The cast of My Heart Gushes Lavender, premiering at Nextfest 2024. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In theatre we don’t get a lot of chances to meet people from the world that actor/ playwright Tori Kibblewhite conjures for us in Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender, premiering on the mainstage at Nextfest 2024.

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The characters are hockey players (uncanny timing!). They’re friends who find themselves together on a bridge, outside a small-town end-of-summer house party. As Kibblewhite says, “theatre is often about theatre people, or the type of people who go to see theatre…. I just wanted to see the people I grew up with onstage.”

Kibblewhite themself, who’s part way through a U of A BFA degree in acting and fresh from a physical theatre workshop with the celebrated Brit company Frantic Assembly, belongs to a rare subset of theatre artists. At 20, about the age of their characters, their own hockey credentials are blue-chip and first-hand.

playwright/actor/hockey player Tori Kibblewhite, in action on the ice. Photo cupplied

Kibblewhite grew up in Stony Plain, playing hockey (#9 for the Onoway Eagles), surrounded by hockey players. As they explain, their mom’s a cheer coach, their dad’s a hockey coach, one sister is a cheerleader, their younger sister and their brother are both excellent hockey players. “I’m kinda the oddball,” they say cheerfully of a family who will make “a fascinating audience” at Nextfest. “I’m very interested to see how they’ll react.”

Hockey players, they’ve found ,“tend to be a repressed group,” verbally speaking. “The play gets dark but the characters lend themselves to humour,” they says. “The ‘hockey boy’ talk, the way they communicate with each other in the dressing room is really something! Definitely a different language; I wanted to peel back the layers of that.”

The other idea that found its ways into Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender, Kibblewhite says, is “someone’s struggle with mental illness, and how that can put the people around them in harder places. It can cause other people a lot of pain.” The “morality of that” interests them.

“I wanted to play with the realism of two characters, two hockey players who don’t really know how to express their feelings…. What if we forced them to express their feelings to the penultimate degree?” That invites a theatrical dimension beyond realism. “I also wanted to explore moments of abstraction, in their relationship and their struggles,” they say of the sound, movement, colour that take over beyond words. “The play bursts from inside the characters. It’s kind like the characters are bursting at the seams.”

What was the draw of theatre for the kid with the very unusual skill set? They pause. “Hmm, that’s a hard one…. I’ve always known that’s what I want to do. There wasn’t a moment I picked; it was just incredibly clear; it was something I’ve always wanted,” says Kibblewhite, who’s also a painter. “I feel like there aren’t many moments in life where you’re totally sure,” and theatre was one of hers.

Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender is Kibblewhite’s second play. A playwright was born, just out of high school, with Painting of Two Girls At A Bus Stop, 15 minutes long. Two girls happen to be at a bus stop. “Both happen to be artists. Both happen to have a shitty boyfriend.” And in the swiping on their respective cellphones they discover they’re both dating the same guy. A double break-up ensues. “A very naturalistic piece,” says Kibblewhite, who’s engaging and droll in conversation. “Nothing crazy, pretty tame to be honest, cute, comedic….”

This theatre town is, it need hardly be said, a hockey town, too. Kibblewhite “definitely wants to continue (with Your Heart Gushes Lavender), expand on the characters, explore more. But I really don’t have a super-big plan yet.…”

There’s this, though: “I don’t often see sports onstage,” they say, noting the exception of  Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, about a girls soccer team, produced by the Maggie Tree at the Citadel in 2022. “Sports are a kind of theatre event; people get dressed up; people perform…. My play doesn’t include actual hockey onstage. But I want to express more of my experience.”

Your Heart Gushes Lavender runs today at 6 p.m., Tuesday at 7 p.m. and Wednesday at 9 p.m. on the Lorne Cardinal stage at the Roxy Theatre (10708 124 St.). See nextfest.ca for tickets and further details.  A 12thnight Nextfest survey, with festival director Ellen Chorley is here.