I Turned Around and She Was Gone marks award-winning actress and drama teacher Jennie Reznek’s first solo stage performance in more than two decades
I Turned Around and She Was Gone is very much a Magnet Production in the sense that they have “gone back to our old team. So Mark Fleischman is directing, Craig Leo is designing, Ina Wichterich has done the choreography, me acting and Neo Muyanga has done the original music,” explained Jennie Reznek.
The Magnet Theatre has been at the forefront of educational programmes in the theatre industry for the past 27 years, but it is their professional stage productions, many of which have some or most of those names involved, that keep them in the minds of the audience.
With this new production, Magnet’s dream team are giving the newer trainee members of the company the chance to see how the seasoned professionals do it: “It allows them to see us at work. And also, what’s happening now is that we’ve got four Expanded Public Works placements, which is like a third year of training, and three of them are making solo shows.”
A big part of the Magnet Theatre signature is also what Reznek loves about working with one of South Africa’s longest standing theatre companies: “Whenever we do approach a new piece, we don’t repeat the same formulas, so none of our shows look the same, but there is a similar... locating of the story in the body, and in the physical images on the stage.
“But, in all the pieces we try to find a new form that best tells the story we want to tell.”
This time around it is storytelling which crosses a wide range of theatrical styles, “so there’s a little bit of clown, a little bit of high Greek tragedy, dance, very straight storytelling ...it’s quite Brechtian as well because we break the fourth wall.”
Reznek is also excited because it is the first time that she is performing with an audience on three sides: “It makes for a very intimate experience, for both me and the audience. That’s one of the interesting and compelling aspects of the play, how intimate it is and how much I speak directly to the audience.”
Another different aspect is also that I Turned Around and She Was Gone takes its starting point from a fully realised script written in blank verse by Reznek, rather than an extensive workshop process.
The basic narrative is that of the Greek story about Demeter and Persephone and the origin of seasons. “When I first started working Mark said, no,” she sighs. “You’re trying to do too many things at once. We have to find a framework.”
The Persephone/Demeter myth viewed as not an abduction story but rather one of change, turned out to be the lens he meant: “To become an adult one has to leave one’s mother and engage with your own wild self that is different from your mother and you have to individuate, and in order to individuate, you have to step into the dark.”
“I originally wanted to tell a story... I’m 55 and my daughter is 15. As I’m moving towards being an old crone basically, my daughter is moving from being a child into a woman. I was fascinated that this movement was happening at the same time in our home.
“Plus I witnessed my own mother’s death, so I was witness to a woman moving from matter into spirit, so I became very interested in these powerful moments of transition that women go through.”
The story is partly about what each of the Demeter and Persephone characters lose and gain, “but also any woman’s story about the loss of their younger self. You look in the mirror and ask ‘what happened?’”
• I Turned Around and She Was Gone is on at the Magnet Theatre from February 18 to March 14, Wednesdays to Saturdays at 8pm. Tickets:R120 at Computicket.