I sing of Pretenderos, land of plot complications. The return of Die-Nasty to a lawless land

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Photo by Mark Meer

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Trolls? You want trolls? How about a dragon? “I’ll make it happen,” says a portentous rumbling voice from the dark. “This is a world with No Rules.” Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. 

Welcome to the kingdom of valiant deeds and vengeful vows, lustful double-takes, eye-watering gazes into the mid-distance, murderous looks, slow-motion action sequences, and intense people who say “and yet…”

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I stand before you (well, OK, sit…) to ponder episode #2 of the new season of Edmonton’s weekly improvised soap opera Die-Nasty, set in the land of Pretenderos. I caught Lord of Thrones on Monday night, to discover that The House of Calgaria has fallen in a great battle. “I fear the Calgarians have gone down in Flames,” says David Calgarian (Matt Alden) of that ancient line.

Old Strathconia, the king of the victorious side, is dead. Murdered! And the new king (Jeff Haslam) is quite sulky about this additional stress, since ruling is bound to interfere with his normal pursuits, “whoring and drinking.” So he’s looking for allies, like Sherwood Park (Tom Edwards, in a particularly fetching wig), to do all the work. Ominously, Lord Strathconia’s fiancée Margot (Kristi Hansen) is nowhere to be found; does that signal guilt? 

It’s a dangerous world, my friends. Someone has a ring, THE ring, and she’s a Calgarian (Stephanie Wolfe). Someone else has a dragon’s egg. And hey, there is a dragon, the last one (fun fact: you have to know how to bond with a dragon or you’re really screwed).

The dragon, incidentally, re-purposes the trench that dominates the set of Shadow Theatre’s The Comedy Company, currently evoking the First World War in a run that ends Nov. 11. 

And there’s this: the remaining Calgarians are on the move, heading north. One of them is the fierce (but lovestruck) warrior Airdrie Calgarian (played by Die-Nasty newcomer Tyra Banda in a helmet and highly amusing winter coat with buttons down the front). She has lethal expertise with the mallet. Currently, no one to my knowledge is working on a PhD thesis about the uses of the wooden mallet in medieval warfare, but someone really should be. Wooden mallets cut to the chase in a way that makes swordplay look merely decorative.

There are hostages: the king’s sister Lady Patricia (Sheri Somerville) has one of her very own that she acquired while falling off a mountain. Everyone is ambitious and pretty thoroughly untrustworthy: Monday’s episode had a big musical number “Who Do I Believe?”, a Sondheim-esque homage that acknowledged the proliferating treachery of the world. In Lord of Thrones, a cross-hatching of two of the most intricate plots in human history, no complication is out of the question. Being dead, for example, promises not to be a setback. Just a glitch. 

Anyhow, the cast and the complications are exponentially amplified for next Monday’s episode with the return of Mark Meer, Belinda Cornish, and Jesse Gervais to the series. Will Margot reappear? Lord of Thrones gets made up on the spot every Monday night at the Varscona. It can be your guilty pleasure.   

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From Nootka Sound to Vimy Ridge: Redpatch, an Indigenous soldier’s tale comes to the Citadel

Posted on October 31, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You could do a lot of exhuming in the archives, in novels, diaries, war poetry, and never discover this striking and mysterious fact: more than four thousand Indigenous Canadians signed up to fight in the First World War.

Who knew? Not most Canadians, that’s for sure. 

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In the ill-lit reservoirs of Canadian history, unknown to most of the country’s citizenry, a pair of engaging and versatile young theatre artists who’d founded a Vancouver theatre company, would find the engine of the story they’d turn into Redpatch.

The Hardline production opening Thursday at the Citadel (co-presented by Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre) tells the story of Half-Blood (Raes Calvert), a young mixed blood First Nations soldier who leaves his home on Vancouver Island to be part of one of the bloodiest frays in human history.

It had all started with Calvert’s late grandfather, “an Indigenous man who fought in World War II.” Calvert, a Métis actor and theatre creator whose family on the Indigenous side comes originally from Vancouver Island’s Nootka Sound, was fascinated. Then he saw his friend and Hardline co-founder Sean Harris Oliver (they met in theatre school, Vancouver’s Studio 58) in a production of Vimy, the Vern Thiessen play about that nation-defining First World War battle, in which one of the principal characters is a First Nations soldier. 

Calvert and Oliver had found the narrative drive for their 15th Hardline play. Four years of research began for the Hardline partners, currently the theatre company in residence at the Arts Club. Judging by the material they found, you’d have thought that the Canadian contribution to the war effort was restricted to Euro-Canadians. “There was just nothing about the Indigenous presence in the books,” says Calvert. “We had to really dig. And in 2012 when we started it was difficult to find anything,” says Oliver, who grew up in Kelowna and has a science degree from Queen’s in his pre-theatre days. “We were amazed at the numbers.”

“It was the Why? that required more analysis,” says Oliver, who directs Redpatch. Why on earth would Indigenous people fight for a country in which they were routinely marginalized? “To understand, it was very apparent we’d have to go to Nootka Island, the original home of my great-great-grandfather, to learn more about the history of my family,” says Calvert. He and Oliver met the chief and last two elders living there. “And we got permission to use words in the Nuu-chah-nulth language in the show.”

What would have motivated the young men of the Nuu-chah-nulth Nation to leave the beauties of the West Coast to go to war half a world away? For one thing, “their world was changing, big time, receding….” says Oliver. Their options were narrowing. “You could either work at the lumber yard or the cannery. And that was it! OR go on an adventure, fight in a war, see the world.… It was the wanting to do something, to prove themselves, to be part of something.”

Raes Calvert in Redpatch, Hardline Productions. Phoro by Mark Halliday, Moonrider Photography

“Historically, they’d been warriors and hunters,” says Calvert. “And that was taken away.” The residential school agenda played its part too: “Forced assimilation, a program to wipe out an entire culture, every dance and song, to disenfranchise a people.” And the Great War was an opportunity “to be part of something big in a big new world happening out there….”

