‘You felt like home right from the get-go’. KaldrSaga, Cardiac’s ‘new queer, old Norse cabaret’. A review

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a very unusual storyteller’s cabaret happening in a handsome brick- and wood-lined room in the river valley. Norse mythology: where friends meet. And if the gods are overseeing the whole operation from their own spot in the time-space continuum, I’m pretty sure they’d be smiling at the effrontery, and the chutzpah, of it all.

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And in the course of it, KaldrSaga, as billed “a new queer, old Norse cabaret,” shape-shifts itself into a play about high-stakes friendship, in this ingenious latest from playwright Harley Howard-Morison and Cardiac Theatre.

In the former Ortona Armoury, reno-ed into a new life as ArtsHub Ortona, two queer ex-friends, a storytelling double-act, are having an awkward, fractious reunion. One of them is the instigator and cajoler; the other, resentful, is the cajöle-ee (it’s an ancient Norse word I just made up).   

When we met them in 2019, Kaldr and Saga were friends, getting together in a pub after a year apart, to tell queer origin stories inspired by Norse mythology. Which is, as we learned, a veritable repository of gender-fluid exuberance. This new cabaret, by Harley Howard-Morison and inventively directed by Sarah J Culkin, has Kaldr (Graham Mothersill) and Saga (Michelle Diaz) singles out queer friendship origin stories — and in the telling, their own emerges.

This is a relationship on the rocks judging by the long (I found it a bit over-long) first “Movement” of four, entitled “Shit-Slinging All Around.” And the question of whether friendship, in particular queer friendship, once lost can be reclaimed, is in the balance.

It will give you some idea of the sense of humour at play to know that as the show opens, Saga (that’s Dr. Saga Steinundötor to you), whose PhD is in nihilism, is delivering a TED talk on meaning. And more specifically on how there isn’t any. Kaldr, who’s crashed the talk rather spectacularly, has been making a name dipping into their shared repertoire of stories to get commercial traction online; Saga calls it selling out.

The actors in Culkin’s production are a study in contrast: Diaz is petite and peppery and Mothersill is strapping and forceful. The performances are go-for-the-gusto in a multi-layered assignment to play storytellers who act in their own stories. And both seem jazzed by connecting with the audience directly — competing for our favour, improvising, annotating. They constantly step outside the frameworks they establish — the multiple gods, animals, people that their main characters Kaldr and Saga play — in order to deliver amusingly barbed asides or critiques of the narrative, the gods, their performances, the odd theatre joke about “main character energy” — and then they step back in. They’re their own stage managers, in a playful way. This will sound impossibly complicated. But the crazy scramble of is part of the fun (this is not a show that turns its nose up at goofiness).

The designer is Whittyn Jason, and they provide knapsacks full of props. A lot of braids and fake moustaches, weaponry, hats fly through the show, with more to come in the grand finale. And Kena León’s sound design is a zinger, with its own punch lines. The pace of Culkin’s production is dizzying. And Howard-Morison’s writing is bright and witty; contemporary asides and Norse idioms jostle together in his script.

The first story Kaldr and Saga re-create, from their best-of vault, is a funny reimagining of that traditional bastion of machismo, the Western. This cowboy vaudeville has queer characters (they ride into the sunrise not the sunset, “two boys, and a horse under each”), a queer attraction-at-first-sight scene with an alluring stranger, frankly fake accents, sight gags, and a generous assortment of double-enten soundtrack to match.

The central feature is the challenge of a female gunslinger who visits a graveyard, dressed in manly Western gear, to summon the spirit of her deceased father from Valhalla and reclaim his sword. The question apparently is whether dad will stay dead or not.

“Dragnarök,” a flamboyant drag revue, has roots in the story of tough-guy Norse god Thor, always accompanied by thunder, who wears a dress to a wedding in order to get his signature hammer back. Howard-Morison imagines a confrontation between Thor, played by Saga, and Thor’s teenage son Mosey, hilariously played by Kaldr, sulking because his dad won’t let him quit martial arts and take musical theatre studies — Hammerstein to Hamilton — instead. How this leads to a go-for-the-gusto double drag number is something I’ll leave with you. Funny, and unexpectedly heart-catching, too.

The final story is about an unusual friendship in a war-centric world, between Tyr, a wayward son of Odin, and Fenrir, a wolf who hasn’t lived up to his billing in monstrousness. And there’s a sacrificial price to be paid for Tyr’s loyalty. There’s a nutty sort of magic to the way it’s told by Kaldr and Saga, using homely objects that will make you smile and test your rapport with the story as it unfolds. A ball of yarn turns in a particularly poignant performance as Fenrir.

It’s fun and spirited. And in the end, as KaldrSaga returns to the academic question of meaning, it turns out there’s a kind of redemption about the act of telling a story in itself. That’s what friends are for. Welcome back, Cardiac.

12thnight talks to playwright Howard-Morison and director Culkin in this preview.

REVIEW

KaldrSaga: a new queer, old Norse cabaret

Theatre: Cardiac

Written by: Harley Howard-Morison

Directed by: Sarah J Culkin

Where: ArtsHub Ortona, 9722 102 St.

Running: Friday through June 8, Fridays through Sundays

Tickets: cardiactheatre.ca

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Making merry with murder: A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder at Grindstone, a review

Posted on May 25, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Oscar Derkx in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudrea

Murder most foul?

Yes, we laughed and laughed. How can you not be tickled by an evening of inspired wickedness in the theatre where you find yourself charmed by a serial killer, and overcome with mirth at the assorted demises of his victims?

Don’t even try to wipe the smile off your face when you see Grindstone Theatre’s lethal musical comedy sparkler A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, at the Orange Hub. The mortality rate is awfully high in the 2014 multiple Tony Award winner by Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak — a clever faux-Edwardian concoction inspired by the same 1907 novel that also inspired the Alex Guinness film Kind Hearts and Coronets. It tips its chapeau to the English music hall, to the sophisticated shrewdness of Noel Coward, to the multi-syllabic daffiness of Gilbert and Sullivan. O death, where is thy sting?

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In a performance of sublime comic bravado, nimbleness, and ingenuity, Ron Pederson dies eight times in the show, as nearly all the aristocratic D’Ysquiths (say “Die-Squith” of course)— a gallery of inbred upper-class twits, snobs, buffoons, and grotesques. It is a true tour de force, perfectly suited to the rather breath-taking multiple talents of Pederson.

I say ‘nearly’ all the D’Ysquiths. BUT, there’s a D’Ysquith Pederson doesn’t get to play. The dispatching of the heirs, one after the other, is done by the forgotten D’Ysquith, the one no one, including him, saw coming. Penniless Montague Navarro is a distant and disinherited relative living in worthy poverty at the outset, who sets out to off every D’Ysquith who stands between him and the title of ninth Earl of Highhurst.

Oscar Derkx in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

Oscar Derkx, a comic actor of finesse and impeccable timing, is a charmer as the disconcertingly adorable Monty. The show doesn’t work if he isn’t disarming.

Monty’s grievances, and murderous campaign, begin when he finds out in a chance encounter with one of her friends (Ruth Alexander, riotously jaunty as Miss Shingle) that his mother was of noble birth, cruelly banished by the family when she ran off with a Castilian (and worse: a Castilian who was also a musician). And so the blood-letting begins. I’m very partial to the New York Times description from years ago that it’s as if Sweeney Todd were written by P.G. Wodehouse. Derkx delivers the very funny song Poison In My Pocket with a sense of discovery that will crack you up.

Sam Hutchings, Oscar Derkx, Sawyer Craig in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

Monty has not one but two love interests, a romantic complication which escalates as the death count rises along with his fortunes. And both women are perfectly cast in Martin’s production: Sam Hutchings as the sexy social-climbing vixen Sibella and Sawyer Craig as the sweetly daffy Phoebe D’Ysquith. Derkx knows exactly what to do with a romantic ballad. And both Hutchings and Craig are impressive singers, with contrasting soprano voices, the one floating pure musical theatre top notes, and the other trilling away operatically. Monty, Sibella, and Phoebe get a delish operetta trio, I’ve Decided To Marry You, staged as a farcical scene between two doors as Monty scrambles acrobatically to keep his squeezes apart.

Kudos to the ensemble — tourists, mourners, servants, cops — which includes both seasoned performers like Cathy Derkach (a riot as the snorting dragon Lady D’Asquith) and recent theatre school grads, all of whom tuck into the tone and style, both musical and spoken, with comic gravitas.

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

The music, played expertly by the first-rate seven-member pit band led by the invaluable musical director/ sound designer Simon Abbott, is complicated. Pederson sings intricately rhymed patter songs, and more Coward-ly musical provocations, in a range of crystalline blue-blood accents (the razzle-dazzle lyrics by Lutvak and Freedman are one of the delights of the evening). Pederson dances, he bends, he seems to change height, weight, and age at will … all at top speed. He exits as one outrageous D’Ysquith and enters, re-costumed and re-constituted, as another — a demented cleric, a fey beekeeper, a eugenicist body-builder in a pith helmet…. The blustering present Earl, Lord Adalburt D’Ysquith, is the most obnoxious of all. His song I Don’t Understand the Poor, complete with chorus (“to be so debased/ is in terrible taste….”) is G&S satire of the highest calibre.

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

One of my favourites, and it turns out one of the hardest to dispatch, is Hyacinth D’Ysquith, a career philanthropist/ narcissist, voraciously combing through the British Empire for a cause after her campaign on behalf of imbeciles and idiots goes bust. “We’ll find ourselves some lepers in the Punjab…”

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

But as a theatre lover, you may also bestow your particular favour on the family thespian Salomé D’Ysquith, in a hilariously disastrous performance as Hedda Gabler. Her exit proves fatal, a matter of real bullets in the stage gun. Killed, yes, as the culprit admits in his diary, before she could be slaughtered by the critics. The deaths and the death scenes stage managed by Monty are riotously à propos.

This elaborately daft material cries out for a creative hand in stage lunacy to match. Which is what it gets from the musical theatre-savvy director Martin. Sight gags abound, along with amusing tableaux. All this chipper death and destruction happens in a red-velvet curtain-draped vaudeville theatre within a theatre. The designer is Chelsea Payne Evason; the locale changes are assisted by projections. And speaking of changes, which in Pederson’s case happen at a hectic pace, everything is assisted by Lieke Den Bakker’s profusion of apt and witty costumes. The nuttiness knows no bounds.

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder is the finale (and most ambitious) production of Grindstone’s enterprising premiere mainstage season of full-sized musicals, produced on a scale at the Orange Hub. And they’re killin’ it with this therapeutic comic mayhem. Give your laugh muscles a work-out before they atrophy, times being what they are.

REVIEW

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder

Theatre: Grindstone

Written by: Robert L. Freedman (book) and Steven Lutvak (music), Freedman and Lutvak (lyrics)

Directed by: Byron Martin

Starring: Ron Pederson, Oscar Derkx, Sam Hutchings, Sawyer Craig, Ruth Alexander, Aniqa Charania, Cathy Derkach, David Michael Juma, Max Fingerote, Tana Bumhira, Zakary Matsuba

Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.

Running: through June 1

Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca

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Getting the band back together. Cardiac Theatre is back! KaldrSaga: a new queer, old Norse cabaret, a preview

Posted on May 22, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Coming together to tell stories (and hear them). It’s what people do; it’s what people have always done; it’s what people will keep doing.

Call that urge a tradition. Or a compulsion. At heart, Cardiac Theatre’s  KaldrSaga: a new queer, old Norse cabaret, opening Friday in a new old place, is a playful homage to that evergreen impulse. And it marks the return to action of nine-year-old Cardiac since their massive Alberta Queer Calendar Project, which in undertook 13 podcast releases of new plays by queer Alberta artists in 2020-2021.

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The beautifully reno’ed venue, airy, wood-trimmed, lined with original brick, is the ArtsHub Ortona in the river valley with a story of its own — once an armoury and in its time a home for naval reservists, Hudson’s Bay offices, a butter company headquarters … more recently artist studios of every stripe, and more recently still, performance spaces. The location is liminal. “It’s not downtown and it’s not Strathcona,” as playwright Harley Howard-Morison points out. “We’ve opened a magic portal,” laughs director Sarah J Culkin. “A gathering place. With lots of parking.”

