photo by Marjo Wright
June Fukumura and Keely O’Brien, co-Artistic Directors of Popcorn Galaxies, a theatre company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, are bringing a taste of their “interactive adventure” The Dead Letter Office to Eastern Front Theatre’s Early Stages Festival, with a Rotunda Installation at Alderney Landing Theatre between February 15th and 17th, as well as a staged reading on February 15th and 16th, before they bring their fully-realized interactive, participatory theatre experience to audiences during EFT’s Stages Festival in May. I sat down to chat with Fukumura and O’Brien in the Board Room at the Alderney Landing Theatre on a particularly beautiful sunny day in Dartmouth, before the most recent snowfall.
Fukumura explains to me that The Dead Letter Office is based on a real-life office of the same name, which started in the United States Post Office in 1825 to deal with undeliverable mail. Since then Canada and the United Kingdom have also adopted this practice. “It was the arm of the postal service that would collect undeliverable letters and parcels, and things that were lost in the system. [They] would all be delivered to this one service, and then these Dead Letter Detectives, would essentially go through these undeliverables and try to send them to the right person by trying to decipher the handwriting, or trying to re-send it.” Often, however, matching the misplaced mail with its intended recipient was impossible, and so these offices quickly filled up with letters and packages. “Relics of people’s actual lives [were] sorted and housed in this one room,” says Fukumura, “There’s something kind of poetic about that, and beautiful.” She also tells me that recently there has been a “magic phenomenon” where some of these undelivered pieces of mail from the past have come back into circulation. “So someone now opens their mailbox, and receives something written during the War,” she says, “We were really inspired by this idea of this theatrical phenomenon that is happening in real life. We really felt like there was a pulse there for a project, and how [this idea] can relate to the world today- maybe the loss that we feel during the pandemic, even post-pandemic, when we still kind of feel that distance, alienation, and loneliness.”
It is apt that this project, centred on letter writing, began while theatre artists were still physically distanced from one another, at the height of the pandemic. Audiences in Halifax will have the opportunity to experience the full show at the Stages Festival in May. At that time the way the show will work is that audience members will sign up, and the Dead Letter Office, Fukumura and O’Brien, will have a lost letter for them, which was written earlier by a different audience member. The letter they receive is addressed to a real person that the writer feels that they have lost touch with somehow. The recipient audience member then responds to the letter they are given, pretending to be the person to whom the letter is addressed. Both letters are exchanged anonymously, to encourage an authenticity, especially for the person who is performing as themselves in this exercise.
The show premiered at the end of 2020 in The Array, a festival hosted by Upintheair Theatre in Vancouver, and it is from this earlier production that Fukumura and O’Brien have collected a series of letters written by audience members, and shared with permission, which will be on display at the Early Stages Festival here in Dartmouth.
“We had about fifty-five audience members who signed up,” says Fukumura, “mostly from Vancouver and the surrounding areas, but we had a couple people from across the country, and even in the States… the feedback that we received was really positive. Often people felt like they were being seen and heard, for the first time in some ways. They were sharing intimate details of their lives that maybe they haven’t shared before publicly, or don’t bring up, but now they are able to express them through letter mail.” In fact, when audiences in Vancouver were told that the show was coming to Halifax, many folks expressed interest in signing up again.
“One thing that feels special to me about this specific project is the idea that the audience members get to take on a role of somebody else’s loved one, to try to exercise empathy. It’s sort of like how an actor would take on a role, and try to find empathy in that character…. As the receiver you’re getting an imagined version of your person. So, there’s multiple layers of play happening, and role playing, all with the intention that it’s about the audience members feeling like they can connect with strangers, essentially… You can glean so much from the actual handwriting; there is something kind of vulnerable, we don’t usually give and receive handwritten things anymore… it’s all digital,” Fukumura sifts through various letters covering a table, which will be displayed this week in the rotunda, “You can see that people took advantage of the form and made it their own. In fact, this person really wrote a lot. It’s a two-pager. This person sent a [copy of] their parents’ wedding photo… this person sent instructions on canoe paddle strokes. I guess their letter was relevant to that. There’s some whimsy in there that is kind of fun.” Normally the letters will remain private between the two audience members and Fukumura and O’Brien won’t get to see the responses, but these archival letters will give audience members a sense of how the project has worked in the past.
“I guess the other artistic question in doing this project is the faith in humanity, in the goodness of audience members being kind to one another. We haven’t explicitly said, ‘please write with kindness in mind, or the intention of making the other person feel better.’ We haven’t actually prescribed a certain way to respond, because I think as a company we are very interested in audience agency, and drawing out that audiences’ experience.”
Fukumura and O’Brien found their way to Dartmouth after reaching out at random to Dustin Harvey of Halifax’s Secret Theatre, “who makes wonderful, amazing things in small intimate scales, and unusual works that sit outside the conventions of theatre, which is exactly what we do. We thought there was a symbiosis between our companies and our aesthetic and our questions,” says Fukumura. Harvey put them in contact with Kat McCormack, Artistic Director of Eastern Front, who suggested that they bring the show to Halifax for both Early Stages, and the larger Stages Festival in the Spring. “[Coming here] fell into our laps in a really beautiful way. It was very fortuitous that all these things lined up and everyone was so generous with their time and resources,” says Fukumura.
The audiences have been generous too, so far. “I think we were quite moved seeing how much care and effort people put into this, because that’s a question: Will people even follow through? And of course we had a few drop outs, but the majority of people really committed and sent us these detailed things, and adding family photos and pages from books… it felt like an honour to receive all of this- to be the conduit to send it forward,” says O’Brien.
“We’re hoping the iteration at Stages will be equally as exciting and people will participate and have these really beautiful exchanges,” says Fukumura.
The Stage Reading of The Dead Letter Office will be February 15th and 16th at 7:00pm in the Rotunda at Alderney Landing Theatre (2 Ochterloney Street, Dartmouth). For more information about all the other Works in Progress, Workshops. Special Events, and Social Events happening at Early Stages visit this website.