They had to relinquish their status to do it. “They weren’t allowed to enlist unless they did,” says Calvert. “And when they came back, it was to discover they’d been cheated: no land, no money, nothing. “They didn’t get what they were supposed to get, as veterans,” says Oliver. “It’s not part of our story, but there’s a story there, for sure. And someone will do it!” 

Raes Calvert in Redpatch, Hardline Productions. Photo by Mark Halliday, Moonrider Photography

It turned out that the wilderness skills of Indigenous soldiers in  hunting and tracking were premium talents in World War I. They excelled at “getting up and out of trenches at night, sneaking through No Man’s Land, getting into trenches, and bludgeoning the enemy,” says Oliver. “They were fast; they were fantastic snipers (the most acclaimed sniper of World War I was Indigenous). They were great scouts, great trench raiders.” In fact, “the Canadians got so good at trench raids that No Man’s Land became known as The Dominion of Canada,” Calvert discovered. 

They found the story that would propel Half-Blood to France. What then? The next question, as Calvert and Oliver developed Redpatch, had psychological traction: What would that constant killing do to a person? “What does this person want? More than anything? To get home!” says Oliver. 

Which is why Redpatch travels freely through time and space, as Oliver explains. “We’re always going back to Half-Blood’s island,” says Calvert.  “We weave time; it’s definitely not linear.… It’s one of my favourite things about the show, the transitions. It’s 1907, then the trenches in 1915, then we go back to times in between….”

The history of Hardline, now eight years old and professional, is a classic indie company narrative —“a lot of energy drinks,” money from hourly jobs to support their theatre habit, putting on events to pay the rent…. As student actors at Studio 58, Calvert and Oliver had bonded, first, because they both had to repeat a term (Calvert laughs) and then because of sports. “My high school (in Richmond) was a bit rough around the edges, always in the bottom 10 per cent of the province. I might have been a dancer but I guess I thought I’d be a target and get picked on.”

Oliver had been on his way to a career in medicine when theatre beckoned. His father, a surgeon who volunteered in Afghanistan, came around to the altered plan when his son wrote a play inspired by that stint. “Now Sean’s parents are our biggest fans!” says Calvert, whom Edmonton audiences saw last season at the Citadel as an aspirational swaggerer who lives “white” in Corey Payette’s Children of God. 

Redpatch, Hardline Productions. Photo by Mark Halliday, Moonrider Photography.

“We both loved physical storytelling!” Calvert says of his Hardline co-creator. And Redpath, which started out as one-person show, then two, then as many as eight before settling on six actors (all Indigenous), reflects that. “It’s the most physically demanding show I’ve ever been in,” says Calvert happily. The actors, who play people and animals, are in perpetual motion. The cast starts every rehearsal and performance day with an hour work-out.

In casting “we were looking for the best movers, who could act.” They all happened to be Indigenous. Although there’s only one female character (Half-Blood’s grandmother), half the cast are women.

There’s dance, there are masks, there are magical transformations, there are soldiers, a Whale, a Raven who’s our guide through scenes. And, as Calvert points out, it happens on a minimal set with minimal props. Each actor has a ‘movement stick’: sometimes it’s a rifle, a trench shovel, a harpoon, a paddle.… “One stick, no shoes,” laughs Oliver, who, like Calvert and all their Hardline cohorts, sometimes directs, sometimes acts, sometimes stage manages, “sometimes sells the beer.” 

“Movement is always part of our work,” says Calvert of Hardline’s signature physical style. “You can see the audience figuring out that they need to track the movement to follow the story!” says Oliver. “We treat the audience with a lot of respect; we don’t pander….

Calvert grins. “At the very least, they will leave saying ‘I haven’t seen something like this before!”

PREVIEW

Redpatch

Theatre: Hardline Productions presented by the Citadel and Vancouver Arts Club Theatre

Created by: Raes Calvert, Sean Harris Oliver

Directed by: Sean Harris Oliver

Starring: Raes Calvert, Joel D. Montgrand, Taran Kootenhayoo, Jennifer Daigle, Chelsea Rose, Odessa Shuquaya

Where: Citadel Maclab Theatre

Running: Thursday through Nov. 11

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com  

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Theatre takes to the trenches: Neil Grahn’s The Comedy Company. A review

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Steven Greenfield, Jesse Gervais in The Comedy Company, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2018

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“And make it funny!” barks the Major at the soldier.   

And so it starts, the remarkable true Canadian story that comes to life in Neil Grahn’s The Comedy Company. The new play by a writer with a blue-chip pedigree in comedy is getting a Shadow Theatre premiere directed by John Hudson and timed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

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It’s a comedy about comedy, or more precisely, about the link between comedy and tragedy. In Ypres, Belgium in 1916 laughter is in tough.

Amidst a nightmare of unremitting horrors, members of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were ordered by their commander Major Agar Adamson (Julien Arnold) to create a musical comedy entertainment, something “light-hearted!” to boost morale amongst the fighting men.

Steven Greenfield, Sheldon Elter, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Jesse Gervais in The Comedy Company. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2018

Some of the funniest scenes of Grahn’s episodic storytelling involve theatrical recruitment, auditions, brainstorming under these dark circumstances. Seven of Edmonton’s most watchable actors create individual characters, and cohere into a true ensemble. Jack McLaren, who has an appealing kind of wry, dry, sassy quality to him in Andrew MacDonald-Smith’s performance, has landed the task of casting. “Hey, would you guys like to be in a show?” He’s greeted by a certain skepticism-unto-incredulity by his battle-ravaged mates. “You have that showbiz je ne sais quoi,” he tells one, puckishly. He tells another “you have a certain star quality.”