That’s where a pair of queer storytellers ply their trade, which as Culkin says, “depends on the audience being there for the story to function, in the same way people did in 600 BCE.” Kaldr and Saga (Graham Mothersill and Michelle Diaz) tap the vein of Norse mythology, a bizarre and wonderful repository of vigorous heavy-hitter characters and oddball minor players, who change genders not to mention species, and trample norms, pretty much at will.

The last time we saw them, in 2019, the two friends Kaldr and Saga were having one of their yearly catch-up sessions in a bistro pub. The Almanac is no more. And neither, as Howard-Morison explains, is the friendship. In some ways, the new cabaret is “a revision, in some ways a sequel, though you don’t need to have seen the first (Culkin didn’t)…. It’s a deeper exploration of what I wanted to do.”

“It’s about a friendship between the storytellers, where they’re at. They’ve had a massive falling-out; they’re ex-best friends. And this is Kaldr coming back and saying ‘let’s give it another go’.” Culkin, a specialist in new work (Brick Shithouse, Re:Connect, In My Own Little Corner, the Nextfest Smut niteclubs), describes the estrangement as Kaldr “going off, doing greatest hits. A bit commercial, TikTok, social media…. Meanwhile Saga’s been doing a PhD in nihilism.”

“This is watching two people who are a bit older trying to re-negotiate a former friendship that is not a romantic relationship. So interesting and beautiful.” It’s not familiar relationship scenarios, “the ones we’ve seen before, the break-up, the divorce, the trying to get back together after a break-up….  This is ‘what does it mean to lose a best friend?’”

Says Howard-Morison, “we don’t have as many touch points for that, for getting back a friend.” And, adds Culkin, “exploring the more specifics of queer friendship…. Those relationships can become a lot more important when you’re not in a position to feel comfortable with your family, or with yourself in every situation. This is ‘chosen family’. The loss is felt more acutely and the stakes of repair are a lot higher.”

“It’s not a partner, and it’s not a parent … and not relationships lost through the process of coming out.” Howard-Morison laughs, “is a rom-com for a friend a platonic-com?”

Kaldr is hot to “get the band back together, set up a night of storytelling, get those juices flowing, and maybe help repair the relationship,” he says. The first part of KaldrSaga is “a camp-y cowboy origin story, a folk ballad, silly, with a dozen characters in the West.” And, says Culkin, “a flurry of superficially addressed western tropes.”

Howard-Morison, the former managing director of Theatre Network, is not without legit cowboy cred himself. He grew up outside Calgary “with earnest ranch-y folk who don’t really appreciate camp ranch that much,” as he says cheerfully. Speaking as we are of unusual origin stories, how many “two-buckle” 4-H Club cattle champions” are there in theatre, after all? The protagonist of his play Redd Meats, set in the Alberta hamlet of Redd (workshopped at Script Salon in 2023) is a student vet and part-time butcher.

“As a queer person you grow up in a world, and you inhabit a world. And I kept them quite separate. Now that I’m in my 30s, all the worlds are colliding, and I’m in a place to write the camp-y ranch story and for that to be OK.”

Cowboy and Norse mythology mash up nicely, say Howard-Morison and Culkin. How about Hervör, a female warrior with an impressive skill set, who dressed like a man to reclaim her father’s cursed sword from his grave? How about the blood content of “the Mead of Poetry,” the magical elixir the knowledge-seeker Odin is after. Making Bud Light look particularly lame, it gives poets their special power. In KaldrSaga you get archetypes with roots in both Norse and Wild West Alberta mythology — “the wanderer, the father figure, the bandit, gunslinger, the mysterious stranger with magical power …” Culkin says.

The second part of KaldrSaga, is a “drag musical theatre revue” inspired by that time Thor, a Norse star, wore a dress to a wedding in order to get his famous hammer back. Thor’s son Mosey, a name meaning brave, is looking to go into musical theatre studies instead of, you know, war.

And part three, as Howard-Morison and Culkin describe, is a kind of found-object puppetry extravaganza. It’s inspired by a particularly gruesome Norse incident in which one of the kids of shape-shifter Loki selflessly loses a hand, on purpose, to the ferocious wolf Fenrir.

Howard-Morison calls the show “a triathlon” for actors Mothersill and Diaz. They play Kaldr and Saga, who play characters, who play characters in drag. They’re wearing “hats on hats,” says Culkin, “sometimes nine hats deep. And we’re having a lot of fun.” Demanding, strenuous fun, to be sure: acting, singing, dancing, comedy, puppetry. Which is one reason Cardiac is trying an unorthodox performance schedule, three Friday through Sunday weekends, so the actors can have a breather.

“It’s a silly, irreverent look at how we tell stories — a cowboy ballad, a drag musical revue, and object puppetry story,” says Howard-Morison of his re-imagined cabaret. “A challenge,” Culkin beams. But such a juicy one!”

And what makes it particularly delightful, to a team that is almost entirely queer, is that “it’s fun. It’s a queer story that isn’t trying to prove anything. We’re not defining anything. We’re not making an argument for or against anything. We’re just a bunch of gay people making a little play,” says Culkin.

These days “queer people in Alberta much less queer artists (pause), well, it’s a bit of a minefield right now,” they say. “So it’s such a relief to me that we’re creating in the positive; we’re not reacting. We’re moving toward what we find exciting, not against what we find scary and upsetting…. You need both; you need a counterpoint. But what if you made a piece about how being a queer person was just kind of awesome?”

PREVIEW

KaldrSaga: a new queer, old Norse cabaret

Theatre: Cardiac

Written by: Harley Howard-Morison

Directed by: Sarah J Culkin

Where: ArtsHub Ortona, 9722 102 St.

Running: Friday through June 8, Fridays through Sundays

Tickets: cardiactheatre.ca

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A serial killer and his victims hanging out together at Grindstone: A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder

Posted on May 21, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Oscar Derkx and Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Why are all the D’Ysquiths dying?”

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That’s what an ingenuous graveside corps of singing mourners wonders in a funny number in the big, killer musical comedy opening Friday in a Grindstone Theatre ‘Mainstage Series’ production at the Orange Hub.

