Strange, playful, and of this moment: The Skin Of Our Teeth from Bright Young Things. A review.

Posted on November 24, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Vincent Forcier, Stephanie Wolfe, Jeff Haslam, Lauren Hughes in The Skin Of Our Teeth, Bright Young Things. Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s strange, it’s playful. And it gets right to the heart of the dark, chaotic, freak-out of the present moment. 

That’s The Skin Of Our Teeth, the high-spirited, anarchic, category-resistant 1942 “comedy” (for want of a better word) by America’s great theatre subversive Thornton Wilder.

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In three acts, and through two intermissions, we follow the fortunes of the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey through one catastrophe after another — the Ice Age, devastating storms in Atlantic City, wars. Radical lurches in the climate, the migration of refugees, the extinction of animals … ring a bell?

The cast includes a fortune teller, Moses, Homer, a dinosaur, a woolly mammoth. Eons pass. Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus have been married for 5,000 years. Plato, incidentally, argues that leaders must have self-control and a balanced mind if the world is to work properly. If that doesn’t speak to the craziness of the present moment, what does?

This bizarre epic, alternately anxious and whimsical, is brought to us by Bright Young Things (an indie that borrows the London tabloid nickname for the elite artsy bohemian crowd of the 1920s). Their mission? The airing of mid-century masterworks we don’t very often get to see. The Skin of Our Teeth, unlike Wilder’s classic Our Town, certainly qualifies. And Dave Horak’s clever, brazenly theatrical production and its cast of top-drawer actors show us what we’ve been missing: a wild experiment which brushes off convention like so much lint off a coat of many colours. It’s alternately anxious and whimsical, mythical and sometimes cheeky about being mythical.

Andrea House as Sabine, The Skin Of Our Teeth. Photo by Mat Busby.

It not only breaks the fourth wall (that theatrical convention that lets us be voyeurs on other lives) but it demonstrates that breakage. The walls (and the windows) won’t stay put. And neither will the exasperated actor playing the maid Sabina (Andrea House), who can’t stand the play (“I don’t understand a single word of it anyway.”) or the comedown of her role  (“I took this hateful job because I had to …. Look at me now.”).

The apocalypse is already in progress as the play opens. A beaming announcer (Sheldon Elter), armed with slides, an old-fashioned clicker and a projection screen, presents the dramatic lead news of the world story of the day: “the sun rose this morning at 6:32 a.m.,” as reported by a public-spirited American citizen. Uh-oh. 

It’s August and New Jersey is getting colder. Dogs are sticking to the sidewalks, and they’re burning pianos in New England. Chez Antrobus, a freezing dinosaur (Cody Porter) is clamouring at the door to get in, along with a woolly mammoth (Nicole St. Martin) and a cluster of refugees. The family is awaiting the arrival of the ebullient Mr. Antrobus (Jeff Haslam), who’s just invented the wheel (he’s already invented the lever), and he’s closing in on the alphabet.

We meet the implacable Mrs. Antrobus (Stephanie Wolfe), inventor of the apron, and the two Antrobus children: Henry (Vincent Forcier), a kid with a murderous mean streak (his name used to be Cain), and Gladys (Lauren Hughes). Sabina, the eternally seductive “other woman” who’s forever giving her notice, has let the fire go out.

Act II happens on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Mr. Antrobus, who’s been elected president of The Ancient and Honourable Order Of Mammals, Subdivision Human, has awarded Miss Atlantic City 1942 to Sabina, now the hostess of the Bingo Hall. When a terrible storm comes up, he herds the animals in his audience, two by two, onto a ship.

In Act III of a play written in war-time, a seven-year war has ended. Mrs. Antrobus and Gladys (and a baby) emerge from the detritus of their suburban house. And Mr. Antrobus, back from the war, deflated and depressed, declares “I’ve lost it…. The desire to begin again.”

Horak opts — this is indie theatre — for a stylized, improvised look that has its own low-budget theatre jokes and captures the oddball jauntiness of the play. He and Bright Young Things artistic director Belinda Cornish are credited with the design, lit by Daniela Masellis. And the handsome costumes, which identify the period in witty fashion, are courtesy of the Citadel.

