Prairie Theatre Exchange opens its new Leap Series this evening with a multimedia production called Empire of the Son.

Writer and performer Tetsuro Shigematsu says the show is the story of a father and son.

"My father, in fact. And he was a man who I never had a conversation with in my entire life. So when he began to get ill towards the end of his life, I began doing a series of interviews with him, and during that time I learned: he had tea with the Queen of England, he was there when Marilyn Monroe sang happy birthday to JFK, and as a young boy he stood in the ashes of Hiroshima," says Shigematsu.

Shigematsu says his father was always home, and they spent time together, but they didn't have an earnest conversation until Tetsuro presented his father with questions from behind the microphone. Both men had worked in radio. A release from PTE describes the show as "the story of two generations of broadcasters and the radio silence between them."

PTE's Leap Series is a series of plays meant to challenge and provoke, and push the boundaries of storytelling. Shigematsu's set features a foley stage of sorts, but he says, instead of just sound, he's creating visual effects.

"There are a series of toys, for example, a miniature finger-skateboard, a miniature model of a broken down city, a scene of a bathtub, and what we do is we take our live cinema camera, and we move and manipulate these objects before the camera, and the audience gets to see this live cinema created before their very eyes, because there's a screen behind me."

Shigematsu says by the end of this tour, he will have performed the show more than 150 times. His father died two weeks before the show first opened. Shigematsu says it's been emotional journey.

"The experience of doing the show every night has been quite extraordinary. It's almost like having a seance every night. Even though the show has lots of laughs and we have a really good time together with the audience,
the interesting thing for me as a performer is, when I look up at these lights, it's easy for me to imagine his presence or his spirit joining me here on stage, and for me as a performer that sometimes hits me with an unexpected emotional force and I think the audience can feel that."

Empire of the Son runs November 28th to December 9th at PTE. It is produced by Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre.