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Todd Houseman and Ben Gorodetsky in Folk Lordz. Photo by Curtis Comeau.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The situation is … grave. And getting graver.

Yup, Gravity, “the cabaret of art and politics” that made its debut 18 months ago, has a lot to work with this time out. 

We’re at a moment in history, when time seems to be unspooling backwards into the 1950s at a great rate and chaos seems nigh. Monday night at Metro Cinema, Edmonton’s merry band of theatre, dance, comic improvisers, visual and spoken word artists, filmmakers step up to create new work that explores the situation. The “Trump Edition” of the cabaret is created jointly by Theatre Yes artistic producer Heather Inglis and Mike Hudema of Greenpeace Canada.

“We thought it might be a colossal disaster,” says Inglis cheerfully of Gravity’s debut edition, poised between the 2015 NDP Alberta win in the spring of 2015 and the Liberals’ federal win that fall.  “But 300 people showed up. It was an exciting evening!”

“How different everything feels, since that exceedingly optimistic fall,” she says. “The last few months have been quite devastating for people. We’re providing a platform for artists to express their reactions….”

“A great diversity of artists,” as Inglis puts it, stepped up to the call for “unabashedly opinionated responses.” So the political discussion will be far-ranging: immigration bans, disability access, gender fascism, the environment….

There are poets: the Somalian spoken word poet Ahmed Knowmadic, a winner in the recent Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, and Edmonton Youth Poet Laureate Nasra Adem, among them. There are theatre artists: Nicole Schafenaker and Kate Stashko have fashioned a dance piece about over-consumption. There’s an Adam Bentley film about Inuit culture, and a Danielle Peers film about disability and access. 

The Gravity lineup also includes dance/performance artist Julie Ferguson, burlesque queen Violette Coquette; Doctor Professor Lavernius Cumquat, a clown satirist of the commedia tradition; the all-female improv comedy troupe The Sphinxes.

Dustin Allen as Dr. Professor Lavernius Cumquat. Photo supplied.

The multi-instrumentalist aboriginal hip-hop artist Mitchmatic leads a dance party finale.

Returning is the highly original Folk Lordz duo of Todd Houseman and Ben Gorodetsy, Rapid Fire Theatre improv stars both, who specialize in pairing the Indigenous oral tradition of storytelling with Russian literary character drama.

“There’s a lot of fertile material at the moment,” says Gorodetsky drily. He and Houseman, who take cues from the audience for their unique Folk Lordz improv, are also the joint mc’s of the evening’s entertainment.  “We’ll be increasing tension, or releasing it — as necessary!”

PREVIEW

Gravity: A Cabaret of Art and Politics (Trump Edition)

Where: Metro Cinema at the Garneau Theatre, 8712 109 St.

Running: Monday 6:30 p.m.

Tickets: metrocinema.org or at the door

Bright Burning by Colleen Murphy, Studio Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Our big fat myth,” declares Colleen Murphy (whose declarations tend to have a combustible edge to them) “is that we’re a classless society.”

“The tremendous gap between the wealthy and the working poor, and the rage beneath”: there’s the tinder for Bright Burning, the new Murphy play that ignites Thursday at Studio Theatre. It was commissioned, and custom-made, for the U of A’s graduating actors, all 12 of them, the grand finale of Murphy’s three-year Lee Playwright-in-Residence appointment.

Playing with fire isn’t a wild departure in the career of the Toronto-based star Canadian playwright/filmmaker. Murphy won the second of her Governor General’s Awards this past year for the fearless and disturbing Pig Girl, provoked by the grisly career of serial killer Robert Pickton.  The first, in 2006, was for December Man, which explored the fall-out of another horrific burst of violence, the 1989 shooting massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.

Bright Burning, which arrives on the Timms Centre stage trailing warnings for “strong language, violence, sex, substance abuse,” has a similarly inflammatory sense of danger about it. “What planted the seed,” says Murphy over pre-rehearsal lunch this week, “is an article about so-called ‘ghost parties’: a bunch of young disenfranchised, marginalized kids who broke into a mansion, trashed the place and left… The police found them; the kids had taken selfies there.”