As Mr. Antrobus, Haslam beautifully charts the evolution into despair and back again of the confident, hearty but naive head of household who doesn’t quite realize that it’s his wife who’s holding the world together. The wife and mother, with her prim apron and fierce defence of the idea of family through every crisis, gets a formidable performance from Wolfe as Mrs. Antrobus. “I could live for 70 years in a cellar,” she declares, “and make soup out of grass and bark without ever doubting that this world has work to do and will do it.”

Her nemesis is Sabina, the eternal seductress and upstager, always undermining the family and lobbying on behalf of herself. It’s the diva role Tallulah Bankhead played in the 1942 Broadway premiere. Whiney and sullen in Act I, and posturing extravagantly in red stilettos in Act II, House’s amusing performance exudes the sense of a character with one eye ever on the audience, trying on possible versions of herself to see which one is more profitable.

Forcier is genuinely disturbing as the ever-violent uncontrollable son, who can never see a stone without wanting to hurl it at someone’s head. And the sweetness of Hughes as Gladys can’t conceal the Mrs. Antrobus-in-the-making of the character.

Is surviving the apocalypse an oxymoron? Sit back (not too far back if you want to catch the quick ‘40s cadence of the actors) and ponder the possibility of optimism in times like ours. Mr. Antrobus has his books. Sabina, a repository of worldly negativity (“it’s better to be dead”), has the movies to go to. And we have the theatre — and a weird, sprawling play that says something about surviving catastrophe. Maybe it’s by the skin of our teeth — but still….

REVIEW

Varscona Theatre Ensemble

Theatre: Bright Young Things

Written by: Thornton Wilder

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: Andrea House, Stephanie Wolfe, Jeff Haslam, Vincent Forcier, Lauren Hughes, Sheldon Elter, Nicole St. Martin, Cody Porter

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 30

Tickets: ensemble.varsconatheatre.com or at the door

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Check-in time at the Bed and Breakfast, Theatre Network’s season-opener comedy. A review.

Posted on November 23, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Mathew Hulshof and Chris Pereira in Bed and Breakfast. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You never have the full story when you’re in the middle of it,” says Drew (Chris Pereira), one-half of the beleaguered urbanite couple we meet at the outset of Bed and Breakfast.

In Mark Crawford’s funny, skilfully structured hit comedy, opening the Theatre Network mainstage season, Drew and Brett (Mathew Hulshof) will undertake to re-create and populate, for our benefit, their year of living dangerously — its antecedents, its crucial decisions, its seminal moments, its setbacks, its generational secrets uncovered.

It’s a year in which they sally forth from their teensy Toronto condo and their downtown rat race life (Brett is an interior designer, Drew a hotel manager) where they fit in. “We have become the people we hate,” says one. Since Brett’s late lamented auntie has willed him her big old heritage house in a picturesque small-town Ontario (where he’d spent his summers as a kid), they exit the big city. And they set about opening a bed and breakfast there, three hours out of their natural habitat.

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“How hard can it be?” says Drew, in a line which is to comedy roughly what “I’ll check the fuse box in the basement” is to horror movies.

I know what you’re thinking (g-a-y-s-i-t-c-o-m, or gay Wingfield), right? So, is this the story of a brave can-do gay couple who triumph over small-town prejudice? The story of small-minded small-town bigots redeemed by (brave, etc.) gay city slickers? Or maybe the story of gay city slickers who drink soy latte macchiatos instead of coffee and get redeemed by the country idyll of Our Town, Ontario?   

The surprise of Bed and Breakfast is that while it steps up and plays a little bit with all of the above tropes (there, I’ve gone and used that word), it subverts them all, too — and in wry, knowing ways you might not have predicted. It’s deceptively mild-mannered; there’s an edge to its charm. So when it goes poignant on you — and it does — you feel that’s earned. 

Chris Pereira and Mathew Hulshof in Bed and Breakfast. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

As Bradley Moss’s production attests, there’s the big theatrical fun of watching two excellent, dexterous actors playing nearly two dozen characters between them: all ages, all genders, all sexual persuasions and occupations, octogenarians, drag queens, snarly gay-unfriendly contractors, bikers, real estate agents…. That’s a veritable barrage of quick transformations.

And there are virtuoso scenes — a committee meeting in the local cafe, a dinner party, and most memorably, the hysterical opening weekend — where multiple characters seem to occupy the stage simultaneously, and at farcical speed. Hulshof and Pereira are impressively precise about differentiating characters with a hand gesture, a facial grimace, an adjustment in posture or gait, speed or vocal cadence. 

