Hints, signs, omens of spring: theatre possibilities this weekend

Posted on May 24, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the terrific new Conni Massing play Dead Letter, premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre we meet a woman who’s desperate for meaning, obsessed by the unaccountable, hyper-alert to any small sign from the universe that might connects the random dots of our existence. The play is funny and dark, and it wraps itself around a murder mystery with clues and heartbreak. It’s a lot for a play and a trio of top-flight actors (Lora Brovold, Collin Doyle, Maralyn Ryan) to do, and they all rise wonderfully to the occasion. You can read the 12thnight review here, and an interview with the playwright here. Dead Letter continues its run at the Gateway Theatre through June 2. Tickets: workshopwest.org.

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•And speaking as we are of omens and signs, the colour green has officially returned to the world, ergo it’s the moment for Sprouts. As the name hints, Concrete Theatre’s annual event is all about theatrical seedlings. Sprouts plants new and original playlets, from a writers of diverse backgrounds, for kids and their families. And over the years more than a few of them have grown into full-length plays for kids that tour and join the Canadian canon.

Sprouts 2024, Concrete Theatre.

This year’s 22nd spring edition happens Saturday at the Westbury Theatre (12:30 and 2:30 p.m.), with a trio of theatre sprouts. And you and your young companions (0 to 12, as billed) can see them all in about an hour.

What’s Sprout-ing? Two are by theatre artists Edmonton audiences have known so far mainly ias actors. Helen Belay’s The Dog and The Donkey That Brays chronicles the quest of the title companions who set forth in search of independence, “who must learn to think before they act and how to use their voice.” The mismatched title characters of Alex Ariate’s The Monkey and the Turtle, based on a classic Filipino fable, are also on a journey of discovery — through a forest in search of food. Solidarity is required.

The third of the Sprouts trio is Lucy, Alison Neuman’s story of a disabled girl passionate about dance. Her adventure is to join live dance classes, and challenge the commonplaces about what dancers look like and how they move. The Sprouts cast directed by Jenna Rodgers includes Julie Andrew, Mohamed Ahmed, and Chelo Ledesma.

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

MASKS!, Rising Sun Theatre. Photo supplied.

•It’s the 20th anniversary of Rising Sun Theatre, devoted to opening the doors of theatre to cognitively disabled people, and providing opportunities for them to practice the art of theatre. Their new show MASKS!, collectively created by the cast under the mentorship of professional theatre artists, focuses on the meaning and magic of the masks, how and why we wear them in life, and what’s underneath.

Most of the masks in the show, says director Becca Barrington, were created by the cast “to represent a character they wanted to explore…. The stories and scenes in the play were developed entirely by the group inspired by their mask characters — who they are, how they move, and what adventures they get up to.”

“We also have some scenes that explore how we use masks and movement in our daily lives to challenge and support our feelings. For example, how to move our mask from sad to happy, or how we can change a frustrated/chaotic mask to something even more powerful… a calm mask.”

MASKS! runs at the Nina Haggerty Centre (9225 118 Ave.) Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3:30 p.m.  Tickets: eventbrite.ca

cast of Grease, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux

•If You’re The One That I Want doesn’t stick in your brain when you see that song title written out in black and white, consider a sensory deprivation tank getaway for your holiday this summer. Continuing at the Mayfield through June 16, Kate Ryan’s big-cast high-spirited production of Grease, choreographed by Julio Fuentes, adds some urban grit to the nostalgia for our collective alma mater Rydell High. Fun fun fun. The 12thnight review is here. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca. 

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Your invitation into a world of dreams: Peter Hinton-Davis directs a chamber version of Das Rheingold at Edmonton Opera

Posted on May 23, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Peter Hinton-Davis, director of Das Rheingold, Edmonton Opera. Photo by Adanya Dunn.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The dream is as epic as the world, and as small as … a ring.

Das Rheingold, the opening gambit in Richard Wagner’s monumental four-opera Ring Cycle, is the grand finale of Edmonton Opera’s 60th anniversary season. And it’s the first time the company has ever undertaken it, with plans to unroll the whole cycle opera by opera in subsequent seasons.

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In honour of the occasion, they’ve enlisted one of the country’s most distinguished theatre and opera directors, to bring it to the stage in a highly unconventional downsized “chamber version” we’ll see up close. That theatre thrust stage itself is an unusual destination for the company, the Citadel’s 685-seat Maclab house — instead of Edmonton Opera’s usual Size Large 2,500-seat home at the Jubilee Auditorium — starting Tuesday. And the forces in the adaptation by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick which premiered at Birmingham Opera in 1990, are a dramatic re-think of size, too: 12 singers with an orchestra of 18 (instead of the usual 85).

The job of conductor Simon Rivard, says director Peter Hinton-Davis, “is everything that happens when (the cast) are singing; my job is everything that’s happening when they’re not singing.”

Wagner wrote his monumental Ring Cycle, a project of some 35 years in the creation, in reverse order with Das Rheingold, the opener, last, as Peter Hinton-Davis explains. What Wagner called “the preliminary evening” launches a wildly dramatic multi-generational story that begins with a shaft of sunlight on gold at the bottom of the Rhine River — and the fashioning of that Rhine gold into a magic ring that will give the possessor the power to rule the world, if (a gigantic caveat) they renounce love.

Das Rheingold plunges us into a outsized world of river nymphs, giants, dwarfs, gods and demi-gods, some of it co-opted from Norse mythology, some of it original. Jealousy, greed, the lust for power, treachery, betrayal … the curse of the ring: there is nothing meagre about the imaginative and emotional scale of Das Rheingold. “Big strokes!” declares Hinton-Davis, a playwright himself, whose startlingly broad resumé encompasses innovative contemporary versions of the classics and new Canadian work (including a major commitment to Indigenous theatre). “And yet, what is so crazy, it’s so precise, so accurate in the way people behave….” Unexpectedly, moment to moment, “there’s a precise psychological realism to it.”

The doom-laden entry of the gods into Valhalla at the end of Das Rheingold means eternal sanctuary, yes, but also their own death. As Hinton-Davis says, “they have knowledge of what they stand to gain at the end of the opera, and what they stand to lose…. What are the aspirations of the gods and what are the moral costs and consequences?” The quintessence of the cursed ring is the trade-off between power and love, the tension between the love of power, and the power of love. “All the characters lose hugely in this pursuit of power.”

