12thNight.ca

playwright Collin Doyle

By Liz Nicholls, 12night.ca

He’s back. Theatres (and audiences) take note. 

If you saw Collin Doyle’s wonderful Let The Light Of Day Through, in Theatre Network’s top-drawer 2013 premiere production, you already know something important about the work of this award-winning playwright. It’s funny. And it’s moving. At the same time, and in a complex and startling way.

“People look at dark stuff more easily through comedy,” Doyle has said.

The Doyle play that gets a staged reading Sunday at Script Salon (an Edmonton theatre success story in itself), has all the signs of that signature combination. Slumberland Motel, billed as “a road-weary comedy,” gives us two ‘70s era underachievers, a couple of vacuum salesman,  Ed and Edward, sharing a room in a seedy roadside motel on Christmas Eve. Their flat landscape of disappointment and disillusion, a world of diminishing prospects — vacuum sales can suck — is transformed by the arrival of a mysterious woman from the next room.

I think we can safely call Slumberland Motel “long-awaited,” a term that applies to many of Doyle’s plays. It won the Alberta Playwriting Competition 11 years ago. Long lead times seem to be a Doyle specialty, a test of patience that would have made other artists implode. Doyle’s The Mighty Carlins, the raucous black comedy of family dysfunction which won the Alberta Playwriting Competition in 2004, was the most famous un-produced play in Alberta, before its Workshop West premiere four years later.

For Sunday’s reading, Robert Benz and Reed McColm are Ed and Edward, with April Banigan as the mystery woman. It happens in the Upper Arts Space at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (10037 84 Avenue) at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free; donations are welcome.

The genial playwright will be on hand to answer questions. I have one: when will it get fully produced by an Edmonton theatre? A Doyle play is always an event. And that long lead time business can wear thin.

Flying Canoë Volant 2016, in Mill Creek Ravine. Photo by Flying Canoē Volant

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you go out in the woods tonight….

It’s a strange form of civic enchantment. Every year about this time, the good burghers of Edmonton, thousands of them, find themselves irresistibly drawn to follow a trail of light and music through the a snowy ravine at night. 

They sing and dance in Mill Creek Ravine by the light of cunningly wrought light sources, in a stunning series of installations. They arrive at a First Nations Camp, and learn drumming from the experts. They find themselves doing jigs and reels with the Dave Cunningham Family Band at the Métis Camp — or making bannock. They meet up with a French-Canadian storyteller/musician (Roger Dallaire) in a Trapper’s Cabin.

It’s Flying Canoë Volante, the five-year-old winter festival where our three founding cultural traditions, First Nations, Métis, and French-Canadian, meet to play in the snow. Then everyone ascends to a city of light — a.k.a. La Cité francophone, the elegant curvilinear French cultural centre — to continue the party, indoors and out-, in a mixture of languages (and beverages).

The 2016 festival. Photo by: Flying Canoë Volant

And the people love it. Daniel Cournoyer, La Cité francophone’s amiable, and supremely bilingual, executive director, reports that in the five years since Flying Canoe became the heir to the defunct Winter Light Festival, attendance has grown from 3,000 to 30,000 last time out. And Cournoyer has enhanced the festivities by partnering with other festivals, Rubaboo for example, and Native Counselling Services.

Illuminating a dark ravine without a power source is no task for conventional thinkers. Flying Canoë Volante‘s ingenious lighting whiz Dylan Toymaker, has assembled 11 artists to create light installations along the snowy way, with contributions by theatre designer Marissa Kochanski and a variety of actors.

The adventures even have a narrative, and it’s an alluringly eerie one. The flying canoe, in different variations, is part of both French-Canadian and First Nations tradition. The 19th century legend recorded by Honoré Beaugrand — “a great piece of French-Canadian literature” as Cournoyer puts it — stars voyageurs who make a deal with the Devil to fly them home to their sweethearts on New Year’s Eve. One catch: they can’t drink or swear or crash into church steeples. Ooops, they do all of the above. “They made a deal, and they suffered the consequences,” laughs Cournoyer.