Moss’s production ricochets through Scott Peters’ allusive  wooden set (with its burlap net walls, beautifully lit). The production relishes the scramble of it all, but leaves “relationship moments” space to breathe. It’s clear that the characters are channelled through the eyes of Brett and Drew as they remember their tumultuous year with its heartwarming ups and its genuinely disturbing downs. Christmas, as we know from the theatre, brings out the best, and the worst, in people.

The broadest comedy is reserved for the representatives of the real estate industry, each outrageous in their own way: the flamboyant Ray, and Carrie, a shriek-y gusher who talks in smiley-face winky-face emojis.

The most amusing characters, affectionately drawn by both playwright and actors, are a couple of teenagers. There’s taciturn nephew Cody (Pereira) who never stops eating, and responds to every conversational gambit with a shrug/ “I dunno” combo. Dustin (Hulshof), the son of the surly contractor who’s taken up baking, peppers everything liberally with “like.”

Nostalgia, as Brett will discover, is double-sided affair. There are the wrap-around porches and porch swings of youth, newspapers “made of actual paper,” the dream of Grover’s Corners, Ont. It’s a world that is vanishing into either the mists of time and/or cottage kitsch. And there are the family secrets buried in that past.

Bed and Breakfast weaves both into a fabric that speaks to the notion of what it means to find a family, and be home. And that’s something you never get on Hotwire.

REVIEW

Bed and Breakfast

Theatre: Theatre Network

Written by: Mark Crawford

Directed by: Bradley Moss

Starring: Mathew Hulshof, Chris Pereira

Where: Roxy on Gateway, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Dec. 8

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

 

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“Have you milked the mammoth?” Thornton Wilder’s The Skin Of Our Teeth, the wildest play of the season. A preview

Posted on November 22, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Andrea House, Lauren Hughes, Stephanie Wolfe, Jeff Haslam, Vincent Forcier in The Skin Of Our Teeth, Bright Young Things. Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The weirdest, wildest play of the season — let’s be bold and call it in advance — is opening tonight on the Varscona stage. It’s not new, though it feels like it might be. The Skin Of Our Teeth was written in 1941, and hit Broadway the following year.

Belinda Cornish, the founder and artistic director of the adventurous indie company Bright Young Things, says she fell in love with Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth the moment she picked up the script and saw the following line. DINOSAUR: “But I’m cold!”

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Yes, my fellow Albertans, the apocalypse is on our minds, now. Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winner follows the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey, as they struggle to survive the advancing Ice Age, catastrophic storms in Atlantic City, devastating wars…. There’s a Dinosaur and a Mammoth in the populous gallery of characters. There’s a mouthy maid played by an actor who declares “I hate this play and every word in it…. O why can’t we have plays the way we used to have?” The set itself disintegrates from time to time. 

Dave Horak, who seems to be Edmonton theatre’s go-to director for the unclassifiably off-centre, the mysterious, the difficult to stage — Burning Bluebeard, The Winter’s Tale, The Bald Soprano, most recently E Day, as examples — directs the eight-actor Bright Young Things production. And it’s unusually large (a “mammoth endeavour, pun intended,” fas Cornish puts it) for a small indie company with no government or corporate funding, supported exclusively by ticket sales and personal donations. 

The Skin Of Our Teeth fascinates Horak. For one thing, “it’s not post-war; it’s the middle of the war. And Wilder is so hopeful! That third act is imagining the war being over!”

“That’s what I told the cast the first day of rehearsal: this is a hopeful story! It has the hopeful Thornton Wilder humanity of Our Town. And I just think that’s really hard right now,” says Horak of these doom-laden times. “We’re in the middle of environmental crisis, political (disasters) … the world is ending. And this writer is trying to tell us that humanity is going to continue.” Horak sighs, and smiles, “It’s a hard statement for me to make…. I don’t know if the audience is going to buy it.”

Stephanie Wolfe and Jeff Haslam, The Skin Of Our Teeth. Photo by Mat Busby.

Where Wilder and the contemporary sensibility part company, Horak thinks, is that “there’s no cynicism in him. No irony. And that’s hard for us… That’s one thing I learned from working with (the late director, mentor, teacher) Tim Ryan, who loved the old musicals of the 30s and 40s. You have to pull out irony and cynicism. They’re not in those plays. And if you layer them on, it becomes a comment on the play.”

