Candy & The Beast, starring Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tzaczyk, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Double vision. By day Jayce McKenzie has been rehearsing a new Trevor Schmidt play that premieres Friday in a Northern Light Theatre production. By night she has been regaling and touching audiences in  … a new Trevor Schmidt play that premiered in a Shadow Theatre production, and just closed last weekend.

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And to that theatrical rarity, two overlapping premieres in two theatres by the same playwright, we can add another. In both Robot Girls and Candy & The Beast — the one a funny and insightful comedy about the complicated lives of junior high girls, and the other a “mystery thriller” set in small prairie town with a dark underbelly and gothic overtones —  McKenzie plays kids. This past month she’s been Vanessa, age 12, an innocent in the world of teenagers, who joins a science club that’s building a robot for an international competition. This month she’s Candy, age 15, who sets forth with her little brother from the trailer court where they live to track down a serial killer. It might well cross your mind that Jayce McKenzie, who’s actually 35, has the secret of eternal youth all wrapped up.

“I think I’m just child-ish, you know,” McKenzie laughs. “It helps I look a little younger, maybe. But I do love to play in that world, like we’re kids again, removing all those filters we’ve added as adults. I mean, we all have that in us, right?, buried under all the rubble.…” The fun of Vanessa, the “robot girl” she played in Schmidt’s warm-hearted and very funny comedy, is that she’s pretty much filter-free. Without adult caution or calculation she just reacts impulsively, and blurts out thoughts and emotions that stop everyone in their tracks.

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

“I was like that as a kid, too,” says McKenzie cheerfully of the bond she felt with the character. “Neurodivergent, with all the problems … never seen as something was a gift, or even just a kid with a different sort of brain.”It’s only been in the last couple of years that the diagnosis of ADHD has clarified matters for her, she explains. Not least because the research into symptoms has been very boy-centric.

Like Candy, half the sibling pair in Schmidt’s production of his new thriller, McKenzie was a small-town kid. She’s from the hard-to-get-at little B.C. town of Kaslo in the Kootenays, where her folks ran the Rosewood Cafe. She was “both a theatre kid and a basketball and soccer kid … until I got kicked off the soccer team for having a bad attitude. I just didn’t click with the coach. It sucked; I really liked soccer.”

McKenzie describes reaction of her kid self as a common neurodivergent response: “It feels like a personal attack, and you don’t handle attacks well!” Since her diagnosis she’s “just started to unravel things … all the things that weren’t my fault, if I got frustrated really quickly, or got mad, or if I felt sensitive or rejected. The diagnosis has helped me be less hard on myself …. ” She laughs. “I just feel everything!”

“And that (directness), I think, is what makes me a good actor…. It’s a double-edged sword.” For all the problems, the ability to remove filters, and cut to the chase of a character’s feelings, a particular kind of direct quick-draw empathy, is at the heart of acting, McKenzie muses. Arguably, it makes that mysterious art more available, more accessible.

The acuteness of feeling has also tapped into the other facet of her career. A Grant MacEwan musical theatre grad of more than a decade ago — “I like musicals but I didn’t necessarily want to be in them!”—  MacKenzie has a company, Alpha Awakening, devoted both online and in person, to wellbeing and healing through meditation, coaching, exploring the therapeutic dimensions of hypnotic states. And since training as a hypnotist in Las Vegas, she’s begun to explore the links between performance and hypnosis. “And I had an inkling,” as a theatre artist, “that there’s more that could be done with it.”

Hypnosis, McKenzie admits, “scared me for a while,” mainly because of its “pass-or-fail expectations…. If you’re onstage, as yourself (not a character), and have people up there and tell them and you’re going to hypnotize them and you don’t, well…. It was harder than I expected, and it really messed with my head.”

But in August of 2019 at the Fringe, just before COVID, onstage at 60-seat Grindstone Theatre, MacKenzie tried hypnosis as performance in an original show she called Alpha Hypnosis. And this summer, at the Fringe, she’ll do “an inner child show,” she says. “The goal is to be able to heal people on the spot, in a way that’s fun and feels safe to them. … with a storyline, with a characters, with a script and parts that are improvised.”

The inspiration, McKenzie says, is Blind Date, the hit improv show in which, as a Gallic clown with a red nose, Rebecca Northan asks an audience member to be her date onstage, and, in real time, they get to know each other.

McKenzie is full of admiration. “I want to do what she did with Blind Date, which was uplift people, make them looks lovely. And it resonated with me. She picked out everything that was great about them, and fed it back to them…. She did the thing that people need to hear. We don’t tell people enough that ‘appreciate that you’re like this’.” Her  improv consultant is Northan’s brother Jamie Northan.

“To me, hypnosis and meditation are pretty much the same,” McKenzie explains, the latter a sort of self-hypnosis where you are in control…. It’s putting yourself in a relaxed state.”

“It’s all come together in this bizarre way,” she says happily of a unique creative journey that started in the energy and empathy of ADHD and moved to theatre, and is finding a way to marry improv and hypnosis in performance.

Candy & The Beast, starring Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tkaczyk, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

Candy, she says of the title character of Candy & The Beast, is a kid who’s “confused and scared.” The question is, “what do people do with fear?” Some, like Candy, who sets forth to catch a killer, face it; others face the other way. McKenzie laughs. “I liked scary stuff when I was a kid. As kids we played with Ouija boards and all that. Now couldn’t pay me to watch a horror story!”

The character we meet “its trying to test the limits of what there is out there, and what we can figure out,” says McKenzie. “And if we do this thing that nobody else has done, then people will see my worth. What do I need to do to be valued?”

PREVIEW

Candy & The Beast

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written and directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tkaczyk

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

Running: Friday through April 20

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com