Lilly, who has an amusingly guileless charm in Sheldon Elter’s performance, is susceptible to the lure of theatre. Fenwick (Steven Greenfield), on the other hand, earnestly resists, on the grounds that it would be shirking front line duty. He’s only persuaded by the thought that the better the group morale the more Germans they’ll kill.

The hardest sell of all is Cunningham (Jesse Gervais), furiously unsmiling and on a short fuse; Gervais is very funny as the soldier without a sense of humour and no sympathy whatsoever for theatrical pursuits (naturally, he’s made director, a theatre joke in itself). “ALL RIGHT,” he bellows, glaring at his cast-mates. “Who’s got a funny idea?” He’s deadpan on legs.

In a surprising story, the most surprising character of all is the Major, one Agar Adamson (Julien Arnold in full blustery bristle), who in the middle of the bloodiest, most devastating war in history takes it into his head to create a company to do original musical comedy revues. It’s an unexpected inspiration from a man who in every other way seems to be a conventional Edwardian military aristocrat who arrives in the 20th century trailing accoutrements from the 19th.

Under the rallying cry “Comedy For Killing,” collective creation and “amateur” theatre have never been more fraught. And Grahn makes full comic use of classic theatre frictions. When it comes time to assign the cross-dressing part — there has to be a leading lady — the discussion that ensues is riotous. Fractious cast discussions about who’s prettier (Greenfield’s Fenwick wins) will crack you up: Grahn has a flair for pursuing a comic idea through dialogue.

It’s a matter of gallows humour that the opening night of the new comedy company is approached by the cast with as much dread as going into battle: “Into the theatre of death rode Jack McLaren….”  A piano player (Nick Samoil) magically appears at the last possible moment.

The audience, fresh from the Battle of Mount Sorrel, is hostile and truculent, to say the least. A drill sergeant (Nathan Cuckow, in one of his many roles) takes charge of discipline: “We’re ordered to enjoy the show! Whether we like it or not!” he snaps. It’s the “girl” and the satirical barbs at their own military leadership that win over the crowd. The Princess Patricia’s have a hit . And they’re ordered to take it on the road. Touring the Western Front with a musical comedy sounds like a punch line in itself.

The Comedy Company, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The visuals are eloquent and have a kind of blasted beauty to them. Designer Alison Yanota’s set, beautifully lit in sepia shadows, is crossed by the brutal diagonal slice of a trench and overhung with tattered shards of gauze (bandages?) on which Matt Schuurman’s vintage projections play. Dave Clarke’s soundtrack of artillery and machine gun fire, and explosions, is a background roar and percussion track that reminds you of the strange context for comedy. And the historical narrative is peppered by last-minute cancellations when the cast gets called away to fight in some of the most gruesome forays of the war, including Vimy Ridge.

Grahn’s script takes its cue from this — it counterpoints musical and comedy numbers and the backstage brouhaha with battle scenes and moments when the characters step forward to deliver thoughts about an apocalyptic war  and their part in it. Occasionally these latter moments seem a little contrived and unnecessary given the nuances of the acting ensemble and the context served up by the battle sequences and the production design. A scene in which a commander praises the new comedy initiative for galvanizing his burnt-out men into continuing the fight, for example, seems directly lifted from research. So do the characters’ reflections on the extreme challenge of wresting comedy from tragedy. We’re actually seeing that happen before our eyes, anyhow.    

World War I ditties from the trenches (arranger Robert Walsh) like “we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here….” (sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne) or “hangin’ on the ol’ barbed wire” (to the tune of “someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah”) nail the sense of existential absurdity that hangs over unimaginable devastation. 

Comedy doesn’t devalue tragedy, says this vivid new Canadian play spun from our own history. It understands tragedy in a different way.

Meet the playwright: 12thnight.ca talks to Neil Grahn here.  

REVIEW

The Comedy Company

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Neil Grahn

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Julien Arnold, Nathan Cuckow, Sheldon Elter, Jesse Gervais, Steven Greenfield, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Nick Samoil,

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 11

Tickets: 780-434-5564, shadowtheatre.org

   

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Laughter in the face of death: Neil Grahn’s The Comedy Company launches the Shadow season

Posted on October 25, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Steven Greenfield, Sheldon Elter, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Jesse Gervais in The Comedy Company. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2018

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Neil Grahn and comedy.

He’s sidled, plunged, back-flipped into it. He’s written it and improvised it, acted it, produced it, directed it, studied it at a distance and up close, for stage for film for TV. He’s looked at from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow….

By any standards Grahn’s The Comedy Company, commissioned by and premiering at Shadow Theatre, is a test-case for laughter, for the elasticity of comedy and the agility of its practitioners. Based on a true Canadian story, it generates comedy where no one would expect to find it — literally in the trenches: the unimaginable horrors of the First World War.

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In the mud of Belgium, members of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division were summoned by their commander to devise musical comedy shows to divert and amuse their fellow soldiers. “You’re in hell, and you’re being asked to come up with light entertainment,” says Grahn. “I just found it really fascinating….” 

That’s the story his play tells, interspersed with comedy scenes and musical numbers, some of them lifted right from the original scripts he uncovered researching in Toronto libraries and the National Archives.   

An amusing and amused conversationalist whose mind works, sketch-comedy fashion, by approaching a subject from odd angles, in elliptical arcs and zigzag tangents, Grahn is explaining his attraction to the history of The Comedy Company last week. We’re in a cafe near his current writing gig at the game-creation giant BioWare, where he’s been creating characters and weapons back stories for their latest, Anthem (debuting Feb. 21). Strains of Sinatra singing “my kind of town” float through the conversational din. Which seems entirely à propos.

“I used to be a game guy in the olden days,” grins Grahn.  “But I had to quit because I have too much of an addictive personality…. I got addicted to World of Warcraft.” His wife did an intervention. “Now all I have is chess on my computer, and I can’t be addicted to it because it’s too hard.”

Grahn provides all his anecdotes with dialogue. Which won’t amaze Edmonton audiences who know that his entry point into showbiz was the seminal sketch comedy troupe Three Dead Trolls, kooky and literate, of which he became the fourth member in the late ‘80s. Or that he was the head writer for CBC Radio’s The Irrelevant Show, cancelled after six seasons: “you know when you’re the top-rated comedy show on CBC radio you’ve gotta expect to be cancelled, right? That’s the price you pay for living in the colonies,” he says wryly. “HQ don’t cut their friends, right?….I always  called us the curling of CBC Radio. We’re not cool, but everybody will watch us!”

The Comedy Company, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Back to the war. “So this 50-year-old blind-in-one-eye major, Agar Adamson of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division, who only got his commission because he a lot of hoity-toity friends in Toronto, calls six of his men and says ‘I’m giving you a week to put together an entertainment for the rest of the troops’…. Four or five days into rehearsals, there was a major attack on the Canadian forces, the second Battle of Mount Sorrel (near Ypres). They all got called to the front line to be in a counter-attack, and got pulled back just hours before. Which probably saved most of their lives.” 

He pauses. “There was no more bloody war to be in as a soldier, anywhere and any time. A butcher’s grinder….”

Major Adamson had come up with the idea for original shows partly because “there wasn’t enough money to bring entertainments from London to entertain the troops,” Grahn discovered in his researches, enhanced materially by the felicitous discovery of the correspondence between Adamson and his wife back home in Canada. They wrote to each other every day.

“A lot of the entertainment had been classical companies or Gilbert and Sullivan. This was different. These guys made fun of their leader. In one of Adamson’s letters he told his wife that had taken ‘a bit of a stitch out of me but I thought about its and it was all in good fun’…. They made fun of their weapons, made fun of the terrible Ross rifle; a lot of their comedy was about sitting in mud: ‘what did you have for dinner? three cigarettes and a tin of beef’….”

“Their first performance was right after the battle (of Mount Sorrel),” says Grahn. And the audience, which might have been the world’s hardest crowd to amuse under the circumstances, were force-marched for miles to a theatre to watch.

It’s the idea of theatrical performance — we’re the soldier audiences who watched the  Comedy Company shows — that made Grahn receptive to the commission his old friend (and U of A theatre school classmate) Shadow’s John Hudson proposed. He’d told John about the story as a great idea for a movie. “Two weeks later John called me, wondering ‘how would that work as a play?’”

It was a fit, a theatre piece about theatre. “It’s a great story. And when the guys argue about who’s gonna play the girl — someone’s got to be the girl — it’s really quite fun.” Grahn, incidentally, can’t quite believe his luck with the casting: Hudson has acquired a notable contingent of Edmonton’s top actors. 

Does comedy have particular the most traction in terrible times? Grahn considers. “For me comedy gets the best traction when you’re not doing it for comedy. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this: good actors in a comedy start acting like they’re in a comedy. Please stop doing that! Don’t try to be funny. Play the scene!”

The secret, he thinks, is commitment. “I think it comes down to that… Comedy should be a byproduct, not a goal!” When that happens, no subject matter is beyond its reach. One of Grahn’s most memorable comic moments, he recalls, was when the Trolls mentored and directed kids creating sketch comedy they fashioned into The Teen Show, part of the Citadel’s Teen Fest during the Robin Phillips regime in the ’90s. 

“It was a wild show…. A 16-year-old girl, who’d lost a leg to cancer three or four years earlier wrote a scene ‘How To Meet Boy, Tip #69’. So she’s onstage, getting off a bus. Her leg falls off and one of the boys hanging around picks it up and brings it to her: ‘hey, you dropped your leg, wanna go for coffee some time?’ We asked her if she was sure she wanted to do it. And she was, like,‘was it not funny?’”When she realized we thought it was, she was good to go! One of the best moments….”

The memory makes Grahn, a congenital brain-stormer, recall his half-serious idea of “getting some smell-o-rama into the show…. I read about this theatre guy in New York who did that. Mustard gas has a sweet sickly smell.” He gave it up: “too much for a three-week rehearsal period.” If he had “a West End budget” he’d investigate the special effect of having a shell tear through the theatre during a performance, the way it happened one time in Belgium. “The shell would be amazing. Like the chandelier, man!” 

His muse may be comic but his instincts are theatrical. “I’ve never approached improv purely as comedy,” says Grahn, who does improv regularly at the Grindstone. I’ve always approached it as ‘how can it be amazingly theatrical?’” Improv, he thinks, rarely works on TV and film. And a lot of theatre bores him. “I get so mad at theatre that just does proscenium shit. The movies and TV are kicking your ass! You need to touch me! Come and blow in my ear.”

Grahn has co-written plays before, to be sure. One of the Trolls’ signature was fashioning sketch comedy into full-length plays, like Saskatchebuzz, a 1992 spoof in which a grim Saskatchewan farmer and his wife turn the economy around, spectacularly, by planting a new cash crop. When we met, day #1 of legal pot, Grahn’s fellow Troll alumnus Wes Borg had just posted the entire play online. With director/playwright Ron Jenkins Grahn co-wrote The Horror, The Horror, a satire spun from the premise of privatized jails and executions. But The Comedy Company is “the first full-length play I’ve written by myself…. It was a bit lonely. But I had my dog Manny with me, so it was OK. Manny makes me walk around the block and re-think things.”

The Comedy Company, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2018

After the war Princess Patricia’s comedy troupe amalgamated with  The Dumbells — “no one’s heard of them now!” Grahn marvels — who toured the country and even played Broadway. “Truly they were the very last of the soldier entertainers, the last of that breed.… Now if the military want a show they’ll get Shania Twain or Brent Butt,” says Grahn. “These guys gained fame. Their command performance for the King of England in London in the Albert Hall was cancelled at the last minute when they were called to the front line for the attack on Vimy Ridge.

