A comedy of adjusted vision: The Oculist’s Holiday at Teatro Live, a review

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The title will make you smile. In its way The Oculist’s Holiday, the 2009 Stewart Lemoine comedy with the whimsically archaic handle, is all about optics — vision, perspective, focus, correction.

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And in the play, set in the impossibly picturesque lakeside town of Lausanne in Switzerland in the early 30s, that vision is constantly adjusted, as you’ll see in Belinda Cornish’s crack revival — its first in 15 years — at Teatro Live!.

The opening scenes are powered by the exhilaration of being on a holiday, an ocean away from the prosaic, the sensible — in a guest house run by an exotic American emigré, Princess Volodevsky (Cathy Derkach) on the lam permanently from all of the above. Chantal Fortin’s design is a kind of oasis (foreign booze bottles, cocktail glasses, amuse-bouches involving caviar) that seems to have landed in a glow of magical horizon-less lighting by Narda McCarroll.

The eyes through which we see the world belong to Marian Ogilvy (the terrific Beth Graham), a congenitally practical Canadian teacher and writer of school textbooks, with all that that implies. We meet her, in her sensible shoes — Leona Brausen’s costumes are a ’30s story in themselves — delivering an inspirational address to the new grads of the Southern Ontario Business College For Women. The play that follows is her story, remembered and set before us: like a Henry James heroine, Marian will shed her old myopic self in the magic of budding romance, in parallel to the seductive views of the Old World.

The characters do repeatedly refer to the awe-inspiring views, which get better and better the higher they climb from the lake through the hillside town. The play opens with Marian’s ‘morning after the night before’ observation that the lake is best observed without the filter of sunglasses. But the sheer dazzle is too much. And she and the genial young American optometrist Ted (Oscar Derkx) she’s met the previous day (and night!) re-apply their shades. A romantic comedy is unfolding, and with it the rom-com obstacle of new arrivals at the Maison de la Princesse.

Mathew Hulshof and Rachel Bowron in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Charlie Hastings (Mathew Hulshof) and his aggressively loud, vulgarian wife Laurette (Rachel Bowron), at first amusingly ignorant, are of the post-war generation chronicled, as playwright Lemoine has noted, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Did you know that this is the same lake as they have in Geneva?” Like the Divers of Tender Is The Night, they seem to be paid-up members of the Lost Generation post-Jazz Age generation that drifted around Europe after the war, purposeless and extravagant, flinging their money around, drinking too much till they’re not quite so charming.

As The Oculist’s Holiday and Cornish’s five-actor ensemble production calibrate, the bright buoyancy of the European holiday that never ends gradually reveals a dark, surprisingly dark, underbelly of damages: through a comic lens darkly. The choice of music, as specified by Lemoine, is Old World classical (a Mendelssohn piano trio) that’s a light lyrical shower of notes on top with more moving undertones. It’s a capture of how the play works.

All the characters of the play, strangers who intersect at the guest house, are from somewhere else, propelled by their own stories. Only Princess Volodevsky, née Dorrie, from Indiana via Paris and marriage to a Russian nobleman doomed by that revolution, is happy to be candid about revealing the secrets of her route to Lausanne. In Derkach’s performance Dorrie, amused and amusing, breezy in delivery, enters and exits at a trot, talking and always bearing libations.

Rachel Bowron, Oscar Derkx, Beth Graham, Cathy Derkach, Mathew Hulshof in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live!, photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Design by Chantal Fortin, lighting by Narda McCarroll, costumes by Leona Brausen

The quintet of actors are expert at riding the humour and articulate nuance, and the funny rhythms, of Lemoine’s dialogue. Graham’s smart, appealing performance as a someone unused to being perplexed or  impulsive charts the gradual erosion at the edges of Marian’s sturdy self-possession and clear perspective (ah yes, the question of focus). Marion is evidently not someone who normally answers “why not?” to a “should I…?” question. Has her vision been blurred by a new on-location attraction to a young man of unthreatening good humour? Derkx’s performance as a doctor, open-faced, professionally devoted to improving vision, captures an unforced, unflamboyant ease and charm.

Rachel Bowron and Oscar Derkx in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The train wreck American couple who crash into the budding romance at the Maison de la Princesse are vividly set forth by Hulshof and Bowron. The crazy hilarity of Laurette, who has neither idea nor  interest in knowing where they are, turns vivacity into something else, something more imperious and more dangerous, in Bowron’s performance.

