On the frontier between hilarity and horror: Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman at Theatre Yes, a preview

Posted on April 9, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The Pillowman, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Get your shudder muscles ready, Edmonton, for the (very) black and disturbing comedy that opens Thursday in a production from Theatre Yes. As in Yes, The Pillowman is coming for you.

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The 2003 play by the Brit playwright/screenwriter Martin McDonagh — the name is your tip-off that hilarity will come with a major flinch factor — begins in an interrogation. In an unnamed totalitarian state, a writer and her mentally challenged brother have been arrested and thrown in prison for questioning. In the town there’s been a rash of murders that bear an uncanny resemblance to those laid out in her memorably gruesome fables which lean into crimes involving children. Bedtime stories they’re not.

Max Rubin, the new co-artistic director of Theatre Yes (with his wife Ruth Alexander), has wanted to do The Pillowman for 15 years, long before the family relocated to Edmonton from the U.K. in 2017, with their theatre company Lodestar in tow. “It’s one of my favourite plays of all time,” he declares. “And it’s an incredibly uncomfortable play to watch in many ways.”

director Max Rubin. Photo supplied

“What I see in the play, at the centre, is that though all the characters do and say awful things at different times, they are all victims, or products, of their awful totalitarian environment.” Which puts us, the audience, in a bind when it comes to indulging our natural tendency to pick a side.

“I don’t really think the play is a political warning against extremism, although the results of that are evident on the stage. It has less to do with ‘content’ than what it confronts the audience with: all the characters are so deeply relatable,” says Rubin. “ It’s so skilfully written it’s almost impossible not to empathize with each of them.” And in a play that alights on

“At one moment you’re laughing, at something very human, the next… abhorrent cruelty.” Rubin says. “I think (McDonagh) never lets you settle on a point of view in the play. And I don’t think there are enough plays like this that genuinely challenge the audience to examine themselves in quite as direct a way. It’s that that excites me most about this play!”

Though issues around freedom of expression and censorship linger in The Pillowman, and in an age where authorities have returned to book-burning, how can they not? But Rubin argues that “it’s not in direct response to something that’s happened, it’s more universal than that.”

Our natural tendency, as Rubin puts it, “is to side with the good-ies. But we don’t have that privilege here… Our expectations are confounded constantly.” This is a play that makes you ask hard questions about what is wrong and what is right — in the play world, and our world too.”

“And at the same time it’s hilarious! Deeply funny and warm and tender. I’m just in awe of it as a piece of theatre writing,” says Rubin. The McDonagh signature — witness a canon of theatre and film that includes The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, A Skull in Connemara, The Hangman, The Banshee of Inisherin — is to play along the treacherous, unstable frontier between the hilarious and the horrifying.

“He mixes comedy with unsettling content so skilfully. And nowhere in his work is it more on show than in this play,” says Rubin, “a cross between an early Pinter comedy of menace and a Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie movie.”

Ruth Alexander in Dead in the Water, Lodestar Theatre and Theatre Yes. Photo supplied

When Rubin and Alexander jointly took on the artistic directorship of Theatre Yes in 2023, they started with Alexander’s original solo cabaret Dead in the Water. And last fall, for The Play’s The Thing, they invited 20 Edmonton stage companies, of every size and aesthetic, to perform one scene each from Hamlet, in their own signature house style. The result was a de-constructed re-constructed two-night production of Shakespeare’s most illustrious heavy-hitter.

The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.

So, as Rubin points out, The Pillowman is their first bona fide Theatre Yes production, “the first time we’re able to say Edmonton ‘this is our style. This is the kind of work we intend to make’.. And it’s a great vehicle for us because it allows us to be really inventive.”

The show “continues the Theatre Yes tradition of using non-theatre spaces,” says Rubin, who was delighted to discover the Pendennis Building, a renovated early 20th century hotel downtown which will eventually contain multiple venues, of many sizes and shapes. Theatre Yes, whose history includes producing plays in elevators, warehouses, a parkade,  opted for the basement (with seating for 50 max). “Vast, concrete feature-less … a perfect interrogation chamber,” Rubin says. “Creepy! So cool! It feels dank, oppressive, and claustrophobic!”

The Pillowman unfolds in a swirl of naturalistic scenes and scenes that replay, or at least conjure, Katurian’s horrifying fables, “that feel almost as if they’re dreams, or nightmares, or parts of he subconscious…. It’s been a thrilling challenge for us , how to tell these stories in a truly frightening and spectacular way with our tiny budget.”

“We’re really excited about the solutions we’ve found…. It’s all about economy and simplicity, about doing as much as we possibly can with as little as we possibly can.”

“We’re looking forward to sharing that with Edmonton,” the home, after all, of the mighty Fringe, where theatre gets made on a shoestring. “You don’t have to have a big budget, or any budget at all, to make something that’s truly compelling!”

Next up for Theatre Yes (either in November or next February, depending on venue availability), and in high contrast to The Pillowman, is An Oak Tree by the Brit playwright Tim Crouch. At each performance, an actor, who plays a hypnotist, is joined onstage by a second actor who has never seen the script and who doesn’t know the back story. “Ten performances, 10 actors of different genders, ages, ethnicities…. It will be fascinating to see how the performances are different and how they are the same,” says Rubin.

“We want to apply our style to a vast range of work, and keep our audience guessing!”

PREVIEW

The Pillowman

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Written by: Martin McDonagh

Directed by: Max Rubin

Starring: Dayna Lea Hoffman, Ruth Alexander, Brandon Mcpherson, Kaden Forsberg

Where: Pendennis Building, 9660 Jasper Ave.

Running: April 11 to 21

Tickets: theatreyes.com

  

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On the outside looking in: Candy & The Beast, a new Trevor Schmidt thriller at Northern Light Theatre, a review

Posted on April 7, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tkaczyk in Candy & The Beast, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a dark and threatening world, a miasma of secret dangers and fear, in which we find ourselves in Candy & The Beast, a new and multi-faceted mystery thriller by (and directed by) Trevor Schmidt premiering at Northern Light Theatre.

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In the murk, a couple of dozen grotesque heads on long spikes leer down on us (a world designed by Schmidt and lighted eerily by Alison Yanota). This is the season’s only two-actor many-head thriller. And the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns has never been foggier.

Welcome to the small prairie town of Black Falls, which is about as far from Grover’s Corners as you can get. A serial killer, species unknown, has been on the loose, picking off townspeople of a particular type — young, female, blonde, lower class.

“Some people are worth more,” concludes Candy Reese (Jayce McKenzie), a smart and snarly Goth kid from the poor side of town. Her eyes are open to both the selective habits of the mysterious (“his her their its”) monster)and the selective lameness of the official investigation. She and her little brother Kenny (Jake Tkaczyk), who’s been smeared with the nickname The Beast by the town bullies for his ungainly size (early onset puberty), live on the margins, where people mysteriously vanish, or get disappeared.

