Playwright Conni Massing, whose new play Dead Letter premieres at Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the great theatre archive there’s no shortage of plays that involve mail, misdirected, stolen, forged. There are plays constructed entirely of exchanges of letters. Last year Irish Repertory Theatre in New York did an entire Letters Series, plays built on intimate correspondence.

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Dead Letter, the new Conni Massing play that premieres Friday at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, the finale to their 45th season might, however, be the first inspired by Canada Post and slow, really really slow, mail service.

The playwright, who has a long and adventurous history with Edmonton theatres of every size and shape, traces Dead Letter to “a convergence of hunches. Little events that intrigued me.” Amongst an assortment of real-life “little events,” there was a postal cue. “A friend of mine got a piece of mail in his mailbox addressed by name to the previous tenant, who hadn’t lived there for 20 years. Where the hell had this mail been for 20 years? It wasn’t just some Mountain Equipment Co-op flyer: what are the consequences of it never arriving?” ‘Dead letter’, she learned, is an actual post office term. “I had my title!”

At the same time, says Massing, wry and entertainingly unpretentious in conversation, “I got tickled by the idea of obsession, someone getting completely obsessed with everyday banal mysteries.” Like single socks, for example: where on earth are their mates? Like Tupperware lids: how can they have just vanished? What does it all mean? Is there a cosmic connection? Or is the universe untenably random?

Cosmic connections? Massing has made bold, original choices before now, in plays like Fresh Hell, in which Dorothy Parker and Joan of Arc unexpectedly shared a stage (it premiered at Shadow Theatre in 2023). Matara, a 2018 Workshop West premiere, explored onstage the special inter-species relationship between people and animals, an elephant in a zoo and the zookeepers.

In Dead Letter, the scale of hidden connection is both smaller and larger. Amy is looking for meaning in the mystery of missing socks, Tupperware lids, a dead letter. Massing herself has a sake bowl full of mysteriously orphaned earrings. “We all go with it,” as a minor if aggravating inevitability, and we move on, many of us in mismatched socks. Amy (Lora Brovold), though, does not. “Frustrating for her is that people keep saying ‘hey, these things happen’…. She wants to know.” What Massing discovered, “early on, writing the first draft of Dead Letter, was there was a reason for Amy’s obsession, a reason “for her to think she should receive a message from the universe. That’s another mystery in the play,” yours to discover, says Massing (mysteriously).”

“And the play goes into different territory at this point…. I feel like it rides a rail between comedy and sorrow; that’s the objective. There’s a darker subtext.” The theatre department of the Massing archive (which also includes TV and film) is is full of plays that have both a sense of humour, often mischievous, and darker hues too.

The Workshop West production directed by Heather Inglis, says Massing, “leans into the murder mystery; Amy is investigating a death related to the dead letter.” As she explains, “Amy’s husband Doug (Collin Doyle) is walking on eggshells and trying to protect her emotions, but also he’s ‘stop this! it will lead you nowhere!’”

Heather Inglis’s production, with its all-star cast, marks the welcome return to an Edmonton stage of Maralyn Ryan as the next-door neighbour (will she shed light on the mystery? is she part of the mystery?). And it’s a rare onstage reunion of the powerhouse real-life couple Brovold and Doyle. The last time they shared a stage was in a Conni Massing play too, arguing about the festive tannenbaum in Oh! Christmas, which premiered at Theatre Network in 2018. Before that, they hadn’t been onstage together since the premiere of Doyle and James Hamilton’s Nighthawk Rules at the 2004 Fringe.

Like Massing, Doyle is himself an award-winning playwright (The Mighty Carlins, Terry and the Dog),. His new play, The Riverside Seniors Village Theatrical Society Presents: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, gets a staged reading at the Citadel’s upcoming Collider Festival.

“I’ll just have to keep writing plays for them to be in together,” Massing laughs. “Delightful people. And it’s great to have another playwright in the room. Collin’s questions and comments come from a different place…. He’s functioning as an actor, but also has this great playwright’s brain.” And, hey, they can run their lines at home.

Brovold is a multi-talented theatre artist, too. Her directing debut was last summer’s hit Fringe production of the shockingly strange play Fiji. And her film The Wounds Within: An Endometriosis Story, which shared her own personal struggle, premieres tonight at Northwest Fest.

“Translating a murder mystery to a theatrical world,” as Massing has done, is an intricate challenge to begin with. And it’s made even trickier by the small cast of three. “I’m really having fun with the conventions of the genre, some of which we’re playing with in a comic way…. You’re asking the audience to speculate about who dunnit, of course. And the play tries to cast suspicion on other people in the apartment building. But the audience knows, even on a subconscious level, it’s got to be one of those three people.”

“It limits your options,” she concedes. “They know you’re not going have the who be some offstage character; that would violate the rules,” Massing laughs. A deus ex machina just wouldn’t be fair. “It’s different with a novel, where the characters are endless; a novel doesn’t have the same obligations.”

With three characters, she muses, “the whodunnit becomes a whydunnit.”

With murder mysteries “people may not understand what’s going on in the moment, but they have to be able to move back though the material and see that the seed has been planted, if only they’d known then what they were looking at. You need to plant it, visually or in the text. But it can’t seem important at the time….” It’s a delicate business writing a murder mystery, she says. “And that’s been challenging but fun.”     

Massing admits to being “weirdly evasive” when it comes to questions about when the idea for a play hatched. “It seems like such long time to take to write play!” She traces the lineage of Dead Letter back to Workshop West’s Playwrights Unit, and its COVIDian incarnation in the spring of 2021:  monthly online meetings of veteran theatre writers like Darrin Hagen, Trevor Schmidt, Mieko Ouchi, Beth Graham, Nicole Moeller, Collin Doyle…. “We’d talk about writing and bring scenes to read,” says Massing. “No one was commissioning me, but you sort of felt you’d like to bring an offering to the group.”

By the summer of 2022, and feeling the need of a deadline, Inglis offered one, along with a workshop. Dead Letter was at Springboards as a staged reading in 2023, and had a Script Salon incarnation, too, directed by Brian Deedrick.   

And now, a full premiere. Massing shies away from the label “comedy” with its single-dimension expectation. “What’s joyful for me is to (discover) a drama, and find yourself laughing along the way.”

PREVIEW

Dead Letter

Theatre: Workshop West Playwright’s Theatre

Written by: Conni Massing

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Lora Brovold, Collin Doyle, Maralyn Ryan

Where: The Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through June 2

Tickets: workshopwest.org