The 6 wives of Henry VIII do girl-power pop (and stop by en route to Broadway): Six the Musical. A review.

Posted on November 8, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Andrea Macasaet as Anne Boleyn in Six. Photo by Liz Lauren.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You’re gonna find out/ how we got unfriended….” sing six queens exploding out of history and into concert in their red-hot opening number. “Tonight we’re gonna do ourselves justice/ ‘cause we’re taking you to court!”

Give it up, Edmonton, for the wives of Henry VIII in Six the Musical! You know them already for being a sequence — “Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived.” Now they’re “Divorced. Beheaded. Live in Concert.” They’re the ex’s of a guy whose place in history was carved by the peculiar combo of being a terrible serial husband and starting the Church of England. 

The sassy what-if? of Six — which lands the wives on the Citadel mainstage for their Canadian premiere (and only Canadian date before launching on Broadway in March) — is the six Tudor queens as fractious girl-power pop stars. Enough of being a spouse to a louse: they’re competing in a song contest, first prize to the one that got more grief, bullshit, and abuse from The Man. “What hurts more than a broken heart? wonders true-blue Jane Seymour, making her case. “A severed head,” snaps Anne Boleyn.

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True, there have been shows before now that assembled the royal sextet onstage to air their grievances. Edmonton audiences have seen a couple: Tara Travis’s one-woman six-queen production Till Death: The Six Wives of Henry VIII (which put them in purgatory, jockeying for position) and Send in the Girls’ burlesque Tudor Queens. There has never been a show, however (OK, to my knowledge), till this Edinburgh Fringe student show-turned-West End hit that armed each queen with their own pop diva musical style nodding to Beyoncé, Avril Lavigne, Rihanna, Ariana Grande…. And also rhymed “Lutheranism.” And mentioned, in passing, the dissolution of the monasteries.

The bright idea from Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, newly hatched Cambridge grads in 2017 and only 25 now, turns out to be a clever, slick but personable 80-minute entertainment, Hamilton-ian in the way it weds unexpected musical styles to history. It’s a blast of theatrical fun with a catchy original pop score, wicked lyrics, a message about female empowerment and solidarity— and a sense of humour that’s smart enough to be jokey (but still heart-warming) about the obviousness of its own premise.

The production, directed by Moss and Jamie Armitage, has all the trappings of a splashy arena rock concert, production values tweaked for Tudor. Emma Bailey’s set with its neon arches, Tim Deiling’s outstanding lighting with its cross-hatched blare of glare at climactic moments, Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s snazzy synchronized rock choreography, Gabriella Slade’s sexy punkish Tudor-accented costumes … all are fun to watch.

And to listen to. A fine female band of four, the Ladies in Waiting led by Edmonton’s Jen MacMillan on keyboards, rocks onstage with the cast. The actors, from the North American premiere production at Chicago Shakespeare Theater this past summer, are first-rate singers and movers, full of style and pizzaz, and dexterous in the comic timing department. And the anachronistic quip-crammed bickering of the queens, both in the songs and between them, will make you smile.

Adrianna Hicks, who has a very funny worldly-wise air to her, lands one of those defiant Beyoncé odes (No Way) as Catherine of Aragon, resentfully sidelined to a nunnery when Anne Boleyn catches Henry’s eye. Winnipeg’s Andrea Macasaet, the only Canuck in the cast, is a riot as the peppery little French-educated flirt Anne. She gets a sparky hip hop-flavoured number (“tried to elope, but the pope said nope…. everybody chill it’s totes god’s will”).

As Jane Seymour, the one who died, Abby Mueller gets Six’s big Adele-ish power ballad Heart of Stone, and knows what to do with it. (She even gets a little musical theatre joke: “stick around and suddenly you’ll see more.” Spot quiz next period).

Brittney Mack as Anne of Cleves, Six the Musical. Photograph by Liz Lauren 2019.

It’s a measure of the pop wit at work in Six — it wears its cheeky anachronisms like sequins on a showgirl — that the fate of Anne of Cleves, rejected because she didn’t live up to her Hans Holbein portrait, inspires Marlow and Moss with the notion of online dating disappointments. Brittney Mack turns in a high-powered screw-you number. Living well (especially in a palace in Richmond, with lots of cash) is the best revenge, it turns out.

Anna Uzele as Catherine Parr in Six the Musical. Photo by Liz Lauren.

Samantha Pauley nails the gummy All You Wanna Do from Katherine Howard, who’s been pawed by guys since age 13. And Anna Uzele as Catherine Parr (“gold star for Cathy Parr”) the sole survivor of Hank’s serial marital history, gets the striking I Don’t Need Your Love, and that feels like resolution. 

It all leads, smartly, to  high-octane finale when the queens put aside their differences and come together as history’s ultimate girl-pop group. After all, “a pair doesn’t beat a royal flush.” And the six of Six are a crack ensemble. Resistance is futile; bestir yourself to get yourself a ticket if you possibly can and “party like it’s 1499.” The opening night audience, which somehow seemed younger than usual, roared to its collective feet with their cellphones pointed stageward. It doesn’t take the gift of prophecy to predict that Marlow and Moss are going places.

And don’t you dare decapitate your fun night out by leaving before the encore. N-N-N-N-N-N-No Way. Check out our PREVIEW and meet Marlow and Moss here.

REVIEW

Six the Musical

Theatre: Citadel

Created by: Lucy Moss, Toby Marlow

Directed by: Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage

Starring: Andrea Macasaet, Adrianna Hicks, Abby Mueller, Brittney Mack, Samantha Pauly, Anna Uzele

Running: through Nov. 24

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From the Fringe to Tudor-mania in the big wide world (via E-Town). Meet the creators of Six

Posted on November 6, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Six The Musical: Divorced. Beheaded. Live In Concert. Photo by Liz Lauren.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe, there were 3,398 shows. Only one of them continues to play to sold-out houses in the West End, and opens on Broadway in March.

That would be Six The Musical, the one that gets its Canadian premiere (and only Canadian dates before that Broadway opening night) on the Citadel mainstage Thursday.  After a packed, held-over North American debut at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. And just before runs in St. Paul, Minn. and the Sydney Opera House.

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Six The Musical: Divorced. Beheaded. Live In Concert, a pop concert/musical starring the wives of serial husband Henry VIII, was created by a pair of Cambridge University grads, best friends who were studying for their finals at the time.

Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, now just 25, were on hand at the Citadel Tuesday, along with the singing queens in their civvies. And, appealingly, they’re still breathing the air of improbability that attaches to the skyward ocean-crossing trajectory of their student production. “It was just supposed to be a fun project before we had to go out and find true jobs,” says Marlow of their bright idea of fashioning the stories of Henry’s wives into a battle of the pop divas — roles to show off the talents of their female and non-binary friends.

How a Fringe show with two £10 lights, a costume budget of £150 or so, and unpaid actors got noticed by London producers (Andy and Wendy Barnes, Kenny Wax) catapulted to hit status ramps up the old showbiz concept Big Break. Not least because it was at a “completely bonkers” festival where, as Marlow points out, the average audience size is “one person or less than one person.”

Their dreams, says Moss, extended to “imagining what if a London theatre wanted to do a week’s run…. then ‘No, No! We’re getting carried away’.” Four Monday nights at the Arts Theatre in the West End, and bam! “That’s when we lost our minds!” grins Moss.

And now, “Wait, Wait! we’re doing an Edinburgh Fringe show that’s going to Broadway!” says Moss. North America, so far? “Wild!” declares Marlow. “We wondered. A show about British history? Are they gonna get it?” Is it enough to change “mate” to “bro”? as he says. Short answer: yes. Long answer: “It’s British history, true. But the form, big fancy glam pop concert, is actually an American thing.”

In Chicago, audience members clustered nightly by the stage door after the show for autographs. And the same thing has happened at the Citadel, 50 or 60 people at a time, after Edmonton previews, reports Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran. The run has attracted ticket-buyers across North America. And tickets are scarce. Says Citadel executive director Chantell Ghosh, for the first time, Citadel tickets have shown up on re-sale sites like Stubhub.

Six The Musical. Photo by Liz Lauren.

Six is the second of two Broadway-bound musicals that the Citadel has hosted recently. The first, Hadestown, reworked in Edmonton from its Off-Broadway version in the fall of 2017, played the National Theatre in London, then took home eight Tony Awards in New York, including best musical, in 2018. Cloran, who saw Six in London, was immediately attracted, for one thing because “women were taking their stories back.” And the stories were attached to “fabulous, incredibly catchy pop songs,” as the 50 million-plus downloads of the cast recording attest. “You can’t not be on your feet cheering at the end,” he says. 

The international spotlight is intense on the disarming musical-writing pair whose muse tends to be comic, they say. “Our main focus is comedy song writers,” says Marlow. We love Tim Minchin (Matilda), for example. And also Max Martin (who writes for the likes of Katy, Britney, Justin).” 

Andrea Macasaet as Anne Boleyn in Six. Photo by Liz Lauren.

They arrived in musical theatre by slightly different routes. Marlow grew up “making music, playing instruments….” Moss trained as a dancer before taking up “directing, storytelling, comedy” at university. “The music I loved to dance to was pop music,” she says.

Although Moss had choreographed some of Marlow’s songs, Six was their first writing collaboration. History and an unexpected musical presentation? Sounds like Hamilton, the groundbreaking marriage of hip-hop and musical theatre in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway phenom. Moss and Marlow are happy to acknowledge the inspiration.  “Huge!” says Marlow. “I was writing my thesis on it at the time. I really love Hamilton!”

“The canon of musical theatre has always reflected the genre of the time,” thinks Marlow, whether that was Rogers and Hammerstein, or rock and roll. “I felt like until Hamilton it had been a while since musical theatre had (embraced) a genre you hadn’t heard before in a musical.”

For a musical theatre creator, Hamilton expands “what you’re allowed to do, the possibilities,” says Moss, who “made a conscious choice not to see Hamilton before we wrote Six.” So the Tudor queens aren’t attached, musically, to the renaissance, to put it mildly; each claims the musical style of a pop diva, Beyoncé or Avril Lavigne.   

Meanwhile, in their non-existent spare time Marlow and Moss are working on a new show. “A show about being single,” sighs the former. “It’s not about us. It’s about two musical theatre writers.” They look at each other and laugh. “I don’t know where that came from.” 

PREVIEW

Six The Musical

Theatre: Citadel

Created by: Lucy Moss, Toby Marlow

Directed by: Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage

Starring: Andrea Macasaet, Adrianna Hicks, Abby Mueller, Brittney Mack, Samantha Pauly, Anna Uzele

Running: through Nov. 24

Tickets: 780-425-1820  

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“Embrace your weirdness”: the world as seen by Girl Brain, coming to the Citadel

Posted on November 5, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Overheard out in the real world — a cafe maybe, or a wine bar: Three women at the next table are laughing uproariously. “That’s a sketch!” floats your way through the air, like a winged mantra. Chances are you’re sitting next to Girl Brain.

“Anything that happens out of the ordinary, or makes us laugh, or makes us think” could elicit a cry of “that’s a sketch!,” as Ellie Heath says. Dreams, the absurdity, the hypocrisies of the world, dating, relationships, the craziness of theatre … all of it a rich vein of raw material that Heath, Alyson Dicey and Caley Suliak are happy to mine.

They’re the trio of Edmonton actor/writers who share a brain, a Girl Brain. And the synapses are firing on all cylinders. The popular sketch comedy troupe arrives on the Citadel’s Rice stage this weekend (as part of the House Series), on an upward trajectory powered by applause from club and festival houses across the country.

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Girl Brain. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

“The universe just led us to it,” says Dicey by way of explaining the birth of Girl Brain. There’s a kind of cosmic inevitability, not least because theatre and a hot tub are involved. For starters the trio are actor pals of long standing who love to write almost as much as they love to laugh. “Writing stems from being working actors, and the desire to create your own work … to take charge and not wait around for people to cast you,” says Suliak. “And don’t get me wrong; I’d still love for people to cast me!” Laughter all round.

“Actually we’re so busy doing Girl Brain we don’t always have the time to do other acting gigs,” says Heath.   

They’d been returned to each other’s company through the interventions of (showbiz-friendly) fate. Why sketch comedy? Heath, who’d written a Fringe play (Tree Hugger) with Dicey — they’ve known each other since they were 15, at Arts Trek — had been in a Vancouver sketch group, The Sweater Zeppelin. Caley Suliak, a Grant MacEwan grad who’d starred in RibbitRePublic’s Spiral Dive and written kids’ plays and her own solo memoir Inside Out, had lived in San Francisco for a while. “When Caley came back we just started telling our stories to each other — and they came out in short vignettes,” says Dicey, a member of Thou Art Here, a “site-sympathetic” Shakespeare troupe.

Their great pal Byron Martin was launching the Grindstone Comedy Club in the spring of 2018. And he was casting about for comedy shows that weren’t improv, to add dimension to programming. Which brings us to the hot tub, the group conversation therein, and Dicey’s helpful “I have an idea!”

“We spent a lot of time together before we got Girl Brain off the ground, basically over glasses of wine, laughing hysterically.… We all love to write,” says Dicey. “And sketch comedy is such a nice art form,” says Heath cheerfully, to general assent. “You get your ideas out in two pages, as opposed to 75 pages!”

Girl Brain. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

In April of 2018, Girl Brain was born, in an hour-long sketch show that instantly became a monthly gig at the Grindstone. “I was so nervous,” says Heath. “I had no idea what to expect, no idea if people were going to like it.” In the end “we were two people away from selling out that show, and it went off like fireworks! Just insane, the reception we got for that show. We were on a cloud for a week after that, so proud of what we accomplished!”

Some of Girl Brain’s signature recurring characters were born in that debut show. Anxiety and Depression are two favourites: Suliak plays the former (“she comes to me really easily,” laughs the actor); Dicey the latter. “Ellie’s character is always in some situation where they show up unannounced, and try to ruin her life!” says Dicey. “In an interview, say, or swimsuit shopping, the doctor’s office, weddings, New Year’s parties.… Kinda cool.” Says Heath, “sometimes I win, and sometimes I don’t.”

“A strength we have as a sketch troupe, that sets us apart, is our theatrical background…. We put a lot of thought into characters; that’s our strong suit.” And the three actors get a particular charge out of writing characters for each other. “I think it’s hilarious when Caley plays ‘the mansplaining guy’.” says Dicey. Heath plays a Suliak creation, Magda, an “aggressive blind Russian lady” who reads people’s skin, their acne, their boobs.

No age or gender is safe. Dicey and Heath love playing a recurring male cop duo who are secretly in love. “They solve crime; they go to therapy,” says Dicey. Every once in a while, “it’s ‘what did Dr. Abigail say?’ and the scene just continues.”

The large, and multiplying, coterie of their returning fans (there’s even a Girl Brain fan club) make it “so satisfying to do recurring characters and have knowing laughter in the audience,” says Heath. “We can feel an energy in the room, a powerful and loving energy.”

If dating worked out all the time, would Girl Brain suffer from oxygen deprivation? “We’d have a lot less material,” laughs Suliak who admits that “sometimes I go on Tinder just to get material, and go on a date…. Men of Edmonton, I’m exploiting you!”      

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

The troupe got its name from a catchy Suliak aphorism: “O man, I’m having girl brain today!” as opposed to “logic brain.” And “as we’ve grown together,” girl brain has turned out to be a validation, a position of strength. “It’s about being empowered; we’re smart women!” 

“We try to send a message of love and positivity,” says Heath. “You are beautiful no matter what you look like. Love yourself! Being weird is beautiful!” Says Suliak “embrace your weirdness!”

“The writing has evolved,” she says. “Practice makes perfect, right? The more we write, the more we learn. And we’ve learned so much from making connections at sketch festivals. When we started we really didn’t know much about it!”

Dicey laughs. “Talk about not knowing anything! …. When Carolyn Taylor (of CBC’s Baroness von Sketch) asked us ‘do you do black-outs?’ we said ‘yeah, we turn out the lights after every scene.” A black-out, in sketch-speak, is a snappy two-line scene.

At the Toronto Sketch Fest last March, Girl Brain met Good Game, three guys from London, Ont.  whose take on sketch comedy is to follow a narrative through a whole show. “They inspired us; We put that into practice in our Fringe show,” says Heath. 

This season, Girl Brain expands its reach, first to the Citadel and this weekend’s House Series gig and then to four dates (Dec. 14, Feb. 29, March 28 and May 16) in Theatre Network’s Roxy Performance Series.

The Citadel show, a dream gig directed by actor/playwright/improviser Belinda Cornish, expands the usual hour-long format into two 45-minute acts, organized on the theme “Girl Brain grows up,” from the adolescent years of Act I to “where we are in life right now in Act II,” as Dicey puts it. And for the first time, a sketch troupe accustomed to being ingenious with a couple of black chairs, gets costumes and a bona fide set (designer: Tessa Stamp), who’s provided “a beautiful girl’s bedroom” for them to play in.

All very deluxe “and feeling more formal and legit,” as Heath puts it. But be assured,  “Anxiety and Depression will be there!” Suliak laughs. “Especially Anxiety. Right before the curtain goes up!”

PREVIEW

Girl Brain

Created by and starring: Alyson Dicey, Ellie Heath, Caley Suliak

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Where: Citadel Rice Theatre

Running: Thursday (added due to popular demand) through Saturday

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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In hot pursuit of justice: The Ballad of Peachtree Rose. A review of Workshop West’s season-opener

Posted on November 2, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Laura Raboud, Alexandra Dawking and (rear) Bobbi Goddard, The Ballad of Peachtree Rose. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Welcome to the team!” says a mysterious executive (Laura Raboud), to the street kid she’s just recruited. “I really believe in you.”

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Team spirit: It’s music to the ears of Peach (Alexandra Dawkins), who ricochets through a desperately lonely, hard-scrabble existence of low-level crime, minor scores, temporary fixes. Even more seductive to the wary new recruit is the concept of family, sisterhood, home. And ah, the beautiful two-storey family house with a wrap-around porch that is the physical embodiment of the abstract concept “rich.” 

Nicole Moeller’s intriguingly crafted new thriller The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, premiering at Workshop West Playwright’s Theatre, unspools from the worldly skepticism that all rescues come with strings attached. There’s a price tag on love and the precious sense of belonging. A taste of it is never enough. And that being the case, what does justice mean?          

Here’s another question that occurred to me, watching The Ballad of Peachtree Rose: Who writes stage thrillers? In this country, almost no one.  And you can see why; they’re hard to pull off. The storytelling is tricky: what starts in mysterious murk is gradually lit. The plot has to take expected turns and angles that surprise the characters (or some of them) as much as us. Information is withheld and leaked out, bit by bit; suspense escalates. Moeller scores on all of the above, with the bonus of a social perspective on crime. And we have the fun of connecting the dots — or arguing that they don’t quite connect. 

(This is not, of course, an evening about the professional challenges of theatrical scribes. But it’s devilishly hard to write about a thriller without spilling a spoiler. Just saying.)

Shannon Blanchet (front), Alexandra Dawkins, Bobbi Goddard, The Ballad of Peachtree Rose. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

I digress. The play, and Brenley Charkow’s adrenalized production, land us, instantly, into a high-speed swirl, with characters who don’t explain who they are, and where they’ve been. Who is Max, anyhow? Everything about Max’s line of work, including the other employees and associates (all played, with smart precision, by Shannon Blanchet), is shady. Clearly she works for a high-level criminal organization with cross-country connections, and an aversion to using FedEx. OK, fancy parties in Toronto are one thing; but no one just ups and goes to Winnipeg for no reason.

Alexandra Dawkins, Laura Raboud in The Ballad of Peachtree Rose. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

Max undertakes a makeover upgrade on the latest ragtag employee: shopping, a Saskatchewan Drive apartment with a view, fancy clothes, free drinks, a more confident walk. “Confidence means you could kill someone, but you choose not to.” (note to self … oh, never mind).

Daniela Masellis’s clever minimalist set speaks volumes: a warehouse of unmarked cardboard storage containers (that Max expressly forbids Peach to open) on moveable shelving that reconfigures the playing space. So does Sauvé MacBean’s score, dominated by the sounds of the Tragically Hip. In the Backstage Theatre we surround the action in a U-shape configuration. 

Weaving through the play, on the sidelines waiting for a turn to speak, is Belle (the excellent Bobbi Goddard) who mourns, furiously and feelingly, her loss: in an unsolved crime her mother was murdered and no application of “justice” will ever be a proper redress. She’s a little repetitive, in truth. But I guess you could argue that’s what it means to be a victim, trapped in a memory by anger undimmed by time. And Belle has narrative duties, too, announcing the passage and dislocations of time that move the play forward and backward. “one month goes by…”     

The characters are engagingly set forth by Charkow’s cast, who are tasked with holding dark secrets close to the chest and letting them loose sparingly. As the twitchy Peach, Dawkins compellingly conveys the sense of a predator/prey whose existence has always depended on alertness and perpetual motion. Raboud’s brisk and vivid Max, whose cunning operates at a more refined level than that of her new associate, can (and does) wield the mantra “honesty, loyalty, integrity” on a spectrum from irony to absolute sincerity. She doesn’t walk if she can stride; she appears and exits at top speed.  Is she a hard heart softened by Peach? A criminal stage manager? Blanchet has the fun of playing a gallery of losers and winners.

And speaking as we are of fun, you’ll be able to claim the thriller fun of arguing about the outcome (so far I’ve heard three possible interpretations, convincingly promoted, by three different people). What seems more certain is that the world — Edmonton, actually — is a harsh and treacherous place for the characters of The Ballad of Peachtree Rose. Its victims are its victimizers, its betrayals and its rescues are indistinguishable at 100 paces. And justice is an elusive concept, a matter of deal-brokering not truth. 

Meet the playwright in this 12thnight PREVIEW.

REVIEW

The Ballad of Peachtree Rose

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Nicole Moeller

Directed by: Brenley Charkow

Starring: Alexandra Dawkins, Laura Raboud, Bobbi Goddard, Shannon Blanchet

Where: Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 10

Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).   

 

 

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What to see this weekend on E-town stages (don’t stay home)

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

James Gnam in Running Piece, Grand Poney. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Time (a possible paradox). There’s never enough of it. It never stands still. It’s almost impossible to make a dent in it. You can move forward through it, but are you actually standing still? 

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The show that comes to the Mile Zero Dance season tonight for one night only is all about that. Running Piece, by Jacques Poulin-Denis for the Montreal-based company Grand Poney, is a 55-minute work for dancer and treadmill. The former (James Gnam of Vancouver’s Plastic Orchid Factory) never leaves the latter, which should give you a shudder of recognition.

It’s at the Westbury Theatre (ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.) tonight. Tickets: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca. 

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

•”Who are the monsters?” Playwright Nicole Moeller wonders about that in her new thriller The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, bringing car chases, illicit money, smuggling, an high-speed criminality, to the  Workshop West season tonight at the Backstage Theatre (where it runs through Nov. 10. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca). Like so many of Moeller’s plays, this one was inspired by the news. 12thnight.ca had the chance to talk to her in this preview. You can check it out here.

•At La Cité francophone, you’ll meet beleaguered Gordon, whose life is unravelling to a soundtrack of scratching and chewing, a home invasion by vermin and a yard invasion by insect forces. Will an obsessively regular routine by day save him from desperation by night?

Simon Bracken and The Mourners, The Particulars. Photo by Dahlia Katz

The show is Matthew MacKenzie’s black comedy The Particulars. The Punctuate! Theatre production directed by the playwright returns from a hit Toronto run for a two-night run (tonight and Saturday). Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca). 12thnight.ca talks to the playwright in this preview.   

•At the Varscona Theatre, two mis-matched roommates, both women and both in their ‘50s, continue to resolve their differences in the quest to change their lives. Jen Silverman’s comedy The Roommate opens the Shadow Theatre season; Nancy McAlear’s production, starring Coralie Cairns and Nadine Chu, runs through Nov 10. Tickets: 780-434-5564, shadowtheatre.org. 12thnight.ca talks to the playwright in this preview. Read the 12thnight review here.

Kristin Johnston in Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

• Come to the cabaret. Baroness Bianka sips her last suspiciously red cocktail this weekend. Saturday is your last chance to find out if you’re her type: that’s when Northern Light’s production of Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, directed by Trevor Schmidt, turns off the i.v. 12thnight meets the star Kristin Johnston in this preview. Have a peek at the 12thnight review here.   

•In six days during the Blitz, the darkest days of World War II, Noel Coward dashed off a new comedy poised on the threshold between the dead and the living. Coward, a blithe spirit himself, said of Blithe Spirit “I knew it was witty, I knew it was well constructed and I also knew that it was going to be a success.”

Comic chaos is unleashed when a highly eccentric medium, Mme Arcati, inadvertently introduces a deceased first wife into the urbane household of the second. Novelist Charles Condamine thereby finds himself in a marital predicament; is he, as he points out, an “astral bigamist?”.

That’s the frothy comedy that opens the theatre season at Concordia University of Edmonton. Glenda Stirling directs the student production, which runs tonight through Sunday, and Nov. 8 to 10 at Concordia’s Al and Trish Huehn Theatre (7128 Ada Boulevard). Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca) or at the door.   

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The Particulars: the invasion of the minutiae. Punctuate! is back in town

Posted on October 31, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Simon Bracken and “the Mourners” in The Particulars, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Poor Gordon. He has a complicated problem. His life, an infestation of minutiae moment to moment, is driving him crazy. Especially at night.

The scratching of vermin in the walls. The chewing of insects in his yard. The drip of a tap. The sound of breathing.… The Particulars, says Gordon’s creator, playwright Matthew MacKenzie  “is not about pest control.” It’s “about a guy who goes on with living without his reason for living.”

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MacKenzie’s spring-loaded black comedy for one unravelling man and seven dancers makes its way back to Edmonton Friday and Saturday in a Punctuate! Theatre production, after an impressively successful run at The Theatre Centre in Toronto.  “At first you laugh at him,” says MacKenzie of the insomniac obsessive at the centre of “a very funny one-man epic.” And then, when you discover something of the mystery of Gordon’s past, “you’re implicated for having laughed at him. But by then you’re strapped in for the rest of the ride.”

“I wrote it 15 years ago, after a bad heartbreak,” MacKenzie explains. “And the story grew.” The 20-minute “mini-show for myself” at the National Theatre School expanded into a full-fledged solo play that, directed by Patrick Lundeen and starring Simon Bracken, was a sleeper hit at the 2008 Edmonton Fringe. In a 2013 incarnation MacKenzie himself starred as Gordon. What happened in that version wasn’t dance, he laughs. “Not really. Just me running around the stage like Oedipus with his eyes put out.”

The Particulars, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

And now, in this latest version of The Particulars, the beleaguered Gordon (Bracken again) has acquired a Greek chorus of seven dancers called Mourners, who create the abstract maze and signposts of Gordon’s interior world. 

Dance, says MacKenzie, Punctuate! artistic director, is a way of arriving at “a heightened state” that often eludes a single actor alone on a stage. The Particulars isn’t the only time that MacKenzie has populated a “solo” show with dancers. In Bears, his captivatingly strange and imaginative 2015 piece — which won awards both for its Edmonton and Toronto productions — the playwright set his Indigenous protagonist forth on a transforming journey into the wilderness, with oil company enforcers in hot pursuit. In the decade’s only “multi-disciplinary comedy about the Trans-Mountain Pipeline,” the visceral Indigenous connection with nature was brought to life by a chorus of dancers who were wildflowers, birds, animals, a shrinking glacier. 

The Other, produced by Punctuate!’s sibling indie company Pyretic Productions (MacKenzie and Lundeen were co-founders and they email each other as Pyrunctuate!) starred a woman who is somehow an outsider to herself, a spectator looking in on her life. A corps of dancers set that intricate idea in theatrical motion, in a production that starred actor/dancer/choreographer Amber Borotsik, .

Simon Bracken and The Mourners, The Particulars. Photo by Dahlia Katz

MacKenzie thinks The Particulars, in its current incarnation, might be the trickiest theatrical challenge of all — as three workshops in the past year will attest. Choreographer Alida Kendell of Good Women Dance, “laid down the law,” MacKenzie grins. “She didn’t want dance to be decorative,” movement pasted on to a text. It had to be organic.

He’s the director, but MacKenzie is keen to avoid the perception that The Particulars is “the Matthew MacKenzie show.” He says “Alida’s voice is the most prominent in the room, definitely; she casts all her dancers.”

In a way the evolution of The Particulars as dance theatre is the story of a theatre company aesthetic. By now, at Punctuate!, “the majority of artists we hire are dancers,” says MacKenzie. “My chief collaborators are dancer/choreographers…. The possibilities with dance (in theatre) are really limitless.” He points to the Jonathon Young/ Crystal Pite collaboration Betroffenheit. “I don’t want to mimic it, of course, but it’s powerful as hell! The term ‘art’ his thrown around a lot. But that’s art!”

“I want words and dance…. That’s where the magic is for me!”

If dance has been one of MacKenzie’s prime theatrical motivators, the other has been the discovery and exploration of his own Indigenous (Cree, Métis, Iroquois) roots. Bears was a bold declaration. Now he’s working with Bears star Sheldon Elter, a Métis actor of huge charisma, on a new solo show, Poster Boy.

The Situation We Find Ourselves In Is This, MacKenzie’s new solo show, is in progress after a September workshop production in Toronto. It’s about his time with the great Canadian theatre mentor/ dramaturge Iris Turcott during her final days. He’s off to the Ukraine in February with Pyretic’s Lundeen and Lianna Makuch (Blood of Our Soil); the latter is developing a new play spun from her heritage in that war-ravaged part of eastern Europe. And in April, After The Fire, a re-thought re-worked version of Bust (first seen at Theatre Network) — MacKenzie’s very dark comedy set in Fort McMurray in the aftermath of the devastating 2016 fire there — plays the Citadel’s inaugural Highwire series.   

But first, after “a couple of years of urban frenzy,” MacKenzie does what he always does to clear his head and recharge his creative skills. He heads to nature — specifically to Canmore for “some time in the woods.”  As Turcott used to say to her playwright charges, “get yourself a six-pack. You’re going to need it!” 

PREVIEW

The Particulars

Theatre: Punctuate! Theatre

Written by: Matthew MacKenzie

Directed by: Matthew MacKenzie, choreographed by Alida Kendell

Starring: Simon Bracken, Amber Borotsik, Bridget Jessome, Richard Lee Hsi, Krista Lin, Rebecca Sadowski, Kate Stashko, Raena Waddell

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91 Street

Running: Friday and Saturday

Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-4201757, tixonthesquare.ca)

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Crime plays: The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, a new thriller from Nicole Moeller, opens the Workshop West season

Posted on October 29, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Who are the monsters?”

That’s what playwright Nicole Moeller wonders. It’s what she’s always drawn to wonder in her plays, and the answer is never clear-cut. She asks again in the new high-speed thriller that premieres Friday to launch the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season.

“It’s fun! It’s exciting! A criminal organization, car chases, smuggling, money!” she says of the sensational world of The Ballad of Peachtree Rose. “But underneath it asks a lot of questions…. How do we end up doing the things we do? How far are we willing to go for a new start and a new life?”

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Like so many of her plays, this latest, five years in the making, was originally inspired by the news, says Moeller who came to playwriting via musical theatre and a degree in journalism. True crime: “a case about a young street kid who got involved in a criminal organization.”

For Moeller, a thoughtful and rather soft-spoken sort, the news has always been a theatrical magnet. But she gravitates to the oblique angles, the ambiguous underside views, the side players. In The Mothers, for example, which premiered at the 2015 SkirtsAfire Festival, a teenager has taken a gun to school, with terrible results. Moeller didn’t investigate the kid’s elusive motive; she wrote a play about his mother, and her life. 

Moeller’s award-winning 2011 play An Almost Perfect Thing was inspired by a luridly awful 2006 news story about a young Austrian girl, kidnapped at 10, who’d escaped her captor after eight years as a prisoner in an improvised basement dungeon under her house. The public turned on her when she refused to play victim; instead she took charge of her fortunes, manipulated her image, and became a media star. 

playwright Nicole Moeller

Monsters tend to come in black and white; Moeller’s preferred colour palette, as she acknowledges cheerfully, is gray. Moeller’s 2017 The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow paints a shaded portrait of a man, both his own prisoner and jailer, who struggles against his predatory demons.    

Five years ago — “it takes me a long time to write; ideas stay in the back of my brain” — the news came through again with theatrical inspiration.  And  Vern Thiessen’s first official meeting in his new job as Workshop West artistic director, was with Moeller to discuss the true crime idea that would become The Ballad of Peachtree Rose. Friday’s opening night at the Backstage Theatre is the grand finale of his last week on the job.

Typically, Moeller, the company’s playwright-in-residence at the time, immersed herself in first-person research. “I wanted to look at crime from all angles,” says Moeller. “It was not a world I understood.” She sat through trials, including the high-profile Travis Vader double-murder trial, “just to see what that world was. I spoke with lawyers, police, people who’d been victims of crime.…”

“It was good to embed myself into that world and put a face on it, try to understand,” she says. “And that also made it more difficult: What story am I going to tell? Whose story do I have the right to tell?”

Volunteer work with people who’ve been through the criminal justice system was revealing: “I can see how they’re led into that life.” What research for her new play offered additionally, says Moeller, was the chance to “to see their effect on victims. And that can really hit home…. You can see what questions are being asked and how they’re being asked. When you read, things are black and white. But if you’re there, experiencing that world, you sense a lot more gray.…”

Says Moeller, “it opened up my world to meet the people. Writing is so isolating…. I could write five plays from the research I did! And you never know how research is going to inform you.” Eventually, in the surfeit of fascinating possibilities she uncovered, she had to choose. 

“I ended up focussing on two women,” says Moeller of her deliberate choice of female characters. “You don’t very often see women having those roles onstage….” Women are often victims of violence, in life and in theatre. But “women who inflict violence?” Not so much. “It creates and a complexity and a rage we need to explore,” Moeller thinks. “This isn’t girls playing boys…. Women are monsters, too.” There is violent crime in The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, and there is “victim representation.”

Peach (Alexandra Dawkins) is a kid who’s “involved in street crime but at a lower level.” Her chance encounter with Max (Laura Raboud), who works for one of the country’s notorious criminal organizations, changes both their lives.

“When I started this play, ‘true crime’ was just gaining its popularity — it raises a lot of ethical questions since it involves real people,” Moeller says. “I’m attracted to the sensational, yes. But what I like to do is draw people in, then ‘what universal questions can you ask?’” In The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, says its creator, “we meet people involved in crime. And we meet someone whose family has been affected by criminal violence.”

In rehearsals for Brenley Charkow’s production, Moeller is struck by the irony that “we’re working on a play that’s interested in exploring how you can get caught up in the world of crime. And here we are, rehearsing, and (that world) is exciting, and fun, and seductive!”

The play is set in Edmonton. “And I’d like to do that more,” says the playwright. It’s fictional, yes, but “it was inspired by something that happened in Alberta — in our own backyard. We should be doing that more. It makes the questions tougher; you don’t get to run away from them as easily….”

One of those questions is about justice. “Where is justice for someone with no options? Someone who comes from poverty and abuse?…. It’s such a hard concept, justice. So it’s good we wrestle with it.”

“I almost had more questions at the end of this than the beginning.” Which is exactly how Moeller likes her theatre. 

PREVIEW

The Ballad of Peachtree Rose

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Nicole Moeller

Directed by: Brenley Charkow

Starring: Alexandra Dawkins, Laura Raboud, Bobbi Goddard, Shannon Blanchet

Where: Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through Nov. 10

Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).   

  

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Women in their 50s get sitcom Botox: The Roommate opens the Shadow season. A review.

Posted on October 25, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Coralie Cairns, Nadien Chu in The Roommate, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s impossible to know anything about the season-opening two-hander comedy at Shadow Theatre — including its title — without thinking of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (female version).

