‘A major breach of technical security at the theatre’ cancels opening weekend of Workshop West’s Wildcat

Posted on October 24, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you’re excited to see the much-anticipated premiere of the new Nicole Moeller crime caper Wildcat at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, which was to have opened tonight, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. The production’s opening weekend at the Gateway Theatre has been cancelled, and opening night has been delayed till Wednesday.

A major breach of technical security at the theatre, unprecedented and as yet unexplained, has resulted in “malfunctions of all the technical equipment,” says Workshop West artistic producer Heather Inglis. Lighting, sound … all systems have been compromised in this “perplexing and mysterious” crisis, says Inglis.

“Plays are a lot of work; theatre equipment is expensive,” as Inglis says. “We’ve tried to outfit this space for the community to use, as well. To have a flexible black box theatre indie producers can work with…. I’ve been an indie producer myself. Now we’ve got to find the funds to replace gear.”

Meanwhile, as Inglis describes, the cast (Michele Fleiger, Maralyn Ryan, Melissa Thingelstad, Graham Mothersill) have rallied, and the technical team led by Jen Magel, the crew, and stage management have worked tirelessly to resolve the damaging issues and restore the technical functions needed to get Wildcat onto the stage in a few days. “We’ve been accessing the Edmonton technical theatre community. And they’ve been very generous with their expertise.”

“We’re working our way through it. And we will persevere!” says Inglis. “We’re looking forward to seeing everybody next week.”

Wildcat runs at the Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd. Oct. 29 through Nov. 9. Tickets (all pay-what-you-will): workshopwest.org.  Workshop West is individually contacting ticket-holders affected by cancelled weekend performances. Further information: 780-477-4944, workshopwest.org.

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A very Canadian kind of hero. Billy Bishop Goes To War: a theatre classic is back, with elbows up

Posted on October 22, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s a question that threads its way through our whole history, and feels especially up front, feet planted, elbows up, at the moment: What’s different about us Canadians anyhow?

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Billy Bishop Goes To War, the bona fide Canadian theatre classic that launches Edmonton Repertory Theatre first season Friday at the Biederman Theatre, wonders about that. For the last half century or so its quizzical perspectives on heroism and a distinctly Canadian cultural identity have alighted at moments that always seem like exactly The Right Moment.

The much produced 1978 two-hander musical by John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with the actor Eric Peterson, its original performers, chronicles the unlikely career of the World War I fighter pilot from Owen Sound, Ont. to international star status. And the Edmonton Repertory Theatre production, starring Steven Greenfield (as Billy Bishop and 17 other characters) and Cathy Derkach at the keyboard), actor-musicians both, reunites this seminal piece with a distinguished director whose passion for getting Canadian voices onstage has been recognized across the country. Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre, the Edmonton company Gerry Potter started 47 seasons  ago when he emerged from the U of A directing program, is all about that, developing a distinctively Canadian repertoire and nurturing its creators.

Jennifer Kreziewicz, the artistic director of Edmonton Repertory Theatre, dedicated to creating theatre that’s “accessible for multi-generational audiences and artists” as she puts it, first saw Billy Bishop Goes To War in the ‘90s at the Citadel, she recalls. “And it really stuck with me as a young theatre-goer…. A fun show, and so impactful.” And she’s discovered a new venue, the 185-seat Biederman Theatre in the west end (in the Lifestyles Options Retirement Community, with parking!) in which to present the two-hander musical. “It’s our little nod to Elbows Up” she says of the Canadian-ness of the classic that launches the company’s first season, which will, if all goes well, include two more productions. “Maybe this is the year I’ll get my first grant!”

She picked a play that’s savvy about nationalism and the cost of war, and paired it with director Potter, who first directed it in 1983. His Workshop West production, starring David LeReaney and Jan Randall, toured around the West at the time. And he’s long thought about re-mounting it. So the invitation from Kreziewicz was welcome, he says.

Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach, Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

“When John and Eric (created) it in the ‘70s, it was a time of cultural nationalism — and not the kind of nationalism that Trump and cronies promote,” says Potter, reflecting on the positioning in time and place of a piece inspired by William Avery Bishop’s memoir Winged Warfare. The cultural nationalism of the time didn’t have anything to do with  right-wing populism; “it was protesting the war in Vietnam, a very anti-war time, a liberal leftist movement. And the thought that maybe we could get a few of our own voices onto stages. That was the movement that Workshop West came out of. And it was new at the time….”

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

As Potter says, the heroes of boyhood were American, and Disney-fied at that: Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and their ilk. This country’s heroes were unknown to him, and to most Canadians. “And this seems like a good time to reflect on how we’re different and if we’re different.” He he points to Margaret Atwood’s 1972 survey of the Canadian cultural landscape, Survival: A Thematic Guide To Canadian Literature. “She looks at Billy Bishop as the product of a northern environment,” says Potter. The prevailing theme she discerned? “Survival, as distinct from the niceties of protocols, traditions, nice manners” that thread their way through the Brit repertoire.

And there were controversies at the time of the National Film Board film,” Potter recalls. The idea that Canada’s flying ace, who’d cheated at military college and inflated his own record to get ahead stuck in the craw of Senators. “Books were written; ‘the NFB should be cut off!’” Says Potter genially, “it’s an interesting issue…. John (John Gray) wanted to explore ‘what’s a Canadian hero?’”

Skepticism about heroism, war, and the co-opting of the colonies for participation on distant battlefields, pulse through the scenes of Billy Bishop. And, as Potter has been re-discovering in rehearsal, there’s a lot of humour in the piece. “The culture of the colonies” is treated in funny ways, Potter points out. Billy is a kind of renegade spirit. “He liked having fun; he doesn’t like to be told what to do by British officers.” How Canadian is that?

