Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

She’s back.

We met Pochsy at the Fringe in 1992, a smudgy-eyed chalky-faced kewpie with a lethal mixture of charm and vitriol coursing through her veins — and that sweet Clara Bow smile. In Pochsy’s Lip she was attached to an IV drip; we never quite recovered.

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Since that unforgettable sighting, we’ve seen Pochsy convalescing on a “dream vacation” at The Last Resort (Oh, Baby: Pochsy’s Adventures By The Sea). We’ve seen the employee of Mercury Packers (“I pack mercury”) summoned by the government for an audit, meditating on modern life (Citizen Pochsy: Head Movements of a Long-Haired Girl). And then, in 2007, the macabre sugar-coated satirist vanished into thin (toxic) air.

After 15 years we meet Karen Hines’s unforgettable creation once more come Thursday, at Theatre Network, in Pochsy IV. If, like me, you blithely read the title as Pochsy 4, think again. Hines and her director Michael Kennard of the horror clown duo Mump and Smoot (he’s Mump; Hines is Mump and Smoot‘s director) think of the title as IV as in pole — as I discovered this past week at the Roxy. “How many titles did we go through?” Kennard asks Hines. They lost count.

“A lot had happened,” says Calgary-based Hines of the year that Pochsy exited the stage, in the “cabaret compilation” Pochsy Unplugged. The nightmare in Toronto real estate that would inspire her play Crawlspace had happened. Hines had moved to Calgary from her home town Toronto. “Then I just started to see the world going in a way that felt too fragmented — the internet, social media … — to encapsulate a room” the way Pochsy does. Hines began to write “bigger pieces,” Crawlspace for one, Drama: Pilot Episode and All The Little Animals I Have Eaten (Shadow Theatre produced it last season).

But during the pandemic lockdown, “I began to feel that Pochsy had to say something…. Pochsy “is the only thing I’ve written that can address certain things in a certain way,” Hines says of the distinctive sting of the sweetness and acid, charm and sickness in the make-up of that diminutive repository of pop-culture sentiment, glib capitalist truisms, self-help slogans and lethally breezy observations of the state of the world. “When I was writing for other actors I couldn’t write biting for them the way I could write biting for Pochsy…. But it’s been scary.”

Kennard grins. “What gives the best stakes in theatre? Death…. With our work, we’re constantly exploring that, and coming at it from different places. With all our shows we give ourselves the opportunity of different locations — same character, same circumstances, different locations.”

“How many times have Mump and Smoot died? We’re constantly diving off a cliff, and reinventing ourselves! With our shows and Karen’s shows, you could put them in any order and they’d make sense.” They’re like cartoons in that respect.

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey

Pochsy IV “is a sliver of Pochsy’s life,” the fleeting moment between the top of the cliff and the ground where your life flashes before your eyes. “Seventy-five minutes of show, an actual 30 seconds in life,” says Kennard. “That’s the model we’re working with.”

Three original artists, expert clowns all who’ve ignored any conventional boundaries of that art form, Hines met the future Mump and Smoot, Kennard and John Turner, in the late ‘80s at Second City in Toronto. “They were already working together on gibberish scenes,” she says of those halcyon days when the term ‘horror clown’ wasn’t in the Canadian showbiz lexicon. “We just gravitated toward each other…. I held the camera for them when when they were trying to make little videos to send to comedy contests. We didn’t call it directing then. We called it being friends and hanging around.”

Kennard and Turner had studied with clown guru Richard Pochinko, and Hines gave that celebrated approach a shot — mainly to be able direct her pals in their new clown incarnations. For her, the Pachinko route into clowning just didn’t take. “I was a terrible clown,” Hines says. “Saccharine! I didn’t like my own performance.” She demonstrates the kind of clown she didn’t want to be, sweetly supplicating and needy.