It was that question, “big ideas, the costs of getting something achieved, the moral lines and ‘is it worth it?’” that drew him to Das Rheingold, says the Stratford-based Hinton-Davis, last in Edmonton to direct a stunning production this past season of Makram Ayache’s provocative epic The Hooves Belonged To The Deer. “It made me think so much about what we do as artists, the sacrifices, the price to be paid.”

Legend has it that The Ring came to Wagner, a multi-disciplinary artist if ever there was one, in a dream. And Hinton-Davis has been thinking, he says, of the dream of the founders of Edmonton Opera six decades ago. “What does it take to take to do something bigger than ourselves?”

Das Rheingold, stage rendering, designer: Andy Moro. Edmonton Opera. Photo by Adanya Dunn.

In Hinton-Davis’s conception, Wotan, the king of the gods, “is a conductor who has a dream of doing the Ring; he’s haunted by it.” His production takes place in a hotel room, “a messy dishevelled hotel room” where in the opening scene Wotan is sleeping in a bed surrounded by scores and take-out containers. “The opera itself is a dream of what he wants to create.” And Wotan has dreams within dreams.

The scope of the Ring, as is nothing less than a mythology, but the story does happens on the human, and even the domestic, plane, too — husbands and wives, lovers and daughters, the dwarf Alberich who steals the gold and instigates the whole multi-opera narrative. With Das Rheingold “I was trying to find a container for it that people could find relatable, rather than a hillside, or a mountain top, or an abstract location,” says Hinton-Davis. “The dream-like structures are inherent in the way the opera is built…. You’re invited into a world of dreams and dream images.”

The idea of a hotel room — “transient, nowhere and everywhere at the same time” — is an original, and radical, departure from the international archive of Ring Cycles that set about capturing the grandeur of the music in massive designs, like the groundbreaking technology created by Robert Lepage for the Metropolitan Opera in 2012, or the giant steel mills of the controversial Industrial Revolution Ring created by Patrice Chéreau for the Bayreuth Festival in the ‘70s.

The relationship between theatre and opera juggles aspects of scale, to be sure. “It’s the dream of many theatre actors to do aa show at the Citadel, the big house,” laughs Hinton-Davis. “For opera singers, the Maclab is intimate, chamber!” He hears “it’s so small” in wonder from his cast at every rehearsal.

The Maclab’s thrust stage, around which the audience wraps, “is a wild departure and experiment for opera,” which has traditionally made its home as an art form on huge proscenium (framed) stages, with a clear separation from the audience.  For one thing, there’s no pit for the orchestra. “And the singers are so accustomed to watching the maestro down centre stage.” So attending to multiple directions, and playing diagonals, all part of stagecraft on a thrust stage, “are all very new to them.”

The spirit of the Birmingham reduction is accessibility. Dove and Vick “thought it a shame that Wagner was not available to so many opera companies” for budgetary reasons. A few characters are cut. “But we’re very accustomed to this in theatre…. It’s rare for someone do an uncut version of a Shakespeare play, for example,” as Hinton-Davis points out. “My goal is to make ‘chamber’ not mean small but ‘intimate’. So the audience gets close to it; it’s not overwhelmed by tons of scenery and pageantry…. It’s a rare opportunity to get into the heads of the characters.”

“People think of Wagner and they think of women with horns and breastplates. And very loud singing,” grins Hinton-Davis. Das Rheingold is “a more lyrical opera….” And the philosophical and psychological nuances are profound: “this is Wagner just before Freud and Nietzsche.”

Wagner himself was an innovator, musically, operatically, theatrically, dramatically; “he even devised theatres for his operas to be performed in,” as Hinton-Davis notes. He muses on the adoption of Wagner (who did have a personal dark side of anti-semitic views) in the 20th century as a poster artist by the Third Reich. “If anything, the Ring Cycle is such a cautionary tale about the abuses of power.” The goddess Erde appears with a repeat warning for Wotan against taking the ring and succumbing to the seduction of power. “‘Love is everything’,” she tells him. “So haunting, so wild, such an intimate moment…. What is the world we want to live in? What are its values? What are the costs of how we treat the environment? What will become of us?”

Hinton-Davis, whose own director’s archive includes many seasons at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, as well as the artistic directorship of the National Arts Centre’s English theatre, will direct Shaw’s Major Barbara next season at the Shaw Festival. And he was intrigued to find that in the playwright’s 1905 preface, GBS pairs Wagner and Ibsen as theatre’s greatest innovators, “who changed the way we think about theatre.”

A companion surprise in synchronicity was completely inadvertent. On a break from total Wagner immersion, in his own Edmonton hotel room he stumbled on a random episode of the ’60s TV series, in which Kaye Ballard and Eve Arden, those kooky pop culture stars, are singing that catchy Ride of the Valkyries.

“The music is rarely decorative and never unmotivated,” Hinton-Davis has found in rehearsal. “And Wagner writes very human gods.”

Das Rheingold

Edmonton Opera, in partnership with the Citadel’s Heart and Hub Program

Adapted by: Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick

Directed by: Peter Hinton-Davis

Conducted by: Simon Rivard

Starring: Neil Craighead, Roger Honeywell, Dion Mazerolle, Catherine Daniel, Sydney Frodsham, Jim Yu, Vartan Gabrielian, Giles Tomkins, Jaclyn Grossman, Mariya Krywaniuk, Madison Montambault, Renee Fajardo

Where: Citadel Maclab Theatre

Running: Tuesday through June 1

Tickets: edmontonopera.com

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The hunger for omens gets … ominous for an obsessive sleuth. Dead Letter at Workshop West, a review

Posted on May 18, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Collin Doyle and Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Design by Brian Bast, lighting by Ami Farrow, projections by Matt Schuurman. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The woman we meet in Dead Letter, Conni Massing’s dark and funny, mysterious and moving, new play — premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre with an all-star cast in Heather Inglis’s production — is on a campaign that would make an existentialist blink.

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Amy (Lora Brovold, who’s wonderful) is on a quest for meaning. And she’s hyper-alert to signage from the universe. She’s after reassurance that the losses in this apparently chaotic world, from small to large — missing socks, singleton boots, dead letters and perhaps people — are not random, disconnected, unaccountable. “Bring out your dead,” she commands the dryer in the laundry room, holding aloft a red knee sock that’s her own red flag. And, hey Universe, you do the same.

Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Common sense, plus her patient but increasingly exasperated husband Doug (Brovold’s real-life husband Collin Doyle) and her nosey next-door neighbour Maggie (Maralyn Ryan), call ‘abandon!’ on this obsessiveness. “These things happen,” or “just one of those things,” they caution her, over and over. And in calmer moments Amy, who’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Ask Me About True Crime Podcasts,” acknowledges the vertiginous perch where she’s planted herself, tenaciously holding on, in toe-holds that appear, vanish, and re-appear higher up, with higher stakes.