Hulshof, making a welcome return to Edmonton theatre, captures with great comic precision a kind of fragile sophistication, poised precariously over an abyss.

Lemoine’s comedies have expanded their emotional palette (and the more predictable sightlines of ‘comedy’) over the years since 2009. But in a production unafraid of double-vision, that gives full weight to disappointment, confusion, and desperation, The Oculist’s Holiday still stands out. That’s a realization that qualifies as a sense of distance. Put on your specs; you can, you should, get the close-up view at the Varscona.

Have you seen 12thnight’s preview interview with Belinda Cornish? It’s here.

REVIEW

The Oculist’s Holiday

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Starring: Beth Graham, Oscar Derkx, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, Cathy Derkach

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through June 16

Tickets: teatroq.com

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‘Not quite like anything else he’s written’: Belinda Cornish directs a Teatro revival of Lemoine’s The Oculist’s Holiday

Posted on May 31, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Rachel Bowron, Oscar Derkx, Beth Graham, Cathy Derkach, Mathew Hulshof in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live!, photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Design by Chantal Fortin, lighting by Narda McCarroll, costumes by Leona Brausen

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Stewart Lemoine play that opens Friday at the Varscona in the Teatro Live! season is certainly a comedy, says Belinda Cornish, who’s directing the first revival of The Oculist’s Holiday since its 2009 Fringe debut. And “it’s very funny….”

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The “and yet…” hangs in the air. And yet, she says, “it’s not quite like anything else Stewart has written,” Cornish thinks. “A really unique play,” and one that expands the usual dimensions of “comedy” to include darker, more wistful, more complex tones, she thinks, invoking the cadre of “beautiful plays” in the Lemoine archive, The Exquisite Hour, Fever Land, Witness To A Conga among them.

As the playwright noted in his introduction to a 2011 volume that includes The Oculist’s Holiday, “I’ve been reading a fair bit of F. Scott Fitzgerald lately.” And Cornish, herself a playwright (Category E, Hiraeth, Little Elephants, The Garneau Block, ), detects that influence and flavour in the world of the play, set in the early 1930s in Europe: “the tail end of the Lost Generation, the ‘bright young things’,  just post-Wall Street crash.”

Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Lausanne to be precise, is the romantic location where a Canadian teacher on holiday meets an American optometrist — and has her vision of the world change forever. What Lemoine and Fitzgerald share, Cornish thinks, is “an extraordinary understanding of the human condition, which they then articulate through the particularities of their own perspective…. A perspective that’s unique, but accessible and relatable.”

Like The Oculist’s Holiday, Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is The Night “has a particular character, an antagonist/catalyst who has a significant impact on everybody else’s lives, and then sort of disappears…. Without being bleak or heavy by any means — it’s a delicious comedy — within the shadow of the war, that lingering impact has an undertone.”

Belinda Cornish, director of The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

Cornish, a member of the Teatro Live! ensemble who named her own indie theatre company Bright Young Things, is drawn to that dark/light period, and its theatrical repertoire. And she appreciates the “nuanced, delicate, hard-to-describe feel of the play.… It’s not leaned into, but it’s the feeling of the Lost Generation, and the sheer joy that comes out of something so dark, with people carrying those scars. They just go forward with their lives — in discovery, in joy — carrying those experiences with them.”   

The Oculist’s Holiday is set predominantly, as Cornish explains, “in a beautiful boutique guest house in Lausanne.” La Maison de la Princesse is run, as the play has it, “by a curious sort of noblewoman of mixed pedigree,” a Lemoinian description if ever there was one. In Lemoine, “it’s never somebody with a straight-forward back story,” Cornish laughs.

Rachel Bowron and Oscar Derkx in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“It’s dealt with so very lightly, but all five people who find themselves at the Maison de la Princesse, including the Princesse herself, have been unexpectedly drawn to Lausanne. They didn’t plan to go there, but find themselves going ‘I think I’m going to stay here’.” The Princesse, for example, was en route to Geneva, “and when the train stopped she told her husband ‘O darling, I think I’m home’.”