Wolves run in a pack (a chorus of howling that’s part of Dave Clarke’s eerie soundscore), and either kill dogs (do they do people?) or, in the case of upper-class canines like Reggie the poodle, recruit them.   

Candy & The Beast, starring Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tkaczyk Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Played by the petite firecracker McKenzie, who gives off sparks, Candy is the fierce if reluctant guardian of her gentle giant bro. He’s played with a combination of tentative and slightly dazed by the statuesque Tkaczyk, as a little boy in a man’s body. And McKenzie’s performance is a smart capture of teenage alienation.  What are you going as on Halloween?” asks the guileless Kenny. “Same thing I am every day,” snarls Candy, “nothing.”

Candy & The Beast, starring Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tkaczyk, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

Candy is determined that they be “seen” in a world that seems to prefer them invisible. Their clothes are costumes (by Schmidt); they appear in scary masks from time to time. Their parents, and authorities like the dismissive Sheriff Lau (“fingers, eyeball, or what-nots…”), are present onstage only as voices on a ghetto blaster.  If Candy and Kenny can catch the killer, thinks the former, their outcast status will change.

The scenes happen in a volley of oblique shafts, with sudden scary head-ons, in Schmidt’s strange, resonant, small-scale thriller. We get glimpses of life lived from the outside looking in. At Candy’s part-time job, at the Pine Cones ice cream shop, for example, she doesn’t get her own company polo-shirt. Hers has the name tag of the killer’s last victim, who did one shift there before she disappeared. Real estate agent matrons, on the other hand, can get blonde highlights with impunity.

Jake Tkaczyk and Jayce McKenzie in Candy & the Beast, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

In this exclusionary world, coming-of age and the disconcerting transformations thereof are a web of doubts for the characters. Candy, perpetually angry, battles increasing uncertainty; she thinks “maybe I’m the real monster.” Kenny has terrible dreams, and wonders if he’s actually a beast: is he turning into a werewolf (all that new hair)?

Suddenly he finds himself at a microphone singing about “a dreadful change … a turning of the page” to a rock beat that appears out of thin air. Later he’ll sing a song, to the same beat, about pain that “pushes your teeth into fangs” and “sharpens your nails into knives.” You could call Candy & The Beast a musical, maybe, but it’s an unconventional, impulsive one. The only character who sings does that suddenly, without warning, and exclusively at nightmare moments.

Jake Tkaczyk and Jayce McKenzie in Candy & The Beast, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

The stylized staging by director Schmidt has the siblings at opposite ends of the stage for much of the time. They’re  together rarely, only when there are psychological interventions and they play each other’s nightmares or unspool each other’s fears.

It’s theatrical and meaningful in conjuring the fracture lines in a splintered life. If you’re looking for an escape from the stresses of the urban, it’s possible small-town life, prairie-style, is not the way to go.

Candy & The Beast is a mysterious, weird, and shivery little two-hand thriller, and you’ll find yourself oddly moved.

PREVIEW

Candy & The Beast

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written and directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tkaczyk

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

Running: through April 20

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

 

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The gift of belief: unmissable Wonderful Joe, The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network

Posted on April 5, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Joe and Mister in Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionette. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Something wonderful, and wonder-filled, happened last night at Theatre Network.

We found ourselves on Eileen Street, in a miniature urban neighbourhood on the wrong side of the tracks. Where the homeless are home, and the misfits and the oddballs of every age, colour, ethnicity, gender, point of origin, struggle to survive and dream on the margins, and quite literally hang out. And we were on “a grand adventure” there in the company of an old man and his old dog, who’d just been evicted that very morning from their apartment.

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The characters come to life first as hand puppets atop a theatre of magical transformations, where Sonny, the friendly South Asian building manager (in a tiny perfect puffer vest and ball cap), imparts the bad news about the tear-down of the building. And then they take over the stage below as marionettes, which is to say people, in a ‘hood teeming with raucous life.

With Wonderful Joe, the latest from the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, the master puppeteer/ playwright/ designer/ actor returns to Edmonton — and to Network, where we’ve seen seven of Burkett’s productions since 1990. And after nearly a decade in which he’s created wildly entertaining hit cabarets, Burkett and a cast of diminutive cohorts come this time with a real play, a funny, thoughtful, and deeply poignant one, that cuts to the heart of a multicultural city like the one we live in.

It’s a beauty of a piece, in its generosity of spirit and affection for the urban demimonde, imaginative in conception and creation, and impeccable in design and craftsmanship. Burkett’s formidable marionette technique is always, and precisely, in the service of the characters.

Young Joe in Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The movement of the puppets onstage is uncannily expressive. Wait till you see old Joe’s stooped shuffle, his bent knees, his quizzical inclines of head, the way he leans into conversations when he’s curious. In an oeuvre that includes Happy with its pensioner hero, and the blind title character of Penny Plain in a boarding house at the end of the world, Burkett has always had a particular affection (and an unsparing eye) for the way old age hangs on the human frame, bending it, pulling flesh down. The tentative arthritic walk of the ancient canine Mister is a little choreographic symphony in itself, not to mention the way he shakes out his tangled fur.

This magic is materially assisted by costumes created by Kim Crossley, who evidently thinks nothing of making to-scale roll-up jeans, or an age-worn tweed sports jacket for Joe,  or a “white girl” plastic prom dress custom-made by an Indigenous dominatrix for herself. And then there are Camellia Coo’s heartbreaking miniature Crocs and Blundstones, or the little Fluevog-style pumps on a gender-fluid trans performer.

The eyes through which we experience the denizens of Eileen Street in Wonderful Joe belong to the old fellow of the title, with his special ability to see the human gold in a harsh and tarnished world. It’s not as if Joe asks for much for himself. He doesn’t mind sleeping on the floor with Mister, who’s too creaky to get up on the bed. “We take turns being the pillow.” Are you OK? Joe’s friends ask him. “No, I’m wonderful,” he invariably says.

This goes well beyond the pathos of “making the best of things,” as more banal advice would have it. Joe’s is an active capacity for wonder, a personal optic that transforms belief into reality and gives dimensions to the fantastical. That this transformation also speaks to the magical art of breathing life into exquisitely detailed, fully committed actors on strings pulled from above, gives the whole experience of Wonderful Joe an extra frisson of delight. Kudos to John Alcorn’s captivating and lyrical score, worldly but transporting, infiltrated by veins of humour.

In shadow at the top of theatre is the virtuoso string puller, God so to speak, who’s human-sized, flat-out busy (there are 17 marionettes and six hand puppets in the show), and amazingly easy to forget all about after a minute or two. If Burkett puts down the strings, the characters have time to do nothing, to be still and daydream, as Joe says of himself. Not running, or meditating, or plotting, “just thinking of things.”