An orphan sock, she concedes, is a “small and unremarkable” mystery, not the DaVinci Code.” But “for some reason I can’t (pause) let it go,” Amy tells us. “Am I hungry for omens?”

Lora Brovold and Maralyn Ryan in Dead Letter by Conni Massing, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Well, yes, actually. It’s an appetite fed by recurrences that Doug and Maggie would call coincidence and Amy calls clues. Ground zero: the laundry room. And gradually, in an escalation cunningly charted by Massing’s script and captured in a terrific performance by Brovold, the play becomes a kind of murder mystery investigation — as seen through Amy’s optic and the theatricality of Heather Inglis’s production.

Designed by Brian Bast, Dead Letter unfolds in the round, on a floor covered by Matt Schuurman’s projection-scape of deceased mail, surrounded on all sides by … us. Since mysteries are based on what’s hidden, a production in the round is a bold choice in stagecraft, to be sure. And it turns out to be an exciting one: the characters suddenly appear out of darkness, from four directions, threading their way through us, apparently from among us, to a stage that’s pretty much bare, except for a laundry basket and a rolling cart that stands in for a whole apartment, plus the storage basement and the parkade. When Schuurman’s projections swirl, with atmospheric noir-esque lighting by Ami Farrow, it’s as if the world is revolving, spinning in motion, planting suspicion and flinging off clues as it goes.

In a way, the biggest mystery of all, not least to Amy, is Amy herself. What accounts for her addled desperation, conveyed with such compelling inventiveness by Brovold? The actor  has the tricky double assignment of being the first-person “narrator” of events as they happen, as well as a participant in the scenes? Brovold is more than up to it.

So what’s up with Amy? Amy isn’t sure. The letter that arrives, addressed to a previous tenant who hasn’t lived in Amy and Doug’s apartment for years, ups the ante from orphan socks. So is the moment when our obsessive self-appointed detective inadvertently lets drop a crucial piece of domestic information, and surprises herself with an insight into her own apparently disproportionate behavior. “Is there life after death? Does a fish know it’s in the ocean?”

Brovold, who has impeccable comic timing, is also an actor with a gift for openness. That she’s so readable emotionally is indispensable to the portrait of Amy and the way Dead Letter is built. And Massing’s cunningly structured, emotionally expansive script, a murder mystery that, mysteriously, may or may not be one, gives Brovold and her two stage companions, top-drawer actors both, a playground with the challenge of being convincing, in subtly calibrated ways, and knowing how to withhold information.

Lora Brovold and Maralyn Ryan in Dead Letter by Conni Massing, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

In a murder mystery, Doyle has a crucially natural low-key charm about him as Doug, a small appliance afficionado who is affectionate and reasonable under conditions that are not (to put it evasively) without their mysteries. As Maggie, Ryan, making a welcome return to Edmonton theatre, is disarmingly sweet and “normal,” if a bit vague and loopy, as she arrives at Amy’s door invariably bearing home-made cupcakes or cookies. Are Maggie’s secrets lapses in her faltering memory bank? Gradually, the mystery spreads its web of suspicion to include a cluster of unseen apartment dwellers, all of whom glint with the sinister.

In classic mystery fashion, the more Amy learns, the more she needs to know. Rebecca Merkley’s apt sound score hints at lurking danger that may or not be Amy’s psychological creation, and so do Farrow’s lighting and Schuurman’s projections.

Dead Letter is an involving evening in the theatre, a surprising tale of innocuous small-scale comic obsession that darkens to become a murder mystery and a domestic struggle about trust. There is fun to be had, and a place in it for heartbreak, too. One of Massing’s best.

REVIEW

Dead Letter

Theatre: Workshop West Playwright’s Theatre

Written by: Conni Massing

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Lora Brovold, Collin Doyle, Maralyn Ryan

Where: The Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through June 2

Tickets: workshopwest.org

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Find Your Fringe, the upcoming 43rd annual edition of our big August theatre bash, and a post-Fringe season of shows too

Posted on May 17, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The continent’s biggest and oldest Fringe festival turns 43 this summer — with shows (216 of them) and artists (1,600-plus from 11 countries). And now the upcoming edition Aug. 15 to 25 has a theme.

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Find Your Fringe, announced Thursday at the annual May Fringe Revue, is named in honour of a venerable Edmonton tradition: in the end you have to curate your own Fringe experience from the dizzying array of theatrical possibilities at the annual summer extravaganza, with accoutrements like the outdoor music series on the ATB Stage (curated by Lindsey Walker), street performance, food trucks, beer tent hangs with friends, and more.

And the poster designed by the Fringe’s resident designer Yu-Chen (Tseng) Beliveau, an artistic capture of the Fringe site in Old Strathcona, is designed with “hidden references to every theme” in the Fringe’s 42-year history. Yes, Fringees, your homework is cut out for you.     

The 216-show local/ cross-country/ international lineup from which you’ll Find Your Fringe come August represents a steady and palpable growth from the 185 shows of The Answer Is Fringe in 2023 and 160 the year before that. Of the 38 venues where you’ll be seeing shows, 10 of them are official Fringe theatres programmed by lottery, and 28 are BYOVs acquired and outfitted by Fringe artists themselves.

At Thursday’s Fringe Revue, bookended by jazz from the trombone-accordion duo (what could be more Fringe?) of Audrey Ochoa and Tiff Hall, co-hosts Fringe director Murray Utas and Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart noted that “everyone fringes differently…. Find your Fringe; do it your way….”

Dart’s own “favourite thing to find at the Fringe”? “I live for the ‘laugh so hard you cry’ moment,” she says, “and the way the Fringe celebrates community.” For Utas, it’s often “going to a show you know nothing about,” and the attendant sense of discovery.

As Utas points out, the lineup’s 11-show international contingent, including offerings from Nigeria, Sweden Australia, includes several “big touring shows,” for the first time since COVID.

Find Your Fringe includes the return of pêhonân, the Fringe’s Indigenous performance series which happens in a variety of venues, curated by the festival’s Indigenous director MJ Belcourt Moses. As well you’ll find the free KidsFringe back (which attracted 13,000 visits last year) in Lighthouse Park, for young fringees and their grown-up companions, curated by the indefatigable Alyson Dicey.