In Lemoine comedies, strangers often seem to meet in unplanned encounters in train stations or at hotels or cafe tables. “People find themselves unexpectedly in the place they need to be,” as Cornish puts it. “There are elements of mystery and discovery, another Fitzgeraldian (feature)…. You cannot anticipate where this play is going to take you,” she says. “And yet in a beautiful arc, it makes the most sense. Very cool…. And very moving.” She cites the actor/playwright Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag fame: “when you get people to laugh they drop their defences; they’re disarmed. And it empowers the way they’re emotionally affected.”

Mathew Hulshof and Beth Graham, The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“You just play the dialogue and the moment; it’s all there, in how the characters are drawn,” says Cornish, a veteran Teatro actor herself (witness an acting archive that includes Witness to a Conga, The Exquisite Hour, Evelyn Strange among many others). And her cast, an all-star quintet of Teatro faves led by Beth Graham, know exactly how to find the comedy beats, she says. Ah, and how to ride the words and rhythms in a way that’s never laboured.

Cornish, who’s been Teatro Live!’s co-artistic director with Andrew MacDonald-Smith for several seasons — it’s always been an artist-run company — has left that shared gig (MacDonald-Smith is now artistic-directing single-handedly), but not her involvement with Teatro as an director and actor. Her lengthy Teatro resumé continues with a starring role in the upcoming July production of Noel Coward’s sparkler Private Lives, directed by Max Rubin.

Meanwhile, in addition to theatre and improv, Cornish has been exploring “a completely different world.” She’s been writing for the horror fiction role-playing adventure game Call of Cthulhu, developed by Chaosium and inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft. And it’s led to film. Occasionally she joins her husband Mark Meer who is, among his multiple talents, a professional Dungeon Master, in improvised D&D role-playing games across the continent and abroad. “A crazy old combo of theatre, improv, and (the game platform),” as she says.

It stands in high contrast to the delicate hues of the unusual Lemoine comedy that opens Friday. “Can I use the word ‘magical’?” Cornish wonders. “Or is that inappropriately whimsical?”

PREVIEW

The Oculist’s Holiday

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Starring: Beth Graham, Oscar Derkx, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, Cathy Derkach

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through June 16

Tickets: teatroq.com

     

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‘New artists, new art’: Nextfest returns to the Roxy for a 29th annual edition

Posted on May 30, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What are they up to, the next generation of artists, the up-and-comers? Your chance to find out is close at hand. Nextfest, Edmonton’s multi-disciplinary festival of emerging arts, returns today to take over Theatre Network’s Roxy and environs for a 29th annual edition.

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“New” is the operative word at the 11-day festivities, which showcase — on stages, on walls, on screens, at performance “niteclubs,” in the park across the street — the work and the work-in-progress of 500-plus emerging artists. They create across the frontiers in theatre, visual art, dance, music, digital arts, film….  Ah, and original combinations of any or all of the above.

Nextfest director Ellen Chorley.

“Cool new stuff!” is the flag under which festival director Ellen Chorley flies. A multi-disciplinary artist herself who claims Nextfest as her own artistic birthplace in her high school years, the effervescent Chorley, who talks with built-in exclamation marks, explains that “emerging” isn’t a matter of chronological age; “it’s being in the first 10 years of your career.”

“Cool new stuff” in theatre, always bountiful at Nextfest, has expanded in Nextfest 2024. There are 15 mainstage plays, in addition to an assortment of play readings and ‘progress showings’. And there’s a new performance venue at the Roxy.

“A really strong year of applications” was the inspiration for adding a new theatre space to the Roxy’s Nancy Power and the Lorne Cardinal theatres, Chorley says. Nextfest has turned Theatre Network’s airy second-floor rehearsal hall into a little black box theatre. “It’s an intimate space, a big/little stage, with 30 seats and four mainstage one-person shows.

Where Foxes Lie by Jezec Sanders, Nextfest 2024. Graphic supplied.

It’s a high-contrast quartet, as she describes. The Ether Journey, by and starring Asia Weinkauf-Bowman, is storytelling, “an exploration of the importance of dreams and myths” as billed. Sophie May Healey’s Hysteria’s House is “a wild clown character piece,” says Chorley appreciatively.  Maiden Voyage, written and directed by Maigan Van Der Giessen is an experimental performance piece woven from improvised music and spoken word poetry. Chorley describes Jezec Sanders’ Where Foxes Lie intriguingly as “a dark kind-of-thriller.”

