A new Canadian musical tells a Filipino story: Prison Dancer premieres at the Citadel. A review

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Prison Dancer The Musical, Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A human sparkler stands before us, a queen with gorgeous chiffon wings, in prison orange. That’s prisoner Ruperto Poblador, aka Lola (played by the charismatic Julio Fuentes), onstage to reveal how she became an internet influencer in the pre-TikTok pre-Snapchat olden days.  

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Prison Dancer, a new Canadian pop musical premiering at the Citadel before a fall run at the National Arts Centre, has a knock-out premise. It’s inspired by an amazingly weird 2007 YouTube sensation, a video of 1,500 inmates in a maximum security Filipino prison in Cebu dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Created by the team of Romeo Candido and Carmen De Jesus (it’s already been a film and a web series), the musical proposes a back story of sorts to this strange dance concoction, with its highly theatrical visuals and Vincent Price-ian voice-overs.

The production itself has a back story, one that introduces Canadian theatre to an impressive (and hitherto largely untapped) talent pool. From the creative and production teams to director Nina Lee Aquino and her 12-member cast, it’s all-Filipino. And on opening night, a packed crowd with a heartwarming representation from the younger Filipino-Canadian community, cheered every song, every move, every big-M emotional moment. And that sense of community and connection feeds the story, too.   

Julio Fuentes in Prison Dancer, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

“If you have imagination you can turn this hell into heaven,” says the sinuous Lola, who doesn’t walk when she can do dance moves, in high heels. She rules the roost on the inside, under the mantra “celebrate whenever we can wherever we can.” And her fellow inmates, locked up for drug offences and running drugs from inside, indulge her, some less genially than others. They do, however, take the time to beat up newcomer Christian (Daren Dyhengco), who’s trying to get clean.

The arrival of a new Warden (Jovanni Si), a pompous disciplinarian who believes in “cracking down,” “atonement,” and “rehabilitation” through punitive physical exercise, threatens to turn this summer camp for the vaguely artistic into military-style boot camp. Needless to say he’s really not a fan of drag.

Prison Dancer, with Julio Fuentes, Josh Capulong, Daren Dyhengco, Renell Doneza, Pierre Angelo Bayuga, Byron Flores, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Lola turns this group exercise regimen into dance. And the hard-ass Warden suddenly, whizz-bang without warning, turns into an enabler — a comic internet slut, with an insatiable appetite for “views” and an eye on his “legacy” as a rehabilitation expert. The Prison Dancer story is constructed at that intersection of those two developments. “Look alive, the world is watching,” as one of the musical’s livelier songs has it. And both the Warden and gradually the inmates take note.

The world of the show is Joanna Yu’s prison set, a moveable trio of revolving multi-level gridwork towers of bars, overhung with shorts and T-shirts, with dramatic lighting by Michelle Ramsay. In Prison Dancer authority, i.e. the Warden in his enforcer sunglasses, naturally gets the highest perch.

If art has a built-in tension in Prison Dancer — dance that is coerced from a captive audience can become joyful and redemptive —  so has love. Two relationships, thwarted by circumstance, get scenes and big matching ballads of lamentation. One is Lola’s relationship with Shakespeare (Dominique Brillantes), who has a wife on the outside. The other, sketched rather than fully occupied, belongs to Christian and his wife Cherish (the affecting Diana Del Rosario). She believes in the power of love to wrest happy endings from sad stories; he’s distancing himself, for her sake. Evermore is the big emotional pop ballad of the piece, reprised climactically.

The prevailing idea of the musical is the transformative power of dance, tested to the extreme in a maximum security prison. And I’m wondering, on this first viewing, why it doesn’t come more thrillingly alive and present in this premiere production. Although Julio Fuentes’ choreography is witty, and seasoned with MJ and Thriller allusions, the show’s premise promises more dancing than it actually delivers, even when the inmates get down with the new program. So far it’s a bit hard to imagine a Broadway destination for the production without some big, visceral, extended dance numbers.

The storytelling and the dialogue, by Candido and De Jesus, are laced with wit and amusing insights into individual characters like Shakespeare and the Warden. This isn’t the reclamation of hardened criminals; this is all about making life inside for the inmate collective more tenable through dance (being in maximum security need not be a barrier to artistic fulfilment, whew). The cultural references, in the Christmas Morning number for example, or the Filipino snack that Cherish brings to the prison, help give Prison Dancer its unique flavour. Bring them on!

With exceptions Candido’s score, though, has a certain sameness about it; it leans heavily into ballads with similar thoughts about “new beginnings” and “freedom.” The musical arrangements, for an able band of three, don’t do it any favours. And on opening night, the lopsided sound mix favoured the piano over audible lyrics, a correctable problem to be sure.

The idea of Prison Dancer as a speculative back story to a mysterious internet phenomenon is very appealing. It has built-in theatricality, it has a live-wire and specific cultural connection, it has a universal message about feeding the soul. And it’ll l be dancing its way into future incarnations. Further development awaits.

PREVIEW

Prison Dancer The Musical

Theatre: Citadel and Prison Dancer Inc.

Created by: Romeo Candido and Carmen De Jesus

Directed by: Nina Lee Aquino

Starring: Julio Fuentes, Norm Aloncel, Pierre Angelo Bayuga, Dominique Brillantes, Josh Capulong, Diana Del Rosario, Renell Doneza, Daren Dyhengco, Chariz Faulmino, Byron Flores, Jovanni Sy, Stephen Thakkar

Running: through May 28

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Boy Trouble: a new play about growing up the hard way, queer and without role models

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Romar Dungo and Maxwell Hanic in Boy Trouble, Amoris Projects. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The teenage characters we meet in Boy Trouble are growing up the hard way: queer and on the Prairies.

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Coming-of-age, the universal struggle for identity, is harder times 100 when you’re figuring out your sexuality for yourself, in a lonely world of secrecy and shame.

“The only thing worse is to not talk about it,” says playwright Mac Brock. His play Boy Trouble, opening Thursday as part of Fringe Theatre’s Spotlight Series, is all about that. “The reality is that (kids) are going through it; they’re thinking about it; it’s happening in their lives. And the more we pretend it isn’t, that their problems don’t exist, the worse the world is for them.”

Kay (Maxwell Hanic) and Anthony (Romar Dungo) are childhood friends, who’ve had, for reasons we discover in the play, a falling out. And we meet them “at a pivotal moment when one of them has learned a secret. And they’re trying to figure out what to do about it….” The show unspools into their past, their memories, the moments that led to their estrangement.

Boy Trouble takes us to 2015, as a wave of new queer TV and movies — Love, Simon, Drag Race and the rest — is about to hit. “A lot of awesome stuff, nice new pathways for the next generation of queer people about to happen,” says Brock, who directs the production that opens Thursday. “Hopeful, joyful. But a lot of the queer stories that made it into the mainstream were sanitized, the magical first kiss, people coming out, to be embraced with wide open arms….”

It was a blinkered vision. All “shiny, happy stories, and we were grateful to have (queer content). But we didn’t see ourselves and our experiences in them,” as Brock says. “It’s what was supposed to happen, and didn’t for us. The expectations add a whole other layer of shame. ” The internet, and its buffet of dating apps with their promise of anonymous access, “allows you to get into some pretty dark corners.”

Boy Trouble has had a dramatic transformation — “a complete rewrite!” — since the original version that premiered at Nextfest in 2019, then went to the Fringe that summer. “The characters outgrew the story,” laughs Brock, who arrived here seven years ago from Regina as an theatre artist with a bent for devised theatre and improv, headed for MacEwan’s arts management program. “Acting? Tried it, hated it!” he declares cheerfully.

The new version of Boy Trouble we’ll see “asks the same questions” as the original, but he and a queer/ trans/ non-binary team of artists “have built an entirely new story.”

Three years ago, we saw a story for one, set in the present: Kay (Hanic), “our troubled gay teen trying to pass as straight and figure things out for himself because he doesn’t see anybody around him who can help him navigate it…. There was so much we loved about that show but we knew it wasn’t done.”

Romar Dungo and Maxwell Hanic in Boy Trouble, Amoris Projects. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

Now there are two characters, from very different backgrounds: Kay is upper-middle-class and white; Anthony, from an immigrant Filipino family, has been out for a while. “They have separate stories. And this is about their collision as they try to figure themselves out.”

“We finally get to build the playground that’s always been in my head!” grins Brock, of Even Gilchrist’s design. “We got Astroturf off-cuts dirt cheap; the City gave us a bench….”

Queer “encompasses such a huge wealth of experience,” as the strikingly diverse Boy Trouble team has found in rehearsing the play, Brock reports. “Class, culture, race, language, power, status…. And there are queer hierarchies too. All kinds of fracture lines. There’s a multitude of ways (the characters) can hurt each other that aren’t just about being queer.”

Brock throws out a question to challenge complacency in theatre world. “How often do you meet multiple queer characters in a show? And how often do they end up together…. We’ll find out if there’s a path for them,” says Brock of his play. “We get to have this conversation! It’s not like we got marriage rights, and then everyone’s happy.”

Boy Trouble was “my first production, my first real go at anything in Edmonton,” says Brock, these days the managing producer of  Common Ground Arts, responsible for the Edmonton incarnation of RISER (the national initiative to support indie theatre) and the annual Found Festival. It’s been three years of big changes for him. “Yup, three years of credit card debt!” he laughs. “I didn’t see my first gay couple holding hands in public till I moved to Edmonton. I was barely out before I moved here! And dating Even (Brock’s theatre designer/playwright partner Even Gilchrist) has changed my relationship to queerness, too…. ”

The three intervening years, accelerated lately by the alarming slide to the right here and across the border, have seen the world spin backwards in many ways. Is a new age of secrecy at hand? After all,  it’s ‘don’t say gay’ in Florida. It’s protesting drag performance (“a gateway, the long-term goal is erasing queer stories”). It’s the surgical removal of gay characters from high school drama, and the promotion of “grooming,” the idea that talking about sexuality with kids is akin to promoting their sexual exploitation.

Boy Trouble, says Brock, explores “what’s at risk.”

PREVIEW

Boy Trouble

Theatre: Amoris Projects

Written and directed by: Mac Brock

Starring: Maxwell Hanic and Romar Dungo

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

Running: May 16 to 27

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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Wait, who’d be crazy enough to improvise a musical? Meet the creators of Flop!

Posted on May 9, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Ron Pederson and Ashley Botting in Flop! The Improvised Musical. Photo by Dahlia Katz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

They’re onstage at the new Rapid Fire Theatre Exchange, looking at each other and the audience.

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They were supposed to have written the new musical they’re supposed to be performing for 10 nights (it says so in their contract). And OMG they just never got around to it.

No sheet music. No script. No director.… A no-fail recipe for showbiz disaster, surely, with an exclamation mark for good measure. That’s Flop!, the musical that two of the country’s star improvisers, Ron Pederson and Ashley Botting, will create live and on the spot from audience suggestions every night at the Exchange. And after the tryout run with Edmonton’s improv-savvy audiences, New York producer Alan Kliffer plans to take Flop! Off-Broadway next fall or winter.

Life and showbiz are full of uncertainties. But an improvised musical for a cast of two leans into the unknown, and fears thereof, at a particularly precarious angle. What possesses Pederson and Botting, and Kliffer?

We set about finding out, on Google Meet. Kliffer is in NYC, where he relocated from Toronto six years ago. Botting is in her Toronto bedroom alongside a trampoline (“My pandemic fitness program. Is there dust on it? YES!”). Pederson is at Pearson, getting ready to fly to his boyhood home town, where Edmonton audiences recently saw him onstage in the musical First Date at the Mayfield. That’s where we’ll see him again come June, along with his Gordon’s Big Bald Head cohorts Jacob Banigan and Mark Meer, in Clusterflick in which they’ll improvise an entire movie.

As Pederson explains, he and Botting met in One Night Only, the Toronto improv hit Kliffer “invented” in 2016.“We were the two Canadians” in the cast of five who’d have played Birdland (the lower level of the storied New York jazz club) in 2019 — until Lin-Manuel Miranda’s improvised hip-hop Freestyle Love Supreme moved into the Booth Theatre, “Alan’s dream theatre,” 300 metres to the left. Then came the pandemic.

“Coming from Edmonton I know a lot of terrific musical improvisers,” says Pederson, with a nod to Grindstone’s The 11 O’Clock Number and Rapid Fire’s Off Book. “But I realize how hard it is to find people who can improvise a song, lyrics, dance moves, be rhythmic physically, do a dream ballet if they have to. More rare than I thought…. That’s how Flop! came about.”

“I’d call him ‘a tenacious visionary’,” says Botting of Kliffer, who says “I feel that the improvised musical really comes from Canada.” Pederson laughs, “I call Alan the Great Ziegfeld.” For his part Kliffer calls the Flop! duo  “improv ninjas,” agile on their feet in a form, musical theatre, that rarely unfolds as a two-hander.

Botting, a Second City veteran whom his stage partner calls “one of the greatest improvising lyricists ever,” does a solo cabaret in which she improvises 10 songs. At first Pederson thought he might try that in Edmonton. He changed his mind after consulting with Botting. “It’s lonely,” she told him. “Not fun. I know I’m doing a really great tightrope walk. I know I’m working at the top of my intelligence and ability. I know I’m impressing people. But I don’t want to be up there alone…. I want to be looking at Ron Pederson, and seeing that little shit-disturber look in his eye, and I’m gonna say ‘don’t do it Ron’. And he’ll do it anyway….”

