Joey Lespérance in Michel(le), Théâtre La Seizième. Photo by Gaëtan Nevincx.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A long weekend in Edmonton: four plays, four stories that demonstrate, in four very different ways, the possibilities of storytelling on a stage, in a theatre.

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•Michel(le), the season finale at L’UniThéâtre, from Vancouver’s Théâtre La Seizième, is the story of two brothers, queer stagestruck siblings bonded in their struggle to be fully themselves in a world of brutal orthodoxies. And it borrows that story from real life, which rattles your ribcage.

In its own vivid way Joey Lespérance’s solo play is, quite literally, a demonstration of the power of theatre . The brother we see before us is the Vancouver actor who wrote the play. Joey’s the one who stood up to the aggressive, pummelling homophobia of a childhood, a family, a bullying father, a working-class neighbourhood in the suburban Quebec of the ‘70s— by escaping, across the country and finding a life in the theatre. The fact that he’s hereThe brother Lespérance conjures, Michel, is also, and at heart, his sister. Michelle found happiness for a time in the showbiz flamboyance of the Montreal drag scene, starting to transition from one body to another more authentic body, dreaming of the life Joey was living in Vancouver.

The closet comes with shackles. Michelle’s tragedy is located in the steel chains of toxic parenting. To regain a mother, she de-transitioned to he. Pronouns are far from incidental in Michel(le). And that terrible retrenchment and self-denial in a world of horrifying violence leads to tragedy. But Michel(le) doesn’t end that way, amazingly. It’s for Michelle’s brother, the actor-turned-playwright, to make her theatre dream come true, in a surreal, flashy but poetic, journey on stage — and beyond the grave.

Regret, grief, anger, and the compelling need to make amends drive Lespérance’s compelling performance. The show itself, which unspools back from the murder into the past, then captures an imagined future, is partly an act of atonement through theatre. And it’s partly a memorable cautionary tale about the repercussions of two kinds of bad parenting.

The theatre curtain that dominates, and divides, the stage in Esther Duquette’s ingenious production, opaque till it’s not, isn’t merely decorative. Sophie Tang’s dramatic, and cunning, lighting is an indispensable participant in the storytelling. It conjures scenes from the mist of the past. Joey and Michelle’s unregenerate bully of a dad, Joe The Bull, appears in outsized shadowplay. Their glamorous mom emerges in a pink glow: “Intoxicating femininity meets toxic masculinity,” as the play says.

The idea and allure of performance is captured by the images, in lights and stagecraft, of the theatre stages, and backstages, where Joey and his bro-sister feel most alive. And the play is a fascinating exploration of the intersection between real life and theatrical speculation. Meet the playwright (and star)  in a 12thnight preview. Michel(le) runs through Saturday at La Cité francophone, 8627 91 St. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

Chariz Faulmino and Nadien Chu in The Tempest, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Tech dress rehearsal shot by Brianne Jang.

• The Freewill Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest has blown into another of its four locations for this weekend’s performances: the Kenilworth Community League outdoor hockey rink. On Tuesday David Horak’s production moves to Lessard through July 7, then finally Sherbrooke after that, July 9 to 14).

The play is one of one of the Bard’s strangest and most elusive. Nadien Chu stars as Prospera, the magician who stage-manages a story on an enchanted island, then renounces her magic. In Horak’s al fresco production, comedy rules over the play’s darker, more mysterious aspects. 12thnight talked to Chu in this preview. Have a peek at the 12thnight review. Tickets: tickets.freewillshakespeare.com.

Anthem of Life Part 1, Theatre Prospero. Photo by Joselito Angeles.

•In the highly theatrical Zulu creation epic happening at Theatre Prospero, the gods, a fractious lot, are arguing about their most successful, most controversial, creation: mankind. In Anthem of Life Part 1, Tololwa Mollel’s adaptation of an epic Zulu poem by Mazisi Kunene, a large-scale colourful story, in which gods, people and animals mingle, gets told in dance, music, a clash of masked figures, a witty contemporary text. Meet Mollel in a 12thnight preview, and read the 12thnight review.

Anthem of Life, Part 1, which launches a planned trilogy, runs through July 6 at the Alberta Avenue Community League (9210 118 Ave.). Tickets: edmontonarts.ca.

•The Mayfield Dinner Theatre revives a perennially popular American comedy, Ernest Thompson’s On Golden Pond, which opened Off-Broadway in 1978, and became a classic movie (starring Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn) in 1981. The all-star cast of Kate Ryan’s production, which runs at the Mayfield through July 28, is headed by Glenn Nelson and Maralyn Ryan as an aging couple negotiating the tribulations of aging and intergenerational estrangement — and resolution. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.