New this year is the re-location of the Fringe’s always sold-out Late-Night Cabaret — which for 13 summers has invariably turned away hopeful audience insomniacs from the Backstage Theatre — to a larger venue: the Granite Curling Club. It’s been a Fringe venue before now, in summer’s past (I remember seeing a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on ice there).

Festival guides are available starting July 31, with Fringe tickets on sale Aug. 7, at fringetheatre.ca.

Dart updated the Sustain Fringe “support what you love” campaign, designed to bolster the festival in these times when expenses have rocketed and funding has dwindled. Midway through the campaign, which began in March, 34 monthly donors have become 290, with $100,000 in donations, towards a $300,000 goal. Have a peek at 12thnight’s interview with Dart in March. “If every Fringe fan donated $5 a month,” Dart notes, “the Fringe would become instantly sustainable…. You are part of this show.” Contribute at fringetheatre.ca/sustain/. Additionally, the Fringe has added a 50/50 raffle, with tickets on sale through May 26.

At the Revue Utas also announced the upcoming post-festival Fringe Theatre season. It opens Nov. 29 and 30 with Erik Richards’ new punk rock play with music Brother Rat, adapted from the song Brother Rat/ What Slayde Says by Canadian punk band NoMeansNo. Richards, an eight-year Fringe veteran who started performing and producing at the Fringe as an 18-year-old just out of high school, calls it “the most wild, outrageous piece of music!” And it led to his first full play.

The season curated by Utas includes the return in March of ᐋᒋᒧᐃᐧᐣ âcimowin, the Fringe’s winter storytelling series from Treaty 6 Indigenous artists, curated by MJ Belcourt Moses. And the finale, April 25 to May 3 at the Westbury Theatre, is Alphabet Line, a new play by (and produced by) AJ Hrooshkin, the winner of this year’s Westbury Family Theatre Award. Inspired by the playwright’s own rural roots as a kid whose dad lost the family farm — and their love of trains — it’s set in Yonker, Saskatchewan in the late 1940s, with a queer protagonist who’s a farm kid reaching out from that isolation. And as the playwright describes, it’s all about “what it means to be a gay hick out in Western Canada.”

Season passes for this trio of shows are now available at fringetheatre.ca.

  

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Do the minor mysteries of the cosmos add up? Dead Letter, a new Conni Massing play premieres at Workshop West

Posted on May 15, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Playwright Conni Massing, whose new play Dead Letter premieres at Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the great theatre archive there’s no shortage of plays that involve mail, misdirected, stolen, forged. There are plays constructed entirely of exchanges of letters. Last year Irish Repertory Theatre in New York did an entire Letters Series, plays built on intimate correspondence.

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Dead Letter, the new Conni Massing play that premieres Friday at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, the finale to their 45th season might, however, be the first inspired by Canada Post and slow, really really slow, mail service.

The playwright, who has a long and adventurous history with Edmonton theatres of every size and shape, traces Dead Letter to “a convergence of hunches. Little events that intrigued me.” Amongst an assortment of real-life “little events,” there was a postal cue. “A friend of mine got a piece of mail in his mailbox addressed by name to the previous tenant, who hadn’t lived there for 20 years. Where the hell had this mail been for 20 years? It wasn’t just some Mountain Equipment Co-op flyer: what are the consequences of it never arriving?” ‘Dead letter’, she learned, is an actual post office term. “I had my title!”

At the same time, says Massing, wry and entertainingly unpretentious in conversation, “I got tickled by the idea of obsession, someone getting completely obsessed with everyday banal mysteries.” Like single socks, for example: where on earth are their mates? Like Tupperware lids: how can they have just vanished? What does it all mean? Is there a cosmic connection? Or is the universe untenably random?

Cosmic connections? Massing has made bold, original choices before now, in plays like Fresh Hell, in which Dorothy Parker and Joan of Arc unexpectedly shared a stage (it premiered at Shadow Theatre in 2023). Matara, a 2018 Workshop West premiere, explored onstage the special inter-species relationship between people and animals, an elephant in a zoo and the zookeepers.

In Dead Letter, the scale of hidden connection is both smaller and larger. Amy is looking for meaning in the mystery of missing socks, Tupperware lids, a dead letter. Massing herself has a sake bowl full of mysteriously orphaned earrings. “We all go with it,” as a minor if aggravating inevitability, and we move on, many of us in mismatched socks. Amy (Lora Brovold), though, does not. “Frustrating for her is that people keep saying ‘hey, these things happen’…. She wants to know.” What Massing discovered, “early on, writing the first draft of Dead Letter, was there was a reason for Amy’s obsession, a reason “for her to think she should receive a message from the universe. That’s another mystery in the play,” yours to discover, says Massing (mysteriously).”

“And the play goes into different territory at this point…. I feel like it rides a rail between comedy and sorrow; that’s the objective. There’s a darker subtext.” The theatre department of the Massing archive (which also includes TV and film) is is full of plays that have both a sense of humour, often mischievous, and darker hues too.

The Workshop West production directed by Heather Inglis, says Massing, “leans into the murder mystery; Amy is investigating a death related to the dead letter.” As she explains, “Amy’s husband Doug (Collin Doyle) is walking on eggshells and trying to protect her emotions, but also he’s ‘stop this! it will lead you nowhere!’”

Heather Inglis’s production, with its all-star cast, marks the welcome return to an Edmonton stage of Maralyn Ryan as the next-door neighbour (will she shed light on the mystery? is she part of the mystery?). And it’s a rare onstage reunion of the powerhouse real-life couple Brovold and Doyle. The last time they shared a stage was in a Conni Massing play too, arguing about the festive tannenbaum in Oh! Christmas, which premiered at Theatre Network in 2018. Before that, they hadn’t been onstage together since the premiere of Doyle and James Hamilton’s Nighthawk Rules at the 2004 Fringe.

Like Massing, Doyle is himself an award-winning playwright (The Mighty Carlins, Terry and the Dog),. His new play, The Riverside Seniors Village Theatrical Society Presents: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, gets a staged reading at the Citadel’s upcoming Collider Festival.

“I’ll just have to keep writing plays for them to be in together,” Massing laughs. “Delightful people. And it’s great to have another playwright in the room. Collin’s questions and comments come from a different place…. He’s functioning as an actor, but also has this great playwright’s brain.” And, hey, they can run their lines at home.

Brovold is a multi-talented theatre artist, too. Her directing debut was last summer’s hit Fringe production of the shockingly strange play Fiji. And her film The Wounds Within: An Endometriosis Story, which shared her own personal struggle, premieres tonight at Northwest Fest.

