Who’s the real monster? Monstress, a new Trevor Schmidt thriller, launches the Northern Light season

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Sydney Williams and Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Briane Jang, BB Collective Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Trevor Schmidt calls his latest play, launching the Northern Light Theatre season Friday, “my Lady Frankenstein show.”

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Playwright Schmidt, NLT’s long-time artistic director, has long been fascinated by the female perspective, female windows on the world, the female voice and vision. Ah, and much to the delight of female actors, roles for women. And Monstress, as its title wittily conveys, re-imagines Mary Shelley’s celebrated Gothic novel of 1818 — the complicated relationship between a doctor and his creation — in female terms.

“There have been lots of different versions of the Frankenstein story,” says Schmidt of the Shelley novel in which Dr. Viktor Frankenstein creates a living being from interred body parts. Some versions, he says, even have a female Dr. Frankenstein. But this question intrigued him: “what would be the difference if the two (Doctor and Creation) were both women?…. Might it be maternal in some way? What if the doctor doesn’t necessarily feel maternal? I wanted to explore the relationship,” he says, along with “a lot of ideas that were present in the original Frankenstein — hubris, doctors thinking they’re God, creation and what responsibility (the creator) has.”

The seed of it was planted in the Schmidt brain as a one-person show, then with a cast of two or three. “It shifted a lot” before Schmidt settled on the show as a two-hander.

Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

In Monstress, a doctor, a woman in the male-centric Victorian world who’s been expelled from medical school for experiments outside the curriculum (or possibly just for being a woman), “brings a dead woman back to life,” at the request of the dead woman’s rich father. The deceased has apparently been thrown off a horse and broken her neck.

It sounds, on the surface, as if there are similarities with the Emma Stone movie Poor Things that came out after Schmidt’s idea had become a script. And the playwright was much relieved to find that they, and their stories, are very different.

“I was a bit nervous about this,” says Schmidt of his dark new play. “People don’t realize how nerve-wracking it is to write a play, hand it to people, and hope they like it….” The excited  response he got back from designers Larissa Soho (lighting) and Dave Clarke (sound) turned things around for him. “It’ll be something!” he felt. Maybe not something for everyone, but “something!”

The design pair found the script “so creepy, so dark,” says Schmidt. “Weird?” He hadn’t quite realized it. “Well, OK,” he thought. “I had to think that maybe my taste level is skewed after years of weird work!” He leaned into it, “and now it’s quite unusual…. I think it’ll be quite unsettling for people.”

A designer himself (he does set and costumes for Monstress), Schmidt thinks the NLT production will be beautiful to look at. “Both Larissa (lighting designer Poho) and I really like intense saturated colours … the colours of the show are green and purple.”

Schmidt offered the role of her choice to Julia van Dam, who’d starred in his production of A Phoenix Too Frequent a season ago (she’s just finished a run of Putrid Brat’s production of The Maids). She chose to play The Body. Another hot up-and-comer, Sydney Williams, plays the doctor.

Gradually, a blurring of identities seems to happen between the doctor and her creation. When he was announcing this season’s NLT lineup, Schmidt wondered “which one is the real monster?”

“I’m always interested in plays with protagonists who are conflicted — what is best for themselves vs what is best for others — society, relationships, love.” In this case “notoriety, success, fame” are the lure. Hubris and ego have roles to play. “Does the doctor’s personal advancement take precedent over the human aspect of the woman she’s brought back (to life)? Where does the doctor’s responsibility lie? If she brought her back, does she have to care for her?”

“I could shape her any way that I want to,” thinks the doctor, as Schmidt describes the play. “Nature vs nurture … someone with the wrong motives gets their hands on an innocent lump of clay…. Ah, but conversely, is that person an innocent lump of clay once they’ve died and come back to life. How have they been changed?”

Monstress is a capper to a year and a half’s “creative surge as a writer,” as Schmidt puts it: no fewer than seven new plays, including two (Robot Girls and Candy & The Beast) last season and three (The Black Widow Gun Club, Microwave Coven, Mass Debating) at this past summer’s Fringe. With more to come.

“We’ll see if some of it is too much for audiences,” he says of Monstress, the opener to a season christened Making A Monster. “There’s disturbing stuff in it…. It’s not like anything that’s happening in town right now.”

PREVIEW

Monstress

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Trevor Schmidt

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Julia van Dam and Sydney Williams

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

Running: Friday through Nov.23

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

 

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The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, a new World War I play by Neil Grahn, premieres at Shadow Theatre

Posted on November 5, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Garrett Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

He was “arguably the greatest soldier this country has ever produced,” as playwright Neil Grahn puts it. “And nobody knows his name….”

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Grahn’s new play The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, premiering Thursday to open the Shadow Theatre season, chronicles the extraordinary life and career of one of Canada’s most decorated heroes in the horrific war that was supposed to end all wars. And when the star sniper and scout, an Ojibwa from Wasauksing First Nation near Lake Huron, returned home from fighting for his country in World War I, it was to a world where he didn’t even have a vote.

So, for the warrior/ Chief/ activist, the “second battle,” this time in the Canadian trenches, began, a battle that in so many ways has never been won in a war that has never ended.

It was when Grahn was researching the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division for his World War I play The Comedy Company, which premiered at Shadow in 2018, that he kept coming across a name he’d never heard. Francis Pegahmagabow’s achievements were startlingly impressive. He’d signed up early, and he stayed on for the duration, fighting through injuries. And to his Military Medal in 1916 was added two bars for bravery and excellence as a scout and sniper in some of the bloodiest, most dangerous, battles of the most destructive war in human history: Ypres, Passchendaele, Amiens, the second Battle of Arras among them.

“Who is this guy?” Grahn wondered. “Why do I not know who this guy is? I felt embarrassed, just by myself, not knowing….”

An indefatigably curious researcher, Grahn, a Métis writer/director/sometime actor who works in theatre, film, TV, and improv comedy, set about finding out. And in the process he uncovered an amazing, and expansive, story. “So many of the early political movements for First Nations were inspired by returning Indigenous veterans…. They went over to World War I and they were peers, one of the soldiers,” in short equals. “But when they came back they were … Indians.”

“The army was quite a good place for being treated for who you were not what you were,” says Grahn. Indigenous soldiers “had been given autonomy and respect, and so when they came back and it was taken away, that inspired them to take action. Many veterans were the leaders” in the Indigenous activist movements that followed.

Ben Kuchera and Garrett Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The injustice of Pegahmagabow’s situation was striking, to say the least. “He comes back a war hero and can’t even vote,” as Grahn says. He’s the Chief of his band, and his loan application — “he’d wanted to get some horses to improve his land and raise his station” — is turned down at least three times. “The Indian Agent felt he “‘wasn’t responsible enough’.” And an activist was born.

Grahn recounted the story to his friend Shadow artistic director John Hudson, with the annotation “this has got to be a movie!”. Hudson pushed him to make a play of it, “and I’m really glad he did,” Grahn says. The stylization built into theatre means that “cast of hundreds if not thousands” is conjured by the five actors of the Shadow cast led by Garrett Smith as Francis. “It’s very egalitarian,” says Grahn of the show we’ll see; “everybody plays everybody, women are soldiers; everybody is pitching in.” The only actor with a single role is Smith; he is, to say the least, busy. “It’s Francis’s story and he’s telling it…. I don’t think Garrett leaves the stage; he’s in everything! An exhausting adventure!”