And when the characters are just hanging out offstage (literally, from hooks in the theatre framework fashioned by Burkett), they’re lighted, by designer Kevin Humphrey, with an atmospheric kind of urban shadow and glow that feels like a city, with a populated vibe.    

Joe’s fellow evict-ees, of every age and station on the spectrum of eccentricity, are all grappling with residual post-pandemic loneliness. We meet a breezy chatterbox teenager with a Fraggle Rock obsession. And you’ll love Margaret, elderly and dotty, who’s spent the pandemic cultivating sourdough starter.

Joe and Mister are out in a ‘hood with downmarket entertainment options. They run into Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and Jesus, all of them very funny, in a gay bar, in their respective off-seasons. Burkett’s theatre is always audacious in its juxtaposition of puckish or riotous comedy and darker more tragic tones (sometimes within the same throw-away line). The Tooth Fairy, for example, a hilariously mouthy muscle-bound tough in a tutu, with a disdain for entitled bourgeois kids who leave a note with bank e-transfer info, is the purveyor of anonymous kindnesses too.

Minnie Shingles, the truculent “directrice” of a troupe of homeless actors, is an inspired creation. The through-line for the latest from The Trash Alley Players, a collective, is the apocalypse (“And then the meteor hit….”). Devoted to the Canadian theatre as she is, Minnie don’t take no shit from divas. “You’re an actor; you sleep with what you’re given,” she says sternly to a member of the company.

Mother Nature in Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The most startling performance, a headline act at the Boulevard of Broken Queens Show Bar, is Mother Nature, old, bald, skinny, nakedly vulnerable. Her song Look At Me Now, a Weill-esque Alcorn number, is a bristling confrontation with despair. “The air gets thicker, and here’s the kicker….”

Perhaps the most memorable scene, equally comic and heartwarming, happens late in the play, with Joe and a sulky, skeptical teenage girl, Getty (Serengeti Levin-Woo), together on a park bench. Can the magical gift of transcendent belief be given to others? Joe has a go at it. And it’s a question for all of us who live together in the world.

What a thrill it is to see a Burkett play — and see that world, in all its beauty and heartbreak, its cruelty and its absurdity, imagined up close and created in miniature, with real dramatic force, by one of the country’s great originals. Don’t miss your chance.

REVIEW

Wonderful Joe

Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network

Created and performed by: Ronnie Burkett

Music composition and lyrics: John Alcorn

Where: Roxy Theatre, 10708 124 St.

Running: through April 21

Tickets: theatrenetwork.com

Warning: children under the age of 16 will not be admitted.   

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Humanizing a hero in a mysterious encounter: The Mountaintop at the Citadel, a review

Posted on April 5, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Cerra and Ray Strachan in The Mountaintop, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A road-weary man with a cough and holes in his socks arrives back in an undistinguished Memphis motel on a stormy night in April 1968, dying for a cigarette and checking for hidden microphones before he phones his wife. His sonorous voice shows signs of wear-and-tear.

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“America, you are too arrogant…”

In The Mountaintop by the American playwright Katori Hall, Dr. Martin Luther King (Ray Strachan) is just back from delivering his “I have been to the mountaintop” speech, one of the 20th century’s most illustrious, at the Mason Temple in support of striking sanitation workers. And, all alone, he’s rehearsing some possible openers for speeches yet to come.

The play imagines the last night in the life of a hero, larger than life,, and tries to find his human size — with the vanity, exasperation, doubt, discouragement, and fear that implies. He jumps at every crack of thunder. The next day, April 4, will be a defining moment in the violent history of a nation and of the civil rights movement: King will be assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

And as he waits for his friend and roommate Ralph Abernathy to return with cigarettes, a motel housekeeper, Camae (Patricia Cerra), arrives at the door of room 306, with coffee, an early edition of tomorrow’s paper, and a mysterious supply of confidence, sass and skepticism.

Cerra’s performance charts a certain surprising — to us and to King — combination of the flirtatious and the fierce. The tired hero with the wandering eye and the smelly feet is intrigued enough to engage with Camae on a variety of subjects including race relations, violence, his own profile, gender inequality, leadership, martyrdom, even theology. Dr. King heaps his coffee with sugar. Camae likes hers “black and bitter.”

Who is she anyhow? The question that starts in playful teasing badinage that goes on way too long in The Mountaintop, takes a magical realism turn-around en route to the top of the mountain. And it’s major theatrical cardio. I can’t really say more except that I have my doubts about it. And I can tell you it relies on the powers of persuasion built into Cerra’s performance.

Patricia Cerra and Ray Strachan in The Mountaintop, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Under Darbasie’s direction, the characters have their own contrasting rhetorical styles; both, in their own way, incantatory. King’s is, of course, a matter of historical record. And it’s captured expertly by Strachan who has a long history with the role in many productions. He slides into a kind of oratorical from-the-pulpit grandiloquence with its own built-in pauses.  Camae’s style, in Cerra’s performance, has a slightly mocking, worldly, amused tone, a kind of faux languor designed to stir it up, and get a reaction.

The Citadel production that opened Thursday  (on the 56th anniversary of the fateful day at the Lorraine Motel) is a curious choice at Edmonton’s largest playhouse. The two-hander has the same director (Patricia Darbasie) and cast as Shadow Theatre’s 2022 production.

Which is not to say, of course, that the exhortations of Dr. King about racial inequality an violence have miraculously lost their relevance in the intervening two years (or the half-century-plus since the terrible history-defining events of 1968 in Memphis). Au contraire. Or that the performances from Strachan and Cerra (who were also in a 2019 Rosebud Theatre production) are anything less than polished, vivid, and committed.

But this is the question: is bigger better. For me, on this second viewing (I was kindly allowed to attend the final preview performance), the play itself — which premiered across the Atlantic in 2009 in a small London theatre, oddly enough, before it ever got to Broadway with a starry cast, Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett — seems thinner and more theatrically gimmicky this time. Delayed surprise, which holds The Mountaintop together, can overstay its welcome, I guess, even in a “bigger” production.

I ended up wondering, too, whether this more fulsome staging, with a design by John C. Dinning and lighting by Jeff Osterlin, ends up inflating a little play with a cool idea beyond its natural capacity.

Ray Strachan and Patricia Darbasie in The Mountaintop, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Anyhow, Room 306 doesn’t really fall into the depressing motel category the script conjures. It’s a large, clean, well-lighted place that’s more like basic, mid-range Holiday Inn. The stormy sky and the strikingly abstract archway in which pages of speeches, and newspapers, and fliers seem to float down from above, lighted like lanterns. It’s a beautiful theatrical image.  And a prosaic place where heroes on the road stay seems suspended in space, in a star-filled galaxy.