““This is not just a history lesson. There’s a bit of that. But mostly it’s a theatrical good time!”

PREVIEW

Billy Bishop Goes To War

Theatre: Edmonton Repertory Theatre

Created by: John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with Eric Peterson

Directed by: Gerry Potter

Starring: Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach

Where: Biederman Theatre, Lifestyles Options Retirement Community, 17203 99 Ave.

Running: Friday through Nov. 8

Tickets and full schedule of performances: eventbrite.com

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Set now, in Edmonton, in the political landscape of Alberta: Wildcat, Nicole Moeller’s new crime caper at Workshop West

Posted on October 21, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

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Re-imagining your inheritance: Morningside Road, a beautiful new Canadian Celtic musical, at Shadow

Posted on October 17, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Mhairi Berg and Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One of the haunting songs in Morningside Road, the “new Canadian Celtic musical” that blows open the Shadow Theatre season, wonders about the remarkable way the past is never black-and-white in memory.

How does it get colourized, so to speak? “In memories you share,” sings Girl (Mhairi Berg) who slides in and out of the present and into the past to become Elaine, the younger version of her Scottish Granny (Maureen Rooney), “there are voices of the people you knew.” And in  the premiere production directed by Shadow’s artistic director designate Lana Michelle Hughes, those strong voices have a live band too onstage with them: three musicians in shadows behind a screen in a tilted frame, who seem to float, in the mind, ever ready to join in on celebratory occasions.

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In a graceful way, that song “There Is Colour” is what this gem of a new musical, by Berg with music by Berg and Simon Abbott, is all about. The dimensions of Morningside Road are small (as small as a family), but its heart is big; its sense of time is complicated. And as a story about stories and the memories that colour, shape, and populate them, the musical actually gains narrative heft, intricacy, and emotional resonance from having a small cast: three actors, three musicians.

A place that’s home “is built of stories we call our own,” as another of Morning Side Road‘s songs has it. And that’s how we meet Granny and Girl, drinking tea and doing crosswords together, connected by Granny’s stories of growing up on Morningside Road in Edinburgh, in the 30s, in war-time and beyond. As Granny, Rooney, too rarely seen on our stages, is a sassy kind of Gaelic sage, anti-sentimental, reductive in her wit. In matters of romantic love, she advises her granddaughter, don’t settle for nice, or reliable. “I just don’t want to see your fire burn out,” Granny declares. “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.”

In Rooney’s performance it is genuinely heart-wrenching to see what happens gradually, in Act II, as Granny’s own fire is dimmed by dementia, and cracks begin to appear in her memory and oft-repeated stories. They aren’t time-proof in their details, much to Girl’s dismay. But there may be other stories to unearth; maybe we are all archaeological sites.   

Under Hughes’ direction Granny and Elaine, her younger Edinburgh self played by Berg, are unmistakably the same feisty person over time. And quick wit and crackling responsiveness, and the same love of words, are recognizable in Girl, Granny’s Canadian granddaughter, too. She’s also played by Berg, who is a luminous and magnetic performer onstage, with a supple, multi-angled voice.

What you inherit, what you imagine, and the uses you make of that domestic legacy of stories, are woven delicately and artfully into the fabric of Berg’s script. Are truth and fact interchangeable? Morningside Road wonders about that, and has its doubts. In harmony with that thought, Daniel VanHeyst’s set has a realistic kitchen table sitting solidly in a world with other possibilities: empty frames, free-floating hints of old-country wallpaper and yellowed old-school lino. Like Granny and Girl, we are haunted, suggests the play and its design (lighted by Lieke Den Bakker).

Mhairi Berg and Cameron Kneteman in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

There’s a third actor, too, and since there are mysteries attached to Lad I can’t tell you too much more than that. Lad appears; he vanishes. While he’s onstage, in captivating little scenes with the firecracker Elaine, he’s a wry, playful, thoroughly corporeal presence in Kneteman’s performance — “I’m the kind of lad who’d lead a lamb astray,” as he sings. But, intriguingly, he doesn’t stay put. He floats in and out of scenes, part memory part dream, in Berg’s play and Hughes’ staging.

The music by Berg and Abbott (a first-rate piano player who’s part of the onstage band himself) is soulfully — and playfully!— Celtic in flavour. There are both “traditional” and rocking folk ballads. There’s a jazzy Christmas morning number. There are love songs that make you fish for your Kleenex. There’s a dance party with a rousing drinking song to match. The score has made beautiful use of the gorgeous “Wild Love,” originally written by Abbott and Cassie Muise for The Trial of Patrick Whelan.

Simon Abbott, Cameron Kneteman, Mhairi Berg, Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Morningside Road co-creator Abbott (also the music director), Curtis Den Otter (percussion) and Viktoria Grynenko (violin) are superb musicians. And Hughes’ sound mix is impeccable. Strange and telling how the violin can turn lyrical into wistful; it’s the sound of memory and romance.

Some ghosts cannot be banished, no matter how hard we try to re-imagine them. And the gorgeous finale song Morningside Road, delivered by Rooney with wrenching simplicity, will make your eyes water. An impressive new homegrown musical, Shadow’s first musical, poignant and funny, with a great score and a story about storytelling, has joined the Canadian theatre repertoire. Don’t miss your chance.

12thnight interviewed Mhairi Berg for a preview, here.

REVIEW

Morningside Road

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Mhairi Berg (book)

Music and lyrics by: Mhairi Berg and Simon Abbott

Directed by: Lana Michelle Hughes

Starring: Mhairi Berg, Cameron Kneteman, Maureen Rooney

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 2

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

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To keep or not to keep, that is the question: Baram and Snieckus bring Big Stuff to the Citadel, a preview

Posted on October 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff, photo by Dahlia Katz.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You go through life accumulating stuff, you know you do. Stuff that looks as innocuous as a tea cup or a broken toaster but comes wrapped in emotional ribbon. Stuff that connects you to people or moments, or selves, you’ve lost.

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What are you supposed to do with all the stuff?

To toss or not to toss. Big Stuff, officially opening in the Citadel’s Highwire Series next week, is all about that. An original combination of storytelling, memoir, and improv interaction with the audience, it’s the bright idea of the Toronto-based married Canadian comedy duo Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram (who’s from Edmonton), along with director Kat Sandler, a playwright herself. They arrive in Baram’s home town trailing raves from a premiere run, twice held over, of Big Stuff a year ago in Toronto, and three weeks at the Segal Centre in Montreal.   

The theme that comes up right away, and lands lightly in conversation with this funny and thoughtful pair, is loss. Zooming in from New York (and a two-night showcase for potential producers), Snieckus and Baram trace the inspiration for Big Stuff to the loss of the last of their parents four years ago. “We became a really tight family in the pandemic,” says Baram, whose parents had been gone for many years before that. “We quarantined together at our little cottage up north, and became really reliant on each other…. In some ways for me, losing (Naomi’s dad) Vic was a harder loss than my own father, hard as it is to admit…. When he passed we were left with a lot of responsibility to take care of their stuff.”   

“I already had my parents’ stuff, which I couldn’t throw away because Naomi wouldn’t let me,” says Baram. “Naomi had her grandmother’s stuff. There was our stuff, a truck full, from L.A. and the five years we lived there going back and forth to Toronto…. I wanted to leave it there; Naomi disagreed.”

Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz

They’re award-winners for sketch comedy and improv who regularly work in TV and film, who met at Second City in Toronto. Edmonton audiences have seen them in action (with Ron Pederson) when The National Theatre of the World has touched down here: in Impromptu Splendour, they improvise an entire play, the one a celebrated playwright like Ibsen or Tennessee Williams somehow forgot to write. For a couple of graduate theatre school actors (U of A for Baram and the former Ryerson now TMU for Snieckus), couples’ friction about stuff, and what stays vs what goes, pointed to live theatre — of a particularly interactive kind.

“Universal!” says Baram, “what to do with the stuff that’s left behind.” And “everybody’s got their stuff — in a basement, a closet, a drawer…” says Snieckus with a sympathetic shrug. Improv is here and now, “ephemeral” in Baram’s word. “We don’t have kids; what are we going to do with all our stuff?” says Snieckus puckishly. “Who’s going to inherit this play?” There’s a flurry of brainstorming; they can imagine Mark Meer and Belinda Cornish having a go at it….

Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

Anyhow, the universality of stuff and its emotional hold on us is how we get to be involved in Big Stuff. “It’s the collaboration with the audience that’s important to us,” says Snieckus of their unusual blend of storytelling and improv. When we enter the theatre, there’s a card on every chair. “We’re asking people for an object that reminds them of someone or something of importance to them…. And it’s part of the storytelling. Through the show we find ways of integrating those objects into the play.” You can join in by contributing stories about your stuff. Or not.

There’s no template for building a theatre piece like Big Stuff, as they describe. “We made jokes, we did stand-up together. And we started writing a lot,” says Baram. And writing, for them, usually starts in improvising. As Snieckus describes, “we’d record scenes on our phones and transcribe. We’d send audio from the cottage to Kat,” who was busy in Stratford working on her hit version of Anne of Green Gables. “Sometimes we’d write monologues about our folks, and bring them back together and read them.”   

“Saving marriages,” he says, joking about Sandler’s multiple contributions to the production. “That ‘other voice’ is so key when working with a couple. So we don’t have to have those conversations with each other about what stays what goes…. It’s so close to us, to our parents. What story can really incorporate a person?”

What stays what goes…. ah, there’s a question that applies in an uncanny way both to writing plays and to the subject at the heart of Big Stuff. Snieckus, whose own Firecracker Department podcast series interviews female and non-binary artists across the continent, says that in the end, she and Baram “chose objects that were relevant to the show,” as the first priority. Your dad’s jacket didn’t make it into the show, even though it’s (signature) him,” she says to Baram. “Or my dad’s pen holster…. A fine line between finding objects that fed the story but also represent the people. (The objects) had to serve two masters!”

“And it had to be equal,” says Baram. “We couldn’t have an hour and a half on (his dad) Harvey and just touch on (Snieckus’s mom) Anne….” Snieckus smiles. Right. Each of our parents actually deserves their own hour and a half.”

As described by Baram and Snieckus, I’d say the double family dynamic has TV series potential, too. Baram senior was “a showman himself,” says his son, whose Edmonton genealogy is blue-chip. Harvey’s Corned Beef Palace, off Whyte, was his dad’s first deli. “And together my parents ran my grandparents’ burlesque club, Blue Danube, across from the Strath. “They were carneys; for years they had The Snackery on the midway at K-Days.” Baram’s brothers went into the biz, “but I just didn’t have it in me.”

And how’s this for historical antecedents? One of Baram’s early gigs was stocking the shelves at his mom’s smoke shop in Webber Motors on the Calgary Trail, right across from Allard Way where SCTV got shot. “That’s where John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin got their smokes.”

“The wild trajectory of life” that returns Baram to Edmonton for a run of Big Stuff at the Citadel has another bonus. “I am going to see the Oilers play,” he declares emphatically. “I grew up in the Glory Years; I’m part of that generation desperately trying to relive their childhood.”

Snieckus, who left home in Kitchener-Waterloo at 17 for theatre school in Toronto, is a first-generation immigrant. Her mom was a Brit; her dad, an organic chemist prof at Queen’s, was Lithuanian. “Both my parents loved Second City. So when I started doing shows there they were ‘aah, NOW we get it!’”

“Acting as a goal of improv is important to Matt and I,” says Snieckus. “We always called it ‘grown-up improv’ because we didn’t want to be bar-provisers. We wanted to do theatre work that just happened to be improvised.” Says Baram, “our whole intention as a company is to bring those two worlds (improv and theatre) together. And it’s happening more and more,” as we know in Edmonton, an improv-crazy town where the top improvisers are stage actors.

“People,” Snieckus thinks, “want their theatre to be more spontaneous, more interactive. And that’s what we’ve tried to do with Big Stuff…. It’s not us presenting; it’s us and the DNA of the day.”

Says Baram, “we tell them our stories; we listen to their stories. It’s a conversation…. There really isn’t a better way to meet a community, to learn about them.” And the live-ness of it all makes Big Stuff  “A.I. proof,” as Snieckus put it, “every step of the way…. And in a world where so much isn’t hopeful, this is a hopeful thing.”

PREVIEW

Big Stuff

Theatre: A Baram and Snieckus Production at the Citadel

Created by and starring: Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus

Co-created and directed by: Kat Sandler

Running: Oct. 18 through Nov. 9

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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On the street where she lived, stories from childhood: Morningside Road, a new Celtic musical, premieres at Shadow

Posted on October 13, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Maureen Rooney and Mhairi Berg in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The through-line of Mhairi Berg’s childhood was stories — fascinating, first-hand stories told to her by her Scottish grandmother about growing up in Edinburgh.

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“I didn’t realize how important they were to me,” says Berg, “But as I got older I realized they were pieces of her I’d been holding on to.” It’s an inter-generational inheritance that has found its way into Morningside Road, the “new Canadian Celtic musical” by Berg (book), with music by Berg and Simon Abbott that premieres Thursday to launch the Shadow Theatre season. “As I was starting to write the show I came to understand that my grandmother was teaching me things, about how to ‘do’ life, how to live life.”

And if she’d had any doubts about the wider resonance of those afternoons at her grandmother’s house, drinking tea with “a witty spitfire of a woman,” they evaporated in the thought that “ah, this could be a story people could relate to, even though they didn’t live those experiences…. Everyone has someone in their life they’ve connected to, heard stories from that have given them a different outlook on life.…”

For Berg, that someone was her grandmother, “fiery, full of wit and wisdom,” who’d moved to Canada, to Edmonton, from Scotland in the early ‘70s (Berg’s mom arrived as a teenager). And, after the overture (so to speak) just outside Sherwood Park, Berg spent the majority of her kid years in Mexico City. Theatre wasn’t the opportunity on offer there, but she took “the usual” (her words, tossed off casually) piano, dance, vocal lessons outside school. Which will shed light on the startling breadth of the artist’s versatility, as an actor, dancer, singer, singer-songwriter, playwright, composer, musician, sound designer, choreographer….

Josh Meredith and Mhairi Berg, As You LIke It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

Consider this expansive career: If you caught Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s music-filled As You Like It in Louise McKinney Riverfront Part this past summer you’ll have appreciated the appealing songs, performed acoustically, that Berg (as the courtier Amiens) wrote for the songs in the good Duke’s country court in the Forest of Arden. If you caught Frozen the Disney musical at the Citadel last season, you’ll have seen elaborate and witty dance production numbers in which Berg had a hand as assistant choreographer.

We return to the Berg story. Back in Canada for high school, she discovered theatre in a full-immersion way, musical theatre to be precise, first at MacEwan U’s theatre department, then a master’s degree in musical theatre from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. Until she arrived in Scotland, “I didn’t even realize my grandmother had an accent,” Berg laughs. “Ahah, people sound like her here!”

Berg’s play Caw-CAW, which premiered this past summer as one of Theatre Yes’s site-specific 20-minute Doorstep Plays, sent three girls on a mysterious, increasingly fractured, camping expedition to redress, or revenge,  And now, covering a lot of theatrical ground in high-contrast, a new Celtic musical with vintage flavours.   

Mhairi Berg and Evan Dowling in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

It was doing Grindstone Theatre’s hit all-improvised weekly musical The 11 O’Clock Number that Berg met Abbott. Grindstone’s extremely busy resident musical director/ composer/ lyricist has never met a musical style he couldn’t embrace, witness his original co-creations (with Byron Martin) Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Die-Harsh the Christmas Musical, Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical and GUMS: An Accidental Beach Prequel, ThunderCats in a career that includes 50 shows so far.

Ah, and the fateful words were uttered by one of the two: “it’d be fun to write a musical with you.”

What they needed was a story. And that was something Berg’s storyteller grandmother provided, along with the musical style into which the pair could lean. “I came from a singer-songwriter energy,” says Berg of her origins as a composer. “But because of The 11 O’Clock Number I’ve been exposed to a wide variety of musical styles … super-helpful.” Abbott’s natural terrain is more pop/rock and musical theatre. “For this show it felt right to have Celtic music since it’s set in Scotland, in the past. With influences of jazz, which Simon knows very well. He’s a very smart writer!”

Composer/lyricist Simon Abbott, Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

“We really wanted the songs to feel organic to the story,” says Berg, “to feel like folk songs that belonged to the time, to feel like they’ve existed for hundreds of years, not songs that are placed in the show because it’s a musical…. So when the grandmother (played by Maureen Rooney) starts singing, you feel like ‘o this comes from Scotland; it belongs in her world’.”

The time travel, as Berg describes, was the biggest challenge for the co-creators (and for Berg the actor). “It jumps from the present to the past, her growing up in Edinburgh. I play the granddaughter in present-day Canada, and slip into playing Elaine, the young girl in Edinburgh, all the memories of her being young, every scene going back in time, changing accents.” The third member of the cast, Cameron Kneteman, plays a mysterious character The Lad in that Edinburgh memory time frame in the ’30s and ’40s.

Both Berg and Abbott were “intrigued,” as the former says, “by using fiddle music.” Writing for violin was a first for both. “We have an amazing violin player (Viktoria Grynenko) in the band, so we’ve we’ve been able to experiment. She’s so good she can take whatever we’ve written and use it!”

Directed by Lana Michelle Hughes, Morningside Road is a complex undertaking, dramatically and musically: in addition to songs, there’s dance music. And nearly the whole show is underscored, says Berg of a production with an onstage three-piece band led by Abbott at the keyboard. Since the characters live in different times, “finding ways for us to sing together was definitely a challenge, because we wanted to have those big ensemble moments too.” The band members occasionally join in the singing, to amplify the musical texture.

The first incarnation of Morningside Road, an hour-long version, happened at the 2023 Fringe, and racked up a handful of Sterling Award nominations. What we’ll see come Thursday at Shadow is the full-sized musical. “We haven’t added to the actual story, but we’ve fleshed it out, beefed it up it.”

Later this season Berg returns to Die Harsh, as Holly the estranged wife and a hilarious assortment of other roles (including a tap-dancing FBI agent). And after that she’s in the ensemble of The Wizard of Oz at the Citadel, as well as working on her own new musical for the Citadel’s Playwrights Lab.

Meanwhile, there’s a new Canadian musical to launch. Berg’s grandmother, alas, is succumbing to dementia, now in late stages, and it’s erasing many of her bold outlines and memories. It’s a hard road. But, says Berg, “this story is a great way for me to handle it all, reflect on it, feel close to her.”

PREVIEW

Morningside Road

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Mhairi Berg (book)

Music and lyrics by: Mhairi Berg and Simon Abbott

Directed by: Lana Michelle Hughes

Starring: Mhairi Berg, Cameron Kneteman, Maureen Rooney

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 2

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

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Hilarity and horror: ghost stories from the dark vault of our history, improvised. Ha-Ha-Haunting returns to Rapid Fire

Posted on October 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Ha-Ha-Haunting at Rapid Fire’s Exchange Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Embrace your ghosts, Edmonton.

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This is the season when the frontier between the living and the dead is at its flimsiest, and spirits are raving (and lining up for artisan beer at the bar. And Rapid Fire Theatre is once more dipping into the dark boneyard labyrinth where our macabre civic secrets lie fermenting.

Ha-Ha-Haunting, which sold out every show in its debut run last season, is back. The concept is crazy and inspired: to let a cast of improvisers loose on the horror stories embedded in our own history. It’s the kind of raw material Catch The Keys disinterred in their late lamented Dead Centre of Town excursions to the river valley. And this time, the stories (researched by playwright Megan Dart) are historical Edmonton locations that open different veins (so to speak) of horror — demonic possession, resident ghosts, bizarre acts of violence, restless avengers, ghostly voices … Edmonton history has it all.

We’re at a séance with the four-member cast (Diane Webb, Christina Harbak, Alaina Sadowski, and host Michael Vetsch on Friday’s opening night). And, eek, suddenly the table at which they sit is on the move (I mustn’t say more). They open mysterious black envelopes, each containing the location and seeds of a real-life story assigned them. And each improviser is compelled to lead an improvised re-enactment, with supplementary characters, narrative interventions, and direction by the others.

The train station in Strathcona (that’s became an assortment of bars including MKT in more recent history) is the eerie locale of a train incident and a subsequent haunting, directed by Sadowski. The U of A residence Pembina Hall, which became a military hospital during the 1918 flu epidemic, a kind of haunting that we know about from more recent viral rampages, is the setting for a doctor/nurse zombie tale, with weapons from the tickle trunk. And, the funniest improv of all, a tale of bizarre serial deaths showbiz revenge by a thwarted actor-turned-drama teacher (inconsolable because whose Fringe show didn’t get reviewed, a cautionary tale for some of us) proved the favourite of the spirits who occupied the house seats, and who get to vote, Survivor-style, on which story should be carried through to its grand finale.

OK, Shakespeare didn’t seem to be their forte. But that’s fair since it’s memories of high school drama that motivate a serial killer. And who knew that Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was such a seminal character?

Anyhow The Exchange Theatre is decked out in spooky seasonal finery, with sound effects improvised by Vicky Berg, technical effects by Rhiannon Eldridge. And there are other RFT stars waiting in the wings to rotate into the Ha-Ha-Haunting casts: Nikki Hulowski, Kelly Turner, Joleen Ballendine, and Tara Koett.

Horror and improv aren’t natural bedfellows (except when it comes to Edmonton road renos). So this is an original. It’s funny and it runs at the Exchange through Nov. 1. The full schedule and tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

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A new season, and with the departure of Bradley Moss the end of an era at Theatre Network

Posted on October 9, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Theatre Network, that storied company in the beautiful new theatre on 124th Street, turns 51 this season. And it’s with reduced programming that invites shows by diverse artistic creators onto its two stages — and news of a dramatic transition in artistic leadership after 30 years.

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“The timing is perfect for change,” says Bradley Moss, who’s leaving the artistic directorship of the company in December after a three-decade association with Theatre Network that includes 27 years in the top artistic position. “Across the country it happens constantly to companies who run new facilities. … Our company is going through an evolution; it’s a new company now. It needs new ideas,  new ways of doing things, new and fresh energy … like I had when I came in.”

“I owe a lot to Theatre Network … to do the things I got to do, the people I got to work with, the artists we got to support,” says Moss. It’s the moment “for me to return to being an independent individual artist. And I look forward to that,” an anticipation that for him is both professional and personal (his long-time partner lives in Calgary).

The two mainstage shows of season 51, neither produced by Theatre Network, are a new Christmas show, Girl Brain, Actually, a parody of the celebrated seasonal film Love, Actually by the sketch comedy trio Girl Brain. Moss himself directs the production that runs Dec. 11 to 21. Batrabbit Productions’ original Rat Academy, a hit bouffon show birthed at Nextfest, returns, this time to the Nancy Power mainstage (April 9 to 12) to chronicle the outsider fortunes of the last two rats in a rat-free province. And the capper, as usual, is Nextfest, returning for a 31st annual edition in June.

Before that, Theatre Network curates a February weekend “best of Fringe” festival (Feb. 20 to 22) of five indie shows, four of them culled from this past summer’s Fringe festival: Ready Go Theatre’s Where Foxes Lie, a solo thriller by and starring Jezec Sanders; Elon Muskrat by and starring Josh Languedoc; Viva Dance Company’s It’s Just You And Me, and Chris Bullough’s solo show Undiscovered Country, held over by the Fringe. Joining them in the weekend lineup at the festival is Shivamanohari  Company’s Dvaita / Duality, a show that explores, in two dance forms, the colonial constructs of gender.

The season also includes the Phoenix Series, a TN initiative to showcase the work of indie companies. So far the lineup includes Alberta Musical Theatre Company’s Pinocchio (running through Sunday at the Roxy), Andrew Ritchie’s Thou Art Here production of Cycle (Oct. 15 to 26), and Brian Webb Dance Company’s Action At A Distance/ BLOT – Body Line of Thought (Nov. 13 and 14). More announcements to follow.   

The mainstage performance schedule, in all, which usually runs to nine weeks of performances, has been reduced to 16 days. The struggle, as Moss puts it, is to run a new facility “and make our own work.” And that will be the challenge for the new artistic leadership at Theatre Network, which will, as he advises, include a both an artistic director and an executive director (Moss currently has both jobs).

Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss

When Theatre Network’s long-time ex-cinema home, a 124th St. landmark, burned to the ground Jan. 13, 2015, the company was determined to return to that storefront footprint. It took six years, spent in “exile” from their ‘hood in Strathcona at the (now) Gateway Theatre. But under Moss the new $12 million Roxy opened in 2022, an amazingly compact theatre on three levels that somehow feels spacious inside (two stages, an airy second floor rehearsal hall, a green room, a set-building shop, the works….). It was an achievement, in construction, logistics, government participation at all levels, fund-raising.

“What I learned, in hindsight, was that raising the money, getting government support, getting people excited,  to build a building wasn’t that hard,” Moss says and pauses, laughing, “well, OK, it was hard, and it took 10 years of my life.”

“But then, it changes the company. Running the facility becomes the focus, and you don’t get any increase in support and funding to do that…. Theatre Network is still funded at 2012 levels.”  And that’s a disappointment to Moss. “Bricks and mortar get supported. But running it at the level that got you there” is a challenge faced by by theatre companies across the country, as he points out. The lesson is that “with running a facility changes the company, it changes the focus, it becomes about running the facility.”

Since his arrival from Quebec to study directing at the U of A (he has an MFA and counts the late Jim DeFelice and Tom Peacocke as his most important mentors), Moss has championed new work by such Edmonton playwrights as Beth Graham, Collin Doyle, Darrin Hagen, Kenneth T. Williams, among many others. And he’s forged working relationships with star national artists too, Hannah Moscovitch, Mump and Smoot, Colleen Murphy, Ronnie Burkett, Daniel MacIvor, Karen Hines, Eugene Stickland among them. From the beginning Moss made a point of producing important Quebec playwrights, like Michel Tremblay, Dominique Champagne, François Archembault. Last season, in honour of TN’s 50th anniversary, Moss assembled productions by a trio of celebrated artists from across the country who have had long-standing relationships with the company under his leadership: Burkett, Murphy, Mump and Smoot.

Moss’s proudest achievement in a Sterling Award-studded three decades at Theatre Network, he figures, might well be the company’s legacy in nurturing emerging artists (12,000 and counting) and their work. He founded Nextfest in 1996. And the multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists, a bright Moss idea that caught on, has grown in both size and influence exponentially since birth. It has a national profile, and it takes some doing to find theatre artists creating in the scene here, both newcomers and veterans who don’t have a Nextfest credit somewhere in their resumés.

All that and a snazzy new theatre…. “I’m grateful that I got to help the Edmonton community, its playwrights, actors, designers,” says Moss. “The positive story here is that we have a beautiful facility. And it’s perfect timing for new energy to come in, new ways of doing things. …. It happens in new facilities constantly. And that’s OK.”