Bright Burning by Colleen Murphy, at Studio Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

In Bright Burning, a gang of six break into a posh suburban mansion with the idea of looting stuff to pay off a drug debt. Simmering resentment escalates into crazy violence that’s not without its black comedy. A meth dealer and her girlfriend arrive. A pizza delivery guy shows up. So do the daughters of the owners. “And the shit hits the   fan,” as Murphy says succinctly. “I took the idea and played it to its emotionally logical extreme….”

“I don’t know what people will do with that,” she shrugs cheerfully. That thought appeals to her. “For the first 10 minutes, the lights are off. We’re in the dark. There aren’t even any (stage) marks…. This is a show with a lot of physical challenges.”

“How would I break into a house? Well, I wouldn’t turn on the lights till I knew no one was there,” grins Murphy, noting mildly that “it’s not the most politically correct sort of play.” 

Which brings us to the chandelier. Murphy laughs. “If you’ve a got a chandelier, you’ve gotta swing on it!” And people do.

Murphy has particular praise for the dramaturgical expertise of director Jan Selman. The U of A’s department of drama “has thrown everything they have on this project: designers, staff, actors, a fight director! Amazing! I’m so lucky to be that playwright! (Laughs). So I just went whole hog!”  

Who doesn’t arrive? “Nobody plays ‘adults’, nobody plays cops,” says Murphy. The cast of 12, four times the size of the Canadian theatre average in this age of shrinkage, are all in the 10 to 25 age range. So are the individual characters Murphy has created for them. So “the challenge for the actors isn’t age,” she points out. It’s class. “It’s a challenge for theatre school actors to portray a different class.”

Bright Burning, Studio Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

“I know this world, and it’s not a polite world. The possibility of violence, drugs…. Like all people, in life and in drama, (the characters) are searching for meaning.”

playwright Colleen Murphy

She had her own challenges with Bright Burning, says a playwright for whom “challenge” has a come-hither allure. For one thing, in an era of small-cast theatre, it’s a rare opportunity for a playwright to populate the stage. “Twelve people, and you want each one to have a character to play who has an arc, a life in this story.”

“We should be peopling our stages!” says Murphy, who “loves conflict, action, tension” in theatre. And this is the season she demonstrates. In The Breathing Hole, premiering this summer at Stratford (directed, incidentally, by U of A grad Renata Arluk), a cast of 19 plays 48 characters — in a story Murphy describes as “the life and death of a 500-year-old polar bear.”

In her opera Oksana G, (with Edmonton-born composer Aaron Gervais) — which debuts in May at Toronto’s Tapestry Opera  — a cast of 16, singing in Russian, Ukrainian and English, brings to life the world of sex trafficking.

For Bright Burning  Murphy “set myself the challenge of writing a play in one scene, in real time, in the same location…. It was hard, in an exciting way, to keep track of where the hell everyone is at any moment.”

“Also, the story demanded it,” as Murphy points out. “Intermission wouldn’t make sense.”

If Murphy’s plays all have striking differences in form, it’s because of the particular demands of the particular story, she says. “The idea dictates the structure; I really pay attention to that! I have to be able to tell the story in a ruthless formal container; that’s part of the storytelling.” She assesses her new phrase, “ruthless formality,” and likes it. 

In Pig Girl, for example, time operates in two different configurations, both onstage simultaneously. Dying Girl’s fatal and heroic confrontation with Killer happens in real time; meanwhile, Sister and Police Officer experience time over nine years, a damning indictment of the official indifference to a horrifying accumulation of evidence.  “It came to me in that form,” says Murphy simply.

In December Man, time spools in reverse. When actors tried reading the play in forward chronology, as an experiment, “it didn’t allow the same insights,” says the playwright, who has a sturdy resistance to sentimentality.

In The Breathing Hole, set in the Far North, time is as epically expansive as the setting is compressed. As Murphy describes it, The whole play happens at the same breathing hole. In three acts, a “magical bear” takes the audience through a story that begins in 1534, with the arrival on these shores of Jacques Cartier, and ends on New Year’s Eve 2034, when ice has vanished from the earth. “A vast tragic arc,” as Murphy puts it, of our wilful inattention to climate change.

With its single scene, in real time, and the occupation of the stage by at least half the 12 characters at any given moment, Bright Burning offers a different kind of formal challenge.

If you saw Murphy’s Armstrong’s War at Theatre Network, where two characters develop a friendship without ever agreeing, you’ll know that her plays don’t stack the deck by presenting thoughts you already agree with. In Bright Burning, with its insights into the rage of the working poor, “there’s a fulsome argument, both sides,” says Murphy. “You watch the trains collide, head on….”

In her acceptance speech at the Governor General’s Award gala earlier this winter, Murphy cited the British playwright Edward Bond. “ ‘If you can’t face Hiroshima in the theatre, you eventually end up in Hiroshima itself’. I take that to mean if we cannot face our own catastrophes in the theatre to gain some insight into why they happened then we risk repeating them.”

It will be for the audience to react in “whatever way they react,” says Murphy of the new play. “Love it, be outraged by it…. All those reactions are valid. The audience can feel whatever they wish. It’s an experience.”

“It may not entirely surprise you that the Shakespeare tragedy Murphy has taken in hand to adapt as satire, for an upcoming production commissioned by Vancouver’s edgy Rumble Theatre, is his goriest, Titus Andronicus. In The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, five outcasts scramble to perform their own version of the Shakespeare play, and the audience is encourage to hurl buns at the stage at moments of high offence.

“I write theatre I’d like to see, and I’m not interested in theatre that just upholds whatever I already think…. Theatre isn’t about pleasing people; it’s about exciting people.”

PREVIEW

Bright Burning (I Hope My Heart Burns First)

Theatre: Studio Theatre

Written by: Colleen Murphy

Directed by: Jan Selman

Starring: the 2017 graduating class of BFA actors

Where: Timms Centre for the Arts, 112th St. and 87th Ave.

Running: through April 8

Tickets: 780-492-2495, ualberta.ca/artshows

Morgan Grau, Sarah Feutl, Graham Mothersill as the Furies in The Fall of the House of Atreus. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Three actors, 300 prop gags!”

“It’s either the highest of the lowbrow or the lowest of the highbrow. One or the other!” declares playwright Jessy Arden cheerily of The Fall of the House of Atreus, the high-speed, gleefully murderous 60-minute comic extravaganza she’s fashioned from Greek mythology.

Poisoning, strangling, backstabbing, usurpation, incest, cannibalism.… The gore-spattered five-generation epic cycle of the family that has pretty much nailed down dysfunction for all time is a generous vein of possibilities. And, lord, what these House of Atreus people can do with a grudge! You don’t have to be a Greek scholar to be impressed by the sheer creative permutations.

The Impossible Mongoose production directed by Corben Kushneryk dazzled small but enthusiastic audiences who ventured into a slightly off-centre Fringe venue in an ex-church last summer. There was lots of repeat business. It’s back this week, in collaboration with Blarney Productions, re-tuned for a run in a real theatre (The Backstage).

Arden and Kushneryk have added a scene or two (“the judgment of Paris is in!”), subtracted others. And Kushneryk has ramped up his striking chalky white-on-white design and reassembled the same agile trio of actors and rowdy ensemble of sock-puppets. “It’s not your great great great great grandmother’s Greek theatre,” grins Kushneryk. “A lot of murder in 60 minutes!” And not, I need hardly add, a lot of sitting around being mopey.

“People always ask me what part’s from Greek tragedy and what I made up,” laughs Ardern. “The most bizarre, the most outlandish (plot developments) are the truest to mythology.”

There are touchstones for us in the lurid tale of vengeful relatives and step-relatives. Clytemnestra stabbing her hubby Agamemnon to death in the bathtub: that rings a bell with everyone. Ditto Helen of Troy or the Trojan Horse. But How many of you (hands up! know about Princess Hippodamia? “She’s not one who got passed down by movies,” shrugs Kushneryk.

“What makes it so appealing,” thinks Ardern, “is the way it loops: we don’t learn from history. This is the story of five generations who continue to make the same mistakes.”

Morgan Grau, Graham Mothersill, Sarah Feutl as the Furies in The Fall of the House of Atreus. Photo supplied.

As the writer and director explain, the show we’ll see at the Backstage is the third iteration of a production that began life in 35-minute form at the Thousand Faces Festival, devoted to the mythic in theatre, a couple of years ago. “The visual language of the play has evolved since that first workshop,” says Kushneryk. “We were throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what stuck…. We’ve let it grow as it needs to.”

He and Arden met as student actors at the University of Alberta theatre school. In one way, they’re a study in contrasts. He’s steeped in musical theatre; he arrived at the U of A with a MacEwan degree and a history of directing “weird little boutique musicals,” like Coraline which played the Fringe. She arrived in Edmonton from seven years with a Winnipeg indie theatre, The Struts and Frets Players, devoted to productions based on mythology. “And this is our horrible Greek baby!” smiles Kushneryk.

Even before they graduated with fine arts degrees from the U of A last spring, they had hatched theatre together three times as a writer/director team. Kushneryk directed Arden’s “living room satire” Harold and Vivien Entertain Guests, which he describes as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as if it were written by Christopher Durang.”

“We share an odd sense of humour,” smiles Kushneryk. “Demented!” says Arden, who amends to “small-a absurdist… We have a very collaborative relationship; the play is just a blueprint!”

“Some moments are script moments; some are director moments,” she says. “And a lot of credit goes to the actors.”

Kushneryk says he started with signature features of Greek theatre, the masks, the declamatory style of speech, and the chorus. “The fun is to see the deviations!” he says. The chorus here consists of the Furies, back from hell to educate humanity …. The three are trying to put on what they think we want, a Greek play.”  And, hey, they get a song, thanks to Kushneryk’s musical theatre bent. 

After The Fall of the House of Atreus, Impossible Mongoose’s first collaboration with Blarney, Kushneryk goes into rehearsal at the Mayfield; he’s in Jesus Christ, Superstar. And Arden is in a university production of the brainiac Michael Frayn play Copenhagen.

But Impossible Mongoose, the indie founded by Kushneryk and Arden with Kristen Papayas, will be back. “We’re keeping our eyes out for the little weird things,” says Kushneryk. “We also love to create and get our hands dirty.”

“Zeus-ical the Musical?” laughs Arden. “The show no one asked for?”

PREVIEW

The Fall of the House of Atreus

Theatre: Impossible Mongoose and Blarney Productions

Written by: Jessy Ardern

Directed by: Corben Kushneryk

Starring: Graham Mothersill, Sarah Feutl, Morgan Grau

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

Running: Friday (opening night) through April 2

Tickets: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca

Ross Travis as Ponce de Ponce de Panache, in Firefly Theatre’s Panache. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There never would have been a sequel if the unthinkable hadn’t happened.

When last we met Ponce de Ponce de Panache, 12 months ago,  it was at a pep rally for the self-glorifying blusterer and king of hyperbolic claims, preposterous entitlement, and alternative facts. As Firefly Theatre and Circus Arts artistic director Annie Dugan put it at the time, the high-flying Ponce was a cross between a certain presidential candidate and Louis XIV. And the Firefly satire and circus fusion, Panache, was a cross-hatching of “Versailles, The Hunger Games, and the current political climate in the U.S.”

Then came November.

“Who could have guessed he would win!” declares Dugan. “We never thought we’d be doing a Part Deux; it was never part of the plan…. We’d already started planning a show around a Christmas Carol skeleton,” she says of early brainstorming meetings with collaborators John Ullyatt and Belinda Cornish.

“But after one week in office, what Trump was doing was too horrible!” In that thought was born the sequel, Panache Part Deux, opening Friday at — which is to say on and above the stage at — La Cité francophone.

Satire is tricky, and outrage is barely sustainable in an age when reality trumps it every time, as Alex Baldwin has admitted on the subject of his sensationally grotesque Saturday Night Live alter-ego. “It’s too awful to parody what Trump is doing, so we’re doing how,” says Dugan.

The Ponce has triumphed. He’s now Supreme Leader of La Cité. Last year, at the pep rally edition of Panache, “the audience was complicit,” as she says of our applause, cued by signs held up by a trio of “minions.”

This year, our complicity continues, since we’re cast as Congress. “This is a day in the life,” Dugan explains. “We’ve turned the how-to of governing into a game show.”  All the circus performers are the Ponce’s cabinet ministers, “his smoke screen, his diversionary tactics,” she says. “A politician surrounds himself with his friends. The ‘former Miss South Africa’, for example, is the Secretary of Mining and Resources…. All the women are ‘former Miss Somethings’.”

Ross Travis as the Ponce, in Firefly Theatre’s Panache. Photo supplied.

