Caley Suliak, Ellie Heath, Alyson Dicey, Girl Brain. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The show that opens Thursday in Theatre Network’s season at the Roxy puts holiday sparkles and Santa hats on a double milestone in Edmonton theatre.

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After eight dizzying years of laughing, sold-out houses the hit sketch comedy trio Girl Brain — which is to say Alyson Dicey, Ellie Heath and Caley Suliak— is taking a creative sabbatical. Girl Brain, Actually, inspired by the celebrated seasonal movie fave Love, Actually, is the trio’s farewell-for-now sketch show. “We don’t want to say forever,” says Dicey.

It’s a salute to their Edmonton fans, who have from the start been smitten with Girl Brain’s quick wit, their original situational, observational hilarity, characters that mine the absurdities and anxieties built into everyday life. And there’s this: Girl Brain, Actually is directed by Bradley Moss, his final production at Theatre Network after 30 years, 27 of them as artistic director.

Ellie Heath, Alyson Dicey, Caley Suliak, Girl Brain. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

“We’re take a wee break because we’re all moving to other exciting things in our lives” says Dicey. “We’re (each) too busy, in separate ways, and creatively motivated to do other things….” Says Heath, whose music career is really taking off (she releases her first album, produced by Hawksley Workman, next year). Dicey is making a full-time commitment to the Fringe, in a variety of gigs including fund-raising, sponsorships, communication in addition to directing the KidsFringe. Suliak, who works in communications at Workshop West and appears in the improvised weekly soap Die-Nasty, has “ideas brewing,” as she puts it, “for performances and solo shows,” a hint that she’s resuming her acting career.

Ellie Heath, Caley Suliak, Alyson Dicey, Girl Brain. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

Too busy to be Girl Brain? That in itself says something about the expansiveness of their story, and the theatre/comedy niche the trio have forged for themselves. Heath cites Kurt Cobain’s advice that “if nobody’s presenting a door for you to walk through, you’ve gotta make your own door.” And that’s what the three did, with Girl Brain.

Eight years ago, three actors, best friends looking to create space for themselves in the theatre scene here, fashioned a sketch comedy show. And they took it to a new little comedy theatre called Grindstone on an off-Whyte Strathcona street that wasn’t busy yet.

Actor/playwrights all three, they’d touched down on sketch comedy, mainly because “it’s the most theatrical of all the branches of comedy,” as Heath says. She thinks of it as “an abbreviated form of playwriting.” They’d spent months “writing stories and creating characters (both female and male, sometimes on ill-fated dates) that would be fun to play,” says Suliak, who has a particular specialty in mansplaining roles. No age or gender was safe. “I don’t know if you know this, but men are so funny!” Dicey laughs. “You may not have realized it because men are so under-represented in comedy (more laughter). “Hey, that’s a little preview of our show.”

On that fateful first night at Grindstone they’d find out whether Girl Brain was a kooky one-off  creative experiment, or something with legs, to mix our anatomical metaphors. They didn’t know what to expect, how the audience would react, whether they’d laugh. “That night is a big blur,” Suliak laughs. “We didn’t really know what we were doing. But the show was sold out, and so we’d navigate our way through this new river. And maybe we’d have a life jacket, and maybe we wouldn’t….”

“We swam!” Heath still can’t quite believe the response from the audience. “People came up to us in the lobby after and asked ‘when’s your next show?’…. It immediately felt like something special that we’d have to do again! It took off really fast; it snowballed.” Suddenly Girl Brain was everywhere, making people laugh at festivals, on theatre stages across town, hosting big sporting events….

Girl Brain, 2019: Ellie Heath, Caley Suliak, Alyson Dicey. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb ccollective photography

“There are characters and scenes from those early shows that we’ve come back to later, refined or amalgamated,” says Suliak. Dicey thinks of the Girl Brain origin story as “a perfect storm” of opportunity and buzz. “Grindstone was also new in 2018girl and we were one of the only sketch groups there. AND Brianne Jang signed on (as the official Girl Brain photographer) with Caley as our social media manager…. We have people who love us as an online group and have never come to the theatre!”

Girl Brain. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

Jang, a multi-talented actor/professional photographer who’s also the manager of the SkirtsAfire Festival, brought an adventurous originality sense of comedy to Girl Brain photo shoots. Ah, and a vivid sense of place. Girl Brain was our sketch comedy trio: Jang would pose the trio on the river valley steps, or at the mall, or in the swanky Roxy Theatre bathroom. Their posters, designed by Jang, are comedies in themselves.

From the start Girl Brain conceived of their sketch shows as theatrical; characters and a through-line were important to them. “It makes us different from other sketch groups,” says Dicey. “When Bradley (Bradley Moss) saw one of our shows he noticed. ‘’Keep doing that’,” he told us.” Actor/director/playwright Steve Pirot and Mike Kennard of Mump and Smoot fame, had similar thoughts. ‘You have something weird and I think you should lean into that’.”

Ellie Heath, Caley Suliak, Alyson Dicey in Weekend at Girlies, Girl Brain at Theatre Network. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Last year’s Girl Brain Christmas special, Weekend At Girlies, inspired by the movie Weekend at Bernie’s, was a girls’ trip to a Mexican all-inclusive. With Love, Actually, Girl Brain has springboarded off an episodic movie, with recurring characters, “that flows very much in the way our shows have flowed in the last few years,” as Heath points out. And they’ve taken the action out West, way out West, to the Mall.

That Moss has signed on to direct is particularly meaningful to all three. It isn’t his first time directing the trio. In 2023, at Theatre Network’s Another F!*#@$G Festival, Girl Brain and Moss collaborated on Humans Never Onstage, a verbatim theatre production devised from interviews with real people, à la Studs Terkel’s Working. It was Moss’s idea. “We’re all big fans of his work” says Heath, who was in the cast of his production of Colleen Murphy’s Jupiter last season. Because Moss is leaving “this might be our last chance to work together in this space!”

When they started eight years ago, having a “girl brain” day was a droll throw-away line about falling through a crevice in the logic brain. It became a validation. And now Girl Brain is stepping off the curb again, venturing forth on new, separate creative pathways.  Brainwaves to come.

PREVIEW

Girl Brain, Actually

Created by: Alyson Dicey, Ellie Heath, Caley Suliak

Directed by: Bradley Moss

Where: Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre, 10708 124 St.

Running: Thursday through Dec. 21

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca