Director Steven Schipper On Atlantis

Maureen Hunter's play poses extraordinary challenges for both artists and audiences. Told through a series of alternating monologues, Atlantis must engage the audience, inspire them to listen and excite their imaginations. The actors must speak directly to the audience, never to each other, revealing their desires as characters do in a novel. For Atlantis to work, the artists and audiences must embrace this unique dramatic form, and allow it to wash over them like the warm waters of the Aegean.

Hunter wants us to reach an inner stillness, so that we will hear Atlantis whisper, "To experience ecstasy, you must first connect with spirituality." Atlantis is about ecstatic love, the kind that seems at once holy and hedonistic, and Hunter allows us to touch it, to see it, and to remember that it is within our reach.

She also wants us to walk out of the theatre newly attuned, not only to the sensual, but to the sensuous. She awakens us to the delectation of our bodies, to the exquisiteness of our souls, and to the opulence of the world around us, affects us profoundly. And yet, she does this so simply. There will be no helicopters on the stage, no chandeliers falling from the fly gallery, just a beautiful story, eloquently told.

Steven Schipper
Manitoba Theatre Centre

• Atlantis main page
• About Maureen Hunter
• Manitoba Theatre Centre's production of Atlantis.
• Director Steven Schipper's Notes
• Transmissions: Translating Atlantis
• An Interview with Maureen Hunter
• In Person: A Globe and Mail piece on Hunter