In A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, the filthy-rich bluebloods are dropping like flies. Mainly because Monty Navaro, a distant and disinherited D’Ysquith living in penury, is knocking them off, one after another, all the family members who stand between him and becoming the ninth Earl of Highhurst.

The determined Monty has a long line of heirs to dispatch en route to the title. And here’s a big part of the fun of the zany, effervescent Tony-winning 2013 Broadway musical adapted from the same 1907 novel (Roy Horniman’s Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal) that inspired the 1949 Alec Guinness film Kind Hearts and Coronets: all the doomed D’Ysquiths, every age and gender, are played by one extremely busy actor.

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

In Byron Martin’s production, he’s actor/playwright/improv comedy star Ron Pederson. He’s back in his home town from Toronto to die in creative ways, bumped off by the “very charming serial killer” played by Oscar Derkx. The latter was most recently seen by Edmonton audiences from his double-duty as Flute the bellows mender and rock band musician in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the ‘70s musical at the Citadel,

We caught up with the murderer and his victims, happily ensconced in rehearsals for Martin’s production, the biggest yet for Grindstone with a cast of 11 and live band of seven led by musical director Simon Abbott. Both actors were lured by the unusual attractions of the musical by Robert L. Freedman (book) and Steven Lutvak (music).

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

“It’s a BIG show, bigger than it looks on the page, chock full of music, a zillion scenes…. And I’m half the cast for gawd’s sake,” Pederson jokes, about his nine-character assignment, a non-pareil quick-change challenge. “The style and size of it are so fun…. There’s definitely something operetta, something English music hall, about it. A parody, yes, and an homage.”

“Huge, and it moves very quickly,” says Derkx. “I remember seeing a number at the Tonys (when A Gentleman’s Guide won four), thinking OMG, what is this show? I want to be in this show! I like musicals but don’t often have that response…. This was such high stakes, so funny, ridiculous, kind of sexy.”

In a musical theatre landscape dominated by pop scores, A Gentleman’s Guide stands apart. And Pederson and Derkx, musical connoisseurs both, have appreciated that. “This feels so different,” says the latter. “I find it refreshing on the ear to go back to a more classical sound.”

“It references Gilbert and Sullivan, the call and response from the ensemble, with a modern flair that gives it an extra sauciness,” says Derkx. “Lots of difficult little chromatic runs and crunchy harmonies. When I’m  listening to some of the work the ensemble does in those harmony lines, it feels like they’re pulling notes out of thin air! So impressive.”

Pederson finds a point of comparison in the 1978 Cy Coleman musical On The Twentieth Century, for the “outsized feel to it. The emotions are high. There’s melodrama. All that is fun for the actors.” And so is the high-speed craziness of his own multiple roles. “Nine characters! And most of them have a musical number…. Rehearsals are exhausting! I keep going ‘O great, we finished that number, I wonder what’s next’. And … it’s me! I’m up again!” He laughs.

Pederson describes the show, including its song lyrics, as “very language-forward, florid and fluid…. I have a couple of patter songs, a little ballad,” and more more more. “Very tricky complex music. All new to me, and really demanding, really fun.”

“The guy I play the most,” he says, is “the current Earl, Adalbert D’Ysquith, an aggressive bully” and the last of Monty’s murderous rampage through his relatives. “Some of them are more morally questionable than others.”

Derkx echoes that thought. “How do we feel about a despicable act when it’s done to a despicable person? Do we forgive Monty for murdering all these people because these people are SO awful? Or do we feel a bit conflicted? That’s the fun I’m looking forward to having with the audience. Are you with me still, still cheering for me after I’ve killed five people, six…? And I kill them in pretty awful ways. Have you thought much about being stung to death by bees?”

Oscar Derkx and Sawyer Craig in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

The fun of Monty, Derkx is finding, is that he’s so “wide-eyed, boyish and innocent. A sweet boy, asking about the family but thinking ‘how are you going to die?’”

Pederson arrives back in Edmonton after a no-pause year that has included the musical Beauty and the Beast at Western Canada Theatre n Kamloops, an Ottawa run of Flop! the improvised musical he and Ashley Botting brought to Rapid Fire Theatre in 2024. And in addition to a packed schedule of teaching improv workshops, he toured with the Toronto Young People’s Theatre production of The Darkest Dark, a stage adaptation of the kids book by astronaut Chris Hadfield.

The enterprising Pederson commissioned Teatro Live! playwright Stewart Lemoine to write him a solo piece, Or You Can Do Nothing, with the idea of “shopping it around and taking it places.” Jackie Maxwell, one of the country’s premium theatre artists, directed the one-night run. And bookings are starting, in Ontario in 2026. A Edmonton run? “Probably.” As Pederson describes, “it seems so simple and adds up to beautiful things…. Comic but in the vein of The Exquisite Hour.”

And here’s more news, people. Mark Meer and Jacob Banigan will be short Pederson for the annual Gordon’s Big Bald Head Fringe run improvising any title in that capacious program. He’ll be in Vancouver, playing the blackmailing banker Krogstad in the Arts Club production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. “And there’s not a joke in that play,” he laughs. “It’s going to be like a holiday!”

Oscar Derkx in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

As speaking as we are of busy-ness, and complicated schedules, Derkx and his theatre artist wife Gianna Vacirca are new parents. Their eight-month son Remy hung out at Midsummer Night’s Dream rehearsals at the Citadel, where they both were working, Derkx in the cast, and Vacirca as the choreographer. And then they went to Europe to introduce Remy to Derkx’s Dutch relatives in Eindhoven in the Netherlands and Vacirca’s Italian relatives in Milan and Rome.

After Gentleman’s Guide, Edmonton audiences will see Derkx, a sometime Teatro leading man,  in Teatro’s The Odd Couple in July. And then, in September, “another big challenge” for guitar chops honed in the Beatles’ As You Like It at the Citadel, and further still in Dream. Derkx is understudying both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel in the fall tribute show at the Mayfield. “I love those guys! That folky magical sound, that thumping finger-style guitar behind their vocals.”

Aniqa Charania in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

Meanwhile, there’s a big juicy Broadway musical. As usual with Grindstone, Martin, has assembled a mixture of veterans like Cathy Derkach and Ruth Alexander, and newcomers, recent theatre school grads. “Terrific singers,” says Pederson of Martin’s cast. “I really like Byron’s gumption, his derring-do,” he says, summoning a word that would have delighted G&S. “Very Edmonton I think….”