In a play where time passing might mean 5000 years — Mr. Antrobus has invented the wheel, and he’s working on the alphabet — crazy juxtapositions of scale intrigued both producer Cornish and director Horak. “It’s so big, and so hilariously meta, but it’s also so intimate and real,” says the former. “The relationships are delicate and true, whilst also being outsized and outrageous —it’s a fascinating dichotomy.”

Horak concurs. The Skin Of Our Teeth “goes from great big huge ideas back down to the smallest details, little tiny moments, in and out all the time.” The encroaching Ice Age down to the specific street address of the Antrobus family house, 216 Cedar Street, Excelsior, New Jersey.” Sometimes the characters are huge, “almost cartoons,” and sometimes they’re the specific actors playing the parts (and bitching about the script and the size of their roles).

It’s a play that “insists on reminding you you’re watching a play,” as Horak puts it. And after every crisis, “Wilder goes back to art, knowledge, literature….”

Given its oddities, Horak has found it unexpectedly “easy to stage.” Most of us (me, included) know The Skin Of Our Teeth from university, only on the page. “But it’s a play; it’s meant to be played…. It makes so much sense when we put it up on its feet.”

Says Cornish, “it truly sweeps from the sublime to the ridiculous. From ‘Every good and excellent ting in the world stands moment by moment on the razor edge of danger must be fought for, whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country to this: “Have you milked the mammoth?”   

Interestingly, Wilder wrote much of The Skin Of Our Teeth while he was staying in Montreal, and at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City. And, says Horak, he was apparently much influenced by James Joyce’s infinitely challenging Finnegan’s Wake. Horak is curious. “If I ever get a holiday, that’s the book I’m going to open.” 

Meanwhile, there’s a play that wonders, as Horak puts it, “does hope make sense? There’s a pretty good argument for it…, If we can get through the Ice Age, a giant flood, murders, war … there’s hope. It’s gonna be a struggle. And the struggle is part of being human.”

PREVIEW

The Skin Of Our Teeth

Varscona Theatre Ensemble

Theatre: Bright Young Things

Written by: Thornton Wilder

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: Andrea House, Stephanie Wolfe, Jeff Haslam, Vincent Forcier, Lauren Hughes, Sheldon Elter, Nicole St. Martin, Cody Porter

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: tonight through Nov. 30

Tickets: ensemble.varsconatheatre.com or at the door

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Bed and Breakfast: a hit comedy to open the Theatre Network season

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Mathew Hulshof and Chris Pereira in Bed and Breakfast, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The theatre repertoire has a fulsome measure of stories about gay kids who pull up stakes in their small-town lives and flee to freedom in the big city. In the hit Canadian comedy that opens at Theatre Network tonight is a sort of reverse migration. 

In Bed and Breakfast you’ll meet a gay couple who uproot their urbanite Toronto lives — one’s a designer, one a hotelier — to open  a B and B in picturesque small-town Ontario. This rural idyll is not without its struggles and setbacks. As Mark Crawford says, “it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.… It’s not Brigadoon. Small towns are complicated.” And so are relationships and the idea of home.

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The actor/playwright, one of the country’s most-produced writers of comedies, knows something first-hand about leaving the place you’re from and heading to the city. After all ,the University of Toronto and Sheridan College theatre grad is a farm kid from the countryside near the little town of Glencoe, “somewhere between Lake Erie and Lake Huron.” His dad’s a farmer; one brother’s a farmer, the other is a large-animal vet.”  So the actor/playwright is in a position to wonder “what would happen if you went home again?” — and wrote a play about it.    

playwright Mark Crawford. Photo supplied.

A certain irony attaches to the fact that three years ago Crawford and his playwright/actor partner Paul Dunn (a co-creator of The Gay Heritage Project) gave up their teeny Toronto condo and moved to Stratford. OK, small it may be (pop: 32,000), but the home town of the mighty Stratford Festival is not perhaps a perfect test-cast for Crawford’s question: “it’s the gayest small-town in Ontario,” he laughs. “It happened after I wrote Bed and Breakfast: We got out! A Toronto exit story. We got the last affordable house in Stratford…. With space. And a yard.”