“I am absolutely delighted with Garrett!” declares Grahn happily of the actor, a member of the Piikani and Kainai Nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy of southern Alberta “He’s the deal! He has a real physicality to him, and a way about him. I sit beside him, and I think ‘I wouldn’t want to fight this guy’…. He reminds me — similar energy and body type — of my buddy Shaun Johnston,” the actor who was a Shadow co-founder with Hudson.

The production is co-directed by Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick. It crossed Grahn’s mind to direct it himself, but he’s right in the midst of creating and directing season 2 of the APTN documentary series Horse Warriors (season 1 is airing right now). As Grahn describes, “it follows the ‘Indigenous relay circuit: Crazy! So dangerous! They race horses in relay fashion; they get on a horse — a highly strung super-fast thoroughbred — and do one lap, jump off and jump on other horse, and do another lap, and then again. And they do it bareback. This is insane!” he says appreciatively. “If it’s happening live anywhere near, go see it! It’ll blow your doors off.”

“It’s kinda like stock car racing if the car could just randomly turn and run you over.” The circuit follows the old plains tribes, Grahn explains. “Where the buffalo roam. Used to room,” he amends. “We’re about as far north  as they go.…”

A documentarian he is, but comedy, improv and sketch, are part of Grahn’s showbiz DNA too. In the late ‘80s he became the fourth member of the storied sketch troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, famously nutty in a highly literate sort of way, and pioneers in fashioning full-length plays from sketches. For seven years he was the head writer for The Irrelevant Show, CBC Radio’s hit sketch show. And he’s created and written seven TV series.

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

“I don’t think I’m capable of doing anything without finding some joy or laughter,” he figures. The true story, unlikely and unknown, that Grahn culled from the mists of Canadian history, the inspiration for The Comedy Company, is a test case. In the darkest days of the First World War, members of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division were summoned by their commander to devise light musical comedy shows to divert and amuse their fellow soldiers — laughter in the face of death.

Grahn says his Indigenous connections have continued to inspire him. “The First Nations comedy sensibility is really dry,” he’s found, to his perpetual amusement. “As soon as I come in and they start to make fun of me, I know I’m in, I’m good. If they’re really polite I’m like ‘O No! What did I do wrong? I’ve pissed someone off’.” This continues to amuse him.

Francis Pegahmagabow, the Indigenous soldier whose life inspired the Neil Grahn play that launches the Shadow Theatre season. Photo supplied.

In the case of The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, “so much of my documentary background has really helped me with the script,” he says. “I’m a Métis guy writing an Ojibwa story,” so he consulted Ojibwa elders to see what they thought of that. “They all said ‘the story should be told, tell the story’.”

Theatre and TV have meant that time has proven in short supply in Grahn’s life. “I’d love to get back to weekly improv,” he says. “It’s so refreshing! When you’re improvising, if you’re doing it right, you’re nowhere else but there…. That, and pickleball (laughter). That’s where I’m at.”

And the research for the play was “brutal,” as he puts it cheerfully. Diving into the National Archives and newspaper sites was tricky, mainly because “not a lot of early First Nations political movements were covered much. You really have to dig.” He’s discovered that in 1927 the government effectively put a stop to First Nations activism by making it illegal for Indigenous people to hire and pay a lawyer.  “Whaaaat!?”

What was he like, Francis Pegahmagabow the man? “He could be fiery,” says Grahn. “And his beliefs were mixed. He was very very Catholic, and also very attached to the Great Spirit and traditional teachings as well…. There was a lot of magical thinking to him.”

PREVIEW

The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Neil Grahn

Directed by John Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick

Starring: Garrett Smith, Trevor Duplessis, Ben Kuchera, Julie Golosky, Monica Gate

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 24

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org 

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Heartbreaking and funny, Stars On Her Shoulders premieres at Workshop West. A review.

Posted on November 2, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Hayley Moorhouse and Dayna Lea Hoffman in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Meegan Sweet and Gabby Bernard in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Every once in a while you find yourself in the theatre fully absorbed in a world that’s both distant and utterly close at hand. And you laugh through tears. It happened for me at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre Friday night.

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There is a moment, both heartbreaking and funny, in Stephen Massicotte’s beautiful new World War I play Stars On Her Shoulders, when one of the five nurse characters in a convalescence hospital in France undertakes to teach another the how-to’s of happiness — in a shattered world.

In Heather Inglis’s premiere production, Helen (Hayley Moorhouse), grim-visaged in the fortress of her own gallows humour, admits “I’ve lost the knack of it.” A feeling of hopelessness has trampled everything else.

How does happiness work? Can it be learned? Or, once lost, re-learned? Georgie (Dayna Lea Hoffmann), a new arrival on the ward, coaxes Helen into the fragmentary world of her own memory — and a moment at home in Canada before the war, a buried image of sunlight through a summer storm. It’s Helen’s first smile in the play, and it will touch you in a profound way.

Stars On Her Shoulders is like that. There is a love story embedded deep in the fibre of the play — it’s for you to discover so I won’t spoil it. But it wears its World War I setting in a much different way from Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding, a dream of first love the conjures the terrible war overseas through the imaginary participation of a Canadian girl back home. For one thing Stars On Her Shoulders is poised on the precarious threshold between centuries, the prescriptive Victorian sense of a woman’s lesser place in the scheme of things and the elusive possibilities of a brave new world of equality between the sexes.

Dana Wylie, Meegan Sweet, Hayley Moorhouse in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

As if to conjure it visually, Inglis stages her production (beautifully designed by Brian Bast and lighted dramatically by Alison Yanota) on a gangway, a pathway between worlds that has us seated on either side. And Darrin Hagen’s original sound and composition design, with its whiffs of Edwardian music hall and its floating allusions to the “modern” world is in sync, too.

At the centre are Helen and Emma (Meegan Sweet), inspired by historical figures, who have braved grave danger to rescue the survivors in a German bombing of a Canadian hospital in Doullens, France in 1918. And these female heroes, who would not be happy with the designation ‘heroine’, are recuperating fretfully, anxious to get back to work. Both, in different ways, have a sharp-edged articulate wit about them that cuts through the traditionally sentimental male-owned landscape of heroism like a hot knife through butter, in the bright comic banter that Massicotte’s dialogue provides them. The play wears its narrative complications lightly, and carries its burden of exposition with expert ease.

Emma’s wounds are obvious: her head is swathed; her hands are bandage mittens. Helen’s are less obvious but less fixable, as we learn in the course of the play. Shell-shock and a shattering sense of “hopelessness” have overtaken her; “I’m lacking a variety of feeling,” she concedes in a rare unguarded moment without the mordant sardonic tone and entrenched irritability that Moorhouse captures so vividly in their performance. “The charm of doing nothing” has vanished, as she snaps. “Was I doing ‘nothing’ wrong?”