“These guys were the beginning of sketch in comedy,” says Grahn. “They were the ones who inspired Wayne and Shuster. Without them, no Frantics, no Kids in the Hall, no Codco, no Three Dead Trolls…. We all build on that.”

PREVIEW

The Comedy Company

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Neil Grahn

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Julien Arnold, Nathan Cuckow, Sheldon Elter, Jesse Gervais, Steven Greenfield, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Nick Samoil,

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 11

Tickets: 780-434-5564, shadowtheatre.org

   

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Chills and thrills in a theatre town: stake out a stage near you

Posted on October 24, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Lew Wetherell and Jason Hardwick in The Bone House. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Uncanny, isn’t it?, how often the words “ordinary nice polite guy-next-door” show up in reports of homicidal rampages?

Researcher Eugene Crowley, the noted “mind-hunter,” is in town this week to give a public lecture on the tracking of serial killers. And it’s his mission in The Bone House to make us understand that serial killers aren’t freaks. They’re unremarkable, run-of-the-mill, indistinguishable from the rest of us — from the person at the next desk, next in line at the LRT ticket machine … or sitting next to you at a public lecture on serial killers.

No wonder they’re elusive; they have paradox on their side:when you’re looking for a serial killer, you’re looking for someone have no reason to be looking for. The real horror is the familiar, after all.

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Not to alarm you, but Crowley’s life’s work has led him to a killer who’s still at large, with 20 murders on his resume. Crowley has tracked The Midnight Cowboy to the Edmonton area.

Nineteen years ago, playwright Marty Chan, until then known mostly for light romantic comedies, took a turn into the dark with his Sterling Award-winning thriller The Bone House — which I remember as a chilling, genuinely unnerving experience.

It’s since been revived elsewhere. And now The Bone House is back, in a production directed by Jennifer Kreziewicz. Thursday through Oct. 31 you’ll find Eugene Crowley (Lew Wetherell) in lecture mode at the Varscona Hotel on Whyte, with Jason Hardwick and Nicole Grainger.  Tickets: www.universe.com.

The Comedy Company, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•Neil Grahn’s The Comedy Company premieres at Shadow Theatre this week. An improbable story of comedy under monumental duress, inspired by real-life history, it follows the fortunes in World War I of the soldiers of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division assigned to create light entertainment for their cohorts. John Hudson’s production, with its all-star cast of top-drawer Edmonton actors,  opens Thursday at the Varscona, and runs through Nov. 11. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

Dale Chiernow and Wild Rose, Hey Ladies!. Photo supplied.

•In other seasonal news, Hey Ladies! opens their new season of “comedy/ info-tainment/ musical/ game/ talk show” spectaculars Friday at the Roxy. Leona Brausen, Cathleen Rootsaert, and Davina Stewart are the creator/ co-hosts, joined by Noel Taylor. Special guests include the pop folk duo F&M, Wild North’s Dale Gienow, and Wild Rose (a stage-worthy porcupine). Naturally, there are seasonal games and crafts (“The Magic of Mushrooms”).

Point to ponder: New frontiers in diversity at the Roxy. The opening production of the season, Jezebel, At The Still Point, which closed last weekend, was another inter-species foray onto the stage. Jezebel is a French bulldog.   

Tickets: 780-453-2440, TIX on the Square (tixonthesquare.ca, 780-420-1757).

•Saturday night marks the return to the Roxy of the great cabaret artiste Patricia Zentilli, star of last season’s Mamma Mia! at the Citadel, to launch season #2 of her themed cabarets. PattyZee@TheRoxy marries songs and personal stories, and for Saturday’s show the theme, a juicy one, is the green-eyed monster, jealousy and envy. Special guests are Jeremy Baumung (Zentilli’s co-star in the Theatre Network production of The Last Five Years) and Nadine Hunt (Edmonton Story Slam winner). Composer Stephanie Urquhart is at the keyboard.

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca, or at the door.

•Continuing …

The Maggie Tree production of Blood: A Scientific Romance at the Backstage Theatre through Saturday. 12thnight.ca talks to playwright Meg Braem here. Meet director Brenley Charkow and the “twins” who are the subject of an ever-creepier experiment here. And there’s a 12thnight REVIEW here. Tickets: 780-409-1910, tickets.fringetheatre.ca.

Dead Centre of Town XI at the Blatchford Field Air Hangar, horror from real-life history at Fort Edmonton through Oct. 31. Check out the 12thnight.ca REVIEW here.  12thnight.ca talks to playwright Megan Dart about our lurid civic past here. Tickets: eventbrite.ca

Holly Turner, Kristin Johston in Origin of Species, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Origin of the Species opens the Northern Light Theatre season at the Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns, through Saturday. Read the 12thnight.ca REVIEW here.  Meet Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt here. Tickets: 780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com.

Two Good Knights: The Music of Sir Tom Jones and Sir Elton John at the Mayfield through Sunday. The 12thnight.ca REVIEW here. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca

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Defy gravity at your peril: Dead Centre Of Town XI at Fort Edmonton

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Dead Centre Of Town, Catch The Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The principle of “what goes up must come down” as applied to air travel isn’t an entirely comforting thought. Defying gravity might have been a blast for Peter Pan but, trust me, it doesn’t always work out. And Edmonton has the history to prove it, as you’ll find out at Dead Centre Of Town XI. 

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Fort Edmonton Park is an eerie place on a fall night. Fields with a single mystery light planted somewhere in the middle: landing strips for aliens? Old houses with an unidentifiable glow in a single upstairs window: haunted? A long boardwalk threads through the park, and as you walk you catch a side glimpse of a faded poster: a smudgy hand reaches toward the lettering: “A Taste Of Eternity.”

