Julia van Dam, Ellen Chorley, Brennan Campbell in A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The production that launches the Northern Light Theatre season Friday, returns a company known for its edgy contemporary choices to a play — a vintage post-war romantic comedy, in verse — it produced 45 years ago. And Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent is another kind of special occasion too.

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Trevor Schmidt’s production marks the return to the stage of a startlingly multi-faceted theatre artist — playwright, actor, director, festival director artistic director, teacher, mentor — whose 18-year history with Northern Light includes being artistic associate, running the box office, publicity, fund-raising, volunteer coordination. In 2020 Ellen Chorley even wrote NLT a play; the funny, insightful Everybody Loves Robbie premiered on the mainstage.

A Phoenix Too Frequent is Ellen Chorley’s first-ever appearance at Northern Light as an actor. She plays Doto, the droll and earthy maidservant/ companion of a grieving widow (Julia van Dam) determined to join her recently deceased husband Virilius in the underworld. In the story, borrowed from Petronius, the pair are in hubby’s tomb, and Doto is along for the ride across the River Styx to Hades. That’s when a particularly appealing soldier (Brennan Campbell) arrives, curious about the light coming from the tomb. Will his attractions, and the life force, prevail over the widow’s death-centric determination?

Playwright Ellen Chorley with cast of Everybody Loves Robbie, Jayce McKenzie left and Richard Lee Hsi. 2020 photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

“Isn’t Doto fantastic?” declares Chorley, a sunny exuberant sort with a buoyant effect on her human surroundings (as the hundreds of emerging artists at Nextfest, the festival she runs, can attest). “She’s so funny! I love her! It’s just a blast to walk around in her shoes.”

Verse dramas are not thick upon the ground, to be sure. The play, a rarely produced one-act by the author of (the much better known) The Lady’s Not For Burning, is “definitely dense, with incredibly stylized language,” as Chorley says. “Also, it’s a lot fun.” And in the devastated post-war landscape “it seems so ahead of its time, in its thoughts about grief and hope, moving on from grief. Somehow it seems very progressive for 1947.”

Delia Barnett and Ellen Chorley in Soiled Doves, Send In The Girls Burlesque. 2019 photo by db photographics.

Writing, running Nextfest, founding theatre companies like Promise Productions, nurturing the theatre careers of new generations of artists … Chorley’s theatre career is multi-limbed. She herself hasn’t been onstage herself since January 2019, in a play she wrote for the burlesque company she co-founded, Send in the Girls. Soiled Doves was a tribute to the female stars of the Wild West. “A very different experience than doing this language-rich play, of course,” she laughs, thinking of the challenges of Fry’s exuberant, often lush, poetry. “Before that, along with play readings and workshops here and there, it was a 2017 Trunk Theatre production of Caryl Churchill’s Fen.”

The Fry play is a challenging way to return to acting. “Fun and exciting to stretch those acting muscles again; I haven’t used them as much lately…. That’s the great thing about acting training: it’s a tool kit of how to approach different projects, and I was able to (dip into) that.” Comedy, as Chorley points out, “is so technical in a lot of ways. It’s about speed, about timing, about pitch…. I had to rely on those technical elements to start figuring out how the performance comes together.”

Ellen Chorley and Brennan Campbell, A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

“In rehearsal, with Trevor’s vision, we’re figuring out where this play lives in style … ancient myth, yes, but written in 1947, and we’re doing it in 2023. All this grief and sadness, yes, and it takes place in a crypt. But there’s also so much life in the play.” It’s what Chorley likes best, she says, “peeling back the layers.”

And speaking of layers, the production we’ll see, Chorley explains, is “classical-looking. We’re all in togas, and the soldier is in a gladiator uniform.” But there’s the playful feeling, as she describes, of “the early ‘50s doing an ancient story.” Schmidt’s design, down to the wigs and the earrings, nods to Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments — “all colourful and gauzy and beautiful. Fun!” To get in the groove “we all watched Anne Baxter in The Ten Commandments.”

Chorley and Northern Light: a relationship forged 18 years ago when “the new little musical theatre grad from Grant MacEwan” did a group audition with a cluster of the small theatres. “I just started going to see plays a lot,” she remembers. “I always tell young actors to do that. And I really liked what Northern Light was doing — interesting scripts, challenging work, productions that would make me think.”

She was (and is) an indefatigable volunteer. ” Northern Light always did A LOT of bingos.” And one thing led to another. “When you love a company you just want to keep showing up for them!” And “truly at Northern Light I’ve learned so much about my whole career as an artist …. Trevor (Northern Light artistic director Trevor Schmidt) has been so generous in letting me in to see his artistic process; his mentorship has been so valuable.”

Northern Light’s 2020 commission to write Everybody Loves Robbie, a love letter to first relationships and high school theatre, was “a life changer,” says Chorley. “A big leap in my writing career! Before that I was mostly producing my own work. To be produced by a professional company allowed me to join the Playwrights Guild of Canada, become a full member of the Alberta Playwrights Network … to operate on a more professional basis as a writer. A Big Step. I was over-the-moon thankful for the opportunity.”

Chorley grew up in an arts-oriented household. The importance of children’s theatre is one of her favourite subjects and she’s eloquent in its defence. It led, in 2006, to her own kids’ theatre company Promise Productions  (her trilogy of amusingly sassy, genre-bent feminist Cinderella plays were a hit at the Fringe).

And high school theatre was crucial, thinks Chorley. At Ross Sheppard, not much known as “an arts school” at the time, theatre was “a scrappy DIY” affair. “It was ‘we don’t have any money but we’re not going to get in trouble trying things. You can be an actor but you should know how to build a flat, do some lighting, figure out stage management, sew costumes.’ And writing and creating our own work was valued! That was a big part of the culture there. And it was really important to the artist I’ve become!” Conversation with Chorley, as you’ll glean, comes with its own built-in exclamation points.

“We were empowered to figure things out for ourselves! And it’s made me a bit bold in my own writing and producing work.”

The teenage Chorley and her theatre pals took a cabaret play they’d created to Nextfest, the multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists she’d later head. And her first play Bohemian Perso ran there. Her first Nextfest gig was curating the festival’s high school theatre offerings. An it was at the 2010 edition she tried burlesque for the first time. Send in the Girls, and the burlesque/theatre hybrid Tudor Queens that she wrote for the new troupe, were at the Fringe the next summer. And their productions, have found full-house audiences ever since.

What was the attraction of that art form? “I liked what it had to say about body positive image,” Chorley thinks. “I liked the relationship with audience. And I liked the style, the glamour, the glitz.” She laughs. “You may have a costume designer. But you’re the one sitting for seven hours gluing on the rhinestones. There’s a DIY quality to burlesque!”

And now, with A Phoenix Too Frequent, Chorley returns to Northern Light, and to acting, her original entry point into theatre as a kid (“I wanted to be a Shakespearean actor”), with a skill set that extends to every aspect of “making art.” And she returns with her usual gusto. “I’m so excited, and maybe a little nervous. But experience just makes you stronger!”

PREVIEW

A Phoenix Too Frequent

Theatre: Northern Light

Written by: Christopher Fry

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Julia van Dam, Brennan Campbell, Ellen Chorley

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through Oct. 21

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com