baker's visually stunning Cabaret.

Gerecke's entry point into the opera world, with its massive stages and "wicked fast" tech times, came via lighting, in Edmonton Opera's warhorse double bill Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci. " But I'm not done! What do I do?" she cried when the appointed hours had elapsed. A designer pal shrugged. "I guess you'll be faster next time." She was.

"We love Bretta!" says Calgary Opera's Bob McPhee. "Who wouldn't?" He praises "her ability to stick to what's true, creatively, while making it work within your resources." Gerecke and director Glynis Leyshon set Rigoletto -- "gorgeous and strange," as McPhee says -- in a kind of tarnished freak show cum circus, with its own sinister underworld visible under the raised stage. Gerecke designed a new Calgary Opera Don Giovanni last season, set in the gleaming office towers of an oil-rich exec-laced city like ... ah yes, Calgary.

For much of January, Gerecke was back there, for the premiere of The Inventor, a major event in the Canadian opera world, for which she created a monumental memory box of cells, in which the serial narrative of Canuck con man Sandy Keith unfolded, in trains, on boats, in salons, hotels, and tenements. She's home less and less; in fact, she hasn't quite decided where home will be in the future, though Edmonton is on the short list, and Vancouver, Montreal, or New York have crossed her mind.

Next season, she's designing a new Carmen in Victoria, the acclaimed Enron musical at Theatre Calgary, and a brand new production of Beethoven's great, and difficult-to-stage opera Fidelo with Edmonton Opera's Brian Deedrick.

The scale may vary. The questions that Gerecke asks her collaborators don't. "Is this is a straight-line show?" Or "is this what you see in your head?" She "makes offers," bombarding the team with visual propositions "until we can find a way to make an idea land." Sometimes, "it's all about texture," like Frankenstein. Sometimes "it happens in lines of light," like Nevermore. Hunchback happens in diagonals through a geometry of arches.

"I'm not a brainiac," says Gerecke, ready to work till the wee hours redoing Hunchback costumes before the truck arrives at Catalyst to transport everything downtown to the Citadel. "I'm more of a gut person." When a mob storms a cathedral, Bretta asks, "How do we get people to feel the way that felt?"

"I'm determined to not be hindered by fear, to be caught in the trap of 'What will people think?' " She laughs. "You have to be invested in the risk. You have to find out whether it works, or if it's a complete disaster. And really, there's not much in between!"

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