The Mosquitos, an original absurdist play premiering at The Capitol Theatre in Nelson, asks us to consider: How do we live in a world together when we no longer share a reality?
The idea first bit Slocan Valley playwright Marya Folinsbee on a hot summer night in 2019. She was up late reading and being pestered by a mosquito, thinking about how to be a mother and live in community during weird and fraught times. Then COVID-19 hit, and she watched the creep of misinformation and divisive politics grow — not just on the world stage but polarizing her rural Kootenay community.
From awkward conversations at the playground — to comment wars on the Slocan Valley community Facebook group, which Folinsbee is an administrator for — the sense that she shared a reality with people around her was disappearing.
In The Mosquitos, an absurd comedy of manners, a group of old friends get together for a dinner party while their community is in the midst of a strange and disturbing transformation. Here, the change isn’t internet-fuelled politics, but rumours are swirling that their neighbours are no longer the humans they once were.
Folinsbee lives on Sinixt territory in Winlaw, built on wetlands of the Slocan River that make for notorious mosquitos in the late spring and summer. She co-created Material Theatre in 2018 with friend and collaborator Martina Avis, to produce place-based rural theatre and performance installations with and in community.
While grounded there, The Mosquitos is inspired by the absurdist theatre movement of the 1940s and 50s in Europe — an artistic reaction to the Second World War, fascism, and the existential crisis of nuclear war.
That movement includes plays like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros, which Mosquitos quotes from and is in conversation with.
The show is created by an all-local cast of artists from the West Kootenays, including projection design, mask and puppetry, local actors and a small crew of children.
Funding was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance and the inaugural Judy Wapp Art Fellowship Award, a local prize created in memory of a beloved Kootenay artist.
Tickets can be purchased at capitoltheatre.ca or at its box office in Nelson. There is also a rustic preview at The Vallican Whole on Friday, June 6, with limited tickets available.
