KEY POINTS:
He went from the Silo to the Sundance Film Festival, and now writer-director Toa Fraser returns to the inner-city theatre where the journey began.
After "gentle persuasion" from Silo creative directors Frith Walker and Shane Bosher, Fraser agreed late last year to rework Bare, his first full-length play,
to celebrate the theatre's 10th birthday. Written when he was in his early 20s and working at Newmarket's Village 8 cinema, Bare consists of a series of loosely connected monologues which capture the Auckland he knew.
In 1998, struggling to establish a brand and a home audience, Silo's then creative director Sharyn Duncan gave Fraser and actors Madeleine Sami and Ian Hughes the opportunity to premiere the new work.
Bare then toured extensively throughout New Zealand, Australia and Britain and Duncan commissioned Fraser to write a second play to be performed at the Silo.
No. 2 eventually became a feature film, written and directed by Fraser, which won the Sundance Film Festival's audience award in the world-cinema dramatic competition.
"The day after Bare opened I was in Continental Noodle House in Durham Lane getting my $4.90 pork and rice when I heard people talking about this play they'd seen called Bare," he says. "I knew that was the start of things so that very day I went and handed in my notice at Village 8."
Meanwhile the Silo - opened in response to the closure of Auckland's Watershed Theatre - grew from a stage for hire to a venue offering a fully produced annual season of theatre.
Shane Bosher says they wanted to mark its 10-year milestone with a work which served as a touchstone in the theatre's history.
"We talked about reviving one of our bigger hits such as The Women or The Goat, but at the end of the day we wanted to look at a work in both a celebratory and a new way and we just kept on coming back to Bare.
"In this production we acknowledge our past, our present and, in some ways, our future. We are serving the text of our first big hit, with a director who has delivered some of our best work, with two fantastic new actors at the beginning of their careers, but whom I believe will become the next generation of professional actors."
Fresh from the Silo's Ensemble Project, Morgana O'Reilly and Curtis Vowell bring 15 characters to life through monologues on subjects as diverse as body image and takeaways, tagging and English literature.
O'Reilly, 21, says performing at night in the Ensemble Project productions and rehearsing Bare by day means it feels as if the duo lives at the Silo. "I can't believe I can keep this much information, this many lines, in my head."
Bare's original female lead, Madeleine Sami, relates to O'Reilly's situation. "Toa wrote the play No. 2 [which she starred in] when we were still doing Bare and it wasn't till about a week before No. 2's opening night that we finally had a finished script.
"I recorded the whole play on a mini-disc and would fall asleep at night listening to it and hoping it would sink in and I wouldn't get the two shows mixed up. It must have worked because I never dropped one line - and if I did no one was any the wiser."
Vowell, 27, remembers seeing Bare at Wellington's Bats Theatre in 2000 and marvelling at the "slickness" of the production. "I had never seen anything like it before and I could not even imagine how it could be put together. It was so slick, so clean and there wasn't one weak link," he says.
"It was incredible, a genuine actor's piece that, as a young actor, you dream of being able to do."
But Fraser thought long and hard about reworking Bare, saying it was a big decision because of the strong emotional attachment he has to it.
"I didn't want to do too much in terms of rewriting because I wanted to stay true to the original material, but in the 10 years since writing Bare New Zealand's popular culture has changed in some significant ways, especially when it comes to Pacific Island representation.
"There has been a massive increase in Pacific Island exposure in terms of television and in the music industry so certain parts of the script had to be reworked to reflect this."
Oliver Driver, who directs the new season of Bare, says he aims to celebrate the Silo through the production.
"You might say Bare isn't so bare any more. We've spent a lot of time rehearsing in the green room and using the things we found laying around as props so we've brought those elements into it to celebrate the theatrical environment."
Fraser will be in the opening night audience as will original cast members Sami and Hughes, who have fond memories of their time with the show.
"It's going to be a fascinating experience," says Hughes. "I might have performed it about 240 times but I've never seen the whole show."
Bosher says 10 years on it remains as relevant and uplifting as ever.
"It's from us, for us, and about us. I think the fundamental reason it shifts New Zealand theatre and our audiences is because it acts as a celebratory index of our lives: good, bad, magnificent, ugly, and luminous. It expands our sense of community and of connectedness which, at a time when information technologies conspire to shut us down into smaller micro-managed bytes, is a very good thing."
On stage
* What: Bare
* Where: Silo Theatre
* When: April 12-May 12