Since Part Deux is a game show, the lavish world of circus is juxtaposed to the contestants, “three normal people with normal needs, petitioners in the Ponce’s court: a gentleman who needs a hip replacement for his grandmother, a women looking for a bus pass, a guy who’s been arrested for jaywalking and wants a get-out-of-jail pass.”

Director Dugan has enlisted a trio of Edmonton heavy-hitter actors: Dave Horak, Shannon Blanchet, and Mat Busby to be the supplicants. Cornish is the dramaturge on the project.  

For the rest, the core group of Panache performers is returning for the sequel, led by San Francisco’s Ross Travis, an acrobat/actor who specializes in the most punishing of aerial arts, the Chinese pole. Dugan has one word for it: “painful!” This year the pole isn’t planted on the stage; it flies, which sounds impossible.

Lyne Gosselin (trapeze with silks) and Mackenzie Baert (rhythmic contortion) are back. So is the ever-inventive musician Jason Kodie, who plays keyboards live. And the magician/illusionist Billy Kidd (Gia Felicitas) returns from her home base in the U.K. Last year, she concocted an act especially for Panache. And it was a showstopper. As a  set-up for Marie Antoinette’s famous line “let ‘em eat cake” she actually baked a cake in someone’s hat.

The finale of Firefly Theatre’s Panache. Photo supplied.

Calgary’s Patrick Chan (aerial straps) is the Ponce’s Secretary of Defence. And the cast includes Lisa Feehan (aerial cargo), Caitlin Mader (corde lisse), and the acrobatic Quebec City duo Les Vitaminés. 

The latter’s act “involves a plastic bubble,” laughs Dugan. “Plastic bubbles for all are how Ponce plans to combat climate change he doesn’t believe in.” 

“I don’t usually do political satire,” says Dugan. “ I like stupid comedy. I’m happy to do things with chickens. And peanut butter.”

“This year the whole show is a little bit darker. And it needs to be.”

PREVIEW

Panache Pt. Deux: The Triumph of the Ponce

Theatre: Firefly

Directed by: Annie Dugan

Starring: Ross Travis, Billy Kidd, Jason Kodie, Lyne Gosselin, Mackenzie Baert, Lisa Feehan, Caitlin Mader, Dave Horak, Shannon Blanchet, Mat Busby

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91 St.

Running: Friday through Sunday

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

Waiting for Godot by One World Theatre. Photo by Truman Buffet.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For poetic impulses and vivid characters, and a certain raucous soulfulness and way with words, you can’t beat the Irish. And Serca (the Gaelic word for “love story) is the festival that celebrates that multi-faceted contribution.

For this year’s edition of the eight-year-old festival — it’s spent the last three on The Ave, 118th that is — artistic director Liz Hobbs has assembled a series of Canadian-Irish plays, in staged readings, to encircle the headline production this weekend. All three are by women and, as Hobbs points out, “try and find an Irish play in the mainstream Irish repertoire by a female playwright with a female cast! It’s hard!”

Bevin Dooley’s Slack Tide happened Thursday. Saturday’s offering (4:45 p.m.) is Beating Heart Cadaver by the Governor-General’s Award-winning Colleen Murphy. Amy DeFelice directs a cast of five top Edmonton actors in the 1998 play — “beautiful and heartbreaking” as Hobbs describes it — in which “a couple who have lost their eight-year-old daughter in a car accident try to find their way back to each other.” Sunday at 6 p.m., it’s Cat Walsh’s Fetch, named for the Gaelic word for doppelganger, in which two versions of the same girl proceed through two different scenarios, by way of different choices. 

ELSEWHERE AT SERCA

• St. Patrick’s Day Irish Ceilidh on the Ave (starting at 5 p.m.): a celebration featuring an Irish stew dinner with Knock Irish dancers, followed by a variety cabaret and, at 8 p.m. live music by the Edmonton Ceilidh Band featuring Jeremiah McDade.
• Saturday (1 to 4 p.m.), a Family Irish Ceilidh, including Maralyn Ryan’s puppet version of The Ugly Duckling, dancing, cookie decorating and crafts, refreshments. After the 4:45 p.m. staged reading of Beating Heart Cadaver, a 7 p.m. performance of Waiting For Godot, followed (9:30 p.m.) an Irish cabaret for adults.
• Sunday’s 2 p.m. Waiting For Godot matinee is followed by Fetch (6 p.m.) and then an 8 p.m. performance of Godot.