The number of applications for a theatre berth at the festival was the usual 100 or so, she says. This year Chorley led a Nextfest foray into the theatre season, October to December, called “My First Play,” a program designed to attract artists of diverse backgrounds — film, music, acting — who were interested in trying their hand at playwriting. And several pieces in Nextfest’s mainstage theatre lineup emerged from the work of 22 participants, much to Chorley’s delight. Ride Like Hell, as one example, is by Aldynne Belmont, a filmmaker by background. It’s a cross-country odyssey billed as “an irreverent riff on pulp literature and sapphic cinema,” that “just blew us away; we all at there laughing!”says Chorley.

This year Nextfest held a Playwrights Weekend in February, along with a workshop on producing theatre. Nextfest tries to follow artists through stages of development, from reading to “progress showing” to full production. And at Chorley’s instigation, Nextfest has been making a point of extending its reach into other festivals. The ambitious folk-rock musical What Was Is All and Madi May’s She/They have appeared at the Fringe in Nextfest productions. This summer Nextfest will produce Grace Fitzgerald’s Carter And The Train at the Fringe.

The Nextfest lineup in the Lorne Cardinal Theatre, the Roxy’s downstairs black box, includes plays by Christina Hollingworth (Meet Me At The Riverside), Ali Muhammad Khowaja (Pepperoni and Cheese), Megan Sweet (The S.P.O.T.T.), and Tori Kibblewhite (Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender).

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen by Jameela McNeil, Nextfest 2024. Graphic supplied.

And in the Nancy Power, you’ll find Grace Fitzgerald’s Carter and the Train, Jameela J. McNeil’s Ms. Pat’s Kitchen, Aldynne Belmont’s Ride Like Hell, Elyse Roszell’s The Hand That Feeds, and What Am I Looking At?!. The latter, by Stretcher Hymen and Hunny Moon, takes backstage at a drag show.

Nextfest’s popular curated performance/immersion nite clubs return on the weekends, starting with The SINsational Cabaret Friday, which finds its theme in the seven deadly sins, followed by the Pride Nite Club Saturday. The following weekend includes the annual Smut Nite Club (a perennial hot ticket), and for the first time there’s an all-ages event, The Kids Are All Right, a matinee nite club. As the Nextfest mantra goes, “come for the art, stay for the party.”

There’s free stuff, too. The first-come first-served workshops, for example, 15 in number and free for anyone intrigued, address a variety of subjects, including those that lean into practicality, “the business of the arts,” as Chorley says. You don’t have to be an artist to find out about clowns and clowning in a workshop led by star clown Christine Lesiak. Or Usha Gupta’s “Kathak: North Indian Classical Dance.” Or Katie Cutting’s “That’s The Spirit: How To Make A Movie Without Funding.” Chorley herself leads “Theatre Producing For Beginners.” And there’s even a one-on-one Nextfest mentorship program that pairs you with an arts professional.

Meanwhile, there’s tonight’s opening night ceremonies, which include performances, previews, music, a dance party DJ’ed by Moody Lion, and pizza. “Come and party with us,” says Chorley. “And celebrate new artists and new art in Edmonton.”

Let the Next-ing begin.

Nextfest 2024 runs through June 9 at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre (10708 124 St.) and environs. Full schedule and tickets: nextfest.ca.

 

 

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Get your festival on (and other theatre, too) this week

Posted on May 29, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The LIbravian, Brú Theatre. International Children’s Festival of the Arts.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a three-festival week in this theatre town (in addition to a much anticipated theatre revival and an intriguing opera experiment).The festive season is here, and the moment is at hand for you to venture forth and sample widely.

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•Nextfest, Edmonton’s innovative multi-disciplinary emerging arts festival, returns to Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre Thursday for 11 days, with a 29th annual edition that embraces 500-plus artists and the chance to see what’s new with the next generation — in theatre, dance, music, film, digital creation, visual art, and experiments in amalgamating all of the above. Stay tuned for a 12thnight survey with festival director Ellen Chorley, and interviews with some of the Nextfest playwrights. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca or at the door.

•At the Citadel, the annual Collider Festival returns Saturday and Sunday to celebrate new play development — and especially scripts scaled especially to find a home on the country’s largest stages. Festival director Mieko Ouchi has assembled a high-contrast selection of four new works-in-progress from the Citadel Playwright’s Lab which has focused on adaptations this year. And the first act of each will get a (free) reading at the festival.