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The Roommate, by the young (and multi-award-winning) American playwright Jen Silverman, brings together two mismatched characters sharing a house in Iowa. The only thing this high-contrast pair have in common is that they’re both women and both in their ‘50s.

Sharon (Coralie Cairns) is the local, a recent divorcée in a place that is, as she says earnestly, “known for corn. And space.” She’s advertised for a roommate, and gets Robyn (Nadien Chu), an urbanite direct from the Bronx — ex-potter, ex-slam poet, ex- (and possibly not so ex-) a lot of edgier activities.

“What do you do?” Robyn asks in response to a persistent questioning from Sharon. “I’m retired,” says Sharon. “From what?” “My marriage.” Now, there’s a Simon-esque sitcom line if there ever was one. And The Roommate is peppered liberally with others.

So why is a gay vegan pot-smoking New Yorker in the Iowa boondocks anyhow? “I thought I’d raise bees,” Robyn says, citing the salutary benefits of “restorative manual labour.”

Sharon’s main activity is phoning her unresponsive son in New York. He’s a fashion designer, and according to Sharon, certainly not gay. Absolutely not; he has a girlfriend. Who happens to be a lesbian. Iowa must be the land where time has stopped, and everyone pronounces homosexual with all its syllables intact and equally weighted. Robyn’s main activity is evading questions, and smoking, cigs and also pot. 

Nadien Chu, Coralie Cairns in The Roommate. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The real curiosity of The Roommate is that, although it’s of recent vintage and by a young playwright whose archive seems full of sassy titles (Collective Rage: A Play In Five Betties), it feels somehow dated. New Yorker shocked that Iowans don’t lock their doors: it doesn’t feel very fresh as comic material. What? They make milk out of almonds? There’s something they don’t sell at the gas station. Similarly a scene where someone prim smokes dope and gets high was past its best-before date some time ago (I’m sure there’s one in Shakespeare somewhere). It takes a certain fortitude to commit to a contemporary scene where one character says “drugs” and the other counters “medicinal herbs.” Bravo Cairns and Chu; they step up, in exemplary fashion.

The idea that it’s never too late to get a sense of adventure and make radical changes in your life is, however, evergreen in theatre: the leaves never fall off. This development, with its whiffs of Thelma and Louise and (as billed) Breaking Bad, happens in a way that’s so surprising it actually feels unbelievable here. I sure didn’t see it coming.

Anyhow, in short the stars of Nancy McAlear’s lively and handsome production are up against some pretty well-trod theatrical inspirations. And they devote themselves in a selfless way to making a thinnish play generate some heart from the age and gender of the characters. 

As the voluble Sharon, Cairns has a kind of tentative, daffy cordiality to her. Sharon is eager to please, forever trying to conceal that she’s shocked by what she’s managed to pry out from her new roommate. Her amusingly earnest way of processing new information in an effort to be non-judgmental will make you smile. So will her outfit (designer: Trevor Schmidt), in neutral colours and buttoned assiduously to the neck. 

As the worldly New Yorker with a secret-crammed past, Chu’s performance, never over-played, shows striking restraint and smart comic timing. Her answer to Sharon’s question “what do you write about?” is a look so nuanced — tinged with a grimace, superiority and a soupçon of amusement — that seasoned slam poets everywhere will feel the sympathetic vibe in their molars.    

McAlear’s production moves this pair expertly around an impressively bright, airy, antiseptically clean two-storey set designed by Daniel vanHeyst. The semi-lit choreographed scene changes are fun. And the music composed and assembled by Leif Ingebrigtsen is tied to character in witty ways.

There’s fun to be had, watching what the Shadow forces make of the play. It’s the play itself that makes you wonder.

REVIEW

The Roommate

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Jen Silverman

Directed by: Nancy McAlear

Starring: Coralie Cairns, Nadien Chu

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 10

Tickets: 780-434-5564, shadowtheatre.org

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Writing for women of a certain age: meet Jen Silverman, the author of The Roommate

Posted on October 25, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Coralie Cairns (front) and Nadien Chu in The Roommate, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

playwright Jen Silverman

Jen Silverman is the New York-based playwright/ screenwriter/ novelist who wrote the comedy The Roommate. Last produced at Chicago’s Steppenwolf in 2018, it’s the season-opener at Shadow Theatre. She made time in her schedule for some questions.

You write, have always written, in a startling variety of forms. Could you riff, as a multi-lingual world traveller, on your initial attraction to theatre? And your entry point into writing for the stage? 

I didn’t grow up going to the theatre – I stumbled into it by accident my freshman year of university and was absolutely electrified. I thought I’d discovered something secret and magical that was just for me. I thought that nobody else had ever felt the way I was feeling. When I’m making a play now, I think about plays as gifts or invitations to the audience. And that’s the feeling I try to write from: Let me tell you something that’s just for you.

Whom do you consider mentors in playwriting? I’ve read that Paula Vogel was an inspiration for you. 

I had an amazing first teacher, Emily O’Dell, who gave me an introduction to theatre that was full of powerhouse female playwrights: she introduced me to plays by Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, Naomi Iizuka and Paula Vogel (who was Emily’s teacher, and later briefly mine). Other mentors of mine along the way included David Adjmi and Naomi Wallace, who I studied with in grad school. And I saw plays by playwrights such as Marcus Gardley, Young Jean Lee, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Basil Kreimendahl, that really shaped my idea of what theatre could be.

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Could you take us back to the seed that germinated as The Roommate? 

It’s rare for us to see exciting, provocative, complicated, morally ambiguous portraits of older women onstage or on screen. There’s something so sanitized about the images we receive of women who are, say, over thirty-five – and that image doesn’t actually mesh with the 50 and 60 year old women I know, who are hilarious and complex and fascinating. I wanted to write a play that gave two female characters the same due that older male characters receive much more often.

The origin point of the play is that my partner’s mother was, briefly, living with a roommate her age. Hearing her stories, I was fascinated by what it means for two adult women to navigate living together, and my imagination took off from there.  (My mother-in-law is not running any kind of criminal endeavour, for the record.)

