The Question... Frank Cox-O'Connell and Evan Webber on Little Illiad (Spark Festival)

Skype it! - Space, Friendship, and the Trojan War
by Estelle Rosen

Frank Cox-O'Connell  is an actor and director in theatre, and a rock drummer in music. Evan Webber is a writer and performance maker. Together they have authored, co-­created or facilitated over a dozen performance works in Canada, the USA and Europe. “We task ourselves with performing what we think is real in order to see it change. We don’t always agree. Our plays are often about this disagreement. We’ve been doing this for almost ten years now in a lot of different contexts and with many different collaborators. We always make things a bit differently, but there is one thing that is consistent, which is that this theatre (EW&FCO) is about how the sometimes opposed interests and positions of different people can coexist in the same place and the same moment in time.”

CHARPO: Little Iliad audiences will experience this play in an unusual fashion; specifically why does the audience watch the show wearing headphones? And tell us about the Skype involvement.

WEBBER: Both of these decisions were made very early on. We first had the idea to make something that could function in the midst of the chaos of a festival, where there's lots of drunk people and music and other shows happening around it. We thought this kind of environment could serve to embody the spirit of togetherness that we think about in the play, the togetherness that inspires art, war and so on. For this to work, the outside needed to be bigger than the inside so the inside had to be made small. So, small audience.

Review: (Ottawa) Little Illiad

Piecing Together Performance

Part man, part machine, wholly entertaining.

by Keely Kwok

I love an empty stage. Right before the show, you’ve taken your seat, the house lights are still on, you observe the space before you and imagine what sort of story you are about to witness. So needless to say it threw me off when I walked into the performance space of Little Iliad and creator/actor Evan Webber was tinkering away on stage. But then again, I’m usually not asked to wear headphones during a performance either. 

After putting our headphones on, Webber gives a polite smile and tests his mic to make sure we can all hear him. “And with that,” he says, “let the play begin.” 

And it really did.