 

PREVIEW

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder

Theatre: Grindstone

Written by: Robert L. Freedman (book) and Steven Lutvak (music), Freedman and Lutvak (lyrics)

Directed by: Byron Martin

Starring: Ron Pederson, Oscar Derkx, Sam Hutchings, Sawyer Craig, Ruth Alexander, Aniqa Charania, Cathy Derkach, David Michael Juma, Max Fingerote, Tana Bumhira, Zakary Matsuba

Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.

Running: Friday through June 1

Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca

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Backyard curtain time: Theatre Yes brings it home with The Doorstep Plays

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Meegan Sweet,, Sophie May Healey, Julia Van Dam in Caw CAW!, one of The Doorstep Plays, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The ancient contract between The People and The Theatre gets an intriguing clause, and the personal touch, in the latest venture by the ever-adventurous Theatre Yes. 

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With The Doorstep Plays, they bring the theatre to you homegrown: new Canadian plays, three of them, by emerging Edmonton playwrights. Curtain time happens right in your own backyard — on your lawn, on your deck, next to your shrubbery of choice. All you have to do, besides invite your friends (or not), is stay home, and pull up a lawn chair. And theatre will come to you, in this original outreach initiative by Theatre Yes producer Monica Gate.

Which is what we got the chance to do one afternoon this past weekend. We saw a trio of young actors — Meegan Sweet, Sophie May Healey, Julia Van Dam — dig into three different roles in three very different 20-minute plays, especially conceived for planting in back yards by three up-and-coming playwrights. They’re threaded together artfully by director Brett Dahl so they slide into each other, with minimal props edited for the great outdoors: a planter, a little tent, an axe, a portable barbecue, backpacks.

Common to the three short plays, different though they are, is the idea of hidden relationships, secrets revealed gradually and without exposition — not easy, to say the least, in a 20-minute play. It’s a challenging assignment, both in the writing and the acting. And I don’t want to spoil your fun in discovery, so a little vagueness from me is required.  

In the opener, Caw CAW! by Mhairi Berg, three girls are out camping. And you gather, from the banter-with-edges, that they’re not friends exactly, but joined in an expedition designed to exact responsibility from a guy who’s fed each of them a line of male bullshit. Is it re-education? Revenge? The leader, the one with the playbook (Sweet), attends to the plan, briskly and with a measure of sardonic exasperation. And the tension between girl solidarity and traumatic personal experience causes stress fractures in the female expeditionary force.

Julia Van Dam and Sophie May Healey in Squirm, one of The Doorstep Plays, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

Autumn Strom’s mysterious Squirm starts with two girls (Healey and Van Dam) meeting n a garden. You wonder about their history; it’s an awkward reunion. And there’s a startling moment when the play takes a turn into the mythology of magical transformation.

The third, and funniest of the three pieces, is Sebastian Ley’s War!. It takes its title into a homeowner’s association meeting — along with the worldly insight that under the cheery cordiality of the ‘hood, the most inflammatory territorial impulses are tinder waiting for a match. That fire starter would be the arrival of a relative newcomer.

We’re at the meeting, ringside, and we get to vote. Times being what they are, it’s hard not to detect a whiff of topical political satire in this smart little play about power grabs, voter manipulation, domestic division, where every little thing from bird feeders to parking spots is a declaration of hostility. Van Dam has a riot as the beaming HOA president.

The cast, playwrights, and creative team of The Doorstep Plays, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Theatre Yes has a history of taking theatre into unexpected places — a theatre loading dock, urban elevators, a warehouse, an alternative music venue, the basement of a downtown building none of us had heard of before. And now … your place. In addition to bringing theatre to you on location, The Doorstep Plays is an original venture into showcasing emerging Edmonton playwrights, in a way that’s close at hand. All three plays are neatly configured by dexterous playwrights, and eminently discussable.

The BYOV (be-your-own-venue) experience can be yours, for a flat fee ($150). You can handpick the guest list: as many or as few friends, relatives, cohorts as you like. And hey, you could meet your own neighbours.

REVIEW

The Doorstep Plays

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Written by: Mhairi Berg, Sebastian Ley, Autumn Strom

Mentor and dramaturg: Monica Gate and Beth Graham

Produced by: Monica Gate

Directed by: Brett Dahl

Starring: Sophie May Healey, Meegan Sweet, Julia Van Dam

Where: your backyard

Running: May 20 to June 1

Further information and full schedule: theatreyes.com

Booking: email producer @theatreyes.com

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Horseplay, an irresistible new play about a bond beyond the traces, at Workshop West. A review

Posted on May 17, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Alexander Ariate as Horse, Lee Boyes as Jacques in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifousl Set by Beyata Hackborn, lighting by Sarah Karpyshin

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Lee Boyes and Alexander Ariate in Horseplay, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

There’s a bright buoyant sparkle to Horseplay, the funny, dreamy, heart-breaker of a season-ender at Workshop West. It’s a new play, about things like friendship and ambition, success and sacrifice, by a young theatre artist whose work you will want to follow from now on: Métis actor/playwright Kole Durnford, who’s originally from Stony Plain.

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Horseplay’s feet, and hooves, are on the grass. Its heart, available for the breaking, is in the air. And, in Heather Inglis’s premiere production it happens under a stunning spiral of tiny flying horses (designer Beyata Hackborn), glowingly lighted by Sarah Karpyshin. As Horse, wonderfully played by Alexander Ariate, says from time to time, “to run is to fly.” That’s already an imaginative leap, beyond the actor perpetually in motion — and there will be more.

Horse’s best friend in the world is jockey Jacques (Lee Boyes, a fine performance too). We meet the former the moment we enter the theatre. He’s already there, just hanging out on grass, amusingly just the way horses do. He’s doing nothing — except having bursts of horse-ly energy, being happy,  and engaging in pleasant repartee with us. You know, the way horses do.