Meegan Sweet in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Sweet is terrific as Emma, a Canadian senator’s daughter of the activist Suffragist stripe, droll, bright, and crisply exasperated by a status quo that has kindly allowed women to participate, as nurses, in the lethal war abroad, but denied them the right to vote. Bandaged hands notwithstanding, she even smokes with a certain insouciance. And the character rises to every setback as a provocation to redoubled efforts. “Our voice was heard; the work continues!” she says of a failed protest launched on behalf of women’s gymnastics. “The answer is invariably No…. It’s persistence that pays.”

Helen and Emma are both, in their way, “odd women,” which is to say women who are out of step with the usual “husband project” — “not so beautiful, not so charming (pause), not so interested.”

Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The pair are surrounded by the working nurses of the hospital. In command, under the male military hierarchy of course, is Maude, a Scot convincingly played by Dana Wylie making a welcome return to theatre from the world of music. She’s proud of her charges, but speaks, from experience you assume, to caution against pressing their luck by arguing about the status of the medal of bravery they’ve been offered. “Don’t spoil all you’ve worked for here” by reinforcing the stereotype of women as “ungrateful, melodramatic creatures.” Emma scorns that view; the new century cannot come into its own fast enough for her.

The performances in Inglis’s production are closely meshed. Hoffmann as Georgie, a repository of wispy period songs and a steadfast spokesperson for the much-battered notion of hope, is a compelling figure, a tantalizing glimpse of the might-have-been for Helen. And Gabby Bernard is very funny and charming as the innocent — in a drawing room comedy she’d be the maid — trilling away cheerfully and cleaving to ‘the rules’ until she’s gradually drawn into a more wayward route to the future.

I’ve made this sound perhaps more schematic than it is. In all, Stars On Her Shoulders is a remarkably rich, full-bodied theatrical experience. And it speaks so movingly, in its theatrical way, to moments in human history that somehow feel seminal, when “comfort and pleasant thoughts” or “carrying on the best we can” just won’t cut it, and vigilance is required. Moments like ours.

I loved it.

Meet the playwright in 12thnight’s PREVIEW.

REVIEW

Stars On Her Shoulders

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Stephen Massicotte

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Dana Wylie

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Nov. 1 to 17

Tickets: All tickets are pay-what-you-will this season at workshopwest.org.

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Lethal power games as performance art: The Maids introduces a new indie theatre

Posted on November 1, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam in The Maids, Putrid Brat. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s something exactly right about entering the theatre through an unmarked door, down the stairs and into a space that invites reinvention and expands before your very eyes. It’s a world ready and waiting for actors to play in.

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The Pendennis Building downtown is where Putrid Brat, a new Edmonton indie theatre, introduces itself by producing an unsettling play that will fray the edges of your nerves (how quintessentially bratty is that?). That Jean Genet’s The Maids, forever young at 77 years old, is a piece all about performance, its seductions, its dangers, its artifices and limitations, is an intriguing calling card from two young actors, Julia van Dam and Hannah Wigglesworth, with director David Kennedy.

It’s a complicated game that Genet’s two maids play, a ceremony in which they take turns playing the mistress they both despise and idolize, and they play each other too. Claire (van Dam) and Solange (Wigglesworth) exist on a densely layered plane of adulation and grievance, oppression and fury. In a space that’s both claustrophobic and too big for them, they create their own theatre of sliding identity, in which their oft-rehearsed script leaks at the seams. And they dream, in a complex way, both of violence and love, homicidal revenge and emulation, a bloodstream of revolution.

Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam in The Maids, Putrid Brat. Photo by Kyle Tobiasson and PoppyRose Media

I had a chance, late in the run — and you have the chance till Sunday — to watch two very skilled actors in this tricky assignment. In the opening scene Van Dam (we’ll see her next week in Northern Light’s new Trevor Schmidt play Monstress) and Wigglesworth as Claire and Solange are in heightened mid-performance as the aggrieved maids. Claire plays the cruel, sneering Mistress and Solace is Claire, so reviled she’s not even fit to kiss the Mistress’s shoe.

“Take up the slack, you slut,” Mistress commands servant. “If you insist on snivelling, then snivel in your attic.” The translation by Brit playwright Martin Crimp has a kind of muscular danger, and humour, of its own.

When the Mistress herself comes home, you hear in Alexandra Dawkins’ detailed comic performance the noblesse oblige notes her maids have sounded and exaggerated in their impersonation — power wielded by the iron hand in the velvet glove, yes, and also condescension ambiguously camouflaged as disarming kindness. In the performance the Mistress projects a kind of vulnerability to men, to the servant class; it’s lethal to the maids’ plans, and she overplays self-consciously for her own benefit. In the dangerous game of attraction/revulsion, aggression and retreat, the maids have raised the stakes in their latest move, which they analyze over and over.

This intricate network of role-playing, alterations, second thoughts, reversals, in a world where fury and fear are in a tug-of-war for supremacy, is captured in Kennedy’s production.

Putrid Brat has attracted a top creative to their debut passion project: Kennedy’s direction, Even Gilchrist’s scenic design, Beyata Hackborn’s costumes, Nick Kourtides’s sinister sound design. And you have the opportunity to see two remarkable, and enterprising, actors at work. Keep your eye on these U of A theatre grads. They’re going places.

The Maids runs through Sunday at the Pendennis Building, 9660 Jasper Ave. Tickets: www.showpass.com/themaids/

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Playwright Stephen Massicotte talks about Stars On Her Shoulders, his latest, premiering at Workshop West

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In 2002, a story of first love, a dreamscape looped against the horrific backdrop of World War I, changed the life of the graphic designer-turned-actor who’d “jumped into theatre cold.” as he puts it.

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Since its Calgary premiere two decades ago, Mary’s Wedding, Stephen Massicotte’s first full-length play has been on a mainstage odyssey across the country, the border, and the pond. In the elite pantheon of bona fide Canadian classics, it has a special place.

Stars On Her Shoulders, the new Massicotte play that opens the Workshop West season Friday (all tickets are pay-what-you-will!), returns the playwright to Canada (he’s lived in New York since 2007), to the World War I vault where Canadian history lies sleeping — and to the theatre where Mary’s Wedding began life as a Springboards staged reading.

It shares the World War I setting with Mary’s Wedding. But “it’s a totally different style,” says Massicotte of his new play, which he traces back to a first draft at Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects in 2016. If Mary’s Wedding is a lyrical, poetic wander through time and space, present and past, Stars On Her Shoulders reflects the brisker influence of Noel Coward, “and particularly Terence Rattigan,” he says of the English master of the traditional ‘well-formed play’. Especially “the feminist suffragette character” in Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy. “An articulate, smart, witty kind of woman of that period.”

The characters, five women in 1918 in the aftermath of a German bombing of a hospital in Doullens, France, are nurses. Two of them, “the heroes of the play,” work through the night rescuing survivors, saving patients’ lives, “putting fires out with their hands.” As Massicotte describes, “a lot of nurses came from prominent families, educated quite well. … I thought it’d be fun to have them (take on) an Oscar Wilde vibe, in the cleverness of their speech.” And he fashioned his play in that vein.

playwright Stephen Massicotte, Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

The old-school structure he’s chosen is, he thinks, a marked contrast to contemporary theatre practice of “many short, intense scenes in different locations,” a reflection of a generation tied to watching TV and movies, and quick small-screen interpolations. “Tennessee Williams, Chekhov … those guys all wrote like that, long scenes that don’t drop the tension by cutting to black-out.”

“It’s a lost art,” he says. “Setting: the drawing room, for a half-hour scene in that location, with people coming and going. Then, the next scene, ‘the drawing room later that day’ … changing from two-hander scenes to three, to four, back to three, in different configurations. It’s quite a feat, really. And it makes you go farther with a scene than you normally might.”

Canadian history provided Massicotte, a military history buff, with a controversy involving what sort of medal of bravery should be awarded the nurse heroes. “Canadian authorities pointed out to the British war office that, although they appreciated this honour, Canadian nursing sisters were officers,” and so should get the military cross. Elsewhere nurses were “regular soldiers,” eligible for a medal on a lower rung in the hierarchy of military distinctions.

He’d mined the incident for one of the “Canadian Heritage Minute” pieces he was enlisted to write. “Heritage Canada didn’t really want to get into the controversy, and focussed on the bravery.” But he’d seen the seeds of a play in it. Massicotte is amused by the fact that the costumes assembled and designed by Brian Bast include some from the Heritage Minutes as per their labels, an inadvertent testimonial to career continuity.

The seven-year arc to opening night, which includes the (alas) familiar COVIDian fits and starts, is, he says, “the longest period I’ve ever worked on a play…. What was good about it is that every time I thought it was ready, I re-wrote it some more. And now I’m pretty proud of it.” Originally Massicotte had planned to write only one more World War I play. Now he has a trilogy, that includes The Oxford Roofclimber’s Rebellion, encounters between war hero Lawrence of Arabia and the poet Robert Graves.

“I’m pretty stoked,” says the genial Massicotte, not least because “this is all women…. It’s a fact that over the years, less roles have gone to women. So anything woman in acting has to be that much better prepared, that much better skilled, that much better talented. Whereas with men, there are great actors out there of course. But sometimes a male actor can get by for a long time just by being OK, OK to work with, reliable.”

“I’ve never written a play with more females than male. And the place is crammed with talent. I’m so impressed,” Massicotte says of Heather Inglis’s production. “The whole cast is crackerjack, really on the ball. And they’re funny! This sounds like a heavy play, but it’s quite funny, I think, in places.”

Massicotte’s own storyline is an original, anything but predictable. “When people ask me where I’m from I don’t say Thunder Bay, where I grew up; I say Calgary,” Massicotte says. “It’s where I did my first plays; it’s where I had my first theatre success.” And he can claim Edmonton roots as well, since he took his earliest writing, The Boy’s Own Jedi Handbook plays, to the Fringe, and other one-acts to Nextfest here.

And, as a graphic design grad of Cambrian College in Sudbury he might never had ended up in theatre at all, if it weren’t for having a crush on a girl who happened to be a stage manager in the college theatre department. “I painted sets, built some set pieces, and thought to myself ‘I wonder if I could do that; I bet I could do that!’” He took improv classes at Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay; he got cast in an amateur production of Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations.

Why Calgary? “At the time I was an air cadet, and in summer I used to teach at the cadet camp in Penhold, and many any of my best friends at the time lived in Calgary.” So, theatre school at the University of Calgary, as an actor, followed, along with occasional thoughts like “What have I done?”

Todd Houseman and Tai Amy Grauman in Mary’s Wedding, a Métis version. Citadel Theatre. Photo by Arthur Mah.

In Calgary he did plays, TV, commercials, “whatever came along.” And then came Mary’s Wedding, “and everything exploded. Oh, I guess I’m a writer now!” And it’s a career that catapulted him to theatre stardom, without a single writing class. “I still write from an actor’s point of view,” he thinks. “What would be fun for actors to do? What would they really enjoy sinking their teeth into? And I try to make even the small roles exciting to play.”

In New York, where he’s been for 17 years, with an American partner (“she went to McGill; she’s Canada-qualified!” he laughs), he writes mostly screenplays for TV and film, especially of the horror stripe. He and his film collaborators have an indie horror film How We Ended ready to go, and they’re looking for distribution. And he’s been working on a youth-oriented fantasy novel. “Stars on Her Shoulders is my first new play in a long time,” he says.

Do his explorations of horror and war have a certain continuity? He muses on the question. “I suppose they’re similar in that people are facing an existential danger. In plays it’s a bit more subtle, of course: someone facing a loss of hope, a loss of the ability to carry on. And having to recover even the tiniest thread of something that can keep them going.”

That is “a something you can get from human interaction, love, friendship, that can help you survive,” even those moments when “nothing seems to matter but we’re all supposed to keep going…. Even when living one more day is an act of defiance in the face of oblivion, sorrow, grief. Hope is this precarious act of profound bravery.”

It applies to the nurse characters of his new play, up against war and the circumscribed rights of women. And “when you have enough plays to look at,” he says, “you realize how much you’re writing about yourself.”

PREVIEW

Stars On Her Shoulders

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Stephen Massicotte

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Dana Wylie

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Friday Nov. 1 to 17

Tickets: All tickets are pay-what-you-will this season at workshopwest.org.

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Two actors, a passion, and a mission: Jean Genet’s The Maids, three years in the making, opens downtown

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Julia van Dam and Hannah Wigglesworth in rehearsal for The Maids, Putrid Brat. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the chiller of a play that opens October 25 in an eerie downtown basement, you’ll watch two sisters act out a dangerous, nerve-wracking, possibly lethal, role-playing game with each other — in a theatre of their own making.

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In a way Claire and Solange, the title characters of Jean Genet’s tense and suspenseful 1947 play The Maids, are performance artists. The sisters, maids in a love/loathe relationship with their mistress, take on, and exchange, roles across the class and power divide. Their ritual is to take turns playing imperious, casually disdainful Madame, and each other. They drink a cocktail of contempt and admiration, and fantasize murderously about what it would take to change their world.

Theatre, roles, performance, fantasy that drifts into reality, inequities of power … it all sheds light on the imaginative hold the play has had for three years on Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam, two  young up-and-coming actors who emerged from the U of A’s BFA acting program in 2021 with a theatrical mission.

Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam in The Maids, Putrid Brat. Photo by Kyle Tobiasson and PoppyRose Media

The pair, theatre school classmates, have turned producers; they’ve written dozens of grant applications, raised money, sought out an award-winning director, found a venue in the newly restored Pendennis Building on Jasper Avenue. And they’ve named their new indie troupe Putrid Brat (from a line in The Maids translation by Brit playwright Martin Crimp). All in pursuit of the upcoming production directed by U of A drama professor David Kennedy, in which they play the maids, with Alexandra Dawkins as Madame.

As they explain over a pre-rehearsal coffee, Wigglesworth and van Dam were moved to collaboration after a scene study with Kennedy from The Maids during the pandemic. “We were really drawn to it, so much to dig into,” says Wigglesworth. And in Kennedy they both appreciated “a really great director, so passionate about the work…. “

The pair dreamed of a full production. “We just thought ‘when theatre comes back …IF theatre comes back….”

As they think about it now, it is perhaps no coincidence that Wigglesworth and van Dam were so attracted to a play about a power imbalance, and the longing to reclaim some control over their lives. They felt it. For one thing, they were part of a U of A graduating class that spent most of their arduous and intense four-year BFA program online, thanks to COVID — a particularly unsatisfying scenario in an art form that’s all about connecting with an audience.

As a theatre student in an all-consuming total-immersion program, a psycho-drama of its own, “your time is really not your own; it’s hard to have a second to think for yourself, and look beyond,” Wigglesworth says…” And at the best of times an actor’s life, after that, involves “a lot of waiting by the phone,” or the inbox. But in times of huge uncertainty, and at the start of theatre careers, they felt especially at the whim of others, of circumstances, of the world. “We were wanting to take some power back,” she thinks as van Dam nods. “To have some control of our own destiny, taking control of anything we could because we felt so out of control.…”

As van Dam puts it, producing The Maids was a kind of statement for them: “I’m not going to let this place (the university) define me. There’s a life beyond this! Anger was really a strong motivation for me.”

A farm kid from the Netherlands who moved to Canada at age six, van Dam drifted away from theatre into film and TV after graduation. The Brandon Rhiness indie film Grotesque, a lot of commercials, and one big American production, Under The Banner of Heaven with Andrew Garfield, shot in Calgary are on her resumé.

She credits Trevor Schmidt’s Northern Light Theatre production of A Phoenix Too Frequent last fall — she played a widow who gives up grief in favour of falling in love — with bringing her back to the stage. And next month Edmonton audiences will see her in the new Schmidt play Monstress at NLT, with more stage work to come this season.

Wigglesworth, originally from Winnipeg, went to Stratford for two seasons, as part of the Birmingham Conservatory, and ended up onstage with the Stratford heavy-hitters, like Colm Feore, in Richard III, as well as The Miser, the Brad Fraser adaptation of Richard II, and a modern take on Love’s Labour’s Lost. She’s now re-located to Toronto, for film and TV opportunities.

All the while, van Dam and Wigglesworth were brainstorming, long distance, about The Maids. The production history of Genet’s play includes every kind of venue, and staging it in a formal theatre was never in their plans. “From the start we thought warehouse,” says van Dam. But they considered every kind of “theatre,” an Airbnb, Rutherford House…. They considered casting a child, or a puppet, as Madame. “Crazy! When we found the space (in the Pendennis Building), it solidified a lot of things for us.”

Three years later, they’re still passionate about the theatre project they’ve built from the ground up. The 1947 play has invited every sort of interpretation: in some productions Claire and Solange are played by men, adding another level of artifice to the role playing, and taking their cue from Genet’s own introduction. Some productions are driven by the class struggle and economic inequities; others lean into the  homo-erotic potential available in The Maids. It seems to speak to every age.

So how does a 1947 play sit in 2024?  “Lately I’ve been feeling it focus on the patriarchy,” says Wigglesworth. “The three women onstage are, in different ways, jostling for their spot in this hierarchy created by men…. You think Madame has all the power, but she’s struggling too with the same things (the maids) are, at a very different level.”

Though the men are never seen onstage, the characters “are very aware of how they’re seen by men.” As van Dam puts it, “who has more value in the eyes of men?”

“When you feel powerless, what are you willing to do, what lengths will you go to to get some agency back in your life?” says Wigglesworth. It’s a question that resonates powerfully in The Maids, and for two young actors at the start of theatre careers. “I feel like Hannah actually is my sister,” grins van Dam.

PREVIEW

The Maids

Theatre: Putrid Brat

Written by: Jean Genet, translated by Martin Crimp

Directed by: David Kennedy

Starring: Julia van Dam, Hannah Wigglesworth, Alexandra Dawkins

Designed by: Even Gilchrist (set), Beyata Hackborn (costumes), Nick Kourtides (sound)

Where: Pendennis Building, 9660 Jasper Ave.

Running: Oct. 25 through Nov. 3

Tickets: www.showpass.com/themaids/

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Bear Grease: an Indigenous makeover for the classic musical, at the Citadel

Posted on October 14, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Bear Grease the Musical, a LightningCloud production at the Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Call it cosmic inevitability if you will. Or maybe an irresistibly cool idea whose time is overdue. But some shows can’t not be born.

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Bear Grease, the hit Indigenous makeover of that classic 1972 musical that takes us all to the ‘50s, is like that. The inspiration of Henry “Cloud” Andrade and Crystle Lightning, Bear Grease re-launches the Citadel’s Highwire Series Friday after a year’s hiatus. And it arrives on the Maclab stage after three years of touring, 169 shows worth, to sold-out houses on both sides of the border.

And it started here, at the 2021 Edmonton Fringe. That was the year Fringe artistic director Murray Utas invited the husband and wife duo to perform in their hip-hop group LightningCloud on a dedicated Indigenous stage in the festival’s new Pêhonân series. “Hold on!” Andrade told him. “We wrote something new (back then it was called Bannock Grease). And it’s pretty freakin’ hilarious. Can we try that instead?” From Utas, as is his wont, it was a Yes! And tickets for the entire run got snapped up instantly.

Lightning, who’s from the Enoch Cree Nation, recalls the random spark that got ignited one night when she and Andrade were watching the 1978 John Travolta/ Olivia Newton-John movie, one of their faves, on cable. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had a show like this?…. There’s no representation out there. And this is so cool, it’s funny,  it’s contemporary. No buckskin, no scenes on the back of a horse! ” In this Lightning speaks from experience. She moved to L.A. age nine with the family and her actress mom, and film and TV started happening for her right away (her first lead role: 3 Ninjas: Knuckle Up).

“An all-Native Grease … we just started laughing,” says Andrade, an Indigenous Mexican (Huichol/ Wixárika) born and raised in L.A. His solo show Evandalism chronicles his hard-ass upbringing there and his rescue from gang culture when he found the arts (or vice versa). “I’ve always been in theatre,” he says, “ever since fourth grade, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and I was Rudolph.” But he drifted away from theatre: “I was kinda type cast, Gangster #3 or Cholo #2.”

But theatre was still on his mind. “And I used music to scratch that itch.” Hiphopera, the marriage of theatre and hip-hop, brought him back, he says. And he started writing, too.

On the fateful night of Grease on cable, brainstorming instantly began. Andrade is, after all, an award-winning MC, and holds the Guinness record for “longest freestyle rap,” a mind-boggling 18 hours. Summer Nights, the Danny/Sandy duet that’s permanently lodged in your brain, got a twist, with the Indigenous slang for making out, hooking up. You know the tune, I know you do. “Summer snaggin’, had me a blast; summer snaggin’, happened so fast…. I met a girl, she’s Enoch Cree. I met a boy who’s not related to me.”

“We wrote the whole song that night,” Andrade says. And the pandemic lockdown was the chance to amplify the 35-minute Fringe edition of Bear Grease. “We wrote in all the missing songs.” Some are in the spirit of Grease parodies, with new, Indigenized lyrics (“meet me at the powwow, you’re the one that I want”); some are from LightningCloud albums. “We knew the audience was going to want ‘something Grease’,” as he puts it. “Then  we started rapping.”

“We put in some hip-hop while still keeping the ‘50s flavour,” says Lightning, whose theatre training at the Beverly Hills Playhouse was of the full-on classical stripe. “That was important to us. We kept the melody and feel of it, the vibe, carved out the words, added our own, added some Native slang….”

Henry “Cloud” Andrade (centre) and the touring cast of Bear Grease, 2023. Photo by KGE Photography

The production reflects that, says Lightning, who played Sandy in much of the Bear Grease touring so far, but removed herself from the cast after show #140 to pass the torch and make her directing debut (Andrade, who was Danny, is the music director and stage manager). “The poodle skirts are still A-line. But instead of a poodle, there’s a bear and ribbons. The guys are still wearing black leather, but now they have beautiful bead-work medallions and kookum scarves. Sometimes they wear moccasins instead of Chuck Taylors….”

Crystle LIghtning and Henry “Cloud” Andrade in the touring Bear Grease, 2023. Photo by KGE Photography.

The ensemble, all Indigenous, are from  is from actors in the diverse, all-Indigenous cast bring with them their own localized traditions and cultural flavours. New to the current cast are three performers, Justin Giehm and Raven Bright, both Dene Navajo from New Mexico, as Sonny and Roger respectively, and Tesla Wolfe as Frenchie. And everywhere Bear Grease goes, “we try to have local references,” Lightning say. “What is the local thing?” In Treaty 6 territory, for example, the show is threaded with Cree here and there, and place names.   

Why take on Grease, instead of, say, any other quintessential American musical? Andrade, amused, remembers playing Sonny in a high school Grease. Lightning says her teenage parents’ first date was watching Grease at the Enoch drive-in. “And nine months later I was born!”

“I wasn’t a rapper at first,” she says. “I started out as DJ, working Hollywood clubs.” She and Andrade met in L.A., at a magazine photo shoot, and they fell in love.  “He asked me to DJ for him for a couple of shows, and then for a 12-day tour…” And then, as she started rapping onstage with Andrade, LightningCloud was born, “first one song, then another, and soon we’re a full-on hip-hop group.” Albums and awards, and touring on both sides of the border, ensued.

The Lightning and Andrade love story gets a dramatic boost at River Cree. Lightning is seven months pregnant and onstage there when her water breaks, which pretty much redefines the ‘actor’s nightmare’. And while she’s at the Misericordia Hospital for the birth of their son, filmmaker Michelle Latimer calls to offer her “a delicious starring role” in the CBC Trickster series.  And she won a Canadian Screen Award as best actress in a drama series for her work. “When my son was born, my world was opened up to roles I’d always dreamed of,” she says.

The couple moved from L.A. to Edmonton, Lightning’s home turf. “Even when I was just visiting (with a touring hip-hop improv group called Free Daps, Orlando-based) I could see that this is a theatre town,” says Andrade. “A town that embraces the performing arts.”

And Bear Grease isn’t just a celebration of Indigenous cultures married to a much-loved musical, as Lightning muses. It’s a crucial “what-if?” proposition, too. After all, Grease conjures an era, the ‘50s, when “opportunities (for Indigenous artists) were non-existent. And they still kind of are…. We have to create for ourselves; no one’s knocking on our door.”

“What if we’d gotten this opportunity before?” she asks. “What if colonization had never happened? Would we have been out there like Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta.”

“But because our reality was a bit different, we had to re-create in a parallel universe….” she says. There are references to darker subjects (residential schools), but the show takes a more oblique route to understanding. “It’s a comedy! And we want everyone to be entertained and have fun.”

Ah, with more to come, says Lightning. “What about Bearspray? Or Rez Side Story?.” Stay tuned.

PREVIEW

Bear Grease

Theatre: LightningCloud in the Citadel Highwire Series

Created by: Henry “Cloud” Andrade and Crystle Lightning

Directed by: Crystle Lightning

Starring: Raven Bright, Kean Buffalo, Bryce Morin, Melody McArthur, Tammy Rae, Teneil Whiskeyjack, Rodney McLeod, Skylene Gladue, Justin Giehm, Tesla Wolfe

Running: Oct. 17 to 27

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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Don’t look now, but who’s that behind you? The Woman in Black, at Teatro Live! A review.

Posted on October 12, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Julien Arnold in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Have sympathy for your audience!” roars The Actor (Geoffrey Simon Brown) emphatically at the start of The Woman In Black, the hit thriller that launches the Teatro Live! season at the Varscona. “Draw on your emotions and our imagination.”

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Andrew Ritchie’s crack production does both.

The Actor has been hired to coach a stiff elderly solicitor, one Arthur Kipps (Julien Arnold), in the fine art of performance. Arthur is a test case for beginner thesp lessons (one of our best actors, Arnold tackles bad acting expertly). But he persists. He feels a compelling need to release the nightmare burden that’s haunted him for 30 years by telling his story to an audience, his family. “Terrible things have happened to me,” he says. “The story must be told.”

The story is a classic old-school goth chiller, of Edwardian provenance. It takes us to a gloomy mansion in a desolate salt marsh on the northeast coast of England, a house so isolated it’s only accessible across a skinny causeway at low tide. But as for the storytelling, the fun of The Woman In Black, a cunning and intricate 1987 adaptation by English playwright Stephen Mallatratt of Susan Hill’s novel — it ran in the West End for 34 years before it closed in 2023 — is that it belongs so fully to the theatre.

It engages “our emotions and our imagination” in the ingenious ways it uses deliberately minimalist theatrical props (a trunk, a couple of chairs, a door, a doll) designed by Alison Yanota, and the technical resources of the theatre. It’s a study in unlocking the power of suggestion to create suspense. When a rocking chair rocks, by itself, in Act II, the audience gasps. Which reminds you how fun it is to share a gasp with an audience.

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Julien Arnold in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Ritchie’s production, and his team of designers, are inspired by the possibilities of this theatre playground. Leona Brausen’s costumes — bowlers, Edwardian suits, rustic garb for the northerners — locate the story in time. The Actor and Arthur Kipps marvel at the “recorded sound,” as they put it, and there’s unnerving live sound too, interspersed with creaks, the whoosh of wind, disembodied shrieks at various imaginary distances, all part of Tori Morrison’s dramatic sound design. And the lighting created by T. Erin Gruber is a character too, an unsettling landscape of semi-visibility, shadows, darkness erupting into startling flashes, flickering lights from mysterious sources. Lighting and sound surround us in this storytelling, from behind, through the aisles, in the unexplored pockets of darkness at the edges of the stage.

Both sound and light play across a gauzy screen that separates past and present. And it opens to reveal — no, suggest — the mysterious labyrinth of Eel Marsh House, in Yanota’s design.

