Gruppo Rubato

Airport Security

Gruppo Rubato is currently in preparation for the world premiere of its newest theatrical work, to open in Ottawa in Spring 2010. Airport Security (a comedy of paranoia) is a seventy-five minute, four-actor multi-character play conceived around airports, written, performed and designed by professional Ottawa-based artists. This production is important for Gruppo Rubato in that it represents the next step in the company’s evolution, maturing from ad-hoc Fringe scale productions to toward a company with stabilized resources and some infrastructure.

As travelers, are we as safe as we are led to believe? Are we in as much danger as we are led to believe? While Orange Alerts, shoe bombs, and overzealous Homeland Security officers may allow Canadians to look down smugly on our neighbours to the south, we should neither forget, nor be blind to, our own growing obsession with “security.”

Airport Security is based conceptually around the idea of being lost: airports are remarkably similar, utilitarian places; in-between points on a longer journey, where the pageantry of security is on full display. We want the audience to experience the bleariness of excess travel – the out-of-place feeling brought about by hopping through time zones, and the excessive waiting under fluorescent lights and re-circulated air. With only four actors tackling the text’s forty roles, characters will meld together like the strangers one briefly encounters when traveling. The production’s design will help emphasize this, with the use of simple, iconic costume pieces (a pilot’s hat, a flight attendant’s scarf, the mirrored sunglasses of a security officer), a mostly bare stage, and a few well-chosen props creating an atmosphere of everyplace – the action could be taking place at any airport, any time, anywhere. Structurally, the play takes a non-linear narrative approach, following a lonely traveler on a cross-country flight, while also flashing between thematically-connected vignettes melding together under the watch of the implied “unseen eye” as characters suspiciously examine their surroundings and others in their surroundings. Airports are places where we see how hard the government works to confirm that We Are Safe, and for the most part, succeeds. Yet airports are also places of mistrust. Proof of identity always at the ready, passengers must do all they can to blend in. Standing out at an airport – behaviourally, socially, or racially – is dangerous.