A thoughtful, funny and thoroughly genial conversationalist, Crawford was “an actor for hire” for 10 years before turning playwright. “Yup, Shakespeare, Molière in Sudbury, theatre for young audiences, lots of school gyms…. “I always wrote, but it took me a decade of being in the theatre” to get the hang of playwriting. “I didn’t know how plays worked, the basic understanding of structure, story — character conflict and goals that need to go forward in a play.”

As often happens, playwrights are born out of actorly frustrations. “For long periods you’re at the mercy of other people…. Writing is a way of having some agency in the theatre.” Crawford adds that the common complaint in theatrical circles is the lack of “a Canadian comedy for the season.”

Enter Crawford, the playwright.

Stag and Doe premiered in 2014 at the Blyth Festival, in the heart of southern Ontario farming country, where two other Crawford comedies (The Birds and the Bees and The New Canadian Curling Club) has launched. The title, as he explains, is Ontario-speak for “a pre-wedding stag party for men and women that’s part community coming-together, and part fund-raiser for the wedding. So… young folks in a small town getting hitched.” Ontario allusion it may be, but Stag and Doe has been produced across the country, by both pro and amateur troupes. Crawford is bemused that a translation continues to run in rep in Poland. 

Bed and Breakfast was his second play, penned while Crawford was acting at Blyth (in Vern Thiessen’s Vimy). And the multi-character two-hander premiered “on location, too,” as Crawford says of the Thousand Islands Playhouse located rustically near Kingston. Instantly popular in 2015, it’s toured widely since, to theatres large and small in cities and towns, Montreal’s Centaur to Victoria’s Belfry Theatre, with Crawford and Dunn together onstage playing the 21 characters in the story. Now, Theatre Network launches its season with Bed and Breakfast, directed by Bradley Moss and starring Edmonton actors Mathew Hulshof and Chris Pereira.

Mathew Hulshof and Chris Pereira in Bed and Breakfast. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

“I love comedy, as an audience member and a performer. It is really hard, but I love it,” says Crawford, who’s something of a comedy scholar. Sometimes, he laughs, he warms to his favourite subject and people say “OK Mark, but what’s the punch line?”

He speaks of “the journey of classical comedy,” which, as happens in Bed and Breakfast, “begins in death, and ends with a marriage or sex…. ” And comedy “is often about domestic things, relationships, friendship, families…. That stuff is worth exploring.” And, after all, “we’re living in dark times.”

“I don’t mean comedy as joke joke joke. The dark is darker because of the light, the light lighter because of the dark,” says Crawford. His frequent dramaturg Miles Potter “talks about ‘an audience for something with meat on its bones…. Is there something to stick with you?’ It’s fun to take people on a journey.”

Often under-valued in this country as Crawford agrees, comedy “takes us on a journey from the dark to the light…. There’s something deep in us that needs that. The world will continue, we will carry on: it’s a view of the world. We can laugh. And that’s an important part of being alive. Take that away and we are fucked…. The value for the audience is enormous!”

PREVIEW

Bed and Breakfast

Theatre: Theatre Network

Written by: Mark Crawford

Directed by: Bradley Moss

Starring: Mathew Hulshof, Chris Pereira

Where: Roxy on Gateway, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: tonight through Dec. 8

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

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Heather Inglis is Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s new artistic producer

Posted on November 12, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Heather Inglis, artistic producer Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Workshop West Playwrights Theatre has a new “artistic producer.”  She’s Heather Inglis, the founder and artistic director of the adventurous Edmonton-based indie company Theatre Yes.

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With the departure of Vern Thiessen after five years as artistic director,  to pursue his own playwriting and teaching career, Inglis becomes the fifth artistic chief in Workshop West’s four-decade history of dedication to playwrights and the development, promotion, and production of new Canadian plays. 

In the Edmonton-born Inglis, the company acquires an adventurous theatre artist — director, dramaturg, producer, curator, educator — with a zest for experimentation, and indie red to match. The 20-year Theatre Yes archive extends both into the controversial contemporary repertoire, new plays by local (and beyond) writers, and immersive site-specific “experiences” that challenge conventional relationships between actors and audiences.

A National Theatre School grad (“my training is in straight theatre”), Inglis says, laughing, that after two Theatre Yes decades with an ample measure of producing “installations, conversations, explorations, that people could ask ‘is it a play?’” she’s “looking forward to plays that colour between the lines a bit more.”   

Inglis brings with her, as she says, “a fairly comprehensive (record) of every aspect of theatre creation and producing.” Commissioning plays, dramaturging, curating, workshopping and directing them (often in spaces too unconventional to be called “theatres”), writing grant proposals, making much with little … that’s a skill set that happens when , as Inglis did, you build an indie theatre company that’s “small but with a significant set of resources.”

Ah, and with a national profile bigger than its size. Anxiety, a 2016 Theatre Yes promenade project, acquired original 10-minute “immersive performance installations” from six of Canada’s indie companies, Halifax to Victoria, that explored the modern epidemic of anxiety. Then Anxiety bused audiences to a “secret location” in an Edmonton warehouse district.

The National Elevator Project, the Theatre Yes bright idea of 2013, (which proved contagious coast to coast) assembled 16 original five-minute plays — commissioned from playwrights by theatres across the country (including Workshop West) — and presented them, eight at a time, in a succession of downtown elevators.

In addition to its original guerrilla projects, often designed to take audiences into spaces that are too small or ephemeral to be called theatres, Theatre Yes history has its share of producing “scripts no one else in our theatre ecology will grab,” as she has said of plays like My Name Is Rachel Corrie, cancelled in New York and Toronto (and at the Citadel, where it was programmed, then removed from the season),  or David Mamet’s Race, or Shoot/ Get Treasure/ Repeat by the English provocateur Mark Ravenhill.       

In Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, Inglis inherits a larger-scale small theatre (with a budget of about $350,000), known across the country for its focus on playwrights and new plays. One of Thiessen’s first official acts as artistic director was to restore the word Playwrights to the official company title. “It’s a bigger company, yes,” says Inglis. “But for me the creation of new Canadian work will always be the aim.… New play development is at the forefront of what I do.” Her new job, she says, “is an opportunity to test myself in a different environment, my production and organization capabilities in a larger frame.”

Like Thiessen who got his first professional gig out of university at Workshop West, Inglis has a history with the company. “When I got out of the National Theatre School I set up an apprenticeship for myself at Workshop West,” she says. David Mann, just taking over from (company founder) Gerry Potter at the time, “took me on as a dramaturg. And it opened up opportunities for me across the country.” And since its official birth in 2000 Theatre Yes has collaborated with Workshop West (Cat Walsh’s The Laws of Thermodynamics, as one example), the Works Festival, and most recently the Citadel on Beth Graham’s Slight of Mind. An exploration of the human desire to transcend limitations, it took audiences into the nooks and niches of Edmonton’s largest playhouse — everywhere except its theatres.

The idea of theatre like Slight of Mind, Anxiety, The Elevator Project, says Inglis, is “engaging writers to work in unconventional circumstances.” Ambulatory these theatrical projects may be, but they’re “text-based,” as she points out.

Meanwhile, Theatre Yes will be looking for new leadership. “It’s lovely to have created the resources” for someone to inherit, says Inglis. And under its new artistic producer (the title and position afford “more financial oversight,” says Inglis), Workshop West Playwright Theatre’s 41st season, which began with Nicole Moeller’s new thriller The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, continues as planned. Programming for the Canoe Festival, Workshop West’s contribution to the Chinook Series in February, has yet to be announced.

“I really believe in the importance of Edmonton voices, Canadian voices in theatre” says Inglis. Under her leadership Workshop West will continue to be a repository of new plays at every stage of development from bright idea to “plays getting close to production,” as she puts it. “One of my tasks is to go out and talk to writers in Edmonton and find out how we can support them. We want to keep the door open, start conversations….” …    

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Three Ladies: a ‘journey of healing’ to open the Fringe “Off Season”

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Three Ladies, Remix The Ritual. Photo by Kay Bennett.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You might flee violence. But you can never escape trauma, says Lady Vanessa Cardona. The damages linger, and infiltrate your life, your relationships, your identity. “Trauma lives in the body.”

Three Ladies, a new and intricate play by the multi-faceted Colombian poet/ theatre artist/ activist (opening Fringe Theatre’s “Off Season” Thursday), is all about the possibility of healing. For Cardona, who came to Canada at 12 as a refugee and is “passionate about sharing refugee stories,” the notion of a “journey” has multiple dimensions. None of them imply a final destination.

Three years ago, the award-winning poet (she’s the 2018 Canadian individual poetry slam champion) wrote a version of Three Ladies. “I wanted to start addressing the trauma I’d been neglecting for a long time,” says Cardona, who has a “theatre and development” degree from Concordia University. “It was getting in the way of my adult relationships in my adult life.…”

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That first incarnation of the play was “about revealing to myself what that trauma was, and what it had done to my body, my sense of being. That version was more about the impact.”

The play that premieres at the Fringe’s Studio Theatre “does include the impact,” says Cardona, who teamed up with Indigenous actor/playwright Todd Houseman for the 2018 Fringe production Whiteface, now a film. “You do need some back story…. But it’s really about my continuing journey of healing, a journey that’s not finished and never will be finished.” 

She’s been working on the play for six months with performers who aren’t “professional” actors or dancers, but “have the gift in them,” and naturally express themselves that way. “As people of colour that’s what we do,” says Cardona. “You ask some of them when they started dancing and they say ‘I’ve been dancing since the womb’.”

The play has an intricate structure, explains Cardona, the founder of the multi-disciplinary collective Remix The Ritual. She herself plays the Lady, one of the title three, who’s “the narrator who keeps the story together and is there in the flesh.” Lady Clown “lives in Lady’s memory,” the forgotten “inner child who’s been trying to get Lady’s attention.” Lady Shadow, the third, “had been birthed in trauma…. She’s all the voices Lady hears in her head.”

These are five in number — Grief, Enabler, Liar, Jealousy, Guilt — played by dancers. Each has “a wounded side and a healed side.” And they speak a poetic text in voice-over.

When Cardona and her family left Colombia they came first to Ottawa. So Edmonton counts as a “personal choice,” as she puts it. “People are very authentic here. It’s one of the last places you see a high amount of Indigenous influence.” In 2018 Fringe audiences saw Whiteface, her striking collaboration with Indigenous actor/playwright Todd Houseman (there’s now a film version). Where Do We Begin?, which premiered at Nextfest, a joint creation of Cardona and Joanna Simon, tracked parallel courses between the refugee and Indigenous experiences of trauma. 

Three Ladies, Remix the Ritual. Photo by Kay Bennett.

“Edmonton raises and supports emerging artists,” says Cardona. “The focus is on growth. It’s a very supportive vibe.” The playwright/director/artistic director  Matthew MacKenzie of Punctuate! Theatre, for one, has been a generous mentor. “So encouraging, and it’s never about him.”   

For a while she lived the Canadian theatre life of the auditioning actor. “A lot of the stories I could relate to. But there were always parts missing…. We don’t have enough ethnic or playwrights of colour.” 

“I’m grateful now,” says Cardona, whose life as a spoken word poet was launched on a trip to Namibia. “Out of something disappointing came the want, the need, to create my own magic, my own art.”

“Telling the story of marginalized people in an authentic way” is all about reclaiming personal narratives, she says. “I can only tell my own story, the path I have chosen…. Other people have chosen other paths.”

PREVIEW

Three Ladies

Fringe Theatre Off-Season

Theatre: Remix The Ritual

Created by and starring: Lady Vanessa Cardona

Directed by: Nasra Adem

Where: Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Nov. 14 to 17

Tickets: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca

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Everybody knows that the bird is the word: Class of ’63 at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on November 10, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Class of ’63: A Rockin’ Reunion. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

OK boomer.

Yes, my friends, you may have heard: There was a time when you could wear white socks with a suit in a non-ironic way. Nostalgia comes with a great band, first-rate singers, a fulsome sound track and dance breaks in the latest holiday musical extravaganza from the Mayfield.

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In Class of ’63: A Rockin’ Reunion by the mysterious Will Marks — a music archivist and curator of demonstrable expertise — a cast of eight apply themselves to the transitional period between the doo-wop ‘50s and the epochal British invasion of the mid-‘60s. And in the complications of the double-optic theatrical premise, as realized in Kate Ryan’s entertaining production, even the nostalgia has nostalgia. After all, it’s the 25-year reunion of the class of ’63 (go Rockaway High); the present is 1988.