Studying bouffon in Paris with the celebrated Philipe Gaulier was a much better fit. “So dark, so satirical, so (invested in) ‘points of attack’. That broke me open; I knew what to do, using affliction as a tool.” The medieval bent of Gaulier’s bouffon style, though, didn’t quite suit her. “I looked for a way to modernize it…. Who are the outcasts now? What’s the affliction? What parodies would I use?”

The ‘90s, far from tranquil, coughed up their share of parallels. “We had friends die of AIDS. There was a sense of plague, a feeling of precarity,” as Hines says. “An understanding of environmental and nuclear threats…. I grew up with that, more than the average bear. My parents were scientists, and they and their friends would talk at the dinner table, in an era when people didn’t worry about protecting children. So I got some ears-full.”

It was an era, too, of “intensification of capitalism,” as she puts it, “the idea of corporations as entities to make money for shareholders, not something for employees, their well-being, their health….The separation of rich and poor grew wider.” These are ideas on which Hines’s satire sharpened its edge, and they found their way into Pochsy, “a microcosm of American consumerist culture.”

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey.

Another inspiration for a character in whom charm and affliction are inextricably entwined came from “watching people in my own life,” Hines says. “My grandmother had dementia, but she was hilarious. And we still use things she said and did…. She was very flirtatious, very charming.”

And then, as Kennard points out, Second City “really prepped you for satire.” Hines was in the touring company. But to be on the mainstage, you had to write your own material. So she did.

“Basically they hauled me across the country for their 1992 Fringe tour,” says Hines of her two horror clown colleagues. “Back when you could get into the Fringe by being organized and getting your stuff in on time.” In Edmonton, Kennard and Turner insisted on camping, a decision of legendary eccentricity in Fringe annals. Hines lasted one night, before repairing to a hotel. “It snowed. In Alberta. In August.”

Pochsy’s Lips had premiered at the new Orland Fringe in 1992. Hines’s debut audience was three people, a trio of guys “who didn’t know each other and didn’t sit together…. It was fantastic. I could just talk to them.” In fact, that direct, eye-to-eye conversation was pretty much de rigueur. “It gave me a real grounding in speaking to the audience. You have to look at every single person.”

The next night? An audience of six. “It doubled every show.” (laughter). In Edmonton, which followed Fringes in Montreal and Saskatoon, “we really blossomed,” says Kennard, who eventually moved from Ontario and is now a U of A drama prof. “Edmonton feels like our home town, creatively.” Mump and Smoot sold out every show. Hines remembers seeing a long queue outside Walterdale, her venue, four hours before showtime. And she was amazed to discover that they were waiting to see Pochsy’s Lips.

The lives of “three striving Toronto artists” (as Kennard puts it) changed in Edmonton. “We’d all started out just wanting to be actors,” he says. “If my acting career had had gone better I’d never have made Pochsy,” says Hines. “I wanted to be Meryl Streep but I was no good at that…. I really wanted to perform; it was just a question of how.”

Now, Pochsy IV, which premiered at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary last January. “We had 12 to 15 times as much material as you’ll see in the show,” says Hines. At first she was hyper-tuned to “people’s sensitivities. I’m way less afraid now!”

“The world gives us our playlist,” says Kennard.” Since January, “the world has changed again, even in eight months,” says Hines. She and Kennard estimate that 20 percent of Pochsy IV is new for the Theatre Network run. AI is a hot-button issue, e.g.  “Will the absence of a soul be telling in the long run?” Hines is thinking about things like that in her new show.

“Clown and bouffon is such a powerful thing.” And the world, let’s face it, is generous about providing material that cries out to be parodied, weaponized by a sharp-eyed satirist with a blade.  “I think there’s a time when we need to come out and play,” says Kennard, whose directorial advice is always to up the venom content. “It’s our job!” says Hines with a smile.

PREVIEW

Pochsy IV

Theatre: Keep Frozen presented by Theatre Network

Created by and starring: Karen Hines

Directed by: Michael Kennard

Where: Theatre Network at the Roxy, 10708 124 St.

Running: opening Thursday through Nov. 5

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca