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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Timeliness? Irony? The world provides, and sometimes theatre just nails it.

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There’s something downright uncanny about the arrival onstage of Wildcat in a week that will live in infamy in Alberta labour history. Workers’ rights, injustice, resistance and retaliation, the connection between people that ignites change … these motifs thread their way through the long set-up and many, sometimes confusing, complications of this new “crime caper” by Nicole Moeller, premiering in a Workshop West production directed by Heather Inglis.

Wildcat, which lives up to its name in several ways in the course of a couple of hours and two acts, is set, in recognizable detail, in Edmonton in 2025. It’s very likely the only play of the season where Kingsway and the old Gainers plant on 66th get mentioned. And it will almost certainly be the only play you’ll see this season you could call an activist crime caper. Moeller’s plays, never skimpy, notably live at the intersection of the intimate and the bigger world of socio-political engagement. And so it is with Wildcat.

In this Moeller experiment, we meet Dot (Michele Fleiger), a union negotiator and shop steward of old, an aging veteran of the anti-government rallies, protests, strikes on behalf of workers’ rights of the ‘80s and ‘90s, during the Klein era.

Thirty years on (and a stroke and bad knees later), “Dottie with the bullhorn” has gradually isolated herself from the world, and her own sense of social outrage. It’s Alberta, for god’s sake, so there’s more to protest than ever; Alberta Next and the health care fiasco instantly come up in Wildcat. But Dot feels past her best-before date, “alone, depleted,” exhausted by doing nothing. And Fleiger, brusque and sardonic, captures wonderfully the prickly fortifications and vulnerability of a character whose sense of absurdity is directed at her own life.

Barricaded in her own kitchen, alone and in full retreat, talking to her deceased houseplant (and to us, in temporary asides from first-person narration), Dot has somehow “lost the ability to leave the house,” as she puts it. And she’s highly resistant to taking calls and returning messages. So it’s a surprise when Pearl (Maralyn Ryan), an old friend and fellow relic from the glory years, makes contact. “I don’t really like to re-hash the old days,” Dot tells her. “I’m not that person any more.”

Memories of Dot’s adrenalized days as a resistance fighter, participating in marches 10,000 strong, handcuffing themselves to cop cars, barricading the gates at Gainers, making the front page in an era when there was real media covering real local news … these are as wispy as Pearl, who has a quavery sweetness and a certain intriguing vagueness in Ryan’s performance.

Dot is resentful about the ministrations of her daughter Gloria (Melissa Thingelstad), a busy but not-uncaring lawyer who squeezes in time she doesn’t have in order to be briskly parental about her aging mom. Gloria oversees Dot’s bills, taxes, passwords, groceries, medications, appointments — and encounters resistance at every turn for her pains. Grown-ups with parents who are hovering on the frontier of old age will recognize the syndrome.

Anyhow, things are not going well in the mother/daughter relationship. Dot hangs out somewhere on the spectrum from tetchy to surly; Gloria is exasperated. “If you don’t start talking to people, you’ll go insane,” she says to Dot. “Too late,” snaps her mother.

Capers and cons do have to be set up gradually, true; the concept of routine plausibility has to be floated, after all. But the setup of Wildcat presses its luck by taking an entire, rather lengthy, first act to let the self-imposed dullness and unexciting inertia of Dot’s life play out: the regular repetition of Dot’s deflections of Gloria, Dot half-heartedly and ineffectually making the acquaintance of Google, Dot’s reluctant exchanges with poor old Pearl. And I’m afraid you do feel its length; it’s something to be got through despite convincing performances from Fleiger, Ryan, and Thingelstad, and dialogue from Moeller that feels real. So surreptitious is Wildcat that Dot sticking a cig, unlit, into her mouth to fake-smoke a Marlboro, a kind of half-assed screw-you to Gloria, counts as an event.

A lot happens at intermission. By the time we’re back for Act II, the crime caper that ensues is an object lesson in how isolated older people become vulnerable to internet scams, for one thing. And how they could use their life experience, and an arsenal of skills no one (including themselves) realize they have in order to fight back. Honestly, I don’t quite understand the machinations of the seniors revenge plot, and I don’t want to tread into spoiler territory. But Act II is where there’s an adventure and Graham Mothersill enters, in full-throttle, as … well, you’ll have to see for yourself. Jason Kodie’s crime caper sound design is a tip-off.

Heather Inglis’s production happens with the audience wrapped around the stage. Ami Farrow’s design doesn’t really have much of a pay-off, except aisles for stage exits and a pack of Marlboros in close-up, in Act I. But it comes into its own with playful moving parts and mid-century kitchen chairs in Act II. Payal Jotania’s costumes, which have a lived-in look for Dot and Pearl (who seems to be wearing a whole closet of old clothes), leave us perplexed in the case of Gloria. The play (and the always terrific Thingelstad) says she’s a high-powered lawyer who travels the country. Her baggy clothes and plastic purse say she’s eccentric thrift shopper, huh?

Revenge is sweet, though, and the revenge of undervalued seniors even sweeter. And if you hang in, you’ll have the rare experience of seeing a play with a topical, even political, edge with enough chutzpah to get wacky. In these disheartening times, when it’s easy to slide into the slough of despond — authoritarians count on this — the old-fashioned Dot spirit of yore, that change is possible if we fight back, collectively, is pretty inspirational (yay, teachers!). Fighting back, collectively: that’s at the heart, in the end, of a messy, somewhat trying, two-part play that, like Dot herself, takes a while to get going.

“We can’t lose each other,” say mother and daughter late in Wildcat. And there it is, activism in a nutshell.

REVIEW

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: through Nov. 9

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