Zachary Parsons-Lozinski stars in Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries, Low Hanging Fruits at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied

Local Diva: the Danielle Smith Diaries (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The entrance of the Fringe: the diva seems to have been flung onto the stage from some cosmic wind tunnel, long limbs akimbo, in perpetual motion. Tragidean, the star of Liam Salmon’s Local Diva: the Danielle Smith Diaries, is a veritable human explosion of fabulosity — and rage.

“I feel like I’m constantly on the edge of a vortex,” they tell us. And they dance as if their identity, maybe their life, depended on performing — precarious if you’re wearing stilettos and you live in Alberta.

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Tragidean (Zachary Parsons-Lozinski) has a story to tell, and a visceral wariness about telling it that’s part of the story. We seem to be standing in for the media, where “angles” are created in advance,  then illustrated, then “common ground” is fabricated. And MLA opinion pieces are splayed on broadsheet pages as if they’re news. The diva calls bullshit on that. “How does it feel to be circling the drain?” the diva asks Postmedia, accusingly. They’ve read the stories about themself: “Local queer. Local gay man. Victim. Hero. Example. Metaphor. A villain.”

And they’re just warming up. Playwright Salmon writes in a witty, hot-coals way for a character who arrives onstage having reached some sort of firewall of exasperation. Or is this the melting point of despair? Owen Holloway’s production, for the indie company Low Hanging Fruits, lets it rip. Parsons-Lozinski goes for broke, in a memorable way that isn’t cautious about leaving room for escalation (and is probably not sustainable for longer than the 45-minute running time).

Tragidean’s story, which emerges mid-narrative from the B-grade drag circuit with stops in bowling alleys, is the story of a queer prairie kid. They opt for invisibility in Catholic high school; they come out, they discover a drag persona and the magical validation of performing. And they discover a world that is, by definition, political. Obviously, they point out, more than 50 per cent of Albertan “don’t care about me and my rights.” Jason Kenney “felt like rock bottom,” says Tragidean. And … it got worse. Danielle.

The world is on fire, Jasper incinerated, “photo ops with known fascists,” “Alberta is in the Stone Age,” the health care and education systems getting systematically dismantled, boards loaded with UCP hacks, progress = coal, Gaza is a mass grave. “It breaks my brain,” says Tragidean, whose mind works by wide-sweep accumulation. They’re not about persuading us. They have arrived at the point of finding the world incomprehensible, absurd, unlivable.

How has it all come to this? This final fury has something to do with the mystery of Local Diva, and why Tragidean is onstage, by themself, telling us their story. You don’t very often get to experience a true and impressive rant onstage, written eloquently and performed as if there’s no tomorrow. And maybe there isn’t.