If you attend the Belfry Theatre’s production of Helen’s Necklace, don’t be surprised if you recognize Helen’s voice. Well known for her voice-acting skills in Sailor Moon, Care Bears, George Shrinks, and Ned’s Newt, performer Tracey Moore sets the stage as western woman Helen who goes on a mission in the Middle East.
Moore describes Helen as a Woody Allen type of character. She’s on a mission to discuss world issues and possible solutions, and is plunked down in the centre of circumstances which she knows nothing about and doesn’t really understand who or where she is.
“Helen’s character is a typical female character that we’re used to seeing in our western culture,” says Moore. “She isn’t a maiden, mother, or crone, but is rather an older professional woman who never made a family of her own.”
In the script, Helen loses her necklace and lets her colleagues go ahead while she journeys into the heart of Palestinian camps searching for her necklace. There, Helen encounters the real loss of the people there. As a western woman, Helen values external things to find herself. The necklace to Helen represents a fragile, lighter-than-air hope that can float above disaster.
“There’s a real statement made in Helen’s Necklace that fragility, willingness to be open, and looking at chaos and tragedy, while maintaining lightness and hope, is the solution,” explains Moore. “Helen comes to a place in the play where she talks about dreaming, hoping, the value of pursuing pasts, and how to find solutions.”
Moore did lots of photojournalism research about Palestinian camps, the history of Beirut, and the references of Helen of Troy. The Middle East is very ancient, so there are conflicts in the tides of humanity coming in and out, she says. There’s been lots of war and loss so Moore says it’s important to look as far back as the times of the Roman ruins to grasp the magnitude of what Helen is viewing comparatively to aspects of a very young country like Canada.
“I work in dreams, in fantasies, as a career, so I try creating things lighter than air to deliver as a gateway to change, hope, or significant motions towards positivity in a personal or societal level,” says Moore. “I know that I have empathy toward conflict in the Middle East but don’t have real understanding. This play serves as a peephole into the world of our brothers and sisters across the ocean to get us thinking of solutions.”
As people of the world, we all lose things and suffer loss. Moore thinks it’s this binding forceŃnot our environmentsŃthat can help us understand each other, and if we look past the environments we can realize that we all have a lot more in common than we’ve realized.
“I hope this play prompts people to see the world differently,” says Moore. “We’re a global community with solutions that are much easier to resolve than we think they are.”
Helen’s Necklace
Until February 22
The Belfry Theatre, $25-$40
belfry.bc.ca