The Promised Land, the future that Dr. King envisaged, not only hasn’t been reached but might actually be getting blurrier, receding into the distance as the news attests — white supremacist take-overs, George Floyd, Republic efforts to disenfranchise Black voters … the list is long. The final vision of the play, and the exhortation to “pass the baton” (accompanied by Amelia Scott’s assorted projections) has been updated for our moment in time. But the sense that the world is stalled doesn’t detract from the power of King’s great and visionary speech, resonating with hope and laced with intimations of mortality, that anchors this odd play. It intensifies our sense of tragedy.

REVIEW

The Mountaintop

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Katori Hall

Directed by: Patricia Darbasie

Starring: Patricia Cerra, Ray Strachan

Running: through April 21

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Playing in the unfiltered world of kids: meet Jayce McKenzie, star of Robot Girls and Candy & The Beast

Posted on April 3, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Candy & The Beast, starring Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tzaczyk, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Double vision. By day Jayce McKenzie has been rehearsing a new Trevor Schmidt play that premieres Friday in a Northern Light Theatre production. By night she has been regaling and touching audiences in  … a new Trevor Schmidt play that premiered in a Shadow Theatre production, and just closed last weekend.

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And to that theatrical rarity, two overlapping premieres in two theatres by the same playwright, we can add another. In both Robot Girls and Candy & The Beast — the one a funny and insightful comedy about the complicated lives of junior high girls, and the other a “mystery thriller” set in small prairie town with a dark underbelly and gothic overtones —  McKenzie plays kids. This past month she’s been Vanessa, age 12, an innocent in the world of teenagers, who joins a science club that’s building a robot for an international competition. This month she’s Candy, age 15, who sets forth with her little brother from the trailer court where they live to track down a serial killer. It might well cross your mind that Jayce McKenzie, who’s actually 35, has the secret of eternal youth all wrapped up.

“I think I’m just child-ish, you know,” McKenzie laughs. “It helps I look a little younger, maybe. But I do love to play in that world, like we’re kids again, removing all those filters we’ve added as adults. I mean, we all have that in us, right?, buried under all the rubble.…” The fun of Vanessa, the “robot girl” she played in Schmidt’s warm-hearted and very funny comedy, is that she’s pretty much filter-free. Without adult caution or calculation she just reacts impulsively, and blurts out thoughts and emotions that stop everyone in their tracks.

Larissah Lashley, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie, Hayley Moorhouse in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“I was like that as a kid, too,” says McKenzie cheerfully of the bond she felt with the character. “Neurodivergent, with all the problems … never seen as something was a gift, or even just a kid with a different sort of brain.”It’s only been in the last couple of years that the diagnosis of ADHD has clarified matters for her, she explains. Not least because the research into symptoms has been very boy-centric.

Like Candy, half the sibling pair in Schmidt’s production of his new thriller, McKenzie was a small-town kid. She’s from the hard-to-get-at little B.C. town of Kaslo in the Kootenays, where her folks ran the Rosewood Cafe. She was “both a theatre kid and a basketball and soccer kid … until I got kicked off the soccer team for having a bad attitude. I just didn’t click with the coach. It sucked; I really liked soccer.”

McKenzie describes reaction of her kid self as a common neurodivergent response: “It feels like a personal attack, and you don’t handle attacks well!” Since her diagnosis she’s “just started to unravel things … all the things that weren’t my fault, if I got frustrated really quickly, or got mad, or if I felt sensitive or rejected. The diagnosis has helped me be less hard on myself …. ” She laughs. “I just feel everything!”

“And that (directness), I think, is what makes me a good actor…. It’s a double-edged sword.” For all the problems, the ability to remove filters, and cut to the chase of a character’s feelings, a particular kind of direct quick-draw empathy, is at the heart of acting, McKenzie muses. Arguably, it makes that mysterious art more available, more accessible.

The acuteness of feeling has also tapped into the other facet of her career. A Grant MacEwan musical theatre grad of more than a decade ago — “I like musicals but I didn’t necessarily want to be in them!”—  MacKenzie has a company, Alpha Awakening, devoted both online and in person, to wellbeing and healing through meditation, coaching, exploring the therapeutic dimensions of hypnotic states. And since training as a hypnotist in Las Vegas, she’s begun to explore the links between performance and hypnosis. “And I had an inkling,” as a theatre artist, “that there’s more that could be done with it.”

Hypnosis, McKenzie admits, “scared me for a while,” mainly because of its “pass-or-fail expectations…. If you’re onstage, as yourself (not a character), and have people up there and tell them and you’re going to hypnotize them and you don’t, well…. It was harder than I expected, and it really messed with my head.”

But in August of 2019 at the Fringe, just before COVID, onstage at 60-seat Grindstone Theatre, MacKenzie tried hypnosis as performance in an original show she called Alpha Hypnosis. And this summer, at the Fringe, she’ll do “an inner child show,” she says. “The goal is to be able to heal people on the spot, in a way that’s fun and feels safe to them. … with a storyline, with a characters, with a script and parts that are improvised.”

The inspiration, McKenzie says, is Blind Date, the hit improv show in which, as a Gallic clown with a red nose, Rebecca Northan asks an audience member to be her date onstage, and, in real time, they get to know each other.

McKenzie is full of admiration. “I want to do what she did with Blind Date, which was uplift people, make them looks lovely. And it resonated with me. She picked out everything that was great about them, and fed it back to them…. She did the thing that people need to hear. We don’t tell people enough that ‘appreciate that you’re like this’.” Her  improv consultant is Northan’s brother Jamie Northan.

“To me, hypnosis and meditation are pretty much the same,” McKenzie explains, the latter a sort of self-hypnosis where you are in control…. It’s putting yourself in a relaxed state.”

“It’s all come together in this bizarre way,” she says happily of a unique creative journey that started in the energy and empathy of ADHD and moved to theatre, and is finding a way to marry improv and hypnosis in performance.

Candy & The Beast, starring Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tkaczyk, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

Candy, she says of the title character of Candy & The Beast, is a kid who’s “confused and scared.” The question is, “what do people do with fear?” Some, like Candy, who sets forth to catch a killer, face it; others face the other way. McKenzie laughs. “I liked scary stuff when I was a kid. As kids we played with Ouija boards and all that. Now couldn’t pay me to watch a horror story!”

The character we meet “its trying to test the limits of what there is out there, and what we can figure out,” says McKenzie. “And if we do this thing that nobody else has done, then people will see my worth. What do I need to do to be valued?”