Class of ’63: A Rockin’ Reunion. Photo by Ed Ellis

Ergo … 40-somethings of the ‘80s are remembering the nerd crushes of first-period science, and slow-dancing to Blue Moon, doing the peppermint twist, hand-jiving, and wincing at yearbook predictions of their Grease years. They’re at a reunion of their younger selves, as arranged and hosted by a pair of intense Grade 12 kids who belong to the graduating class of ’88 but who (as conveyed by Melanie Piatocha) have a degree of take-charge brio that has defined party-planners since the medieval period. Jahlen Barnes, a versatile and dexterous singer, plays her pliant boyfriend and gofer. 

Just as there’s inevitably a cool dude named Chip, who’s inevitably a quarterback and inevitably a hit with the gals in every graduating class since Abelard and Heloise went to the prom. Here Chip c.1988 is an elementary school football coach (Kieran Martin Murphy), by reputation a hot-shot in every sport and noted player of “back-seat bingo” in his high school years.

Melanie Piatocha and Jahlen Barnes, Class of ’63. Photo by Ed Ellis

Anyhow, the intricacy of this premise requires an impressive degree of pizzaz and invention from the designers. T. Erin Gruber’s projections play across three screens and the tiled walls of the school gym, as a barrage of yearbook pictures, song lyrics, abstract psychedelic designs. Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting, from the harsh gym glare to more moody and romantic memory shots, is a boost. Leona Brausen’s wigs and costumes, a riot of pleated skirts and prom dresses, are a comedy in themselves, and step up to specific locations. (May I single out Bunny’s show-stopper red party dress, with a matching hair bow that has its own choreography when Stephanie Pitsiladis dances, as she is wont to do?).

And speaking of choreography, Christine Bandelow’s dance inventions are a veritable archive of styles, mashed potatoes and peppermint twists. Piatocha shakes her fringed frock like a refugee from What’s New Pussycat?.

Kieran Martin Murphy and Melanie Piatocha in Class of ’63. Photo by Ed Ellis

The show, under Ryan’s direction, unspools as flashbacks of school life and extracurricular activities: The Diner, The Drive-In (Hitchcock’s The Birds is playing), The Locker Room, The Beach, The Classroom.… Four guys, who deliver doo-wop classics like The Great Pretender or The Wanderer, appear first as feet under cubicle doors in the boys’ can, and emerge as a fully-formed group.

A matching scene takes us to a pyjama party in a girl’s bedroom: four girls (Pitsiladis, Piatocha, Pamela Gordon, Simone Denny) and a medley that includes Johnny Angel, Be My Baby, Please Mr. Postman, such Brill Building products as One Fine Day.

Mike Zimmerman and Pamela Gordon in Class of ’63: A Rockin’ Reunion. Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis

The production has a breezy way with gender (boys don’t own the Elvis songs) and indicators like TV show themes. And the characters are lightly differentiated; Zimmerman, for example, is the rabbity science nerd who is “least likely to get a girlfriend” in his yearbook annotation. The muse of Ryan’s production is comic, and the theatrical challenge is how to animate a period that seems to exist in clichés. Intermission at the drive-in comes with life-size dancing ketchup and French fries. The Beach scene at the top of Act II, with Jan and Dean’s Surf City is an amusing black-light dance number for kids and surfboards.The lifeguard (Barnes) gets to sing I Will Follow You.

My fave flashback was Clubs, and the Glee Club’s contribution, a hybrid of West Side Story and The Sound of Music. I have to admit that my high school graduation theme was Climb Every Mountain. Geez, I hated remembering that.

The moments when the characters return to their present, and reflect on the life lessons they’ve learned from the ’60s, are less successful. And the oh-by-the-way scene that has the characters acknowledge, in passing, the impact on them of the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King seems particularly awkward.    

Since the music is a kind of memory scrapbook, chronology and theme aren’t organizing principles. So a wave of music, from Sam Cooke to the Everly Brothers, Tequila to The Monster Mash, comes at you. As usual at the Mayfield, the musical values are strikingly high. The band, led by keyboardist Erik Mortimer, are stylistically savvy; the ensemble, all strong of voice, serves up a (very) generous song list of songs you know. 

And you can have a cocktail (and dessert) with your nostalgia. There have to be some rewards for graduating.

REVIEW

Class of ’63: A Rockin’ Reunion

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre, 16615 109 Ave.

Written and compiled by: Will Marks

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Jahlen Barnes, Simone Denny, Pamela Gordon, Kieran Martin Murphy, Melanie Piatocha, Stephanie Pitsiladis, Brad Wiebe, Mike Zimmerman

Running: through Jan. 26

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca

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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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