Still fresh off his run with Nicola Cavendish in 4000 Miles, 26-year old Vancouver native Nathan Barrett gets a little more intimate with a production of Matthew Mackenzie’s The Particulars.
[pullquote]“Imagine you lose the person you love and you can never see them again. Everything else in the world becomes mundane and so intrinsically linked that you cannot see joy anywhere and you are so trapped in a routine that it becomes an impossible task to find a way out of it.” – Nathan Barrett[/pullquote]“Truth reads no matter what size house you are in,” says Barrett of his move from the Stanley Theatre, home to 4000 Miles, to the much smaller PAL Studio Theatre for The Particulars. “The audience knows what’s real and what isn’t.”
And while Barrett says he has the capacity to play big and small, he also is just happy to be acting in this one-man show: “It could be three people in the house I’m ecstatic. As long as there are more people than me in the audience I’m good,” he laughs.
After seeing the playwright perform a shortened version of The Particulars six years ago, Barrett says he has always wanted to perform the play, but the timing both professionally and personally never presented itself until now.
“I want to do it because I’m trying to get over my own heartbreak,” admits Barrett, who recently broke up with his girlfriend.
The Particulars tells the story of Gordon who, like Barrett, is trying to get over his own loss.
“Imagine you lose the person you love and you can never see them again,” says Barrett. “Everything else in the world becomes mundane and so intrinsically linked that you cannot see joy anywhere and you are so trapped in a routine that it becomes an impossible task to find a way out of it.”
“We mortals sometimes lose our loves and it is out of our control and it is so annoying,” he continues. “You learn from your mistakes and try to love again. This guy is not moving on and I am not moving on and for a big reason: when you know you found the one and that gets destroyed it doesn’t make sense to let go.”
Before you start to think of The Particulars is one big sob fest though, Barrett reminds us that it really is a comedy.
“It’s funny. It’s heavy. That is the subtext that I have to deal with as an actor,” explains Barrett. “I know all the lines and words, but it is the guy’s pain that I’m concerned with; a sometimes very funny pain. You watch this guy and you love to see him fail and it is so hilarious, so pathetic, and so relatable.”
With a title that has as much to do with the mundane aspects of life that we grasp onto to help stay afloat during stressful times, as it is about how the playwright has written his script, Barrett is looking to honour the text that he originally fell in love with a half-dozen years ago.
“The play is particularly wordy, very detailed with long-winded sentences and enormous text; it is very ‘particular’,” he says. “It is such a full, descriptive and very voluptuous script, and I want to suck on the words.”
As for The Particulars helping the young actor to finally get over his own break-up? Barrett is candid, but you can also tell he isn’t willing to share all the particulars right now.
The Particulars plays the PAL Studio Theatre (581 Cardero St) November 11-16. Tickets are available online at https://northerntickets.com.