PREVIEW

Candy & The Beast

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written and directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Jayce McKenzie and Jake Tkaczyk

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

Running: Friday through April 20

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

     

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An old man and his dog, a tale for a broken world: Ronnie Burkett’s Wonderful Joe premieres at Theatre Network

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Wonderful Joe by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo suppied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The old man we meet in Wonderful Joe, the new Ronnie Burnett Theatre of Marionettes play getting its much anticipated world premiere Thursday at Theatre Network, has a magical gift (and a dog).

Call it vision. Joe can see life that no one else sees: people who are invisible, or maybe aren’t real — until Joe sees them. When he gets evicted, he and his dog Mister set forth on a grand adventure in the world, which is to say his urban neighbourhood. Which might explain why the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and Jesus, in their respective off-seasons, are hanging out in a gay bar. And why a troupe of homeless actors are performing a morality play in Joe’s  back alley.

Last week, Burkett, the tallest member of the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, was back in Alberta, and back at the Roxy, a home away from home for his productions since 1990. And the Toronto-based playwright/ actor/ director/ designer/ marionettiste, who grew up in Medicine Hat (and started touring puppet shows at age 14), was awaiting the arrival of his Wonderful Joe cast-mates. They were in transit, somewhere in the hinterland, reposing silently (possibly fretfully, since they’re highly strung) in their special crates, at the mercy of Canadian shipping.

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Their impressively large bi-level theatre, with painted graffiti panels, was already up on the Roxy mainstage. “It’s based on my mentor’s stage from the ‘40s,” says Burkett of the American puppeteer Martin Stevens. “Only we made it bigger. And the coolest part, that no one in the audience will ever see, is the bridge (where Burkett stands) and stage floor and ladders and supports all fold up into their own box.”

The competing divas of Little Willy, chanteuse Jolie Jolie and aging diva Esmé Massengill. The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied.

“That was our challenge, to make a set that would fit into a van,” says Burkett. Which, incidentally, was the lesson of Little Willy — in which the diminutive actors of the Daisy Cabaret “do” Shakespeare — the semi-improvised show Burkett brought to Theatre Network for a short run in February 2023. As he explains, the cargo costs to ship Little Willy back to Canada from its California dates, “just one way, on just one leg of a seven-city tour!,” were an unsustainably hefty $24,000.

Wonderful Joe, says Burkett, “has been in my mind for a long time. It’s taken forever to write, and I don’t know why that is. Maybe because I got used to creating stuff by improvising?” That’s how The Daisy Cabaret, the holiday spectacular Little Dickens, and Little Willy, all three of which Burkett continues to tour to sold-out houses (and could do forever since they’re updated nightly), came to be.

This new piece, which will play Stanford University and the Nimoy Theatre at UCLA after the Edmonton premiere run, was originally going to be Burkett’s emerge-from-the-pandemic moment. In those uncertain, isolating times, “when I didn’t know when theatre was going to open and how big it would be,” as he puts it, “I’d built a little hand puppet show, The Loony Bin, that’s really sweet and funny, and fits in a car so I could drive it, set it up, do the lights myself….. Like when I started in Alberta,” long before he would receive the 2023 Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement.

A play that would be an heir to Burkett’s ground-breaking signatures, Tinka’s New Dress, Penny Plain, Happy among them: that was the plan. “But coming out of the pandemic presenters requested that instead of a sad show about an old man and his dog, could they have The Daisy Cabaret? And reluctantly I said yes, and did Little Willy. And they were right!” Burkett laughs his distinctively rumbling smoky laugh. “To get people back into the theatre it had to be silly and fun and fun, a room full of laughter. And it turned out to be this huge hit! Stupidly popular!”

But Joe and Mister stayed put in the Burkett mind. He calls Wonderful Joe “a small show,” with “only” 17 marionettes and six hand puppets. It isn’t as dense as Tinka or Penny Plain, says its creator. “It’s a simple, gentle story about Joe, and who he encounters.”

Face sculpting for Wonderful Joe, in Ronnie Burkett’s studio. Photo supplied.

So, back at the gay bar, Joe runs into the Tooth Fairy, “a little body-builder who’s built like a moose. In a tutu,” as Burkett describes. The off-season Santa “is in a too-short Hawaiian shirt and cut-off jeans.” And Jesus “isn’t the Sunday School Jesus”; for one thing he’s brown. And as for the troupe of homeless players in Joe’s back alley, they’re led by Minnie, “the directrice, who’s very old and louder than everyone, and swears, and is funny,” says Burkett.

The people who are real because Joe sees them are a multi-cultural  assortment of urban characters in a multi-colour multi-ethnic city like Toronto or Edmonton — “that’s the city now; you can’t do all-white and be of the city” — the disenfranchised, the lost, the outliers struggling to survive.

“We have an Indigenous character named Baby, a mixed-race trans sex worker, a South Asian guy named Sunny who’s funny, and delivers the news that Joe’s building is being torn down … a moody teenage girl named Getty (Serengeti Levin-Woo)…. They’re all there.”   

“The people Joe meets are invisible to society…. They’re all Joe’s neighbours.” And “we have flashbacks, because I always do, where we learn what happened to child Joe and teenage Joe.”

Mother Nature is in the show too, old and worse for wear, times being what they are. She’s naked (save for a feather boa made of garbage bags). And she’s “the only one in the show who has a song.” Look at Me Now, is a Weimar-flavoured number (“Piaf could have sung it.” says Burkett) by the jazz musician/composer/lyricist John Alcorn, Burkett’s real-life partner, whose original music underscores the show, with additional vocals by Coco Love Alcorn.   

“The band is back together!” says Burkett happily of the creative team, his obsessive perfectionist collaborators, many of whom have worked with him since Penny Plain and before. Lighting designer Kevin Humphrey, for example, and stage manager Crystal Salverda are back; so is Marcus Jamin, a high-precision stringing virtuoso.

shoe moulds for Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied

“I made a character named Terri who looks like Terri,” (Terry Gillis, Burkett’s long-time production manager, says Burkett. Kim Crossley, who works at the Stratford Festival, is back to execute the exquisitely detailed costumes Burkett designs. And the shoes are by designer Camellia Koo, who’s actually made tiny jelly sandals for Minnie, perfect Blundstones, penny loafers with, wait for it, to-scale pennies. At a bar near the Burkett puppet studio, they found a kind of beer in a can with copper in the label. “Not a beer I’d care to drink. And we punched out a penny…. Now that’s commitment!” declares Burkett in delight.

Mister, Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre o Marionettes. Photo supplied.

And back in his supervisory role as the company’s studio “Majordomo” (as credited in the program) is Robbie, the elderly canine member of the Burkett/Alcorn household. Mister, says Burkett, “isn’t physically based on Robbie, but absolutely on my relationship with him.”