“Translating a murder mystery to a theatrical world,” as Massing has done, is an intricate challenge to begin with. And it’s made even trickier by the small cast of three. “I’m really having fun with the conventions of the genre, some of which we’re playing with in a comic way…. You’re asking the audience to speculate about who dunnit, of course. And the play tries to cast suspicion on other people in the apartment building. But the audience knows, even on a subconscious level, it’s got to be one of those three people.”

“It limits your options,” she concedes. “They know you’re not going have the who be some offstage character; that would violate the rules,” Massing laughs. A deus ex machina just wouldn’t be fair. “It’s different with a novel, where the characters are endless; a novel doesn’t have the same obligations.”

With three characters, she muses, “the whodunnit becomes a whydunnit.”

With murder mysteries “people may not understand what’s going on in the moment, but they have to be able to move back though the material and see that the seed has been planted, if only they’d known then what they were looking at. You need to plant it, visually or in the text. But it can’t seem important at the time….” It’s a delicate business writing a murder mystery, she says. “And that’s been challenging but fun.”     

Massing admits to being “weirdly evasive” when it comes to questions about when the idea for a play hatched. “It seems like such long time to take to write play!” She traces the lineage of Dead Letter back to Workshop West’s Playwrights Unit, and its COVIDian incarnation in the spring of 2021:  monthly online meetings of veteran theatre writers like Darrin Hagen, Trevor Schmidt, Mieko Ouchi, Beth Graham, Nicole Moeller, Collin Doyle…. “We’d talk about writing and bring scenes to read,” says Massing. “No one was commissioning me, but you sort of felt you’d like to bring an offering to the group.”

By the summer of 2022, and feeling the need of a deadline, Inglis offered one, along with a workshop. Dead Letter was at Springboards as a staged reading in 2023, and had a Script Salon incarnation, too, directed by Brian Deedrick.   

And now, a full premiere. Massing shies away from the label “comedy” with its single-dimension expectation. “What’s joyful for me is to (discover) a drama, and find yourself laughing along the way.”

PREVIEW

Dead Letter

Theatre: Workshop West Playwright’s Theatre

Written by: Conni Massing

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Lora Brovold, Collin Doyle, Maralyn Ryan

Where: The Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through June 2

Tickets: workshopwest.org

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Making The Debut: a new play by DJ Kena León debuts at RISER Edmonton

Posted on May 13, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Kena León and Miracle Mopera in The Debut, HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Debut, the music-filled play premiering this week under the RISER Edmonton banner, lives up to its name in multiple ways, from multiple angles.

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For one thing, it marks the arrival in the world of theatre of well-known musician and DJ Kena León, and the debut of their new multi-disciplinary company, HOY! Productions. For another, León’s debut as a playwright is a coming-of-age story, seen through the queer Filipinx lens, a debut of a different sort.

In Filipino culture, as León explains, a debut, pronounced ‘deyboo’, is a big-deal debutante coming-out party, “a chance for a family to show off their daughter: A dress! A grand entrance! It looks and feels like a wedding.” León compares it to the quinceañera celebrations in Latin American cultures.

Another debut explored in León’s play is the immigrant experience in this country of immigrants. One of The Debut’s two queer Filipinx immigrant characters is a DJ (played by León), “who’s been in Canada for some time and has adapted. The other (played by Miracle Mopera) is a recent arrival, trying to take everything in — a new language, a new culture….” Their connection is latter’s ‘debut’, in the planning stages.

“It’s the story of two people trying to navigate the complexities of their culture while also understanding it’s time to honour their true selves,” says the playwright.

Miracle Mopera in The Debut, HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton. Set and costume design Rebecca Cypher, lighting by Rory Turner. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

“As a musician and DJ by trade, storytelling to me started in the form of songwriting. And the first iteration of this play was a 15-minute multi-disciplinary presentation that had a lot of my songs … telling a story of a queer person navigating a new country as an immigrant.”

That’s when León got “a nudge, (laughter) a very hard nudge,” from Mac Brock, the ever-persuasive managing producer of Common Ground Arts, to submit The Debut for development in the RISER Edmonton program, part of a national initiative to provide theatre resources to indie artists. “Fifteen minutes just wasn’t enough to tell the story. Exciting! Now I had the ability to expand it!” And the team that RISER put together, including much queer and Filipinx talent, is impressive, they say. “I was very lucky to have a team with lived experience. Everyone is on the same page.… I’m so grateful.”

Kena León, DJ-turned-playwright. Their play The Debut premieres as part of RISER Edmonton. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

“Music is integral to The Debut,” they say. “It weaves the story together… and I was able to incorporate my love of DJ-ing (they DJ live before every performance). In addition to the songs, the play is underscored, the work of star composer/musician Lindsey Walker who built her design from León’s set list. “The learning curve was steep; I didn’t come from theatre world. This was the first time I was able to write the script and also work with a whole team.”

Music was inevitably crucial to their first play. It was always part of their life (piano lessons started at age three); “if you’re Filipinx you learn singing and dancing by osmosis; you’re surrounded by it.”

Miracle Mopera and Kena León in The Debut, HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

For the play León pulled from their own life experiences, “but fictionalized!”, as a first generation Filipinx immigrant. They arrived in Canada with their family in 1997, age 11 — first Vancouver for six months, then Edmonton mid-winter. “My brother and I were very excited about our first snowfall, then we were O, O, it’s cold!”

Eloquent and lively in conversation, León is perfectly, idiomatically, bilingual. They learned English in school in the Philippines, starting in Grade 1 (“I remember spelling ‘apple’). School learning and real life have their differences, as they discovered. “O my goodness, suddenly this is the language all of the time! That first year (in Canada) I had to translate everything….”

León remembers the feeling of dispossession, of being homesick. “I feel like half my childhood was in the Philippines, half here.” I left at Grade 5; we were all being prepared for high school, and suddenly we moved and it felt like starting all over again. I’d built this community of friends…. My first year of being in Canada I’d still write letters to my friends at home.”

“You mourn a little bit. There’s uncertainty, you’re a bit scared of what’s going to happen. Definitely a shock.”

Kena León and Miracle Mopera in The Debut, HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

Being queer and coming out in a “traditional and very conservative culture” where family life is multi-generational isn’t easy, as León knows first-hand. And that tension and anxiety is built into The Debut. “It’s not easily accepted. A lot of queer folk stay in the closet for some time until they feel the family is ready or they have some independence.… There’s fear that when you come out you lose that entire system.”

“It was a huge decision to tell my folks; I’d been mulling it over for years,” says León. “My parents didn’t accept it at the beginning. It was hard; we had to have some distance…. My parents raised me to be honest; I didn’t want to lie. So that was an internal conflict too.”