The 2016 edition of the festival. Photo by Flying Canoë Volant

Cournoyer loves the festival’s “fusion of francophone and indigenous cultural traditions, a pow-wow of talent!” And Flying Canoë Volant isn’t a spectator sport. “I don’t want you to come here and just watch!” declares Cournoyer, with his usual exuberance. “I want people to partake. I’ve encouraged all our partners to engage the audience, to have interaction!”

 When you emerge from the ravine, Flying Canoë Volant turns more contemporary. The Rubaboo Festival is in charge of programming the theatre at La Cité francophone. Expect performance poetry, music, video, storytelling (Dallaire joins Elder Jerry Saddleback).

Out in the hall, it’s a cabaret, with three bands — one indigenous, one francophone, one anglo-Canadian — each night. There’s outdoor DJ-ed entertainment in the basin that the building encloses. And there’s “a big old dance party” at the end of Saturday night’s festivities, too.

“In the five years we’ve been doing it, I’ve learned so much,” says Cournoyer feelingly. “The partnerships! The knowledge I’ve gained! The cultures are so rich!”

The idea is “to create dialogue (between cultures) without imposing it. That’s what happens when you engage people…. It’s a journey of discovery.”

PREVIEW

Flying Canoë Volant

Where: Mill Creek Ravine, Rutherford School, La Cité francophone (8627 91 St.)

Running: Friday and Saturday. In the ravine, 6 to 10 p.m., at La Cité francophone, 6 p.m. to midnight.

Admission: free

Raoul Bhaneja, Karen Glave, MIchael Rubenfeld, Birgitte Solem, in Hope and Hell Theatre production of Disgraced, at the Citadel. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca 

“O my god! What’s he going to say next!?”

It’s 2012 and Raoul Bhaneja and his actor wife Birgitte Solem are in New York watching an Off-Broadway audience watch a play. Everybody is tense, alert, engrossed: no oh no, don’t let him go there. 

They’re watching a two-couple dinner party, in a chic Upper East Side apartment, fracture in scary ways they’d never expect from successful, highly intelligent, “progressive” people who might think of themselves as post-ethnic.

The play is Disgraced, by South-Asian American writer Ayad Akhtar — a novelist/screenwriter/playwright, whose name — pre-Pulitzer Prize and Tony splash — wasn’t exactly household currency in theatre circles at the time. What struck Bhaneja, the Toronto playwright/actor/blues musician whose Hope and Hell Theatre brings the play to the Citadel this week, was that “the audience doesn’t know what they’re supposed to think.”

Bhaneja was excited by that. “This is why you do plays! To engage people!”

Bhaneja, engaging himself and entirely unpretentious, had first noticed Akhtar via a blog post. The writer had talked about a South-Asian pal who’d gone to a Hamlet audition, and the improbabilities had struck him: “he’s never going to play The Man.”

“There were all kinds of connections for me!” laughs Bhaneja. For one thing, his ethnicity is mixed (his mother is Irish, his diplomat dad is from Delhi). For another, as Edmonton audiences know, he’s taken on the slings and arrows of outraged traditionalists and their casting practices himself — by doing a solo Hamlet that’s played here a couple of times, and toured the world.

So Bhaneji read Disgraced, and its unresolved (possibly unresolvable) complexities blew him away. So — this seems exactly like something Bhaneja would do, and why he’d name his company Hope and Hell — he contacted Akhtar and set up a meeting. Which is why he and Solem had figured out the “kids! parents!” situation and flown down to New York. An additional nail-biter for an evening of nail biting: “We had one night! And one of the actors was 40 minutes late for curtain.”

Acquiring the rights for Hope and Hell took a while. Disgraced moved to Broadway, and acquired a Pulitzer and Tony nominations. But finally, this past year, it happened.

The Robert Ross Parker production that brings Bhaneja back to Citadel after the 2015 run of his theatre/concert/memoir hybrid Life, Death and the Blues, arrives here after a much-applauded run produced by Mirvish in its high-profile alternative season.

Bhaneja plays Amir, a high-powered Manhattan corporate lawyer specializing in acquisitions. He’s an ex-Muslim of Pakistani descent up for promotion in a Jewish firm. His wife Emily (Solem) is an up-and-comer WASP artist inspired by the Islamic world and its design aesthetic.

Raoul Bhaneja in Disgraced. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

Their guests are Emily’s Jewish art dealer (Michael Rubenfeld) and his African-American wife (Karen Glave). Which sounds like a setup, as Bhaneja agrees. The play, he says, is “deliberately stocked with different points of view…. You agree with one person, then with another, then with another.”

He muses on the notion that intelligence “is the ability to hold two opposing points of view in your mind at the same time.” Disgraced, he says, “pushes that to the brink!”

Which may be why 80 per cent of the audience, “instead of the usual 20,” tends to stay for the talkback sessions, as Bhaneja reports. 

What Disgraced sets about “is creating engaging characters.” What it wilfully refuses to do — Bhaneja thinks this is its appeal — is “to tell you the feeling you’re supposed to have…. Two hours afterward, the audience is wondering what they think. The next day they wake up wondering. Whatever you think about it, you’re wrong by the end.”

“Answers?” Don’t look to the cast, Bhaneja laughs. “We don’t feel we can help you there, folks…. That’s what’s fun about it.”

Remember how your mom and dad always told you ‘don’t talk about politics and religions at the dinner table’.” Disgraced is what happens when “well-off, highly educated, privileged and successful people” ignore your mom and dad. It’s post-9-11 and combustible subjects like Islamophobia come up. Ethnic assumptions in this liberal élite are up for grabs.

“I’m not a tribal person, you think. I’m a progressive Western open-minded person who believes everyone’s equal. Right?” Disgraced “takes that assumption and pushes us against it.”

The play’s relevance hasn’t exactly leaked away. Current events have seen to that. And Canadians can’t exempt themselves, witness our own election with its divisive hijab controversy and the Conservative platform of informing on “barbaric cultural practices” into the social lexicon. Bhaneja brings up the name Kellie Leitch and her Trumpesque affinities.   

“So many elements reflect our lives here,” in a country that prides itself on multiculturalism. The fear of “the other” isn’t limited to the country south of the border. The play speaks powerfully in Germany, with its migrant crisis, for example. Bhaneja has  just been called to audition for a Singapore production of Disgraced.

Karen Glave and Michael Rubenfeld in Disgraced, Hope and Hell Theatre production at the Citadel. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

“Its resonance continues to deepen,” says Bhaneja, who thinks Disgraced is well on its way to classic status. “There’s a weight to it.” He points to Arthur Miller and A View From The Bridge. “It was really good 50 years ago; it’s really good now.”

And its great strength is “a refusal to moralize and tell you what to think,” he thinks. “It doesn’t present answers…. But there’s an edge and brashness to it that’s not very Canadian.”

He encountered the play while doing final drafts of Love, Death and the Blues, in which our “half-white” protagonist resists the prejudice that he’s not black enough to be an authentic blues musician. “I was inspired by Akhtar,” says Bhaneja, “his boldness in facing the questions.”

He remembers his playwriting teacher at the National Theatre School (Sheldon Rosen) telling his younger playwright self that  “whatever you write about now, you’ll be writing about forever.” It’s been born out. “I’m drawn to questions of culture and identity. All my stuff so far, and the TV series I’m trying to get going…. it’s central to  what I’m trying to figure out. It’s what I can contribution to the theatre conversation.”

Has traditional casting, circumscribed by ethnicity, widened its embrace? Bhaneja, whose career moves from stage to screen and back again, pauses to consider. There are “positive signs, a more diverse perspective in characters, more reflective of our society. But I’d have hoped, 20 years in TVland, that it would be farther along than it is.”

“Being half-white has given me a double-sided access,  to roles I wouldn’t have had the chance to do if I were darker.” He laughs. “It hasn’t been a bad thing. And it’s also who I am!”

The role he landed in the Jessica Chastain thriller Miss Sloane was, as written,  “a 50-year-old white-haired textbook lobbyist.” And Bhaneja had thought “I’m never going to get this.” What he especially loved about the experience was hanging out with big-name actors who made time for the scheduling-busting complications of live theatre, John Lithgow and Sam Waterston among them. 

If Edmonton has a special place in his affection, it’s partly because of Citadel’s Bob Baker stepping up to acquire the Hope and Hell Disgraced even before its Mirvish production. Partly it’s because Disgraced is the first time in more than two decades — since a Fringe tour of 1995 — that he and his wife have been onstage together; they’ve even brought their kids. “We can walk into work together! A great change of scene for us….”