“The tone is a sense of home, of loss, and the longing for home,” says Burkett of his newest play. And the through-line, he says, borrows its prevailing metaphor from kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by filling the cracks with gold. “When people are broken you don’t have to dispose of them, you can mend them with gold — be they old, be they street people, or outcasts. And that’s Joe’s magical ability…. He sees what he believes.”

PREVIEW

Wonderful Joe

Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network

Created and performed by: Ronnie Burkett

Music composition and lyrics: John Alcorn

Where: Roxy Theatre, 10708 124 St.

Running: Thursday through April 21

Tickets: theatrenetwork.com

Warning: children under the age of 16 will not be admitted.   

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‘Let the whole world melt away!’ Nuova Vocal Arts goes to The Prom

Posted on April 1, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The cast of The Prom, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Jacy Eberlein

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I just wanna dance with you/ Let the whole world melt away/ And dance with you/ Who cares what other people say?”  — The Prom

In The Prom, the double-sided Broadway musical comedy/ satire that opens Thursday at the Varscona Theatre, you’ll have fun of watching a bunch of narcissistic Broadway veterans (with Broadway-sized vanity) undertake a career rehab/ celebrity activism field trip.

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Their destination? the homophobic American heartland, small-town Indiana, where a 17-year-old lesbian has been barred from bringing a girl to the high school prom. And that side of the 2018 Broadway musical feels important and timely in our moment in time and space where history seems to be spinning backwards.

The NUOVA Vocal Arts production directed by Kim Mattice Wanat, the company’s 95th show, is perfectly placed to celebrates 25 years in the life of a theatre company that hasn’t so much changed its stripes in the last quarter of a century, but continually expanded its reach — in cabarets, in festivals, in site-specific re-inventions of the repertoire, in the repertoire itself.

As artistic director Mattice Wanat explains, the optic of the company she founded in 1998 was originally fixed on opera, “and bridging the gap between university training and the professional stage.” Opera NUOVA (as per its former name) was designed to train and showcase emerging opera professionals from across the country. “Over the part five years, “we’ve incorporated more musical theatre.” she says.

Witness this 25th anniversary season which culminates in a vocal arts festival (May 24 to June 23) in which musical theatre and opera rub shoulders, in intimate settings. It includes two contemporary American chamber operas, When The Sun Comes Out and As One at Concordia University’s Al and Trish Huehn Theatre. And Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and Rossini’s Il barbiere di siviglia at the Capitol Theatre in Fort Edmonton Park. And the musical Titanic at The Robert Teller Hall at Concordia.

The Prom in rehearsal, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Mel Bahniuk

“We’re trying to extend our reach and build bridges into the community,” says Mattice Wanat of a season that’s already included Dear Edwina, a musical for the nine to 15 crowd and the multi-general Irving Berlin holiday musical White Christmas, which sold out seven shows at the Capitol Theatre in December.  “We want to embrace emerging artists, both young professionals and community artists…. And seeing the stage occuped by (both) has been an experience that’s really inspiring.”

With operas like When The Sun Comes Out and As One, with their gay and trans protagomnists, and now the musical The Prom (book by Bob Martin of The Drowsy Chaperone fame and Chad Beguelin, music by Matthew Shlar), Mattice Wanat hopes to attract the LGBTQ-plus community, both as artists and audiences.

Traditionally, as she points out, the opera audience is a quite specific demographic. “I wanted to change the face of how we were doing opera, in more intimate settings…. I went to the Freewill Shakespeare Festival in the park and thought “if they can do this with Shakespeare, why can’t we do it with opera? Way more access, more fun, more inclusive!”

The cast of The Prom, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Jacy Eberlein

The mixed professional/ community cast of 28 in The Prom “includes lots of generations,” says Mattice Wanat. “High school artists, MacEwan and U of A grads, folks that are like my age: 15-year-olds to a 56-year-old.”

She’s enlisted Brett Dahl, a queer actor/director and recent U of A Masters degree grad as assistant director. “I felt it was important to have someone from the queer community,” she says. Their goal is to attract both LGBTQ+ audiences, and audiences who are more ‘conservative’ — “to extend the narrative.”

The Prom, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Jacy Eberlein.

Dahl, fresh from directing his queer-focussed adaptation of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as his MFA degree production, argues that The Prom “doesn’t target ‘the other side.” That would be the PTA in Edgewater, Indiana, led by the show “villain” Mrs. Green, who goes to extraordinary lengths to prevent infiltration of the prom by Emma and her girlfriend. It mocks the Broadway vets, narcissists whose save-the-world expedition is comically self-serving.”Both sides have flaws, and room to grow,” says Dahl, who will soon direct a production of Jordan Tannahill’s Is My Microphone On? for the Citadel’s Young Company. “Everyone is on a journey of acceptance.”

“The play sends a message of acceptance and joy; it tries to embrace everyone.”

Mattice Wanat echoes the thought. “The music is funky and fun! Dress up and have a party! The reprise of Dance With You says it all, Mattice Wanat thinks. “This time, is’s ‘dance with you in life’. Be out in the world. Live proudly as your true self! And that’s a beautiful thing.”

The Prom runs Thursday through Sunday at the Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave. Tickets: eventbrite.com. Full NUOVA Vocal Arts Festival schedule at nuovavocalarts.ca.

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The long weekend in a theatre town

Posted on March 29, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts at Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What happens on a long weekend in a theatre town? For starters, a new indie puppet musical and a musical theatre classic, an insightful and captivating comedy about teenage girls, a musical revue, a new play festival.

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•The Adventure of Young Turtle, the new musical for kids (five-plus) and their grown-up friends that launches the 19th annual edition of Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival, creates an imaginative undersea coral reef playground (designed by Even Gilchrist and lighted by Amberlin Hsu) for its cast of queer puppet characters. And they’re all fashioned, with considerable flair and ingenuity, from recycled castaway stuff — old hoses and juice containers, bottle caps and take-out containers, plastic cutlery, umbrellas, and an impressive quantity of bubblewrap.

The questing hero in the heartwarming queer coming-of-age story created by playwright S.E. Grummett, in a So.Glad Arts production directed by Jay Northcott, is a turtle, played by a human in a backpack shell and fins. Played by the endearing Logan Stefura, our youthful turtle is having an identity crisis. Bullied as a landlubber by the fantastical sea creatures in their world, they’re confused by all the ways they “feel different inside.” Try as they might to fit in, they’re an outsider, perpetually apprehensive in their own world: they’re just not like their big strong can-do bro or their helpful domesticated sis. Boy? Girl? None of the usual binary pronouns seem to be right.

In the course of their first migration, when they lose track of their family and find themself alone in the big wide ocean, Young Turtle has a series of encounters with strangers, who invariably turn out to be more than their appearance or our hero’s ingrained expectations. And they’re expressively manipulated and voiced by a team of performers — Ali Deregt, Émanuel Dubbeldam, Oli Guselle.