It was lonely at first. “I crave the family unit, so I had to build a chosen family.” It took a few years,’ they say, “but my dad and I spoke. ‘We’re family, let’s figure this out together. Our beliefs and values may not 100 per cent align, but there’s absolutely no reason we can’t come together in the middle somehow’.”

“Now we have dinner, and I bring my partner.”

For an artist who comes from “music and sound world,” as they put it, what was the attraction of theatre? “I started working as a sound designer for a few shows…. And I found theatre allows the complexities, the many layers, of this story — queerness, coming out, a culture — to come forward. You’d never get that in a song.”

“Theatre is a bigger container for a complex story.”

PREVIEW

RISER Edmonton

The Debut

Theatre: HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton

Written by: Kena León

Directed by: Amanda Bergen

Starring: Kena León, Miracle Mopera

Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Tuesday through Saturday

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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On the road again: the Freewill Shakespeare Festival takes The Tempest to community league hockey rinks this summer

Posted on May 13, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not….” The Tempest, Act III, scene 2

The Freewill Shakespeare Festival has taken its game resident playwright on the road before now, and even to the Fringe three years ago. Last summer Shakespeare’s Edmonton Airbnb was a beautiful hand-crafted spiegeltent at the EXPO Centre, with alternating  Freewill productions of Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night.

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This summer, light on his feet as always, Shakespeare is on the move, outdoors, to four different Edmonton locations, with a single play. In this their 35th annual edition, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival — booted from their home on the Heritage Amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park by three-YEAR renos — is taking their ever-resilient resident playwright to four Edmonton community leagues, a week in each, starting June 20. At Crestwood, Kenilworth, Lessard, Sherbrooke, we’ll be seeing Dave Horak’s production of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s strange and wonderful late-period “romance,” close at hand in that most quintessentially Edmonton of venues, an outdoor hockey rink.

So, in the summer of 2024, a theatre company is in exile, doing a play set on a mysterious island, over which a magus in exile presides. We’ll be sharing Prospero’s island up close — actually Prospera’s, since Nadien Chu (Lady Toby in last summer’s Twelfth Night) is taking on the role in Horak’s gender-crossing nine-actor production. And we’ll be in a place that echoes with “the sounds and sweet airs” of generations of face-offs and slapshots. “Hyper-local!” says Freewill’s artistic director. “Essentially in our audience’s back yard.” And the performances will come with Freewill’s traditional festive trimmings, he says, “tents, food trucks, a beer garden, popcorn, merch….” Tickets are already on sale (see below).

As Horak explains, the actors, mic’d, will be centre ice. “We’ll be setting up a platform stage,” a thrust configuration that will have the audience on three sides. The seating capacity will be around 350 or 400, about twice the spiegeltent audience size. “We’ll build some bleachers, and you can bring your own chairs, blankets, picnics. “I find I like directing in an intimate setting,” he says. “And our audience wants to be outside.”

Fresh from directing U of A theatre students in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Horak picked The Tempest as the sole offering for this year’s festival, he says, first because it hasn’t been staged by Freewill for 14 years. (the 2012 production, which alternated with Julius Caesar, starred John Wright as Prospero and Amber Borotsik as Ariel). The play’s magical mysteries, including the Act III masque, a banquet that appears out of thin air, are “visually fun. Lots of music, huge puppets … we can really take advantage of being outdoors.”

As for the meteorological subtext of the title (fingers crossed, everyone) at a festival that always credits Mother Nature as “ambience director” in the program, “none of the four community leagues has an indoor space.” So just in case, Freewill is making plans for “an emergency venue” in the school gyms that are next door to the community league hockey rinks. “We can make this work,” he says.

The Tempest, elusive, weird, and fascinating (not least because it might be the last play Shakespeare wrote solo), has invited interpretations of every stripe over the centuries. Many contemporary Tempests embrace colonial themes: an island colonized, and its indigenous inhabitants enslaved, by Europeans. Horak’s production, he says, will lean instead into “the environmental…. The global North has encroached on this magical island … now ruined by waste and garbage.”     

“It invites big costumes, big character choices,” says Horak, a big fan of the late Shakespeare romances in all their strangeness. “Like The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest is not in a real place… These aren’t realistic plays; Shakespeare is a poet; he uses metaphor.” Locating Shakespeare plays in a very particular, identifiable place or time, seductive as that can be for a director with a concept, is often reductive rather than expansive, Horak has found.

Shakespeare doesn’t identify the island in any way in The Tempest, which is one of its manifold attractions. “And because we’re outdoors and in a rink, we’re on this island all together, surrounded,” says Horak. “I hope it will feel like that…. The Tempest doesn’t change location, and the time is quite linear.”

He hopes Freewill will be back with two alternating productions next year. But in the current climate, battered by both the lengthy closure of Hawrelak Park and the post-pandemic malaise, “we’re being super-cautious.” Calgary’s outdoor Shakespeare festival, a year older than Freewill is cancelled altogether this summer. Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach has reduced its programming.

“We’re doing the best we can,” says Horak. “One thing I’ve noticed is that Shakespeare is super-resilient. And so is this company…. I take some optimism from that.”

The Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Tempest, directed by Dave Horak, runs June 20 to July 14 in four locations: Crestwood Community League June 20 to 23; Kenilworth Community League June 25 to 30; Lessard Community League July 2 to 7; Sherbrooke Community League July 9 to 14. The cast, a mixture of veterans and newcomers, includes Nadien Chu, Chariz Faulmino, Meegan Sweet, Brett Dahl, Hal Wesley Rogers, Troy O’Donnell, Jessy Ardern, Melissa McPherson, Cody Porter.

Full schedule at freewillshakespeare.com. Tickets are now on sale: tickets.freewillshakespeare.com.

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Embrace the kooky: Trout Stanley at L’UniThéâtre, a review

Posted on May 10, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Steve Jodoin, Mélissa Merlo, Stéfanelle Auger in Trout Stanley, L’UniThéâtre/ Théâtre Niveau Parking. Photo by Emilie Dumais

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is a kind of kooky mania — or is it frazzled euphoria? — about the captivatingly weird play that’s currently running, for the first time ever in French, at L’UniThéâtre.