And then, just off one of the Fort’s vintage streets is a giant of a building, the 1929 Blatchford Field Air Hangar, pale in the moonlight, its secrets sealed inside. Before we enter we gather around a bonfire, which is the international signal for ghost story.

Dead Centre of Town. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

Secrets, long buried, are the point  of Catch The Keys Productions’ annual foray into the graveyard of our collective history. Playwright Megan Dart is the exhumer who uncovers the ghoulish, shivery stories that have been composting, unknown to most of us, in the E-town soil. Director Beth Dart and a cast of 13 bring the ghosts to life.

Inside you’re in the maze of an airport which, as in all airports, means you never quite know where you are. Instead of aggro, though, you get anxiety. You thread your way through corridors where shadows flicker and grow huge behind translucent walls, sinister sounds echo, and the undead give you a nudge from time to time — or emerge, in ghastly, hollow-eyed chalk-faced pallor, to smile as they look you right in the eye or whisper in your ear.

Can you find your flight, the one indicated on your boarding pass? No one’s asking for your frequent flyer number; it’s just assumed. The proposition of Dead Centre Of Town XI is that real E-town history can turn complacency to horror. There are freakish accidents, lethal crashes in snowstorms, mid-air conflagrations, mystery disappearances and abandonments, terrible consequences on the ground, live cargoes splattered through the universe. Edmonton after all is the gateway to the middle of nowhere, and it’s a big empty cold nowhere.

Spectral flight attendants from hell, soldiers on a countdown to doom, pilots who are dead before they even take the wheel, cargoes splattered over the cosmos … our history is surprisingly gruesome. I’m pretty sure I saw a ghoulish nun on one of my flights: Edmonton as the gateway to the Great Beyond. As our chief tour steward Colin Matty sneers, “If god had intended man to fly, he wouldn’t have made him so squishy.” 

It’s a chilling immersion in the combo of  human error, mechanical failure and E-town’s terrible weather that is a formidable obstacle to longevity. This conjuring of the ghostly is made possible by a whole team of designers, including Michael Caron (sound), John Evans and Kat Evans (set, costume, make-up and lighting). The lighting sources, like the ghosts, are unexpected in Beth Dart’s production.

Have I said too much? I can’t tell you more without spoiling the hair-raising. Let me leave you with this: Dead Centre of Town XI is not for the queasy air traveller. Have a peek at the 12thnight.ca preview here. 

Dead Centre of Town XI runs through Oct. 31 at the Blatchford Field Air Hangar, Fort Edmonton Park. Tickets: fortedmontonpark.ca,  eventbrite.ca. 

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In the land of Pretenderos, a plot of epic proportions: Die-Nasty returns with a Lord of Thrones season

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Photo by Mark Meer

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Epic battles, dynastic conflicts and alliances, murderous intrigues, lethal challenges, fierce creatures (in striking character roles), aspirational heroes, ancient grievances, copious references to The Throne, a plot that no one person can fully understand…. Yes, smells like suds to the deluxe improvisers of Die-Nasty brigade.

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Welcome to Lord of Thrones. In its 28th season, opening its new season of weekly episodes on the Varscona stage tonight, Edmonton’s award-winning weekly improvised soap opera takes us to the Kingdom of Pretenderos. Four great Houses are in lethal and long-standing conflict: House Park “led by Sherwood and gracious Gazebo”; House Calgarian “led by the brave people of Calgaria”; House Minster “led by Loyd, Boyd, Floyd … and Margot” and House Strathconia “led by Lord, son of Old.”

After a Great Battle, the latter is currently in the ascendancy as Die-Nasty begins — with Margot (Kristi Hansen) is betrothed to Lord Strathconia (Jesse Gervais). But Margot’s dad Lloyd  (Jeff Haslam) remains apprehensive that House Calgarian isn’t as dead as all that. 

After that, no one in any kingdom knows what will happen (except that winter’s coming), as a company of crack improvisers takes to the stage armed with medieval syntax. Lord of Thrones runs every Monday at the Varscona (10329 83 Ave.) from tonight through May 27. Tickets: varsconatheatre.com or at the door. 

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“Thicker than water and stronger than bone”: twin performances in Blood: A Scientific Romance at The Maggie Tree. A review.

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Gianna Vacirca, Jayce Mckenzie in Blood: A Scientific Romance. Photo by BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the beating heart of Meg Braem’s intricate Blood: A Scientific Romance are twin sisters whose mysterious bond is an elixir of life. Beyond empathy, beyond heredity, beyond biology, Angelique and Poubelle seem to be joined at not only the cellular, but the soul-ular level.

And in the Maggie Tree production, directed by Brenley Charkow, it’s startling to see that strange and alluring premise come fully to life in star performances by Jayce Mckenzie and Gianna Vacirca.

Those mesmerizing sister performances, intertwined physically and intellectually, are the most persuasive and compelling feature of a production that doesn’t just slide off the rails later, but goes wildly off them and self-destructs in spectacular B-movie black comedy fashion.

But amazingly, even when that happens, you buy into its dark story of obsession and torment — thanks to performances by McKenzie and Vacirca. You understand, at least in theory, why an ambitious doctor (Liana Shannon), a scientist with secrets of her own, might be fascinated, and maddened, by the the twins’ healing link that eludes her scientific research. And why, as they age, she ups the ante gruesomely on her experiments.

A terrible car crash on a prairie highway in 1952  leaves two little Quebec girls (their intertwining of two languages is significant in the story) orphaned at seven, and near death from their injuries. Against all odds and rational explanation, Angelique and Poubelle recover and come to flourish when they are placed next to each other.

Dr. Glass takes them home, an isolated prairie farm house of the gothic persuasion in the middle of nowhere to study further. In the strict regimen of data accumulation in the course of a decade of being investigated they come to realize they are her prisoners and her “lab rats.”