In short, the theatre feels occupied, so to speak, by the story. The play begins in a darkened Edwardian theatre, and the Varscona, with its proscenium, its red velvet curtains, its brick and wood, turns in a fine period performance. That Strathcona venue has never felt smaller, and that’s a compliment.

Geoffrey Simon Brown in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

I’ve left the narrative to the last, because there’s a lot that mustn’t be revealed in advance (as The Actor says at the outset, “have sympathy for the audience” and I’m all for that.”). The Woman In Black is a play within a play, and there’s a moment when the inner play slides in and takes over, and the actors switch places. Geoffrey Simon Brown plays the younger Arthur Kipps, a skeptical lawyer sent by his London office to the village on the marsh, to settle the affairs of the elderly occupant, deceased, of Eel Marsh House. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but…. The performance charts the gradual escalation of his unease into terror. “What are you holding back? I must know!” he cries to a local.

Julien Arnold and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And Arnold, unleashing a whole arsenal of accents, plays everyone else the young Kipps meets on his life-changing journey north, taciturn villagers and eerie pony cart drivers included. In Arnold’s performance the characters are precisely differentiated. “You may doubt,” says one village dweller. “We know.”

In a thriller with only two credited actors (and one uncredited dog, excellent in the role of Spider), the challenge to the actors to conjure the full cast is extreme. And these are actors who dig in. This, incidentally, is the second production of the theatre season in which a character will holler “Stella!” at top volume.

There’s the tickling suspense of wondering, and there are scary surprises, my friends, in this season of the scary. Buy in — the invitation offered by the production is alluring — and see what live theatre can do.

Check out 12thnight’s PREVIEW interview with director Andrew Ritchie.

REVIEW

The Woman In Black

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stephen Mallatratt from a novel by Susan Hill

Directed by: Andrew Ritchie

Starring: Julien Arnold, Geoffrey Simon Brown

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 27

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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The existentialists from Ummo are back: Mump and Smoot in Exit, at Theatre Network. A review.

Posted on October 11, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

John Turner (Smoot) and Michael Kennard (Mump) are back, in Mump and Smoot in Exit, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Mump and Smoot arrive, as always, from a mysterious place, through the crowd — inhabitants of another mysterious place, the theatre (that’s us!). And, as always, they’re mid-adventure, mid-conversation, en route to the stage.

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It’s dark; they’re carrying lanterns. Each is chained to the heavy burlap sack they’re dragging. And we’re never quite sure whether their nightmare is us, or vice versa.

After a decade’s absence, the ‘clowns of horror’ from the planet Ummo are back among us, at Theatre Network to premiere a new show, Mump and Smoot In Exit. And it’s an original, unusual even in an archive with a notable attraction to the grotesque and the macabre.

In their collected canon, the interplanetary travellers, who speak Ummonian (a language that hints now and then at English, “Wow”, “I’m outta here”), have found themselves in locations we’ve all experienced: a tent in the wilderness, a wake, an airplane, a restaurant negotiating spaghetti…. Eruptions of blood and gore, unhinged entrails, severed limbs, rarely to be found in Trip Advisor, just happen. The familiar is a slippery slope it seems.

Anyhow, in Mump and Smoot in Exit, the latest from the prize Canadian theatre artists Michael Kennard, John Turner and director Karen Hines (whose character Pochsy is one of the country’s great creations too), they have arrived in a smoky place where none of us has been. And we’re discovering it together. There are clues, to be sure (design consultant: Andraya Diogo). It’s a landscape dominated by a skeletal tree (Beckett’s vagabonds, waiting around Godot to show up, would recognize it), full of bones and skulls, enigmatic monuments, a gargoyle with glowing red eyes. The entrance is an electrified archway of skulls. And they are not always alone there (Lauren Brady, listed in the credits as “Actor,” in full spectral get-up).

Mump and Smoot (Michael Kennard and John Turner) In Exit, with Lauren Brady as Gog. Theatre Network, photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

There will be a moment for Mump and Smoot when it dawns on them where they are; it’s a moment we’ve been wondering about, too. Incidentally this poses a special problem for a writer: there’s so little I can tell you about the story without spoiling it. So I’m leaving that aside, for your own good.

Mump (Kennard) is the bossier, shirtier, more aggressive one in a tuxedo jacket, with the single periscope horn. He’s the one who takes charge and gets mightily irritated when things go south. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Smoot (Turner) is more pliable and impulsive, distracted by the audience, and ready to play. If he were to see a skull (and he does) he’d pick it up and give it a pat on the bonce. I’m pretty sure I heard “alas poor Yorick” emerging from the Ummonian phrase book. Ditto “don’t touch” from Mump. Everything that happens in In Exit is a test of this comically fraught, signature relationship.

Mump (Michael Kennard) and Smoot (John Turner) “In Exit,” Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

They arrive onstage in a kind of daze, as if the show is an aftermath of something. Smoot isn’t feeling 100 per cent. Mump, who’s whispering, isn’t quite his usual confident self either; he looks oddly bewildered, then downright appalled. They are trying to remember how they got where they are. And it’s a measure of Kennard and Turner as actors in action, in detailed comic performances, that we understand, without language, an existential conundrum.

Smoot, with his chipmunk voice, is the follower, the voluble one who ingratiates himself with the audience (we go “awwww” and Mump grimaces). Mump, the skeptic, rolls his eyes; he makes of congenital exasperation an entire repertoire of reactions in Kennard’s performance. His characteristic gesture is throwing his hands up, an eloquent ‘whatever’ at moments of maximum aggro.

Victor Snaith Hernandez’s lighting is rather spectacular. And Greg Morrison’s superb original score, with its strange jagged dissonances and mad violin riffs, is in itself an aural exposition.   

It’s a show unusually laden with props. And much to Mump’s chagrin (and the general hilarity in the house), they were wayward on opening night. But hey, that gave us a chance to appreciate Kennard and Turner’s skills as improvisers. For me, the more overt sequences with the audience, a group invocation to Ummo for example and a bilingual conversation soliciting individual audience members to answer a question, might be tuned up, along with the scenes involving puppet versions of the characters. So far, the seams do show a bit.

The particular genius of Mump and Smoot is the way they put the physical — no, the visceral — into dark comedy. We’re only held together by a wing and a prayer, apparently; otherwise our arms and legs would fly off, a foot here, a bone or two there. These things happen when you’re a clown of horror. And, speaking as we are of visceral, there’s lip-smacking fine dining onstage.

But in Mump and Smoot in Exit, black comedy is infiltrated by questions of good and evil, life and death. Religion — they are disciples of the god Ummo — is put to the test. Is memory a haunting? Can you really know if you’re in a bad dream or actually conscious? Mump and Smoot In Exit wonders about things like that. And so do we. It’s high-stakes hilarity, and we laugh and keep on laughing.