You couldn’t go wrong calling Trout Stanley, by the poet/ novelist/ playwright Claudia Dey, Canadian Gothic. It plants that flag on a garbage dump in the B.C. hinterland, and ups the ante in a macabre but shimmery world with “a death spell.” But it’s sort of a thriller (there’s a murder mystery and a mysterious outsider), too. And sort of a romantic comedy (there’s love at first sight). But more of a black comedy with  a wacky realism/surrealism mix, captured perfectly in Vano Hotton’s design (lighting by Denis Guérette), which surrounds the raised platform of the stage with garbage bags and shiny magical draperies. And it’s all ignited by startling, extravagant verbal fireworks.

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In a remote town somewhere between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley, we meet the orphaned Ducharne twins, Grace and Sugar, who were once triplets, on their 30th birthday. Grace  (Stéfanelle Auger) runs the town garbage dump, and poses (as she demonstrates) for hunting season catalogues and billboards. Her birthday present to her sister Sugar (Mélissa Merlo) is a rifle. The latter, a woebegone recluse who’s worn their dead mother’s tracksuit for 10 years (and hasn’t left the house in that decade), makes “tragic figurines.”

Every year on their birthday something terrible happens, and on the eve of their big 3-oh, it’s happening again: a murdered stripper who’s the town Scrabble champion.

And there’s this possibly sinister development: into the odd sibling equilibrium of Grace and Sugar crashes a rumpled drifter looking more than a little worse for wear in a borrowed (stolen?) cop’s uniform. He is, he says, “looking for something I lost.” As Steve Jodoin conveys he’s a peculiar combination of menacing and addled. And his name is Trout Stanley. What kind of name is that? he’s asked. “A fish name.” His parents drowned before he could ask them why. And he’s looking for the offending lake.

Trout, who’s taken a vow of silence discovers Sugar in the process of hanging herself from a light fixture, and falls in love with her at first sight. An oddball courtship follows, marked by a veritable explosion of language in original combinations, and unusual confessions (as well as Jason Kodie’s apt soundscore, which veers wildly between romantic lute motifs and driving rock). “I’m a fainter,” she tells her suitor; she’s not toppled by the bizarre or the gruesome, but by “regular everyday things.”

Stéfanelle Auger and Mélissa Merlo in Trout Stanley, L’UniThéâtre/ Théâtre Niveau Parking. Photo by Emilie Dumais

The word count, which happens in short outbursts and long, escalating, image-filled monologues, is astronomical. Trout, a sort of wandering philosopher and part-time foot fetishist who’s taken a vow of silence that’s been unbroken in 10 years, till now, seems to have just re-discovered human speech. An he’s making up for lost time.

This eccentric trio is vividly, not to say hyperbolically, set forth by the cast of this L’UniThéätre co-production with Quebec City’s Théâtre Niveau Parking, directed by Hugues Frenette. The chosen acting style is heightened to say the least, and the deliberate quirkiness does grate a bit, until you get used to the world of the play.

Grace, the self-styled “Lion Queen” who has an earthy confidence  about her in Auger’s performance, has the showbiz gene as she struts the stage posing in her copper cowboy boots, and declaring definitively on … anything. “Garbage tells me everything!” she says of her rapport with a job where you can learn a lot about humanity by looking at what humans throw away.

Sugar’s mopey-ness and low self-esteem are tuned to an amusingly  phlegmatic matter-of-fact key, as captured by Merlo. It turns out she has a lot to say too, when she finally has someone to say it to. She compares her budding love affair with Trout thus: “Two snails.  Meeting for the first time. On a beautiful day.”

Steve Jodoin and Mélissa Merlo in Trout Stanley. Photo by Emilie Dumais

Sugar is unlikely, incidentally, to receive much consolation from her sister. “If I was Sugar Ducharne I’d kill myself too,” declares Grace gracelessly. As Trout, Jodoin (the artistic director of L’UniThéâtre) captures a certain boy scout earnestness; he is, it turns out, an off-centre quester with the soul of a romantic. “No one should be alone.”

They’ve all lost something. And in their own idiosyncratic ways, they’re all waiting for something, too, desperate for love, and hoarding surprising caches of poetic language. It’s that need that makes you bear with them, and hope that their wacky fairy tale love triangle will have a happy ending.

REVIEW

Trout Stanley

Theatre: L’UniThéâtre and Théâtre Niveau Parking

Written by: Claudia Dey, translated by Manon St-Jules

Directed by: Hugues Frenette

Starring: Stéfanelle Auger, Steve Jodoin, Mélissa Merlo

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91 Street

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: lunitheatre.ca

 

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A new play by Neil Grahn launches Shadow Theatre’s upcoming season 31

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Shadow Theatre will launch its upcoming four-production 31st season with the world premiere of a new play by Edmonton’s Neil Grahn.

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The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow chronicles the extraordinary life and career of one of Canada’s most highly decorated Indigenous soldiers. The star sniper and scout returned home from fighting for his country in World War I to find himself in another kind of trench — a world where he didn’t even have the right to vote. And the warrior/ Chief/ activist took up another kind of cause.

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

The play isn’t the first time that playwright Grahn, a theatre artist of extreme versatility — his credits, most recently leaning into film and television, include improv and sketch comedy — has turned to Canadian history for inspiration. In 2018, Shadow launched their season with a hit premiere production of Grahn’s The Comedy Club, which brought to life another largely unknown true Canadian World War I story: the members of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division who were summoned, in the darkest days of that darkest of wars, to devise musical comedy shows to divert their fellow soldiers.

“Francis is reflecting back on his life,” says Shadow artistic director John Hudson of the new Grahn play, “and it’s very fluid in time periods.” He co-directs the Shadow production (Nov. 7 to 14) with Christine Sokaymoh Frederick. Ryan Cunningham, Toronto-based these days, stars as Pegahmagabow, and leads a cast of five that so far includes includes Trevor Duplessis, Monica Gate, and Ben Kuchera.

Johanna Bonger, the sister-in-law of the painter Vincent van Gogh. Photo supplied.

History figures prominently in the 2024-2025 Shadow lineup announced this week. It includes another world premiere. At the centre of After Mourning, Before Van Gogh by Calgary-based playwright Michael Czuba, is the sister-in-law of the painter, Johanna Bonger, a woman with a mission. She not only refused to destroy his art work after his death, but worked tirelessly to ensure the world would know about it. It’s an arduous journey: amazingly, van Gogh, who died in obscurity, didn’t sell a single painting during his 36-year lifetime. John Hudson’s production (March 20 to April 7) stars Lora Brovold as Johanna, with a cast that includes Steven Greenfield, Donna Leny Hansen and Yassine El Fassi El Fihri.  Vincent himself is the role that has yet to be cast.

The script gets a staged reading at Script Salon May 12.