Many of your plays seem to feature women characters pushing for change in their lives, or chafing at the lack of it. Could you expand a little on that? 

I think we all reach moments in our lives where we feel trapped by the accumulated decisions we’ve made, by the things we’ve become accustomed to. We may not even be aware that we’re unhappy – we’re just mired in the status quo. Sharon’s status quo is her loneliness and her feeling of being invisible; similarly, Robyn has been moving through the world as a lone wolf of sorts, although in much different circumstances. The two of them create a combustible energy together – they can imagine themselves differently, because they create a new space of imagining together. Once you can see a new life for yourself, the natural next step is to reach for it.

A lot of my plays are about people seeking or finding transformation – people who are either succeeding or failing at pursuing a different vision of themselves or their lives. In this way The Roommate is in direct conversation with plays that are stylistically very different, like the absurdist comedy Collective Rage: A Play In 5 Betties (Woolly Mammoth, MCC), or the gothic-absurdist The Moors (Yale Rep, Playwrights Realm).

Do politics, and the current “populist” regressive craziness of the world, impinge with any directness, on your work?  

As a queer woman raised in a number of different countries, I bring a specific lens to my work. I am fascinated by power dynamics, and the many kinds of power and disempowerment that can exist simultaneously within a relationship – or a culture. When it comes to theatre, I’m interested in a political vocabulary that is complex, contradictory, and built on questions instead of answers. That said, to ask burning questions — especially now — is inherently political.

The Roommate by Jen Silverman, currently onstage at the Varscona Theatre, runs through Nov. 10. Nancy McAlear’s production stars Coralie Cairns and Nadien Chu. Tickets: 780-434-5564,  shadowtheatre.org  

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Do shebangs come in partials? Simone et le whole shebang opens the L’UniThéâtre season

Posted on October 22, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Nicole St. Martin and Crystal Plamondon in Simone et le whole shebang. Photo by db photographics.

Gaetan Benoit and André Roy in Simone et le whole shebang. Photo by dbphotographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a certain heat-seeking rom-com engine driving Simone et le whole shebang, the raucous, tart-tongued season-opener at L’UniThéâtre, Edmonton’s francophone theatre. At the centre is an unexpected encounter between two hostile, elderly characters, who are up against the ravages of time and place.

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Jessy is an old New Brunswick Acadian, a singer/songwriter who’s spent 35 body-breaking years working the Alberta oil patch, and paid the price in mobility. Simone is a Montreal actor whose star has faded, dimmed by the encroachments of  Alzheimer’s. And they’re battling on foreign soil, so to speak — in Fort McMurray, in a care facility. 

The play, by Quebec’s Eugénie Beaudry, isn’t kidding about “le whole shebang.” The mind-body duality is just the start of it, in a play that embraces dreams, aging, memory, choice vs. compromise, east vs. west, free will, assisted death, jobs and the economic downturn, the generation gap.… It’s possible that a partial shebang might be more workable and feel less scrambly, in truth; Simone et le whole shebang spreads itself widely (and thin). 

It relies on vivid performances for impact, and it gets them in Vincent Forcier’s entertaining production, which fluidly moves through the intricacies — and Brianna Kolybaba’s atmospherically rustic design, lit by Larissa Pohoreski — in a strikingly artful way. In many ways, the play is about the opening and shutting of doors. And the design and Forcier’s stagecraft are as punctuated by that as any door-slamming farce.   

Jessy (André Roy) is haunted by his party-hearty younger self (Gaetan Benoit), a singing cowboy who delivers a melancholy song about aging, poverty, and underachievement at the top of the show. He’s come to the West, age 35, to make some quick money. And “quick” turns out to be measured in decades. He surveys the wreckage of his older self with a mixture of pity and exasperation, and annotates accordingly.

Simone (Crystal Plamondon) is haunted too — by past glories and the actor’s nightmare of not remembering her lines. Her memory works in fits and starts, a process of fleeting confusion captured beautifully in this smart performance. Which is why her daughter (Nicole St. Martin), a brisk transplanted Montrealer working in Fort McMurray and struggling with a failing marriage, has re-located her mother to the wild west.

The daughter is haunted by her neglectful husband, a presence via his voice on the phone, and the absence of children in their marriage. And the play drifts towards her resolution, gathering steam and invective.   

Simone et le whole shebang is playful about stereotypes, and deals in them. And the performances in Forcier’s production flesh them out in 3-D. As Jessy the elder — prickly, raspy-voiced and vigorously foul-mouthed in a ripe conglomeration of both of our official languages — Roy is a charismatic presence. “That’s how I roll, bitch,” he says to Simone, bragging about his prodigious archive of lovers. “Chicks are like jobs; I’ve done them all.” 

The latter, whose grip on reality is variable (ditto her feelings about the facility), is remarkably unassailed by the assault of Jessy’s cockiness and language. “Eat shit,” she says with surprising calmness. “I’m not lost; I’m jet-lagged.” Plamondon’s comic timing is impeccable; it invariably includes a thoughtful pause before she volleys back.

Gradually, the two old characters come to appreciate each other — for their waywardness, for their losses, for their morbid humour. “You’re a flower growing in a field of shit,” Jessy says to Simone. Surprising developments, and laughter, ensue, to be deliberately vague. And the actors commit to a variety of comical moments.

In young Jessy, Benoit creates a character fuelled by sardonic humour and disappointment. St. Martin is forceful as the daughter, harried by her mother’s resistance, by anxiety turning into panic, by the knowledge that her domestic future is gradually eluding her grasp.

The invasion of French by English phrases, in a land where francophones are the minority, has a bright startling colour palette. “Ils sont gone,” says the young Simone later in the play. “Un monumental fuck you.” There’s something irresistibly western Canadian about that. And this is the week to appreciate L’UniThéâtre’s bold, gutsy, cross-country choice.

REVIEW

Simone et le whole shebang

Theatre: L’UniThéâtre

Written by: Eugénie Beaudry

Directed by: Vincent Forcier

Starring: André Roy, Crystal Plamondon, Gaetan Benoit, Nicole St. Martin

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91 Street

Running: through Oct. 26. In French, most performances with English subtitles

Tickets: lunitheatre.ca

 

    

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