In the most brutal experiment, one twin is submerged in a bathtub of ice water to the point of hypothermia while the other’s vital signs are recorded for comparison. There’s always synchronicity, in a way science can’t explain. What is this bond that can change body temperature and bring the near-dead back to life? Dr. Glass is furious to know, and to present her results to the world.

Gianna Vacirca and Jayce McKenzie in Blood: A Scientific Romance, The Maggie Tree. Photo by BB Collective.

There’s a fourth character in the play, a newly graduated doctor (Jenna Dykes Busby) who arrives at the farmhouse in the middle of the night to be Dr. Glass’s assistant. An oddly mousey and solitary creature, maladjusted in the world, she’s studying plant biology as a way to understand human connectivity. Will she rescue the twins from their imprisonment? Or is she just too weird? 

Anyhow, in a mystery/thriller (with a cinematically sinister sound design by Leif Ingebrigtsen) you have to wonder why the play abandons the unnerving believable in favour of over-the top gothic bizarre so decisively in its later scenes. And you wonder, too, why in a play about creeping discovery — the twins’ and ours — the production opts from the start for a full-blooded transparently mad scientist performance by Shannon’s Dr. Glass.

Yes, the stakes are high. But it’s a little hard on queasy ambiguity,  much less suspense and the dawning realization of horror, if the villain is from the outset so flamboyantly psycho, a sadist à la Dr. Mengele. And it certainly leaves the weird assistant role stranded, despite the best efforts of Dykes-Busby to make her plausible.

But you return to the twins, and a mysterious relationship of individuals who are, and aren’t, separate. Who live in and out of half-lit blue world of flashbacks and shared memory. Megan Koshka’s sinister shadowy lighting captures the play’s intricate portrait of doubleness in an eloquent way on a bi-level set .

Are twins duplications, or halves, or each other? Vacirca as Poubelle the starchier more naturally rebellious one, and McKenzie as the more fragile Angelique are uncanny together in Charkow’s production. Their impulsive energy, their alert and instinctive awareness of each other moment to moment has a detailed physicality to it.

At rest their limbs are entwined, a human knot tied against all threats. Their storytelling game is double too. It’s in rhyming couplets, alternating lines at top speed in two languages. And it suggests that the twins share an intelligence as well as a memory bank that dates back to the womb. They are each other’s repository of traditions. You won’t be able to take your eyes off them.

That’s the real draw of Blood: A Scientific Romance, a welcome introduction of Braem’s work to Edmonton audiences. Can the bond of love be dissected? Can poetry triumph over science? Although it stacks the deck in this production, here’s a piece of theatre that wonders about that. And you will too.

REVIEW

Fringe Spotlight Program

Blood: A Scientific Romance

Theatre: The Maggie Tree

Written by: Meg Braem

Directed by: Brenley Charkow

Starring: Jayce McKenzie, Gianna Vacirca, Liana Shannon, Jenna Dykes-Busby

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

Running: through Oct. 27

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

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The fear of flying, and the return of Dead Centre of Town

Posted on October 18, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Dead Centre Of Town, Catch The Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Ladies and gentlemen, we will be boarding tonight by zone. The dead centre zone.

For 11 years now, Catch the Keys Productions has been leading us on nocturnal Halloween expeditions into the macabre, digging in the boneyard where the gruesome secrets of our civic history lie mouldering and our ghosts refuse to stay buried. This year’s edition of Dead Centre of Town, opening tonight at Fort Edmonton Park, takes us into the vast and eerie Blatchford Field Air Hangar, a replica of the 1929 original originally built by Wop May, the World War I flying ace and star aviator.

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Start fearful, and prepare to be horrified. Playwright Megan Dart, whose researches into Edmonton history are the basis of her original scripts for Catch the Keys’ immersive chillers, has discovered macabre stories of landings gone wrong, mid-air collisions, doomed aerial manhunts, flights into destruction. “Acts of God, man vs. nature, the elements, failed mechanics,” says Dart. “Fear that is out of our control.…” Fun fact (Not): “I learned you shouldn’t fly in February. A vast proportion of accidents happen then.”

Suffice it to say that the assumption we can, at will, fly through the air with the greatest of ease, has a lot to answer for in Edmonton aviation history.

Dead Centre Of Town is a name lifted from the grisly local lingo of yore for the intersection of Jasper Avenue and 109th St. One of Edmonton’s first mortuaries had stood there,surrounded by coffin shops and embalming emporia. It was where bodies of soldiers arrived by train and got dropped off during the last century’s wars. Eleven years ago it was a night club, and Catch the Keys’ Dart sisters, playwright Megan and director Beth, specialists in immersive theatre events in found spaces, lived nearby.

That’s where the debut Dead Centre Of Town happened, a one-night stand. And the rest is history — bigger and bigger shows and longer runs on location of Edmonton sites like the former tinsmith shop that turned theatre before it turned into the late lamented ARTery performance venue. Or the ex-cinema that became the Avenue Theatre. Or the first train station on the south side of town.

For the last five years Dead Centre Of Town has taken us down by the river to Fort Edmonton, where fog hangs in the air of an autumn night. We followed ghosts along 1885 Street, into historic saloons or school rooms. Last year, it was the spooky 1920 Johnny K. Jones Midway.

And now, the air hangar. “We’re so thrilled,” says Megan Dart. “It’s been on our wish list since we moved down to the Fort!” The space comes with its own “wildly different challenges,” to be sure, “a big old open warehouse that we fill imaginatively, our biggest build we’ve ever undertaken.” But there’s this: it’s indoors. And after a year of unpredictable interference from the elements, including wind storms gusting to 200 K and snow on Halloween, “we had to cancel two shows for the first time ever,” indoors is a felicitous concept.

The team, 13 strong and the same size as the cast, has scrounged from the Aviation Museum. “We have the fuselage of an old plane. We have wings and propellors…. We’re the Franksteins of aviation,” Dart laughs.