Bea, a 2010 play by the Brit writer Mick Gordon, is the choice of director Amanda Goldberg, the new artistic producer of the SkirtsAfire Festival who was Shadow’s Artistic Director Fellow in the 20223-2023 season. As Hudson describes, the play is a challenging mixture of “a lot of comedy, full of love and heart and friendship.”  The young woman of the title is in a bleak situation in the real world. She lies paralyzed, year after year, “and the play lives in her imagination, where she dances, and sings, full of life. The Shadow production Jan. 23 to Feb. 9 2025 stars Kristin Unruh, with Michael Watt and Kate Newby.

The season finale (May 1 to 18 2025), Where You Are, is a much-produced multi-hued comedy by the Canadian playwright Kristen da Silva about two sisters, whose peaceful retirement on Manitoulin Island is complicated by an uncontainable secret. Hudson describes it as “lovely, heart-felt and very funny.” Shadow faves Coralie Cairns and Davina Stewart star as the sisters in his production, with Nikki Hulowski as the daughter of one of them. The fourth role remains to be cast.

Meanwhile Shadow’s 30th anniversary season finale, Tiny Beautiful Things, continues its run at the Varscona through May 12.

Subscriptions for the upcoming season are now available at shadowtheatre.org.   

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This weekend in a theatre town: get festive, see what’s onstage

Posted on May 3, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Ogboingba Tries To Change Her Fate, Jabulani Arts Festival. Photo by Beshel Francis.

Brett Dahl, Michael Peng, Michelle Todd, Sydney Williams in Tiny Beautiful Things, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

On the stages of this theatre town this weekend is a high-contrast array of entertainment possibilities, from a comic adaptation of a classic novel to the enactment of an advice column to a full-fledged festival. Have a peek at the possibilities.

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•Last night I went to a theatre that was full — no, crammed to the rafters — with a festival. And festive people. And a tangible vibe of festivity.   

It was opening night of the Ribbon Rouge Foundation’s inaugural Jabulani Arts Festival, a celebration of African, Caribbean, and Black Albertan culture. And Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre was rockin. Downstairs in the Lorne Cardinal Theatre, the full-house poetry performance performance was running a bit overtime. Upstairs, outside the Nancy Power Theatre, people were queuing to see the festival’s (very) sold-out mainstage theatrical production. I was lucky to get in, when someone had a spare ticket. Meanwhile, it was fun to look at the festival’s very striking visual art exhibition (curated by Elsa Robinson) on the walls of the lobby.   

Ogboingba Tries To Change Her Fate, the collective creation of the Artspace Theatre Team, is a new play with a contemporary spirit, inspired by a traditional tale from the Ijaw people of Nigeria. In a high-energy succession of scenes — and a fascinating array of theatrical means in the production directed by Jan Selman — a cast of six women “do” the story of the title heroine, whose doubts and insurrectionist spirit bring her smack up against her destiny.

Ogboingba’s assigned role in “the journey of life” is healer. It’s what she chose when the roles were getting handed out, a comical scene in which some women picked motherhood, or mystical powers, or (amusingly) “relevance.” And we see her amidst the swirling comic chaos of the community  — at the market arbitrating arguments, overseeing other women’s kids, attending expertly to a line-up of medical complaints (she’s the designated family doctor, and you know how hard it is to find one these days.

The spirit of the dance (choreographer Eric Awuah) sets these scenes in motion across the stage. And they’re accompanied by a rhythmic score, played live by a five-member musical ensemble, that includes original compositions by Noreta Lewis-Prince, Larissah Lashley, and Yaw Ansu-Kyeremeh. Some of the songs are familiar, I glean, since the audience sings and hums along: this is a participation show and an air of informality prevails. Whittyn Jason’s set, props, and lighting design is a full participant in the playfulness of the enterprise, with gauzy veils that separate supreme beings from the proletariat, or blue silk rivers, or white ocean waves. The costumes are by Merlin Uwalaka.

The women are savvy and congenial, jostling over money or trying to enlist Ogboingba as a babysitter. And the cast plays the unruly kids too, both young ones (with giant bows on their heads) and moody teenagers. When Ogboingba discovers that she is dissatisfied with her destiny, “something’s not right…. I did not choose not have children; I want my own child,” they are, first, taken aback. She is needed, everyone says, in her traditional role. And then the forces of fate really line up against our heroine.

We see her, with strings attached, a stylized theatrical image that speaks to every woman now. We see her climbing a teeter-y assortment of white ladders, hand-held, on her journey towards the Creator. “Who are you to think you can speak to the ultimate being?”

It’s an ingenious assortment of images that sets about capturing the predicament of women who feel stuck with something they felt they wanted at the time, but doesn’t fit any more. And we can’t help hoping that Ogboingba will prevail. The enthusiasm of the opening night crowd felt like a real communal response.          

I left before the party, and the live music (which included the musicians who had accompanied the play). Ogboingba Tried To Change Her Fate continues through Saturday. Friday and Saturday’s festival lineup includes poetry and dance shows, with workshops, food trucks, and live music. Full schedule and tickets: theatrenetwork.ca. 12thnight got to talk to the director Jan Selman and creator/performers Lebo Disele and Yasmine Lewis-Clarke in a preview.

The Ribbon Rouge Foundation’s Jabulani Arts Festival runs through Saturday at the Roxy, 10708 124 St. Tickets and full schedule: theatrenetwork.ca.

Continuing:

•At Rapid Fire Theatre’s Exchange, through Saturday, enter the “realm of improvised nerdery” as billed. That would be the impossibly ingenious Improvised Dungeons & Dragons, led by the impossibly ingenious Dungeon Master Mark Meer, and fuelled by audience suggestions. Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

•At the Citadel, the sound of music is dominated by the clang of swords in a comic swashbuckler adaptation of The Three Musketeers that includes a lot of thrust and parry and gorgeous costumes. Daryl Cloran’s production runs through May 12. Check out 12night’s preview with fight director Jonathan Hawley Purvis who has the 17-member cast hanging off chandeliers. And the review is here.

Daniel Fong and John Ullyatt in The Three Musketeers, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•At the Varscona, Shadow Theatre’s production of Tiny Beautiful Things, adapted by playwright Nia Vardalos from a collection of advice columns. It’s not exactly a play, in truth. But Michelle Todd is thoughtfully captivating as the columnist who consults her own life experience instead of bookish authority as she listens sympathetically to letters from assorted people (played by the other three actors of John Hudson’s cast) who feel up against it. It runs through May 12. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org. The 12thnight review is here.

  

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