REVIEW

Mump and Smoot in Exit

Theatre: Theatre Network

Created and performed by: Michael Kennard and John Turner

Directed by: Karen Hines

Running: through Oct. 27

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

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Let’s do the Time Warp again: on being Dr Frank-N-Furter in Grindstone’s cult classic season opener

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski as Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s time warp time. Picture this: a little kid in the single-digit age bracket, with Halloween insomnia, sneaks downstairs way past his bedtime and turns on the TV. He flips through the channels; he stumbles on a sight, and an attitude, he would never forget. He finds himself immersed in the fun and games at Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s place.

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“It was the first authentically queer film I ever watched,” says the exuberant Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The 1975 celluloid incarnation of a sci-fi rock n’ roll goth fantasy cult musical devised two years earlier by an out-of-work B-movie-obsessed London actor (that would be Richard O’Brien) made an indelible impression. “I was swept away by the outrageousness and the irreverence, not knowing either of those words — and the aggressive unashamed queerness of it!” Talk about “another dimension, with voyeuristic intention,” as the Time Warp number has it.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

That was the ‘90s. And Parsons-Lozinski’s awestruck, and receptive, younger self (“I don’t know what this is, but I’m confident I AM this!”) could hardly have predicted that his grown-up theatre artist self would be onstage in the Halloween season of 2024, starring as the “sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania” in the cult classic. Byron Martin’s production of Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show launches Grindstone Theatre’s first-ever mainstage series of big musicals at the Orange Hub (Oct. 18 to Nov. 3). “I think shows come into your life when they’re meant to!”

“I jokingly say that the plot is ‘straight couple makes gay friends’,” declares Parsons-Lozinsky, who arrives at a Strathcona coffee joint in pink sequinned clogs and a leopard coat with cuffs the size of truck tires (“my fashion sense is ‘enthusiastic’”). He has one of those laughs that could pop the earbuds out of email-ers three tables away.

Bella King, Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Cameron Chapman in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

If you’ve ever snapped your rubber gloves along with Frank-N-Furter at an interactive performance on stage or screen, I don’t need to tell you this. But, what the hey, it involves the dark-and-stormy-night arrival of newly engaged innocents Brad (Cameron Chapman) and Janet (Bella King) at the mansion of the enterprising scientist, “an unapologetically queer space” as Parsons-Lozinski puts it. The raucous (singing) household includes the show-stopping creepy butler Riff Raff (Josh Travnik) and his sister Magenta (Kendra Humphrey) — and Frank-N-Furter’s pièce de résistance. Which is the unveiling of his latest lab creation, the muscular specimen of the title (Mark Sinongco).

Parsons-Lozinski arrives in fishnets (“and lots of skin”) on the Orange Hub stage that once belonged to his alma mater MacEwan Theatre Arts, and his student performance as Man #1 in The Music Man, now lost, alas, in the mists of time. He brings with him a resumé packed with punk, club dates, cabarets, drag shows as his high-heeled persona Lilith Fair, and playwriting (The House That Fucks played Off-Broadway in the Fringe Encore series in 2022).

His drag debut was in a show for a vanished Edmonton troupe wth an enigmatic name, Rabbit Marmot. And after graduation he worked for Aimée Beaudoin (now the co-owner and co-producer of Spotlight Cabaret) on the Jubilations Dinner Theatre circuit. He was the first full-time drag cast member in their Orange Is The New Pink — as Lilith Fair.

He’d long been fascinated by drag and its theatrical possibilities. A remount of Guys in Disguise’s BitchSlap! was “the first drag show I’d seen where the drag wasn’t the joke; it was the medium for telling the story.” And he held that thought.

The Pansy Cabaret, starring Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Daniel Belland. Photo supplied.

Recently, Parsons-Lozinski, Calgary-based “for now,” has been leaning into theatre. “I feel like I’m moving into a different stage of my career,” he says. The turning point, he thinks, was The Pansy Cabaret at the Fringe in 2022, Darrin Hagen’s meticulously researched exploration of a vivid, playful, and brave chapter of showbiz history: the flowering of queer and drag culture on Broadway and vaudeville during the Prohibition era in New York. And its utter erasure by homophobia in a single decade when Prohibition ended. The jaunty performance style, the sounds of that era and its cheeky and sometimes poignant Edwardian song repertoire, the sassy interaction with the audience … all were well within the Parsons-Lozinski compass in a bold, resourceful star performance, as Edmonton audiences discovered.

“Darrin,” he says, “has been my biggest inspiration…. He changed my life by putting me in The Pansy Cabaret. That show put me on a completely different path.” And its “homage to the people who came before me and who bravely put it all out there so I can be the artist I am now” inspired a post-Pansy Cabaret creation of his own. Millennial Sex Witch is “a continuation of that thought, through a contemporary lens, what it’s like to be a drag artist now.”

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Thomas Jones in With Bells On, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, EPIC Photography

In With Bells On, the 2023 Devanand Janki/ Tommy Newman holiday musical based on Hagen’s two-hander comedy of that name, Parsons-Lozinski played a drag queen, in full seasonal regalia, stuck in an elevator with a mousey sad-sack accountant. “Family friendly! A lovely heartwarming Christmas show. And transgressive because of that,” says the actor cheerfully.

At the other end of the spectrum, tonally speaking, is Liam Salmon’s furiously articulate, politically scathing solo play Local Diva which premiered at last summer’s Fringe. Fuelled by exasperation, then outrage, the Local Diva character was “the most aggressive thing I’ve ever done,” says Parsons-Lozinski. And it unleashed, not unexpectedly, a toxic deluge of homophobia on social media.

He’s done lots of musicals, and is about to do another. But even though he graduated from a theatre school specializing in musical theatre, Parsons-Lozinski doesn’t really think of himself as “a musicals person” per se, “I don’t read music. And I love to smoke…. I sound more like Kathleen Turner every day.”

Rocky Horror is “the perfect intersection of the aggression of Local Diva and the frivolous fun of With Bells On,” he thinks. “It’s so powerful to be able to come into this show which formed so much of the comfort I have with my identity now, and the body of work I would pursue. And to use it as a middle finger….”

The timing is right: “there’s so much aggression and resistance to queer work,” he says. “I have been on the receiving end of so much vitriol on social media, from people who want to vilify my community…. I’m channelling both my love for the material, and this anger I have about we are being talked about,” he says. “That aggression, that resistance … I feel like I’m able to throw it back!” And, hey, there’s no fourth wall.

Each performance of the show will feature a new guest as the Narrator. And Grindstone is going full-interaction with the production. Which makes Rocky Horror  “a great choice” for the little company that brought us Hot Boy Summer and Die Harsh. “Their roots are in improv,” as Parsons-Lozinski points out. And in this musical “the audience is its own character.”

With his club cred, Parsons-Lozinski has always savoured that direct connection. Be warned. He can hardly wait.

Check out Grindstone’s mainstage season lineup at the Orange Hub (where they manage the theatre spaces) here.

PREVIEW

Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show

Theatre: Grindstone Theatre

Created by: Richard O’Brien (music, lyrics, book)

Directed by: Byron Martin

Starring: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Bella King, Cameron Chapman, Kendra Humphrey, Mark Sinongco, Josh Travnik, Karlee Squires, Evan Dowling

Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.

Running: Oct. 18 through Nov. 3

Tickets: showpass.com

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