Ah yes, and there’s the prospect of Die-Nasty on his nights off with a troupe of the country’s top improvisers, including Mark Meer and Belinda Cornish. The last time he was here, in Love, Death, and the Blues, “I had the best improv night of my life!”

PREVIEW

Disgraced

Theatre: Hope and Hell (originally presented by David Mirvish)

Written by: Ayad Akhtar

Directed by: Robert Ross Parker

Starring: Raoul Bhaneja, Birgitte Solem, Michael Rosenfeld, Karen Glave, Gabe Grey

Where: Citadel Theatre

Running: Thursday through Feb. 12

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com 

Shaun Johnston in Annapurna, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You can always tell when Shaun Johnston is in a theatre. Yes, there’s his beloved Chevy pick-up (c. 1990) outside the Varscona, a four-inch layer of snow on the cab. In a world of constant flux and starry oneupmanship, there’s something highly consoling about this.

The effect is enhanced when you catch sight of a mysterious round red machine in the cargo bed. It’s the same one you asked Johnston about last time he went AWOL from TV-land to be onstage here, four years ago. After all, you never know when someone might need an air compressor, as he points out.

There’s one upgrade to this image of constancy. “OK, I’m not in love with those, but…” says the man himself, affable as ever, apologetically pointing out rust concealer thingies around the fenders. Johnson, incidentally, remains the only actor of my acquaintance who habitually moves through the world with a tire gauge in his shirt pocket. After all, you never know….

“I know where everything is! And I use it all!”

Johnston has brought his lanky frame back from television — where he’s the salty patriarch Jack Bartlett in the long-running CBC series Heartland — in honour of the 25th anniversary season of the theatre company he co-founded with U of A theatre school mate John Hudson.

Johnston’s Shadow Theatre homecoming this time is Annapurna, a two-hander relationship reunion/mystery of the ignitable type by well-known American playwright Sharr White. In Hudson’s production, opening Thursday at the Varscona, Johnston is a cowboy-poet living a ragged, much-reduced sort of life in a crumbling trailer in the Colorado wilds. Shadow leading lady Coralie Cairns is the wife the wife he hasn’t seen since she walked out on him in the middle of the night 20 years ago.

How has she tracked him down? And why? The exchanges are acrimoniously witty. “All’s fair,” says the actor. “There are no Geneva Convention rules in this relationship.” 

Coralie Cairns and Shaun Johnston in Annapurna, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

“It’ll be a shocker when the lights come up!” grins Johnston, who’s just startled the baristas into conversation by trying to pay for a a couple of coffees with a hundred dollar bill. 

In his time Johnston has played a succession of striding cowboy heroes, deviants, miscreants, psycho killers, sheriffs, good ol’ boys, first in theatre and then mostly film and TV. The last time he was onstage here, Johnston was the grizzled Old Man drinking Jim Beam in Shadow’s 2012 revival of Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love, the same scorcher in which he’d played the restless rancher/visionary Eddie in 1982. And there’s something about Shepard’s laconic visceral style that suits Johnston to a T.   

This time, an actor who looks born to wear jeans and boots, on whom cowboy hats do not look like an affection, will be wearing … an apron. Only an apron —  if you don’t count the oxygen tank in a backpack. “Well, that’s a new experience for everyone,” he laughs amiably. “Don’t sit in the front row.”

“This show’s a freight train, two hands on deck the whole time,” he says, cheerfully mixing his transportation metaphors. “I do love the dialogue, the ‘cowboy-poet’ (designation). But it goes way beyond that. My character is a smart guy, a highly educated, highly intelligent person. But he hasn’t let that academic strain affect the truth of who he is….” 

“I’m using Shaun’s voice, Shaun’s dialect,” he says of his take on Ulysses, the surprisingly erudite cowboy-poet who has somehow — in one of the play’s mysteries — been reduced to terminal squalor. “Not some cowboy extravaganza.”

Shaun’s “dialect,” incidentally, is the idiom of the Ponoka jock farm kid who came to theatre improbably, and late at that at 26, via working on the rigs, freelance trucking, and every other kind of construction job. It is entirely likely that he was the only actor in his theatre school class who might plausibly say of his younger self that “I could have plumbed your house. And welded your railing too.”

