Michele Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan in Wildcat, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

FUN. In a world of anxiety and dread, it’s an elusive concept, but a seductive one, says playwright Nicole Moeller unspooling time back to her inspiration for Wildcat. Her new crime caper premieres Friday with a starry cast in the Heather Inglis production that launches the Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre season.

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Moeller, who’s thoughtful and self-deprecating in conversation, is thinking back. Five years ago, the pandemic was locking people into their homes and the separate configuration of their lives. And “after 10 years of back-to-back projects,” Moeller says, “I wanted to write something lighter, something I could have fun with, not knowing if it would ever be onstage.”

As Edmonton audiences know, a Moeller play, which tends to have a gestation period measured in years, is often wrested from the news, and at jagged, oblique, underbelly angles. The playwright, who came from the curious double optic of musical theatre at MacEwan (“such a blip in my background!” she laughs) and before that journalism, gravitates to the dark, shadowy end of the theatrical palette. She had turned into a playwright, as she describes, writing Without You in the course of a 24-hour playwriting competition. “At 3 in the morning I said to myself ‘Oh, I won’t be acting again; clearly. I liked writing so much more than I’d ever liked being onstage.”

playwright Nicole Moeller. Photo supplied

The news was a draw. And her journalist brain was drawn to use it theatrically, “the story behind the story and all that,” she says. ” I’ve often used those sensational topics as a hook, but I always try to go for the universal behind it.” Moeller’s break-out hit of 2011, An Almost Perfect Thing, for example, was inspired by a hair-raising news story about a young Austrian girl kidnapped at 10, who escaped from her captor after eight years locked in a basement prison.

The Mothers, the SkirtsAfire Festival mainstage production of 2015, explored the life of a mother whose kid took a gun to school and made tragic use of it. In 2019 the fulcrum of Moeller’s high-speed thriller The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, the grand finale of Vern Thiessen’s term as Workshop West artistic director, is the seduction of a street kid into a criminal network.

Bobbi Goddard, Alexandra Dawkins, Laura Raboud, in The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And now … a crime caper. Is this new lighter tone pandemic-related? “For sure,” says Moeller. “And it’s also the way things are in the world…. Yes, my writing is lighter. For one thing (rueful laughter) you almost can’t go darker than things are today.” News junkies are in tough these days. And the news isn’t the magnet for Moeller that it used to be. “I’m having a hard time with it now. And I’m trying to fight against those feelings. The world should activate us, not overwhelm us….”

Wildcat, and the central character of Dot (the workshop title at the 2024 Springboards Festival was The Resurrection of Dottie Reed) “were inspired by a woman I was quite close with…. She’d been a strong union person, she’d been on strikes and protests in the ‘80s and ’90s, a staunch NDP-er. But when I knew her, in her ‘70s, she’d become isolated. It was interesting to me, the contrast between who she was, and what happens sometimes to older people.”

“Such an interesting woman,” Moeller says affectionately. “Tough as nails, but such a kind heart. I love that contrast in people who are outwardly one way, inwardly something else.”

At the heart of Wildcat is the relationship between 60-something former union organizer Dot (played by Michele Fleiger) and her daughter (Melissa Thingelstad). Since it’s a crime caper, there’s a lot for the playwright (and for me) to be mysterious about. Moeller divulges that “we see Dot at the beginning, in isolation…. A chance encounter with an old friend from her union days” (Maralyn Ryan as Pearl) changes all that. And they get to be on a wild adventure they hadn’t expected,” Moeller laughs. “This is me, so there’s always going to be heavier stuff. But this is a fun way to explore it. It’s a ride!”

“I was interested as well in that transition period, kind of awkward and muddy, between child and care-giver, parent and patient…. It’s difficult for people to talk about, that transition. We’re not where we were and we’re not where we will be; we’re in-between. And how do we navigate that?”

An inveterate re-writer (“I am very known for making changes,” she says modestly), Moeller spent the first two weeks attending Inglis’s rehearsals with the experienced cast of Fleiger, Thingelstad, Ryan, and Graham Mothersill (who plays all the characters the adventurers meet). And “it’s evolved a lot,” she says of the script. Moeller is a playwright unusually receptive to considering input from the director and the cast. “Heather is so fantastic at seeing the seed of something, and she’s quite direct, which I like…. And these actors are so incredibly smart,” she laughs. “When Maralyn Ryan gives you a suggestion, you’d want to consider it!”

Wildcat is Moeller’s first crack at writing for characters (and actors) substantially older than her. “It’s so bizarre,” she says. “There are lots of older people going to theatre. But we don’t often put them onstage, especially in big roles, having adventures.  Older people “don’t often see their own stories onstage.”

Though it’s not directly seeded by the news, Wildcat reveals Moeller’s interest, as she says, “in ‘80s labour history in Alberta, the nurses’ strike of 1986, protests against Klein in the ‘90s…. Because of the way the government is now, it’s important to remember when we’ve stood up and protested in the past.” Workshop West bills Wildcat as “a surefire antidote to the Alberta news cycle,” a cheering thought.

And its Edmonton setting  is by no means random or incidental. “If it ever went beyond this production, would I keep it in Edmonton or change the city?” Moeller has asked herself. “In my plays I like people to have a touchpoint in their real home.” But in the case of this one, with its resonances of labour history, protests, and feisty stand-up characters, she’s thinking ‘maybe leave it here, in Edmonton’. “If only so that people can see an Albertan who’s not (the Albertan) people see on the news…. We ARE diverse; our opinions ARE diverse. And I don’t know how much the country knows that.”

PREVIEW

Wildcat

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Nicole Moeller

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Michele Fleiger, Maralyn Ryan, Melissa Thingelstad, Graham Mothersill

Where: The Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Friday through Nov. 9

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will