Saturday night’s offerings pair Nowhere With You: A Joel Plackett Musical Experience by James Odin Wade with Sue Goberdhan’s The B-Team. The former, in which the protagonist returns to his home town to reassess his life, is inspired by music. The latter is, as billed, “a contemporary twist on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic The Scarlet Letter.

playwright Collin Doyle

Sunday night’s pair of readings, co-presented by Script Salon, include Katherine Koller’s adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Persuasion and Collin Doyle’s The Riverside Seniors Village Theatrical Society Presents: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

And the weekend includes workshops. Saturday’s is “Adaptation For Large Spaces,” led by playwright Belinda Cornish, whose own adaptation of the Todd Babiak novel The Garneau Block premiered on the Citadel mainstage in 2021. Sunday’s workshop, with musical theatre veterans Kate Ryan and Steven Greenfield, is “Building A Musical.”

Full schedule and tickets for the workshops: citadeltheatre.com.

•The world is crazy, unstable, unpredictable. But there is reassurance, my anxious friends:  just up the road in St. Albert, the young at heart will find that the Kids Fest, the venerable International Children’s Festival of the Arts now in its 40s, has returned to the banks of the mighty Sturgeon Thursday through Sunday.

The seven mainstage productions, from across the country, the U.S. and Ireland, include Grimmz, a hiphop uptake on Grimm stars like Cinderella from American touring duo Experiential Theatre, The Libravian (from Ireland’s Brú Theatre, based in Galway), and Dino-Light from New Orleans’ Lightwire Theatre.

As always at the Kids Fest, the startlingly accomplished St. Albert Children’s Theatre is doing a show: the “junior version of Polkadots: The Cool Kids Musical, inspired by The Little Rock 9, a group of courageous Black kids in the ‘50s who stood up against segregationist attempts to bar them from entering an Arkansas high school. You can meet three Indigenous puppets in The Bighetty & Bighetty Puppet Show, the creation of artists from Pukatawagen, Manitoba. And there’s more — outdoor performances, activities both ticketed and free, and an all-pervasive festive vibe.

The full Kids Fest schedule and tickets: tickets.stalbert.ca.

Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•The Teatro Live! season continues Friday with a revival of Stewart Lemoine’s funny,  delicately nuanced 2009 comedy The Oculist’s Holiday, which takes its characters, and us, to Switzerland and the shores of Lake Geneva in Lausanne  in 1931. The all-star Teatro cast of Belinda Cornish’s production is led by Beth Graham as a Canadian teacher on holiday, with Oscar Derkx, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, and Cathy Derkach. Stay tuned for a 12thnight interview with the director, a playwright and actor of note herself. The Oculist’s Holiday runs on the Varscona stage (10329 83 Ave.) through June 16. Tickets: teatroq.com.

Das Rheingold, Edmonton Opera. Photo by Nanc Price.

•Edmonton Opera’s unconventional “chamber” version of Das Rheingold, the opening opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, takes a truly wild story of fractious gods, Rhine maidens, giants, a lecherous dwarf, and its huge emotional landscape to a place it’s never been before: “a hotel in Edmonton 1964.” It’s fascinating to see the imaginative vision and stagecraft of the celebrated theatre/opera director Peter Hinton-Davis unleashes on this.  And it happens out in the open on a thrust stage, the Citadel’s 685-seat Maclab Theatre, surrounded by the audience.

The adaptation by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick finds a way to reduce the orchestral forces from 85 to a lean mean 18. Wotan (Neil Craighead) is asleep and dreaming of conducting his own production of Das Rheingold. In place of the magisterial king of the gods figure, here he’s a rumpled figure who seems to wake up with a killer headache when the Rhine maidens start singing and his wife arrives, on his case. And he’s taken aback (no wonder) by the sheer force of the gold thief Alberich in Dion Mazerolle’s knock-out performance. Andy Moro’s stunning design and lighting are indispensable dramatic participants in the Wagnerian cosmology, from the bottom of the Rhine to the celestial sphere, of this highly theatrical production, which moves through the whole joint and among us, up and down staircases and through the aisles.

Das Rheingold continues Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at the Citadel’s Maclab Theatre. Tickets: edmontonopera.com.

•AND it’s the last weekend for Workshop West’s lovely production of Conni Massing’s Dead Letter, an intricately layered comedy that darkens into a murder mystery and beyond, into more existential mysteries. Tickets: workshopwest.org. Check out the 12thnight review here, and an interview with the engaging playwright here.

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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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