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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a dark and threatening world, a miasma of secret dangers and fear, in which we find ourselves in Candy & The Beast, a new and multi-faceted mystery thriller by (and directed by) Trevor Schmidt premiering at Northern Light Theatre.

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In the murk, a couple of dozen grotesque heads on long spikes leer down on us (a world designed by Schmidt and lighted eerily by Alison Yanota). This is the season’s only two-actor many-head thriller. And the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns has never been foggier.

Welcome to the small prairie town of Black Falls, which is about as far from Grover’s Corners as you can get. A serial killer, species unknown, has been on the loose, picking off townspeople of a particular type — young, female, blonde, lower class.

“Some people are worth more,” concludes Candy Reese (Jayce McKenzie), a smart and snarly Goth kid from the poor side of town. Her eyes are open to both the selective habits of the mysterious (“his her their its”) monster)and the selective lameness of the official investigation. She and her little brother Kenny (Jake Tkaczyk), who’s been smeared with the nickname The Beast by the town bullies for his ungainly size (early onset puberty), live on the margins, where people mysteriously vanish, or get disappeared.

Wolves run in a pack (a chorus of howling that’s part of Dave Clarke’s eerie soundscore), and either kill dogs (do they do people?) or, in the case of upper-class canines like Reggie the poodle, recruit them.   

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

Played by the petite firecracker McKenzie, who gives off sparks, Candy is the fierce if reluctant guardian of her gentle giant bro. He’s played with a combination of tentative and slightly dazed by the statuesque Tkaczyk, as a little boy in a man’s body. And McKenzie’s performance is a smart capture of teenage alienation.  What are you going as on Halloween?” asks the guileless Kenny. “Same thing I am every day,” snarls Candy, “nothing.”

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

Candy is determined that they be “seen” in a world that seems to prefer them invisible. Their clothes are costumes (by Schmidt); they appear in scary masks from time to time. Their parents, and authorities like the dismissive Sheriff Lau (“fingers, eyeball, or what-nots…”), are present onstage only as voices on a ghetto blaster.  If Candy and Kenny can catch the killer, thinks the former, their outcast status will change.

The scenes happen in a volley of oblique shafts, with sudden scary head-ons, in Schmidt’s strange, resonant, small-scale thriller. We get glimpses of life lived from the outside looking in. At Candy’s part-time job, at the Pine Cones ice cream shop, for example, she doesn’t get her own company polo-shirt. Hers has the name tag of the killer’s last victim, who did one shift there before she disappeared. Real estate agent matrons, on the other hand, can get blonde highlights with impunity.

Jake Tkaczyk and Jayce McKenzie in Candy & the Beast, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

In this exclusionary world, coming-of age and the disconcerting transformations thereof are a web of doubts for the characters. Candy, perpetually angry, battles increasing uncertainty; she thinks “maybe I’m the real monster.” Kenny has terrible dreams, and wonders if he’s actually a beast: is he turning into a werewolf (all that new hair)?

Suddenly he finds himself at a microphone singing about “a dreadful change … a turning of the page” to a rock beat that appears out of thin air. Later he’ll sing a song, to the same beat, about pain that “pushes your teeth into fangs” and “sharpens your nails into knives.” You could call Candy & The Beast a musical, maybe, but it’s an unconventional, impulsive one. The only character who sings does that suddenly, without warning, and exclusively at nightmare moments.

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

The stylized staging by director Schmidt has the siblings at opposite ends of the stage for much of the time. They’re  together rarely, only when there are psychological interventions and they play each other’s nightmares or unspool each other’s fears.

It’s theatrical and meaningful in conjuring the fracture lines in a splintered life. If you’re looking for an escape from the stresses of the urban, it’s possible small-town life, prairie-style, is not the way to go.

Candy & The Beast is a mysterious, weird, and shivery little two-hand thriller, and you’ll find yourself oddly moved.

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: through April 20

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com