Life experience was his strong suit. When the drama department auditioning team asked “do you have any questions for us?” he was probably the only hopeful who stepped up: “So, do I get in?” He’s amused by his memory of theatre luminary Tom Peacocke, now professor emeritus, saying briskly, with a smile, “You’re the one! Every group has a bad one!”

Back to Annapurna, named for a Himalayan peak of formidable challenges for climbers. “I bite at Coralie’s character,” says Johnston of Ulysses. “Each of them holds a card. Or each one thinks the other one does. And they take a lot of shots to see if they can catch a look at the card…. It has the momentum of a thriller, without being one. As well as the emotions of life and love.”

“I knew I’d love it; John picked it,” Johnston says of his Shadow co-founding father. “He knows me as well as any theatre and film pro in the business…. My affection for John has remained the same from the get-go,” he says of the Shadow-y origins of the company. Its official history starts with the 1992 premiere of Johnston’s own Catching The Train, a gritty drug-fuelled tale (with live rock band) inspired by growing up in the mean streets of Edmonton.

“We founded Shadow together, but it was John’s conception. And it was simply this: if you do good theatre people will come.”

Ironically, Annapurna brings Johnston back to Edmonton precisely at the moment he doesn’t have a place to stay in his home town. He and Sue, his wife of three decades, have always lived in Edmonton with their two boys even though Johnston spent much time doing TV and movies in Vancouver or Calgary (where Heartland shoots). Until now.

They’ve just sold their place here, and bought one in Kelowna. Why Kelowna? “It was where we had our honeymoon, and it kinda grabbed me,” says Johnston. “I didn’t have enough money for Paris or Hawaii,” he grins. “I had to hawk my camera to buy a wedding ring.”

He credits “my entire career to Sue. She’s the reason I stayed with it, the reason I was able to succeed in my craft.”

That craft of acting “is the same on film as onstage, of course,” Johnston says. “You have to inhabit a character, and keep relationships real.” But in comparison to the 7 1/2 day shoots per episode of Heartland, for example, “theatre is all-consuming. You rehearse all day for weeks; at night you do your homework….”

Ah, except for the 7 a.m. pick-up hockey games he plays every Wednesday and Friday he’s in Edmonton.

What he likes about Annapurna is the relationship that is gradually revealed in the course of the play: “the efforts of two people to solve the mysteries of love…. I’m a dad. I know what it’s like to love so deeply you’d be willing to die for someone.”

PREVIEW

Annapurna

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Sharr White

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Coralie Cairns, Shaun Johnston

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 5

Tickets: 780-434-5564 or TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)

Star Killing Machine, a Broken Toys Theatre musical by Clinton Carew and Kris Schindell. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“If you worked at a nuclear bomb factory,” Clinton Carew asks  pleasantly, by way of conversation opener, “how would you feel?”

This is the kind of question that could lead to “I’m just doing my job; get off my back!” as Carew puts it. Or years of expensive therapy.

Sometimes, though, it leads to soul/rock/funk albums with bona fide original lyrics. And sometimes — OK, rarely — soul/rock/funk albums with bona fide original lyrics lead to “poignant musical comedies about the end of the world,” like Star Killing Machine.  premiering Thursday in a Broken Toys Theatre production (in association with Fringe Theatre Adventures, in Azimuth Theatre’s “emerging company” lineup). 

So: what we are (or profess, or believe) vs. what we do for a living. “We are all compromised,” says playwright/director/actor Carew, who created Star Killing Machine with composer/musician Kris Schindell. Who among us can argue? The applications are endless, even if you’re not Albertan. 

What characters are going for in Star Killing Machine is an equivocal goal, if ever there was one. In a research facility “just south of the Arctic Circle,” scientists are working to develop a machine that will destroy the world. And they’ve just had a break-through.

Carew, who’s the possessor of a classic skeptical shrug, does one now; you’ll have to imagine. We’re in the Backstage Theatre, as designer Kevin Smith is tinkering with a glass-ball contraption that lights up and revolves, in a ‘70s sci-fi way. And Carew is describing the point of origin of the new musical in the early 2000s (this is a project that goes back). “I was writing infomercials for a living,” says Carew. “The money was good, but I was having huge philosophical difficulties with what I was doing.”

