Isolation Suite captures the soundscape of a man who's come UnDone
Theatre Conspiracy and Rumble Theatre audio series blends rock ‘n’ roll, poetry, and theatre
Isolation Suite’s Tim Carlson and Christie Watson. Photo by Reznek Creative
Theatre Conspiracy and Rumble Theatre present Isolation Suite, an audio series and website, starting April 15
IF THE TITLE Isolation Suite has you thinking of a COVID self-quarantine room, think again: creators Tim Carlson and Christie Watson were working on the multimedia mashup of rock ‘n’ roll, poetry, and theatre long before coronavirus was a household word.
The idea for the audio series first came to playwright-musician Carlson, of Theatre Conspiracy, when he encountered the midlife blues of his early 50s.
On a conference call with co-creator, drummer, and Rumble Theatre managing producer Christie Watson (the other half of his two-piece band Cold Calculi) he admits it was rough. “I was trying to take care of myself, feeling like I was teetering on the edge a bit. Around that time a lot of friends and colleagues were suddenly hitting fairly substantial mental health crises,” he says. “Further research confirmed that’s fairly common: the late 40s and early 50s is typical for men in North America for hitting depression, and the highest rate of suicide for men in North America is in that time.”
And so Carlson began to write—both music and text—as a way of making sense of things. Slowly, sometime in 2018, the character of UnDone started to emerge: an aging East Van musician who is feeling increasingly invisible, isolated, and irrelevant. Even his friends have ghosted him.
UnDone is going grey physically—in publicity photos for the show, a silvery mane obscures Carlson’s face, looking a bit like Cousin It reimagined as a past-his-pull-date indie rocker. But Carlson also sees his character as going grey socially and psychologically as his identity disappears.
Meanwhile, UnDone’s East Van neighbourhood—what the character calls “Absolutely Broadway & Fraser”, and Carlson’s own stomping ground—becomes increasingly surreal.
Photo by Reznek Creative
“The effect is further exacerbated by a loss of touch and that got me thinking about loss of other senses—smell, taste, hearing—as a part of UnDone’s experience,” the playwright explains. “And, as it turned out, these are now side effects that COVID patients are experiencing, along with ‘brain fog’ and other psychological reactions. UnDone also experiences the loss of the ability to read anything digital. As far as I know that hasn’t become a COVID side effect!”
Carlson had imagined the character would lead to a larger, live-performed theatre project, similar to his past documentary-style works like Victim Impact, Foreign Radical, and Extraction.
Those plans would be changed radically by an isolation that locked down the world.
But first, parallel to Carlson’s research, he and drummer Watson had started a band called Cold Calculi. (Watson’s Rumble Theatre shares space with Theatre Conspiracy at the East Side’s Progress Lab.)
“I always thought you and I starting a band was an inevitability,” Watson tells his colleague on the call. “Before I met Tim, I pretty much knew his musical taste and knew it was the same as mine….Isolation Suite was in the works, but the focus at first was, ’We need to get together and play!’”
And so it became obvious that Cold Calculi’s experimental, indie-rock-driven songs could express UnDone’s story. With theatres shuttered due to COVID, the work morphed into a six-part, episodic audio series.
“It’s maybe somewhat ironic that a project that was, in conception, about breaking down isolation is perhaps best experienced on headphones,” Carlson says with a dry laugh. But he adds the material lent itself perfectly to the new platform: “Most of the text is an interior monologue.”
The artists point out that their songs are integrated differently here than they might be in traditional musical theatre, reflecting the character’s descent into a darker shade of grey. Audio series producer David Mesiha uses the band’s haunting, feedback-strafed music to underscore UnDone’s thoughts.
The series will unfold over multiple weeks, backed by the website that complements and enrichens the experience. Think East Side alleyway photos, the scribbly drawings that stand in for UnDone’s state of mind, and the stop-motion-animation video We Teach Our Objects How to Speak Our Language by Margaret Krawecka and Ulla Laidlaw that came out as an early teaser for Isolation Suite. (Stir wrote about it here.)
Watson describes the website as a sort of “lobby” for the audio series. “It’s a durational show, in a way, and this is somewhere you can go back to, so you can go deeper into UnDone’s world,” he says.
“Hopefully through the show, people can find a deeper connection to something—something a little bit more supportive, to feel like we're creating a space where we can continue to experiment with this idea. This gives it a framework: when you finish the show you can go wander around the website.”
Aware of how many people out there are struggling with the same depression that inspired Isolation Suite, the production is working with community partner Moving Forward Family Services, a registered charity that provides low-barrier counselling for individuals, families, couples and children.
And so, remarkably, Carlson and Watson are building connections in isolated times—not just with community and audiences, but between themselves.
“So many aspects around this show are healing and beautiful,” says Watson. “For me as a songwriter and getting to explore that and the friendship between Tim and I—that’s been so central.” Think of it as whatever the opposite is to going grey.
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