Alexander Ariate and Lee Boyes in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

As Horseplay starts — it kind of slides into starting, as signalled by Horse — he and Jacques are together, being jocular (sorry, jock-ular) and sharing carrots. You know, the the way friends do. With the teasing, amiable friends’ banter about playing games with built-in dares, having crushes and denying them, getting a kick out of their shared affection for horse puns. Has anyone ever truly understood “looking a gift horse in the mouth”? Try explaining it. Horse, for one, is baffled.

Durnford’s writing has a clever crackle to it. It’s fun. And that fun is enhanced in performance by the amusement of the characters, who crack each other up.

Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

Horse has blown off the afternoon’s training in order to stand by the fence, and discuss grass with the fetching show horse in the next field. What does a crush mean, Horse wants to know. What does it feel like to be in love? Is it “meeting someone who loves grass as much as I do?” Jacques tries to explain.“You have to ask her out,” he prompts. “I just can’t,” says Horse, as they jockey around the subject of dating.

They’re brothers, says Horse. “Brothers from another mother,” Jacques amends. Their rapport in motion is captured, with ingenuity, in Amber Borotsik’s outstanding choreography for the pair. They move together in an exhilarating kind of horse ballet; it exudes joyfulness in the interlocking performances. You want them to dance together forever. And while Horse acknowledges that we’re in “an alternative reality” in the free-floating meta-framework of the play — how do horses hang onto monkey bars? with their hands, of course — he assumes that’s true.

But friendship will come under duress from worldly pressures. Horse’s certainty that “we get to stay together forever” gets squeezed by … money. As the bearer of news from the human sphere, which seems always to be about competition and winning, Jacques reluctantly explains “that’s not how the world works.” It’s mere weeks till the big race. And if they don’t start winning, Horse will be sold. There will be “no more whimsical joyful dancing between scenes…. We don’t have time to break the fourth wall.”

If pursuing a dream, your personal Kentucky Derby, means sacrificing something crucial to best-friendship, it had better be worth it. The stakes keep getting raised, in a way that never seems forced, always natural, in the play. Can love withstand relentless pressure? Horseplay horses around with questions like that, in a wistful, heart-tugging way that includes ketamine-fuelled dream sequences. And, anchored to our affection for Horse — and the innocence, charm, and commitment of Ariate’s wide-eyed, exuberantly physical performance — it cuts to the chase. “Maybe we should just enjoy what we have…. Hold your horse.”

In its own cantering off-centre way, Horseplay is a coming-of-age play, with the sadness that implies. Jacques tries to ease Horse into the adult human world of success and money, and inevitable disconnection. “I no longer want to grow up,” Horse says, in a moment that makes your eyes water. “It’s hard to be grown up and know the world.”

Hard and getting harder all the time. An irresistible play about love, friendship, dreams, and a bond beyond the traces is something to cherish.

Meet playwright Kole Durnford in this 12thnight.ca preview.

REVIEW

Horseplay

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Kole Durnford

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Alexander Ariate, Lee Boyes

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through June 1

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will, suggested price $40).

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The self in a bind: the RISER New Works Festival opens with Calla Wright’s Binding

Posted on May 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Calla Wright in Binding, RISER New Works Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

New this year the RISER New Works Festival began its weekend of performances and workshops last night with a work-in-progress production of a challenging and playful one-human many-puppet show.

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Destined for Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival in 2026, Calla Wright’s Binding is built on a fraught, conflicted relationship. Cal, the non-binary person we meet onstage, can’t happily or sustainably live with parts of their anatomy that send the wrong identity markers to their bearer, and to the world. As the title suggests, it’s their boobs. They undermine the self, its sense and stability. And this show is an encounter, a challenging, witty confrontation between these problematic parties and Cal. It’s a conversation, and the boobs are articulate, to say the least, and not just size large smart-asses, in sticking up for themselves.

Binding by Calla Wright, RISER New Works Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective

At the moment, the production, directed by Sarah Emslie, seems to be experimenting with its theatrical flourishes of the piece, the outsized props of the trans experience, all retrieved, amusingly, from A Closet. Wright is a smart writer, and their sheer unflinching honesty will knock you back in your seat. There are more performances of Binding this weekend, and stay tuned for the full production at Expanse.

RISER is all about supporting and mentoring indie artists and producers. And this new festival, the brainchild of Common Ground Arts Society, has had he bright idea of a producer’s lab. It taps the resources of the community, in an initiative that sets up one-on-one meetings with this theatre town’s expert professionals.

Details, and the full schedule of the four festival shows, are up on the Common Ground Arts Society website. And you can have a look at 12thnight’s preview interview with Common Ground’s  executive producer Mac Brock here. 

RISER New Works Festival runs through Sunday at the Backstage Theatre (Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.).    

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A horse named Horse, a jockey named Jacques: Kole Durnford’s Horseplay premieres at Workshop West

Posted on May 15, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the new Canadian play that premieres this week, on the gallop at Workshop West, we meet two best friends, as close as brothers, closer maybe. At heart these two love nothing better than hanging out together, having fun. One is a horse (named Horse); one is a jockey (named Jacques).

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And then in Horseplay, by actor/playwright Kole Durnford, pressure is applied by the world, and the stakes of love and friendship are raised by the dream of success. “They’re trying to win the Kentucky Derby,” says Durnford of his unusual pair of dreamer buddies. “And they have to win in order to keep Horse around. Which puts a big strain on their relationship.”

A Métis artist originally from Stony Plain, Durnford, who’s thoughtful and funny in conversation, traces Horseplay back to an unexpected starting gate in 2024: a 24-hour playwriting contest at the Toronto Fringe, and the idea of “a horse who breaks his leg.”

Horseplay playwright Kole Durnford, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo supplied

It was right after a third production in 2023 of his first play ECHO — a reimagining of the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus — at Toronto’s Next Stage Festival. That production, directed by Durnford’s best friend Robert Morrison, a theatre school classmate at TMU (Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly Ryerson), came loaded with stress for the pair. “It felt like a really big deal, my biggest playwriting thing I’d done, a big step for the whole team…. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves,” says Durnford, “and I was extremely burnt out.”

“I wanted some low-stakes fun,” he says, acknowledging with a laugh that 24-hour playwriting contests wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of an antidote to stress. “I knew I had to unpack what my last artistic experience was.” At some point in that 24 hours, Horseplay “turned into this piece about me and my best friend and main creative collaborator,” muses Durnford. “A piece about us following our dreams , trying for success, feeling the pressures of the world,  finding a career doing something you love.”