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Pinocchio: a hit AMTC musical for kids returns, a test of ingenuity and theatre magic

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Katelyn Cabalo, Kevin Thomas, Chassidy Andrews in Pinocchio, Alberta Musical Theatre Company. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Fifteen years ago, a highly eccentric, episodic 36-chapter 19th century Italian novel, a fairy tale adventure with a puppet hero who dreamed of being a real live boy, tickled the fancy of a musical theatre writing duo whose jam was re-imagining classic fairy tales for contemporary kid audiences.

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The fairy tale was Carlo Collodi’s 1883 Pinocchio, serialized in Italy’s first newspaper for kids. And in the hands of playwright/ director/ actor Farren Timoteo and the late composer Jeff Unger, Pinocchio’s wildly fantastical odyssey over land and under sea became an ingenious much-travelled 60-minute musical comedy — for three energetic, very agile triple-threats. The trio, in constant motion, played two dozen or so characters — a kooky assortment of animals, con persons, monsters, with costume-changes to match. And they sang original Unger songs that ranged from an intricate Sondheim-esque number for Gepetto the puppeteer, G&S for a couple of sprightly groupers, an Italian tarantella, American Gospel….

Alberta Musical Theatre’s award-winner, a test of theatrical savvy if ever there was one, is back in a new production directed by Corben Kushneryk, starting tonight at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre for eight performances before it sets forth on Edmonton theatre’s most demanding and extensive tour: 220 shows and counting in seven or eight months, in schools, community halls, even the odd theatre. “That’s a lot of little eyes watching,” grins Kushneryk, who has the cherubic aspect of a big little kid himself. “New venues, new acoustics … every day a new adventure.”

As with many AMTC shows, as Kushneryk points out, Pinocchio has proven to be a springboard for energetic young up-and-comers, mostly recent theatre school grads on the threshold of professional careers. You know their names; they’ve become significant players in the Edmonton theatre scene. Its premiere production in 2011 introduced Madelaine Knight, Byron Martin , Chris Scott. The revival of 2018 starred Josh Travnik, Chariz Faulmino, and Cameron Chapmen.

And so it is with Kushneryk’s new cast: emerging artists Katelyn Cabalo, Kevin Thomas, Chassidy Andrews, recent MacEwan and U of A theatre grads all of whom were in Fringe shows this past summer. And they will be tackling a musical “that’s full of zany comedy, gags and bits, a combination of farce, reality, age-appropriate horror.” Pinocchio does get eaten by a giant shark, for example. And a premise with contemporary resonance that re-works Collodi’s dark and whimsical tale in a way that’s much different than Disney’s 1940 animation since it focuses on a fractured father/ son relationship. “A sad, lonely elderly puppeteer feels abandoned by his son,” who has eloped. Pinocchio, Gepetto’s magical puppet creation, sets forth into the world to retrieve him. As Kushneryk puts it, “it’s about finding connections again, the strings that connect our hearts, a magical creature re-uniting a broken home….”

At the centre is the accordion, “the heartbeat, the push and pull, the bellows, the pulse, the breath….” It conjures, in Timoteo’s author’s note, “the spirit of Italy, past, present and future.” Often AMTC shows put a sassy feminist spin on familiar tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. And for this new production, Kushneryk has done some gender-swapping, as he says. “The judge who puts the heat on Pinocchio is a kind of Judge Judy character….” And “the head baddie” is a woman too.

In the post-COVID world of shrunk budgets, touring theatre is even more a test of logistical ingenuity and resourcefulness. Kushneryk, who spent three seasons as the co-artistic director (with Tracy Carroll) of Concrete Theatre, borrows from one of AMTC’s fairy tale re-creations, “it’s about spinning straw into gold.”

For the upcoming tour, the actors are on their own: “no stage manager, no live music (professionally recorded tracks, including underscoring). They fire their own sound cues, sometimes while they’re onstage. No technicians, no sound crew, no backstage (dresser)….” Says Kushneryk, laughing. “it’s a big puzzle,” he says of “tour-izing” the show. And since it’s clearly impossible, the result is … “magic!”

In his time Kushneryk himself has toured theatre for young audiences shows, among them Concrete’s The Bully Show. “I had a single jacket and a hat,” and in the Q-and-A sessions after the show, the kids would ask him where the rest of the cast was. “Magic! I can’t wait to see their minds blown with this one,” when a character disappears behind one drape, and emerges seconds later as a someone different in a different costume!

Deanna Finnman has designed new costumes. The set uses elements of Corey Sincennes’ original design, “re-imagined to tour” as painted bas-relief drapes. And the actors do the rest. “Very much a working-class job,” as Kushneryk says. “A lot of sweat and effort, full-body engagement, a labour of love. They are travelling troubadours.”

PREVIEW

Pinocchio

Theatre: Alberta Musical Theatre Company

Created by: Farren Timoteo and Jeff Unger

Directed by: Corben Kushneryk

Starring: Katelyn Cabalo, Kevin Thomas, Chassidy Andrews

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

Running: Oct. 3 to 12, then on tour

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

   

  

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The reluctant activist who loves her kid: The Pink Unicorn opens the 50th birthday season at Northern Light, a review

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Zentilli in The Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the solo play that returns to Northern Light Theatre after a decade to launch the company’s 50th anniversary season, we meet a woman whose alignment with her world — and the next one too — gets thrown off the rails. Which leaves her with a choice to make.

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In the play by the Canadian-born American writer Elise Forier Edie, Trisha (Patricia Zentilli) is not one of the world’s natural activists. She’s a small-town Texas widow and single mother, a conservative church-going Christian who is perplexed and appalled when her teenage teenage daughter announces she’s gender-queer. Joleen — new name Jo, new pronouns they/them — wants to start a gay-straight alliance at Sparkton High School. Guess how that goes.