The fearsome-looking shark, for example, feels misunderstood too (“I am more than my last meal”), and regularly pretends to be a dolphin so others won’t flee.  The moray eel, an inspired creation who’s had a lifetime of repelling other creatures, with attendant anxiety issues, is habitually leery of meeting strangers. And they have helpful advice for Young Turtle about being brave, in a soulful ballad. “Maybe being brave is being true to yourself.” A drag-inspired cuttlefish with neon light-up moves, advises “don’t hide your colours tonight,” in a go-for-the-gusto disco number. The inventive score created by Rae Spoon and Ruaridh MacDonald is sung with varying degrees of success by the versatile performers.

It’s fun, it’s light, Grummett’s text is witty, the puppets are delightful. And the theatrical spirit-lifting message to marginalized kids that whoever they are they’ve got friends and don’t have to swim alone is important without being heavy-finned. Times being what they are in the prairies, where ever-escalating political grandstanding punishes trans and queer kids, the show is particularly welcome. Kudos to Expanse.

The Adventure of Young Turtle runs through April 4 at the Expanse Festival (various times). Check out 12thnight’s preview interview with theatre artist S.E. Grummett here. And 12thnight’s Expanse preview here. The full Expanse schedule of events, including Friday and Saturday’s curated dance: azimuththeatre.com. All tickets are pay-what-you-can. In advance: fringetheatre.ca.  

If you’ve been waiting for this long weekend to venture out to the theatre, it’s your last chance to …

Larissah Lashley, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie, Hayley Moorhouse in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

… see Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre’s premiere production of the funny and touching Trevor Schmidt comedy about four junior high girls who join the science club to create a robot for an international competition. Its delights are many. For one thing, the cast, directed jointly by John Hudson and Lana Michelle Hughes, is one of the perfectly meshed ensembles of the season. Through Sunday at the Varscona Theatre. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org. Have a peek at 12thnight’s review here.

Priya Narine (centre) in The Sound of Music, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

… see The Sound of Music at the Citadel, the only production in recent memory without Alp projections (those of us in the Shoctor seats are the mountains). The kids in Rachel Peake’s production are particularly delightful. The 12thnight review is here. Through Sunday. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

… catch Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s Springboards New Play Festival. The staged readings are your chance to see what goes on behind the scenes, as plays at every stage of evolution get developed en route to full production and opening night. Friday night it’s Summer Solstice by Collin Doyle, Saturday it’s The Resurrection of Dottie Reed, and Sunday night’s finale, the Springboards cabaret, includes excerpts of new scripts from beginner playwrights and star veterans like George F. Walker. All tickets are pay-what-you-can. In advance at workshopwest.org. The 12thnight preview, with annotations by WWPT’s artistic producer Heather Inglis, is here.

… catch a dinner, drinks, and Elvis as the Mayfield wraps up the run of One Night With The King Sunday.  It’s now or never for Matt Cage’s performance, with the celebrated repertoire to match. Next up? Grease.  Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

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The Expanse Fest is back for a 19th annual edition, ‘re-framed’

Posted on March 28, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Mayumi Lashbrook in Fairly Becoming, Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Expanse, Azimuth Theatre’s 19-year-old movement arts festival, a “celebration of ALL bodies onstage,” is back, March 28 through April 4. And, says Azimuth’s co-artistic director Morgan Yamada, it’s been “re-framed” for the hard-edged realities of our post-pandemic moment in the arts.

The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts at Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied.

“How do we reframe our perspectives, with the resources we have?” That’s the question that confronted Yamada and Sue Goberdhan, who jointly steer the Azimuth course. And it’s the theme of this year’s edition of the festivities. The telling of body-based stories is the engine of the mainstage “performance series” that opens tonight with The Adventure of Young Turtle, a queer puppet musical for all ages (five and over) by S.E. Grummett of Saskatoon-based So.Glad Arts and an all-queer/trans/non-binary team of artist collaborators from across the prairies. Check out the 12thnight PREVIEW with Grummett here.

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The origins of the well-named Expanse festival are in dance; it’s constantly expanded the dance frontiers ever since. Reframe Perspective: Stories in Motion, Friday and Saturday on the Westbury stage, is a dance curation that includes a trio of offerings. In and out of dark is by Molly McDermott, the Edmonton-based recipient of Good Women Dance’s New Work Award. Its focus, as Yamada describes, is “how we look at fear,” a “playful exploration of darkness and nightmares” as billed. The collaborative piece is performed by McDermott, Max Hanic, Alida Kendell, Tia Kushniruk, and Will Scott, with live sound.

Shion Skye Carter in Residuals, Expanse Festival 2024. Photo by Lula-Belle Jedynak

Residuals (住み·墨), a memory piece by Vancouver-based dancer/choreographer Shion Skye Carter, channels the traditional art of Japanese calligraphy and sets childhood memory in motion in a contemporary journey of self-discovery.

And Fairly Becoming brings Toronto’s Mayumi Lashbrook of Aeris Körper to the festival in a solo show that, as Yamada describes, is a meditation on consumption and the climate crisis.

Between shows, the Lobbyists return with site-specific, immersive  collective movement creations, in spaces that aren’t the theatre — like the Westbury lobby.

And the grand finale is The Expanse Living Room Party April 4, its title a nod to Expanse’s first home. Yamada describes it as “a big cabaret party with cool new work from local artists” — music, dance, drag, spoken word, monologues, and more. The evening includes a music video premiere from Just Moe, and a performance from Juno-nominated Josh Sahunta.

Between mainstage performances, Expanse in its outreach mode includes mixers and workshops with many of the festival artists. S.E. Grummett, for example, will share their first-hand experience in How To Tour Your Work (and not go broke in the process).

Check out the full schedule, with more information, at azimuththeatre.com. Azimuth is big on accessibility: all tickets (available in advance at fringetheatre.ca) are pay-what-you-can.

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‘My love letter to queer and trans kids’: The Adventure of Young Turtle launches Expanse Festival 2024

Posted on March 28, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts at Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One morning this week, I went on an undersea excursion backstage at the Westbury Theatre, and I met an apprehensive moray eel.

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Their body was once an air compressor hose, their eyes Gatorade bottle lids, and their pointy teeth, plastic forks. They were hanging out with fellow sea creatures, including an oyster who opened like a takeaway food container to reveal a nice fat pearl inside. And a giant jellyfish who’d started life as a garden umbrella then developed shimmering bubblewrap tentacles.

They were getting into character for the “queer puppet musical for kids” that premieres Thursday to open the 2024 edition of Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival. In the course of S.E. Grummett’s 60-minute The Adventure Of Young Turtle, our hero — the only character in the production from Saskatoon-based So.Glad Arts who isn’t a puppet but has a human body, with accoutrements like fins and a shell — will meet a butch shark, a gender-fluid clownfish, a cuttlefish with drag queen eyelashes to die for. “Different letters of the queer alphabet,” as Gummett (Grumms) puts it.