Ron Pederson and Ashley Botting in Flop! The Improvised Musical. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

“What Ron and I have in common,” she thinks, “is that we play the theatricality of it, not the shtick-y game-y sense. And we both have a deep love of musicals, of the art form. It’s in our bones.… What Ron and I like is to be very precise and impressive with our craft. And very stupid with our content! That’s the balance we both thrive in!” Pederson and Kliffer smile.

“We have a richer attack because we’re both Jason Robert Brown nerds,” laughs Pederson. “We have a lexicon of things to reference and pay homage to.” He knows first-hand the extreme challenges of long-form improv, of “taking care of a story, and making audiences care about it, for an hour.” Gordon’s Big Bald Head regularly sell out houses for their annual Fringe foray, in which they improvise any one of the shows listed in the Fringe program. The National Theatre of the World, the Toronto improv troupe he co-founded in 2008 with Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, premiered plays that famous playwrights like Ibsen or Tennessee Williams somehow forgot to write.

Though musical theatre-crazy, like Pederson, Botting’s entry point into showbiz was improv rather than musicals because “Second City was a thing I could do instantly and really well” when she decided to be a performer. “I didn’t go to theatre school…. And I didn’t see myself as a clear archetype in musicals when I was coming up. I wasn’t old enough to be what I essentially am, a funny sidekick character (with a voice to match). I wasn’t blonde enough to be an ingenue. Improv kept saying Yes to me. So that’s what I did.”

Both Botting and Pederson come at musical improv with a skill set that includes writing and directing. The former has been in Halifax this year writing for This Hour Has 22 Minutes; she’s directed Second City mainstage shows recently. Pederson, who directed the Winnipeg premiere of his play The Player King at Shakespeare in the Ruins in Winnipeg, is currently working on a theatre commission.

“Musical improv seems to bring together all the things I have to offer,” says Pederson. It’s a thought echoed by Botting, who came to the 2019 Edmonton Fringe with Second City’s She The People. “Whenever I return to musical improv I bring all the skill sets I’ve acquired.”

They’re thinking of the Edmonton premiere of Flop! as “a way to figure out what it is,” as Pederson puts it, with a smile. “The failure aspect,” as the title blurts out, is a way to engage the audience’s assistance. The improvisers are in trouble, “when you have an hour and there are only two people….” And a musical raises the improv stakes exponentially; “it’s got failure in the recipe.”

“I boldly say it synthesizes all the the things I do, but it never fails to make me go ‘why the hell am I doing this?’ before I walk onstage,” says Pederson. He describes going to a doctor lately to get an Ativan prescription, for flying. “He’d seen me improvise and asked ‘why do you need these pills…. I’ve seen what you do’.”

Ron Pederson and Ashley Botting in Flop! The Improvised Musical. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

The conceit of the show, as the pair describe, is that the audience has the fun of helping bail out the beleaguered improvisers onstage, (a duo plus the dexterous musical improviser Erik Mortimer at the keyboard).

“Our goal,” says Botting, “is to be self-referential. We can step outside the show and say ‘Hi, audience! How’s this going?’.” Says Pederson, “we’re letting the audience in on the negotiation that goes on, stepping outside the musical to talk about structure, or where the hell it’s going to go…. I hope to get them to sing along with us. It’s engaging them to sit forward because we could come at them at any moment with ‘OK, now what’”?

“I love playing with the audience. I love when you get a bit of an emotional something from the audience, why they care about something, what’s important to them.”

The storyline takes care of itself, they argue. “When you get the Who? and the Where?, the What? will show up,” says Pederson. “As long we’re not too Bourne Identity,” adds Botting.

In improv, the element of surprise is the terror and the joy, both addictive as Pederson and Botting describe. “Surprise is the engine of the whole thing,” says the former. “I am as surprised as the audience is; I’m just experiencing it differently,” says the latter.

“We’re all in the same sort of magic. It’s not like I’m doling out something I already know I’ll be doing. It’s allowing it to be whatever it is. And enjoying the journey.”

PREVIEW

FLOP!

Created by: Ron Pederson, Ashley Botting, producer Alan Kliffer

Starring: Ron Pederson, Ashley Botting, musical director Erik Mortimer.

Where: Rapid Fire Exchange, 10437 83 Ave.