“We’re playing with space in a major way,” says Dart of the production concept: “a labyrinthine airport terminal,” with lighting (or lack thereof) designed by Beth Dart and Chris Dela Cruz. “There are engineers on the team,” she says. “And a mathematician to help us figure out how to move the audience.”

All us travellers into darkness will get a boarding pass, and with four flights to choose from. “The audience can choose what order to see them in.”

Dead Centre of Town, Catch The Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

As for the stories, “we explore the period 1929 to 1985,” the latter bookend unusually recent by Dead Centre Of Town‘s historical standards. That, incidentally, was the year that “two Hercules transports collided mid-air, and all 10 crew members were killed, a bizarre fluke of an accident in a fly-over celebration. A very dark day in Edmonton’s aviation history.”

Dart discovered other morbid mysteries. Here’s one: “A military plane carrying unreported cargo vanished in 1943, mid-flight….” The crash site was found five years later. “But the military never confirmed or denied. There was no crash report, no manifesto,” only talk of a million dollars.

“Edmonton (owns) a lot of aviation firsts,” says Dart. “The first air harbour. A major hub during wartime, as the gateway to the North. During one day in World War II, a record number of planes, more than any other air field in Canada, landed and took off from here.”

And here’s the thing that frays the nerves: flying is always a matter of life and death.

PREVIEW

Dead Centre Of Town XI

Theatre: Catch The Keys Productions

Written by: Megan Dart

Directed by: Beth Dart

Starring: Colin Matty, Adam Keefe, Christine Lesiak, Morgan Smith, Elisa Benzer, Louise Casemore, Bobbi Goddard, William Mitchell, Rebecca Sadowski, Mat Simpson, Jake Tkaczyk, Barry Balinski, Morgan Yamada

Where: Blatchford Field Air Hangar, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: tonight through Oct. 31

Tickets: eventbrite.ca

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“It calls bullshit on scientific distance.” Blood: A Scientific Romance opens its mysteries under The Maggie Tree.

Posted on October 17, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Gianna Vacirca and Jayce Mckenzie in Blood: A Scientific Romance, The Maggie Tree. Photo by BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Something odd is happening to Jayce Mckenzie and Gianna Vacirca. Their cast-mates in Blood: A Scientific Experiment have noticed it. So has their director Brenley Charkow; ditto their producer Kristi Hansen of The Maggie Tree, an indie company dedicated to nurturing and showcasing women theatre artists. 

Mannerisms, gestures add up. McKenzie and Vacirca have taken to sitting the same way: they cross their ankles and dangle their feet. They’re alert to where exactly each other is;  they check in with each other by glance. They look up at the exact same time. They listen;  they “play a lot with breath,” as McKenzie says.

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Mckenzie and Vacirca are becoming twins. They play Angelique and Poubelle in the Meg Braem play that opens Thursday in a Maggie Tree production. And the bond between them, which seems to propel a remarkable recovery after the car accident that orphaned them, eludes the every experiment by the scientist who takes them home to investigate further. “The doctor witnesses a miracle, for want of a better term,” says Vacirca. For Angelique and Poubelle “it seems like being rescued. For a while….”  says McKenzie.

Yes, there’s a mystery at the heart of Blood: A Scientific Experiment. And it has to do with siblings.“Dr. Glass (Liana Shannon) can’t figure it out; she certainly didn’t expect to wait 10 years for answers. It brings the doctor’s stakes way up,” says Vacirca. “The play calls bullshit on scientific distance.” Says Charkow, “she’s straddling a crisis of ethics.”

Human testing: there’s a branch of science that might send a little frisson of apprehension down your spine. Not least because Blood: A Scientific Romance takes place in the post-war pre-cellphone world 1952 to 1962, with the twins at age 17, and flashbacks to their seven-year-old selves. The notorious Dr. Mengele, after all, was fascinated by twins. It “feels like as a thriller,” says Hansen. “A romantic thriller,” amends Mckenzie. “A thriller about love” with a soupçon of sci-fi, says Vacirca.

“The car accident is the prologue,” says Charkow, who calls the play “a ghost story of sorts.” She smiles. “I’ve always been drawn to the dark. And people are not perfect in this play….” She’d thought about creating “a clinical white world” for the twins to live and be tested in. Instead her production opted for “the dark (isolated) farm house.”

Gianna Vacirca, Jayce Mckenzie in Blood: A Scientific Romance. Photo by BB Collective.

It’s the human connection that eludes Dr. Glass. “Siblings parent each other,” says Mckenzie, who’s intrigued by the way the twins “are constantly doing what’s best for the other, trying to help the other get through…. Who loves you? Who’s responsible for you when you don’t have parents who have to love you?” Vacirca remembers that, growing up, she and her younger brother “disciplined each other.”

Meanwhile the twin sisters who hatched “in the exact same oven” as Vacirca puts it, start to develop individually. Their relationship evolves in ways that surprise them. 

And speaking of experiments, originally, the play’s two doctors, the famous Dr. Glass and the young medical acolyte (Jenna Dykes-Busby) who’s tracked her down, were played by men. Charkow met with the playwright to ask her “what would it mean if they were played by women?” The playwright’s answer: “I don’t know. Why don’t you try it?” It was an apt way for a production of Blood: A Scientific Romance to start.

12thnight.ca talked to playwright Meg Braem, the U of A’s Lee Playwright in Residence, here.

PREVIEW

Blood: A Scientific Romance

Theatre: The Maggie Tree, in Fringe Theatre Adventures Spotlight Program

Written by: Meg Braem

Starring: Jayce Mckenzie, Gianna Vacirca, Liana Shannon, Jenna Dykes-Busby

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

Running: Thursday through Oct. 27

Tickets: 780-409-1910, tickets.fringetheatre.ca

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