Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s fresh. It’s funny. Its sharp-eyed insights into the fraught high-stress lives of junior high teenage girls are blended into fast-acting chemistry in Trevor Schmidt’s winsome, hilarious, often touching, new comedy Robot Girls.

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It’s a tricky age, both to live through and to convey onstage. Of course it is: these are personalities in motion, with malleable sides, and room to grow in. And the quartet of characters we meet — “three young women … and one girl” at the Nellie McClung Charter School For Girls — are a bit worldly and a bit not, scrambling to figure things out for themselves, buffeted between home and school, getting rubbed the wrong way by parental, cultural, and historical (from “the olden days”100 years ago) expectations,  carrying residual catchphrases in their backpacks.

Hey, that’s what friends are for: allies, armour, critical mass at a red-alert time of life. And Robot Girls is, among other things, a love letter to girl grit and friendship. It starts with joining a science club, a little act of gender defiance in itself, to build a robot for an international competition. The weekly after-class meetings happen in a cluttered room (designer: playwright Schmidt) with the kind of linoleum that is a time-honoured part of the educational system.

Abigail McDougall, Hayley Moorhouse, Larissah Lashley, Jayce McKenzie in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The script, and the Shadow production directed jointly by John Hudson and Lana Michelle Hughes, are, together, an intricate piece of work. No one says anything in this show without getting interrupted, or annotated, or sidetracked. Everything, and nothing, is a non sequitur when you’re a junior high girl. And characters regularly step outside the group in asides (lighted glowingly by Even Gilchrist) to reveal their real thoughts — which happens less and less frequently as they make friends and get more confident about sharing secrets in person.

Abigail McDougall, Hayley Moorhouse, Larissah Lashley, Jayce McKenzie in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The actors are a delight. This cast is one of the most perfectly meshed ensembles of the season, and the characters are vividly, endearingly, drawn by the actors. They all wear identical knee socks and charter school pleated skirts (costumes: playwright Schmidt). But their performances, imbued with expertly timed overlaps and comic pauses, are calibrated so that ages 12, 13, 14 are differentiated. And so is the looping texture of breezy rejoinders and head-on reactions.

Chashida (Larissah Lashley), the serious grade eight-er with the conservative parents who’s also on the students’ union, takes charge of reading the club rules at their first meeting, before the robot kits (the teacher supervisor never arrives but is spotted crying in the staff room from time to time). “I’m popular,” Chashida concedes, “but nobody likes me.” There’s a subtle distinction the adult world might learn from. Interestingly, her club-mates might wonder what exactly a Muslim is (when a Secret Santa plan is a no-go), but don’t seem to even notice the hijab.

Deep-voiced “Bloody Mary,” the “grade nine-er,” arrives with the reputation of tough-ass jock (running shoes dangle from her backpack). And there’s a certain starchy lack of meekness about her, in the very funny performance from Hayley Moorhouse. “Why can’t we own it?” she declares, in response to the peer group mockery of “robot girls” in the war zone that is school. What’s wrong with that club name? “We’re girls. And we build robots. And we’re cool.”

Larissah Lashley, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie, Hayley Moorhouse in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Darby, in a perfectly pitched performance by Abigail McDougall, is smart, and tentative, frazzled by a constant series of phone call demands for baby sister pick-up at daycare. And the youngest, Vanessa, slightly dazed in the august presence of grade eights and nine-ers, and always a beat behind, is played, with great comic pizzaz and timing by Jayce McKenzie. Vanessa is the “girl” among “young women,” the innocent whose reactions are, amusingly, a veritable generation away from her science club cohorts.

She’s the one who dances the robot moves and thinks about sleep-overs. She’s the one who inadvertently spills the secret that she has a child psychologist, and the big spoiler alert news — her cohorts struggle not to roll their eyes — that there is no Santa Claus.

Her twin sister is in Drama Club, in rehearsals for The Crucible. The robot girls’ assessments of that play are a lot of fun. Darby is the one who knows it’s about the McCarthy prosecutions. Vanessa is incredulous: “you mean the witches are the bad guys?”

“Are we communists?” she wants to know. “Not officially,” says Bloody Mary.

Their discussions about gender and pronouns (they want the robot to be both gender-less and a ‘she’), their hyper-sensitive tuning to the rumour mill, their awareness of the commonplaces about boys ‘owning’ science, their reactions to inconsistent adult behaviour (“mothers are so embarrassing, right?”) … these are the fabric of the play. Robot Girls touches down lightly on a broad swath of complications and insecurities in the characters’ lives. And the actors negotiate it all with ease, and not so much as a whisper of kid-acting condescension.

And as they divide up the tasks involved in robot-creation, you find yourself caring about these characters, and wanting their collective creation that plants a girl flag in the field of science, to feel like a triumph for them. It’s a lot of fun, and you’ll recognize your younger self onstage, struggling to survive. Hey, I seem to have something in my eye….

REVIEW

Robot Girls

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Trevor Schmidt

Directed by: John Hudson and Lana Michelle Hughes

Starring: Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through March 31

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org