“How on God’s green earth can you be a girl and a boy at the same time?” wonders Trisha. “A person without a gender”? What can that mean? In Trevor Schmidt’s boldly stylized design for his new production, Trish, blonde and beautiful and pink-clad in the person of Zentilli, puts her case to us not in a “real” small-town kitchen with a cup of coffee but in a fanciful pink salon with a glass of pink lemonade.

A cleaner in the local hospital, she lives in a kind of pink Barbie puppet theatre, imaginatively lighted by Larissa Poho. The pink wallpaper peels back a little in one place to reveal a window to the idealized outside world, a small framed image of white picket fence, wheat, blue sky puffy clouds.

Patricia Zentilli in The Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jan, bb collective photography

This is Trisha’s world from the inside out, in Schmidt’s design a vision through her eyes, and it’s unambiguously unilaterally feminine, bolstered, as we learn, by fundamentalist Christianity. It’s a chamber where the notion of gender as non-binary or fluid, indeterminately located somewhere on a spectrum, (or, as Jo says, invisible), is, to say the least, preposterous.

Trilling away in a light, bright, soprano timbre (with one of those improbable Texan drawls you have to get used to), Zentilli conjures for us a woman who is genuinely startled and dismayed to discover a whole new, darker, colour palette to the universe. If Jo had been knocked up, or even if “the Mormons had got hold of her,” Trisha’s equilibrium would have rocked, but held firm, she says. But “nothing in my life had prepared me for gender-queer” and “bi-what-nots.”

But when her minister, Pastor Dick (ha!), fulminates against gays, uses the Bible as a weapon, hauls out the Nazi argument, Trish finds herself outraged on behalf of her daughter. And she walks out of church and her own life — into a new one. In a nuanced, thoughtful performance Zentilli conveys the dramatic enormity of it all for the character, the sense of a Candide shoved, step by reluctant step, into a brave new world for which she has no GPS. Trish’s sense, sometimes comic and sometimes poignant, of her own limitations, prejudices, and flaws, makes her likeable despite it all, and gives her a different flavour than, say, the blue-collar heroism of a Norma Rae or an Erin Brockovich. Trish never does call Jo “they” instead of “she.” But she does confront the school principal, and finds his authoritarian hypocrisy infuriating.

In her new life the people she meets, including her first lesbian (Enid is so fat Trish “feels sorry for her bones, working overtime to hold her up) and wheelchair-bound Dorcas (whose speech is like “gargling”), are not to her taste. “I hate diversity,” she admits at one point; even the word feels foreign in her lexicon, as Zentilli conveys. The beauty in diversity is something Trish has to struggle to see. “I don’t know how Jesus did it,” she sighs. “The Other” is not someone she’s ever wanted to meet — until that Other turns out to be someone she loves.

Perhaps the most surprising thing of all in The Pink Unicorn is that Trish’s transformation isn’t so much about understanding — she admits she might never understand gender-queer — but empathy. And it’s empathy honed by the experience, new to a life-long majority-dweller, of being in the minority.

Social ostracisim ramps up with threatening phone calls, horrible names spray-painted on her car … and an unfamiliar sense of being an outsider, like Jo and her LGBTQ+ friends, bullied at school. Trish has always just had ‘her people’ around her. And now she doesn’t. And she pays a price. In standing up for her kid in a small town, she’s up against church, religion, school, social circle, red-neckism, even (or even more implacably) her mother. And the sheer mystery of Joleen-into-Jo compels Trish to re-think her estrangement from her alcoholic big bro, in a bar scene that will make you laugh, and cry.

Patricia Zentilli in The Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective photography

Part of Trisha’s “journey” is learning to speak to other people, to mobilize outrage to assemble her thoughts and impulses. It takes considerable acting finesse in shaping a character to pull this off. Zentilli is impressively skilled at negotiating this improbable development, from the woman with a supply of rustic similes (“nervous as a naked man in a pond full of snapping turtles”) to a woman who can toss off “cross-dressing in the name of Thomas Paine is not the American way.” Or in an encounter with school principal Cyril Makepeace (ha!) where she notices “a crack in his complacency.” Which sounds a lot more like the playwright than Trisha. Zentilli’s smart performance takes this into account: this is an insightful and emotionally engaging, funny and touching play, but not a great one in its writing.

Patricia Zentilli in The Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective photography

I must admit, I didn’t quite follow the elaborate (and to me a bit forced) line of reasoning in Trish’s story that links Jesus, this life to the next, a pink unicorn named Star Dancer to God, and civil rights and the ACLU (and a throw-away comment about “New York Jews”) to religious beliefs as opposed to organized church religion. Darrin Hagen’s delicate score, with its hints of celestial magic, seems entirely à propos. And, in a play about enlightenment, or lack thereof, Polo’s contributions as lighting designer are crucial to the rhythms of the production.

In one way, The Pink Unicorn is slightly out of date, of course, in a world that has pretty suddenly spun forcibly backwards to an out-and-out fascist repression of “diversity.” As reported by Trish, Jo’s commentary about the patriarchy or “the capitalist agenda,” has lost some of its comic lustre lately. But in another way, the play is timelier than ever, here in our own part of the world where an Alberta government is going out of its way to marginalize gay and trans kids. Empathy is called for, with some outrage too, as The Pink Unicorn and Zentilli’s performance, tell us. You don’t have to understand to be tolerant.

As Trish says “there is no happy ending.” It’s a thought that, like this play, stings and makes you teary.

REVIEW

The Pink Unicorn

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Elise Forier Edie

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Patricia Zentilli

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 11

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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