“And it’s also about brotherhood. My friend Robert is my brother in a lot of ways…. We are family. All I kept coming back to as I was writing Horseplay was how much I love my friend.”

He remembers the escalating pressures of working on ECHO for its Next Stage opening night. “We began to lose sight of why we were doing it in the first place…. When you’re an artist, you never do (art) — or at least I think it’s wrong to do it — for success. You have to do it because you love the work and you love the community it creates. And I think I lost sight of that.”

Lee Boyes and Alexander Ariate in Horseplay, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

“I feel like Horseplay was my desire to return to the reason I wanted to make art,” Durnford says. “The reason I cared, and tried to do this … and (laughter) become a broke person.” He’d set aside the “ultra-serious thriller” he’d been struggling with for two years for a play that happened in a 24-hour burst of creative energy. “Objectively,” he says of Horseplay, “it’s so much better. In every single way.”

Durnford describes growing up on an acreage outside Stony Plain — he went to Blueberry school “which is a real place,” he laughs — as a kid who didn’t fit in with the male sensibility of the community. “It was so terrible for me; I hated it so much…. I was a sensitive person; I didn’t understand masculinity in a lot of ways; I didn’t understand why all these people around me pretended not to feel their emotions, care about things. I really struggled.”

By the time he Durnford was in Grade 8, his parents rescued him from Blueberry. Vic, the arts school in Edmonton, was his salvation. “My parents drove me to Spruce Grove and I caught the bus every day….  And it was a game-changer for me!” He’d found his people, and himself. “I’m a person who cares and wants to devote time in my life to feeling my emotions and thinking about the world. And I feel that carries through Horseplay in some ways.”

Horse “doesn’t understand the constraints of the human world. He doesn’t know what money is. Or why best friends don’t spend their whole lives together. Or why you’d go off and get married or anything like that.”

Durnford, who’s in his mid-20s, went to TMU (he graduated in 2022) as an actor. “But I always deep down thought I should be a writer/ director,” he thinks now. It started at Vic, where playwright/director Vern Thiessen ran a program called Theatre Blitz, “a sort of after-school writing club.” Durnford and his 16-year-old classmates wrote plays and read them. “ I’m so lucky to have gotten some of the early writing out of my system,” he thinks. “An early getting-the- kinks-out….”

He works as an actor in Toronto, where he lives at least for the time being, with reservations about “the hustle culture” there. His first Dora Award nomination in 2022 was for Mixtape Productions’ “super-fun camp new musical” Killing Time: A Game Show Musical. Its playfulness and lightness of touch have been “a huge inspiration.” The second, an ensemble nomination in 2023, was for Niizh at Native Earth, “an Indigenous coming-of-age romance” as he describes. Both were happy experiences.

But it’s revealing that one of most memorable classes for Durnford at TMU theatre school was “creative performance studies,” devising theatre in tandem with dancers. And the COVID shutdown year, his third at university, in which acting classes suddenly got transferred to digital platforms — “an online version of The Three Sisters?” he laughs an eye-roll of a laugh — was an impetus to “focus on all the (non-acting) opportunities I had, to direct a film, or write…. I’m honestly grateful. That year forced me to think about my artistry beyond acting.”

Durnford the playwright came fully into being in the course of that year. ECHO happened right after that (it played the Edmonton Fringe in 2022), then Horseplay. Horse and Jacques caught the eye of Workshop West’s artistic director Heather Inglis and resident dramaturg Darrin Hagen when he submitted the script to the theatre’s play reading service. And he’s so delighted with Inglis’s cast, Alexander Ariate and Lee Boyes, that he can’t imagine being in the play himself.

He credits the Edmonton Fringe with underlining the essence of theatre, its live-ness, a quality he’s often found missing in Toronto. “If you don’t give people a reason to be there, live, with you, no one cares….”

“I feel like the Edmonton Fringe is my home base,” he says. “I think when I wrote Horseplay I wanted to write something that’s like an 11 p.m. Fringe show. Very weird and also very alive.”

PREVIEW

Horseplay

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Kole Durnford

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Alexander Ariate, Lee Boyes

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Friday through June 1

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will, suggested price $40).

  

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Hot theatre choices on Edmonton stages for your long weekend, a 12thnight survey

Posted on May 14, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Horseplay image by Dave DeGagné, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You don’t lack for choices in Edmonton theatre as the long weekend approaches (Queen Victoria wouldn’t have it any other way). Consider some of your options: the premiere of a new Canadian play with a whimsical and profound concept; one of the great plays of the 20th century produced by a new Edmonton theatre company. Plus the continuation of a funny Canadian comedy with a heartwarming undercurrent, and a Canadian adaptation of a 19th century classic novel … and more.

Randy Brososky as Salieri in Amadeus, Initium Theatre in partnership with Psychopomp Theatre. Photo siupplied

•Edmonton’s newest theatre company, Initium Theatre, introduces itself with Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, in collaboration with another indie, Psychopomp Theatre. At the centre of the 1979 play, Shaffer’s most popular, is the 18th century career composer Antonio Salieri, whose star in a music-centric culture (and place in history) is eclipsed forever by a boorish young genius named … Mozart. Salieri, waging a war of vengeance against his divinely gifted rival, is a figure with tragic dimensions. In Jon Shields’ production, this great plum role is taken by Randy Brososky, with Drake Seipert as the upstart Wolfgang and Cassie Hyman as Mozart’s pert wife Constanze. Amadeus runs through Thursday at Campus Saint-Jean (8406 91 St). And the music is sure to be good! Tickets: showpass.com.

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Horseplay playwright Kole Durnford, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo supplied

•At Workshop West, the best-friendship of a horse named Horse and a jockey named Jacques, “bonded like brothers,” is the point at which Horseplay saddles up. The new play by the young actor/playwright Kole Durnford, a Métis artist originally from Stony Plain, premieres Friday in a Heather Inglis production that stars Alexander Ariate and Lee Boyes. It runs through June 1 at the Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd. Tickets: workshopwest.org. Stay tuned for a 12thnight interview with the playwright, coming up shortly.