Inner conflict isn’t just for theatre, my friends. It fuels music too. The immediate result was the song Star Killing Machine — music by Schindell, lyrics by Carew — that became the title track of a rock album from the pair’s “barely post-millennial band” Mr. Relaxer.

Carew’s actor wife Elena Porter, who’s part of the 10-member cast of the Broken Toys production and the company’s artistic producer, was “just a groupie at this point,” as they laugh. “In a very exclusive audience.”

“The album never really got released properly,” sighs Carew, who still plays with a hockey-team band (“we only do non-metaphorical songs about hockey”). “For life reasons. For timing reasons. And that bugged me at some level. Thirty people in the world heard it, and 26 people really liked it.” 

Two years ago, Kristi Hansen, one of Azimuth’s triumvirate of artistic directors and an actor/musician herself, sought Broken Toys out to be part of the company’s “emerging company showcase. And a musical, two years in the development, was born in that invitation.

The album-to-musical transition, though unusual, is by no means  unheard of in musical theatre world. The album that led to Star Killing Machine the musical is one, as Carew describes it, had a certain thematic continuity: “searching for meaning in a hostile universe.”

Still, Carew regarded it as a theatrical experiment. “I didn’t know it’d be a good idea. It was just my latest project. It was the same why-not? spirit that inspired his new translation of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters for Broken Toys in 2013.

The idea wasn’t just a song cycle, like, say, The Last Five Years. No, Carew wanted to know “can these songs be put into a musical musical?”

Porter, a Grant MacEwan musical theatre grad who’s been in the cast of such Plain Janes’ productions as It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! in 2014 (she played Lois Lane), enlarges the thought. “A musical musical, with characters who are motivated, who are going for something, who are moved to sing at peak emotional moments.” At the first workshop, with its 35-page script, they had numbers, not names.

Garett Ross, in Star Killing Machine. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Four pages of that script remain, along with Carew’s lyrics, and 90 per cent of the music, along with a new song or two, all shaped into reprises, recurring character motifs, and the other architectural spaces and arches of a musical comedy about the end of the world. Says Carew, “the plot ended up growing and flexing in a way to accommodate the songs.”

“The title song happens eight minutes into the show,” says Carew, of lyrics devoted to “that’s how we make our living.” He grins. “This is an Alberta play written about Albertans.”

Carew was inspired partly by his own experience working up north in the oil industry, albeit in an office job. Partly, it was the experience of his physicist brother, working with a Harvard team in a high-level nuclear research facility of the CERN persuasion. “Imagine if CERN was in northern Alberta!”

There’s an amusingly reductive side to rarefied science on this level of meritocracy, he reports. “The scientists have to do all the support services,” Carew says. “After all, who can you trust to work with plutonium?…. The job is 80 per cent cleaning, 20 per cent science.”

Porter smiles. “They can make anti-matter. But they can’t wash a dish.”

The Star Killing Machine forces are unusually large for an indie production (actually, for any theatre in town, times being what they are): 10 actor musicians, including an onstage band led by Scott Shpeley, who’s also a character, and a mysterious “special guest appearance” from Ryan Parker. “We could never have done anything on this scale without Azimuth and Fringe Theatre Adventures,” says Porter of the three-(short) act two-intermission musical. 

“I’ll be fascinated to find out how people respond to it,” says Carew, who repairs happily to the wardrobe room with Porter every rehearsal break to play with their 10-month-old daughter Penelope. “The apocalypse is exhausting.”

PREVIEW

Star Killing Machine

Theatre: Broken Toys in association with Fringe Theatre Adventures, as part of Azimuth Theatre’s “emerging company” 2016-2017 lineup

Created by: Clinton Carew (book and lyrics) and Kris Schindell (music)

Directed by: Clinton Carew

Starring: Elena Porter, Chantal Perron, Tatyana Rac, Luc Tellier, Scott Schpeley, Kristi Hansen, Cody Porter, Garett Ross, Rebecca Merkley, Ryan Parker

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

Running: Thursday through Jan. 29

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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