Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“It’s all about The Dress.”

Birth of a show. It’s 2017, and a man walks six feet behind two strong, tall (funny) women as the three theatre artists stumble home from the Winnipeg Fringe beer tent at the end of a summer night.  An image comes to the man. He imagines the women, “seven feet tall, formidable figures, gliding in elegant dresses.”

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The man is Ian Walker, mechanical engineer turned theatre designer. The women are Christine Lesiak (FOR SCIENCE!, The Space Between Stars) and Tara Travis (Til Death: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Who Killed Gertrude Crump?), star theatre creators both.

“Great!” says Lesiak, like Travis intrigued by the image conjured by Walker (Lesiak’s real-life partner). “So …  what’s the story?”

Ah, that was the question. And it took a while to answer. Six years and a pandemic later, we’re about to find out, when The Spinsters opens on the Westbury stage Jan. 19, in a Small Matters production that is far from small, except perhaps in cast size.

Lesiak and Travis, veterans of original performance theatre on the cross-country Fringe circuit, one Edmonton- and the other Vancouver-based, had known each other for a decade or more. “We always admired each other and each other’s work — and looked for an excuse to work together,” says Lesiak, a space physicist-turned-theatre artist whose show FOR SCIENCE! combines science and clowning. “A cross-province creation,” says Travis, who’ll  be back at the Edmonton Fringe this summer for the first time since 2016 in a new Monster Theatre production.

Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker

A “giant magical dress show” (with footwear and big hair) had its origin image, but  but got its narrative legs, so to speak, in “isolation times,” as Travis puts it. “When we were allowed, we decided to bubble up in a cabin, on a lake.” Half-way between Vancouver and Edmonton, in the Rockies, “ducks swimming; how did we stand all that tranquility?”

“We shared experiences growing up tall and feeling awkward, bonding over our awkward youths, having bad posture, trouble finding clothes that felt right. And one of us said something like ‘I always felt more like an ugly stepsister than Cinderella…. We looked at each other and … DING!”

“It’s all about The Dress,” though the Brothers Grimm didn’t put it that way in their aspirational fairy tale about the put-upon but upwardly mobile girl, victimized by the meanest step-sisters in sibling history, who gets to rock at the ball and nab the prince. “If you have The Dress you can be anything you want,” as Lesiak puts it. “It’s about access — to the illusion of wealth and class. If you have The Dress you can change your life, and the way everyone sees you, effectively how you’re received.” Travis laughs. “A mask of epic proportions!”

The infamous squabbling duo are the underdogs of the fairy tale world, overshadowed by their famously annoyingly goodie two-shoes (sorry, shoe singular) step-sister. Finally, with The Spinsters, they’re stars. Over coffee, Lesiak and Travis, who have a sisterly hilarity about them and crack each other up constantly, are joined by their amused director Jan Selman. “We meet them after their youths, middle-aged (and single) and still needing all that approbation they never feel they got enough of…. Cinderella had a fairy godmother and they didn’t and it’s really Not Fair.”

And, to add insult to injury, admit it, you don’t even know their names. “They’re tired of the lies always told about them. And they’re wanting to write their own story,” says Lesiak. “They’re trying to reclaim the narrative,” says Travis. “They feel they’re owed.”

Tara Travis and Christine Lesiak in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo supplied.

So “no voice, no names, upstaged all the time by Cinderella….” What did they do? “They’ve set out to prove history wrong,” says Travis. “They bought the freakin’ palace,” says Selman. “They’re making good, or at least good enough,” says Lesiak. “And they’re hosting a ball for you, just like the good old days. They’re choosing to perform….”

“We’ve got a point to prove, and we’re gonna prove it,” says Travis. “If it kills us!” says Lesiak.

Selman calls The Spinsters “a big-splash coming-out party. They’ve invited us all; they’ve got a show for us. In their minds they’re opening in Vegas. They set out to show off to the nines, and rehearse the heck out of it. And (mysterious laughter) other things ensue.”

Which is which? “I’m the elder sister,” says Lesiak of her character. “I’m the one who’s more fiscally responsible. I take care of the palace insurance!” She and Travis, who finish each other’s sentences, burst out laughing. “I’m the short-attention gal,” says the latter. “Very impulsive, basically informed by my neurodivergence; yup, I’m an ADHD-er!”

“The sister dimension is so rich,” says Travis, who has several sisters and is very close to them. In a way, she argues, sisterhood is “a more emotionally intimate relationship” than romantic ones; “sisters are  vaults for each other’s secrets.”

“I find working on this I’m always thinking of my sister and our relationship and how it’s changed over the years,” says Selman, a U of A drama prof. “Love and rivalry all bundled together.” Lesiak grins. “I’m the only one here who doesn’t have a sister. And now I feel like I have one.” “You are my chosen sister,” says Travis consolingly.

“It’s a delicate balance” with the stepsisters, she says, “between them in cahoots, then in competition and how quickly that can switch: instant hate, instant love.” Lesiak laughs. “At the end of the end everyone wants the prince.”

The pair assembled their dream team of six design collaborators, some from Vancouver some from Edmonton, and all with innovative theatre cred. As Selman discovered when she joined the team last summer, when “the play existed but was still developing,” they’re “each mad geniuses in their own way, with an intense area of experience.”

The dresses, say the actors and their director, are architectural wonders, engineered (and that’s the right word) by Walker who invented structures for the show, including a chandelier. “Once he entered my life, my envisioning of shows got a lot more complicated when I saw what he could do,” says Lesiak. 1,100 hours of sewing went into the frocks built by Adam Dickson and a team of nine sewers.

How to move in them was the challenge of coach and choreographer Ainsley Hillyard. Puppet designer Dusty Hagerüd (did I mention there are puppets?), had to figure out how his vertiginous wigs — which instantly add at least a foot to already tall women —  could be worn “without pinning them into our heads!” as Travis says with a grin. Composer/sound designer Michael Caron is currently working on Catalyst Theatre’s revival of The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare about to open at the Grand Theatre in London, Ont.   

Physical comedy is something both Lesiak and Travis lean into. Is The Spinsters a clown show? Selman says no. “But they’re bringing their ‘clown stuff’ with them — elevated choices, a great capacity to engage directly with the audience on the spot. Really fun!” There is, after all, no fourth wall in the palace. “There’s always room for the new on any given night,” says Lesiak. “That’s the liveness of live theatre.”

Surprise! “Every scene is a little different in style,” says Selman of the show, which had a short inaugural run in Vancouver before Christmas. “Just when you think you get it, it flips around on you. Physical theatre, yes, but other things too. Stand-up at moments, but not really….” Travis says “you’ll never know what’s next. Unless you’re a very gifted psychic.”

“Bonkers. Yup.” says one. “The most bonkers show either of us has ever been at the root of, for sure,” says the other.

PREVIEW

The Spinsters

Theatre: Small Matters Productions and Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created by and starring: Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis

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

Running: Jan. 16 through 27

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca