KEY POINTS:
When Penumbra, the theatrical centrepiece of Auckland Festival AK07, was first performed in Wellington, director Christian Penny's mother warned him she might leave before the show ended.
She thought the play would be too long, so Penny told her there were two intervals during the near four-hour show and she could go quietly during one of those.
She stayed to the very end, though, captivated by the characters and the desire to find out how their lives evolved during the 50 years of New Zealand history Penumbra deals with.
Penny says his mother's reaction typifies what he has observed of audiences who watched the epic production when it was performed at Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School in Wellington in 2004.
"Audiences were so hungry for the stories because they are New Zealand stories," he says. "I could feel it in a way I hadn't experienced with any other production. They were hearing our stories and thinking about them in different ways and caught up in the fusion of the various voices."
Penumbra is one of the more ambitious theatrical undertakings in New Zealand performance history, spanning 50 years and interconnecting the lives of around 40 characters across three generations.
It crosses geographical and chronological boundaries to demonstrate the impact social and political turning-points have on people who, ultimately, shape and interpret those events.
Bringing Penumbra to Auckland, where it makes its professional debut, has been a journey almost as epic as the script itself. Penny says it wouldn't have happened had it not been for the fact it was developed - eventually - as a drama school project, giving cast and crew the luxury of several years to craft and re-craft the story.
Ironically for a piece that owes much to a Wellington-based drama school, it started life as a story about Auckland. In 2001, Penny, a new father living away from inner city Auckland for the first time in many years, and his friend the writer David Geary, agreed to collaborate on a new work about the City of Sails.
Around the same time, the New Theatre Initiative - which is developing a new theatre in Auckland - funded two development workshops.
"Those involved in the New Theatre Initiative obviously thought things were going to happen more quickly than they have," says Penny. "They were looking for work which might be suitable for the theatre when it opened."
As further workshops were held and the story developed, actors and crew alike suggested possible material to be included. The play, called Point on the Hill, grew from an Auckland to a national story encompassing the Bastion Point occupation, the Tangiwai disaster, the reaction to Queen Elizabeth II's 1953 tour and the importance of the Big O.E. in the Kiwi psyche.
By 2003, Penny had moved to Wellington to teach at Toi Whakaari and Geary was living on Canada's Vancouver Island. Miranda Harcourt, Toi Whakaari's then head of acting, suggested the show be done within the school as a graduation project for the 2004 class.
"It was fantastic because I was struggling to see how to produce a work like this because of the expense and the time involved," says Penny.
Helped by a number of fellow Toi Whakaari tutors and an enthusiastic student body, the piece began to take a more definite shape. Students were each given semi "secret" assignments - called provocations - to research, bringing back stories and experiences to fold into the script. Geary describes the process as highly collaborative and says the aim was always to involve actors in the writing.
He calls himself the script co-ordinator and says it has been his job to "iron out wrinkles in the writing" rather than produce an entire finished script. "I live in Canada and make 'commando-style' raids down here to work on the show," he says. "This is one production which owes a lot to flash-disc technology and email."
In August 2004 the show's name was changed to Penumbra, the technical term to describe a partial shadow but particularly that of an eclipse.
"In an eclipse a larger area is dominated by the penumbra - the partial shadow where the moon and the sun aren't in complete alignment," Penny explains.
"We took the idea of the penumbra as our starting point because we live more of our lives in this space, framed by a collection of shadows cast by our forebears - parents, communities and the political forces that have preceded us and affect us in the present."
Performed for just one week at Toi Whakaari, the organisers of AK07 then commissioned a new season of Penumbra.
A further two years have been spent transforming the '04 production to the '07. The cast has been reduced from 16 to 10; the story made larger to suit a space which can hold an audience of up to 550 rather than 70 people.
New research tasks were assigned to the cast, a mix of those who appeared in the original, and newcomers.
"I came to Toi Whakaari to teach but it has been the most amazing place to make this production," says Penny. "It's a huge show, a totally ambitious undertaking but it's innovative and it's ours."
Performance
What: Penumbra
Where and when: SkyCity Theatre, March 9-17