Logan Stefura, Émanuel Dubbeldam in rehearsal for The Adventure of Young Turtle. Photo supplied

“And they all teach Young Turtle lessons … about identity and being yourself, being able to embrace who you are and showing that to the world. Things about how to be brave outside rigid, masculine emotions. Things about the strength of community and found family.” They laugh. “A lot of creatures and an ocean of possibilities!”   

No bubble wrap is safe from the inventive zest (and hot glue gun) of Grummett (Grumms) and co. No rubber glove or scrubby, pool noodle, spare backpack, or old hula hoop. Empty juice bottles, beware: you could be on the brink of a transformational experience. And as for plastic cutlery … well, check out the disconcerting toothy grin on that big-mouth shark.

“Stylized trash,” declares the transgender non-binary artist cheerfully of the diverse cast of animal characters played by four performers (Ali Deregt, Émanuel Dubbeldam, Oli Gusell and Logan Stefura), one from Saskatoon, two from Edmonton, one from Calgary, in a rare example of “a cross-prairie queer collaboration.” Beyond virtuoso ingenuity with found objects, “we wanted to make everything so it looked re-purposed too. Part of the aesthetic!”

“I was the kid who who wrote a play for my class, then directed it, acted in it, designed a set cobbled together from everybody’s parents’ stuff,” says Grumms, who has a sunny sort of buoyancy about them in conversation. “I went to the University of Saskatchewan as an actor, then started making my own stuff, and doing the Fringe circuit….” For one thing “there wasn’t enough work to just be an actor. And there weren’t a lot of parts for trans folks like myself.” Besides, “I’m what my theatre mentor (playwright/director) Yvette Nolan calls ‘a theatre rat’. I like to get my hands in every little bit of the process, even the poster design.”

And that, they think, is the gravitational pull of Fringes: “you get to make every little piece of it!”  And those festivals have figured prominently in their work. Physical comedy and puppets, both Grumms signatures, were involved in Pack Animals, the show they and their So.Glad collaborator Holly Brinkman took on tour to nine Fringes (including Edmonton’s) in 2019. A woodpecker and a beaver get lost in the woods….

Grumms met their life partner on that tour, and the pair found themselves waiting out the pandemic in Australia. In Grumms’ absurdist physical comedy Something in the Water, inspired by their coming out as transgender, the audience watched the performer/creator turn into a giant squid, a monster outsider. It won the Best Theatre prize at the giant Adelaide Fringe in 2017, and has since sprouted a kids’ version, and played the Play The Fool Fest here.

Creepy Boys, the “little-c clown show” (“I don’t do noses”) comedy Grumms created with partner Sam Kruger, inspired by “growing older and how we feel about re-boots and re-makes of everything our childhood,” premiered at the Twin Cities Horror Festival. And it’s played Fringes in Australia and got raves at the very big one in Edinburgh.  

In 2016, “fresh out of theatre school,”  Grumms and Caitlin Zacharias had created SCUM: A Manifesto and taken it to the Saskatchewan Fringe. Playwright/dramaturg Vern Thiessen called it their “fuck-you play.” Grumms beams. “It was rage-filled and what I needed at he time.”    

“But as I developed my theatre voice I’ve come back to comedy, as a way of enlisting the audience, extending love to characters … as a way of making queer work very accessible to everyone. If we can laugh together, we build a community in theatre.”

“Comedy,” they muse, “can be a Trojan Horse for important themes and content.” They’ve found that a lot of the plays about trans people that aren’t written by trans artists “are rooted in trauma. And I’m less and less interested in telling those stories and more interested in telling stories that are full of joy and celebration, that are empowering to the trans community, not just putting our stories onstage to educate.”

Grumms and co-producer Mac Brock celebrate the fact that the cast and creative team of The Adventure of Young Turtle are entirely trans, queer, non-binary. And all the animals are queer too. There’s “a big win in this,” as Grumm says. Not least because it’s a moment in our history when anti-trans rhetoric and oppressive legislation threaten the human rights, health, safety, happiness of kids. After the Edmonton premiere run at Expanse,  a national tour in 2025 will launch at Saskatoon’s Persephone Theatre.

Logan Stefura, Ali DeRegt ih The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts. Photo supplied.

The Adventure of Young Turtle, which emerged from an original short story Grumms wrote before the pandemic, is So.Glad Arts’ first show specifically written with kids (the five-plus crowd) in mind. And it’s a musical (music by Rae Spoon and Ruaridh MacDonald): “I don’t write music, but the hero’s journey suited the musical form…. Every creature can have their song (the eel has two).”

Émanuel Dubbeldam, Ali DeRegt, Oli Guselle in rehearsal for The Adventure of Young Turtle. Photo supplied.

Puppets are big in GrummWorld. “I don’t fit into a lot of binary roles,” they say cheerfully. “I’m an odd duck onstage…. I‘d love to be cast as a leading man (laughter) but I don’t think that will happen any time soon…. I’m often cast as non-humans, robots, cyborgs, aliens, (more laughter) squid monsters.” For Grumms puppets were “a way of opening up what I was allowed to play onstage as a trans performer. I could play all kinds of genders, creatures, inanimate objects…. I got to use the whole of my creative practice.”

They’re tickled by the ‘trash into treasure’ aesthetic that’s an invitation to imagine — to “fall in love with a garbage bag or a little hunk of clay, or be captivated by a piece of wood.” Puppets are “so live … theatre magic that can’t be a movie or online. And you can see the fingerprints of the people that made it.”

Kid audiences buy in instantly; “with adults you have to tease it out a little more, do a little more warming up to get to that place.” Grumms loves performing for kids. “They tell you exactly how they about things … an audience who haven’t made up their minds about the world yet!”

The ocean is a meaningful setting for their new musical, Grumms figures. “We’ve only discovered 10 per cent of the ocean, and the ocean has been around forever. Like the ocean we’ve only discovered 10 per cent of gender expression and identities. And like the ocean queer and two-spirit people have been around forever. It’s not a new thing.”

“This is my love letter to queer and trans kids…. It feels much needed right now. I hope the kids who need to see it, find it.”

PREVIEW

The Adventure of Young Turtle

Theatre: So.Glad Arts at the Expanse Festival

Written by: S.E. Grummett, with music by Rae Spoon and Ruaridh McDonald

Directed by: Jay Northcott

Starring: Ali Deregt, Émanuel Dubbeldam, Oli Guselle, Logan Stefura

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

Running: March 28, 30, 31, April 3 and 4

Tickets: pay-what-you-can (suggested $25), tickets.fringetheatre.ca or at the door

 

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