Maxwell Vesely and N Girgis in YAGA, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the nearly-last moment this past weekend I got a chance to see what happens when one of the country’s smartest young playwriting talents tangles with a macabre Slavic myth — and has her way with it.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

I was lucky to catch one of the finale performances of Kat Sandler’s Yaga: Shadow’s season-opener, the production directed by the company’s new artistic director Lana Michelle Hughes is the hottest ticket and biggest hit of the Edmonton theatre season thus far.

Here I am, telling you what you’ve just missed (which will sound a bit gloat-y and mean): a contemporary thriller, an ingenious feminist murder mystery that’s as funny as it is unnerving — a combination that’s tricky to pull off onstage, to say the least since in less skilled hands those qualities tend to cancel each other out onstage.

The heir to a yogurt fortune, a young dude with a proclivity for older women, has gone missing in a small college town. And a private investigator and a police detective are on a case with instant suspects. In Sandler’s hands, the myth of Baba Yaga, the aged crone who lives in a hut in the woods that’s propped up on chicken legs, takes on a scarier, dimension that’s decisively female: the older woman, especially the seductive, sexual, independent woman, as monster — mysterious, unknowable, unmanageable.

Maxwell Vesely and Emily Howard in Yaga by Kat Sandler, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Hughes’ production looks and sounds wonderfully atmospheric and eerie onstage. Characters emerge through branches of a mapless wood (the beautiful design is by Cindi Zuby, stunningly lighted by Even Gilchrist). The sound, which grapples to get its hooks into melody, and just about lands before it slides into dangerous almost industrial riffs, is by Chris Scott.

And the real fun of it for the audience is the sheer playful theatricality of the ingenuity at work. Yaga is a sexy, intricately structured, darker-than-dark, multi-character comedy … with an inventive cast of just three. It’s led by a wonderful nexus of performances by N Girgis, including Baba Yaga herself, in a welcome return to Edmonton theatre. And Maxwell Vesely and Emily Howard are cops, detectives witnesses, bystanders…. And we have the fun of putting a puzzle together ourselves.

I haven’t yet sampled the CRAVE TV series adapted by Sandler and starring Carrie Anne Moss and Hudson Williams. But I’m finding it hard to believe that this can work nearly as well onscreen with a big cast. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Anyhow, congratulations to Shadow and to Hughes on a superlative show. After a fall of multiple fractures and way too much hospital time, Yaga was my re-introduction to the world. And I couldn’t be more grateful.

Check out the rest of the Shadow Theatre season here.