•In Where You Are, the season-ender at Shadow Theatre, we meet a family with dark (and dark-ish) secrets roiling beneath the tranquil comic surfaces of retirement. The comedy by Canadian playwright Kristen Da Silva has a fulsome measure of funny lines, and takes a turn into heart-warming, and tragic, in Act II. You’ll laugh and possibly cry. John Hudson’s production, led by Coralie Cairns and Davina Stewart, with a delightful performance by Nikki Hulowski as a daughter with problems of her own, runs through Sunday at the Varscona. Take a gander at the 12thnight review. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

•Little Women, the evergreen, much-adapted 19th century Louisa May Scott novel, taken off the page and onto the stage by Canadian playwright Jordi Mand, continues its run (through May 25) at the Citadel. It’s a (very) faithful adaptation, a series of book highlights more than a play, delivered by Jenna Rodgers’ excellent cast led by Hayley Moorhouse, Christina Nguyen, Donna Leny Hansen and Erin Pettifor, with Nadien Chu as Marmee. Have a peek at the full 12thnight review. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.

Kory Fulton, Niko Combitsis, William Lincoln, Devon Brayne in Jersey Boys, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•At the Mayfield, release your inner Sherreeeeeee, as Jersey Boys continues, with its dramatic story of the rise and fall of the pop band The Four Seasons  — and dozens of their ridiculously contagious hit songs. It continues through June 8. The 12thnight review is here. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051.

   

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The Doorstep Plays: showtime for emerging playwrights in your own backyard

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Make yourself at home, people; you’re already at the theatre. All you have to do is step outside your door, and it’s showtime in your own personal venue.

Theatre Yes, specialists in theatre that happens in unusual configurations in unusual places, will bring three new 20-minute Canadian plays, by a trio of up-and-coming playwrights, to you — on location, at your place May 20 to June 1. The Doorstep Plays are custom-tailored for your own backyard.

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For a flat $150 fee, “you can invite as many people as you want. The Doorstep Plays can be just for you and your partner. Or if you want to have a whole garden party, you can,” says the ebullient Theatre Yes resident producer Monica Gate. “We don’t care! It’s a unique experience to each yard…. The audience has much impact on how the story is told as the actors do.”

Gate is, I venture to say, the only theatre producer in town who hears advance commentary from audiences like “I’ve prepared my deck!” or “I’ve picked up all my dog poop!” or “I’ve got a reverse-pie lot.” She says “it’s pretty endearing to see how excited people are.”

Each performance is BYOC (bring your own chair). “We don’t supply lawn chairs,” says Gate. “OR you can do ‘standing room only’, maybe leaning on your neighbour’s fence,” says veteran playwright Beth Graham, Gate’s partner in curating the submissions, mentoring the creative team and dramaturging the new Doorstep pieces by Mhairi Berg (Caw CAW), Sebastian Ley (WAR!), and Autumn Strom (Squirm).

And, hey, “you don’t have to worry about parking,” as she points out.

For the audience The Doorstep Plays is an unusual adventure in theatre accessibility. As for emerging artists, Gate “pitched it (to Theatre Yes co-artistic director Max Rubin and Ruth Alexander) as a mentorship opportunity…. There’s no warmer audience than the people who invite actors to their home. It’s a great opportunity to put emerging artists in front of audiences who want their work. It’s a unique, special, intimate relationship when artists are invited to people’s homes.” It’s no accident that support for the new project came from the Edmonton Arts Council’s “connections and exchanges” program. This is all about community. As Gate says, “so many people post-COVID don’t even know their neighbours! This is a great way to meet them.”

Theatre Yes’s call for submissions last year was an invitation to “emerging playwrights,” a descriptive which, for Theatre Yes, has nothing to do with age.  As curators, Gate and Graham were looking for playwrights who’d never had a professional production of their work. They got 15 submissions in the first two weeks, and then months later, 20 more an hour before the midnight deadline one Sunday night. Thirty-five in all, and encompassing a wide variety of creative responses to the mandate: a 20-minute play with a cast of three actors.

“They were idea pitches,” says Graham. “Beth and I were looking for a proposal that made the best use of the space of a backyard,” says Gate. And choosing the trio for The Doorstep Plays, with a through-line that would link the three in some way as an evening’s entertainment, wasn’t easy.

“Three very different artists, three very different worlds,” says Graham of the Doorstep lineup, from an intimate two-hander to a wild and crazy HOA (Home Owners Association) meeting, to a three-girl set-up in the back country. And they’ve made very different imaginative uses of the backyard space.

Gate and Graham started working with the playwrights in October; there was a week-long workshop at the end of February. And the playwrights had till the end of April to make adjustments. Gate is still wonderstruck by “the level and the quality of the writing.”

The three actors — Sophie May Healey, Meegan Sweet, Julia Van Dam — have risen impressively to the challenge of learning three characters in three different plays, and in record time (a two-week rehearsal period). “It takes a certain kind of actor to engage in this way,” says Graham of the unique Doorstep challenges, which include a different performance space for every single performance.  “That’s the pain and the joy of it!” she smiles. “ Scary but an adrenaline kick.”

In addition to the emerging playwrights there’s an emerging director (Brett Dahl), and an emerging stage manager (Sarah Yorke) too. “I’m not an emerging producer,” says Gate of her career history on both sides of the Atlantic, which includes the extreme complications of community-building in Theatre Yes’s two-night sin which scenes were assigned to 20 Edmonton performance groups. “But this, The Doorstep Plays, were certainly an emerging dramaturgy project, to be working with playwrights in this way.”

She laughs. “I’ve just come to expect that working at Theatre Yes. Every project is something you’ve never done before. That’s the beauty of it…. Even if we do this again next year, it’s not going to be the same: three different stories and totally different challenges!”

Gate has her Doorstep mantra: “Go big or go to someone else’s home!”

PREVIEW

The Doorstep Plays

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Written by: Mhairi Berg, Sebastian Ley, Autumn Strom

Mentor and dramaturg: Monica Gate and Beth Graham

Produced by: Monica Gate

Directed by: Brett Dahl

Starring: Sophie May Healey, Meegan Sweet, Julia Van Dam

Where: your backyard

Running: May 20 to June 1

Further information and full schedule: theatreyes.com

Booking: email producer @theatreyes.com

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