Running: May 18 to 28

Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com 

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Dreaming (and dancing) big: Prison Dancer premieres at the Citadel’s Collider Festival

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Prison Dancer, with Julio Fuentes, Josh Capulong, Daren Dyhengco, Renell Doneza, Pierre Angelo Bayuga, Byron Flores, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a theatre festival that thinks big about the new — creating it to live on large performance spaces across the country and beyond, developing, celebrating and showcasing it. The Citadel’s Collider Festival, a collision of artists and forms and larger-scale inspiration with potential producers, is back Thursday for a third annual edition.

And with Collider comes the premiere of Prison Dancer, a new musical that’s billed as “the world’s first transmedia musical with an all Filipino-Canadian and Filipino-American creative and producing team.” Ah, and an all-Filipino cast of 12 from across this country, including four from Edmonton.

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Prison Dancer, the Citadel’s mainstage season finale (playing opposite Punctuate! Theatre’s First Métis Man of Odesa in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre), is the joint creation of Romeo Candido and Carmen De Jesus, Filipino-Canadian artists both. Their inspiration? The 2007 video, which instantly went viral on YouTube, of 1,500 inmates in a maximum-security Filipino prison dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

At Collider, as Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran points out, there’s new work of every provenance, poised for future productions in national and cross-border (and -ocean) partnerships. The back story of Prison Dancer, and its launch as a stage musical, has the longest lead time, and the most multi-platform history. By far.  “Prison Dancer has lived in many different ways on its journey here,” as Cloran says. 

“Romeo and Carmen started to develop Prison Dancer for the stage over 10 years ago.” And it made a splash and collected awards at the 2012 New York Musical Theatre Festival. But that’s mid-story. As far back as 1993, when Candido and De Jesus were both in the cast of a Toronto production of Miss Saigon, they were already dreaming of a collaboration that would tell an authentically  Filipino story and celebrate Filipino talent.

A decade ago, an Off-Broadway future was thwarted by the arrival on the scene of another musical with a Filipino story: Here Lies Love, the immersive David Byrne/ Fat Boy Slim musical, tells the Imelda Marcos story. “It had more momentum and cachet, so Prison Dancer stalled a bit,” says Cloran. Ironically, just as Prison Dancer if officially launching after a decade in the making, Here Lies Love is preparing for a large-scale Broadway run this summer.

Cloran’s own connection to the project comes via one of the producers, Ana Serrano. She ran a digital media lab at the Canadian Film Centre (where Cloran had a residency), and she encouraged the Prison Dancer creators “to imagine it in different ways, living on many platforms.”

Julio Fuentes in Prison Dancer, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Prison Dancer has been a web series and an award-winning film. And, inspired by the Citadel’s own history of commercial partnerships honing pre-Broadway runs of Hadestown and Six, Serrano reached out. “Edmonton has such a vibrant, and large, Filipino community, it felt like a great connection,” says Cloran. Money from the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund, designed to galvanize large projects, was indispensable. And work on Prison Dancer as a stage musical resumed. The production that opens Thursday is directed by Filipino-Canadian artist Nina Lee Aquino — the former artistic director of Factory Theatre and new head of the National Arts Centre English Theatre — who also delivers Friday night’s keynote address.

The story is a validation, under extreme circumstances, of the redemptive power and joy of song and dance (choreographer: Julio Fuentes). And Candide’s original music, embracing pop, house, R&B, is, says Cloran, “the most poppy electronic dance score that we’ve done here….”

Prison Dancer’s Asian Heritage Month premiere at Collider, a Citadel- Prison Dancer Inc. co-production, is a fruitful collision between the not-for-profit and commercial theatre.  And so is one of the four new plays getting a reading at Collider: Evening Train, a musical by Ursula Rani Sarma and Mick Flannery, partners the Citadel with Irish commercial producers. In fact, the entire team of Irish creators and producers arrives from Ireland for Friday night’s reading, along with the Hadestown musical supervisor and dramaturge from New York.

Says Cloran, the project validates the international networking of the Citadel in Hadestown, Six, and most recently Peter Pan Goes Wrong, all currently running on Broadway. As Cloran explains, the Irish singer-songwriter Flannery was interested in building his concept album Evening Train into a play. “He was talking to his musician friend Anaïs Mitchell (the creator and composer of Hadestown) about how to do that. And she said ‘call the Citadel’,” he laughs.

“Because so many companies in Edmonton develop great new work on small stage, or at the Fringe, or at the 200-seat level,” Collider “is us trying to figure out what we can offer playwrights.” The question it addresses is “how to create work for a large stage” (both the Maclab and the Shoctor, for example, are 700-seat houses).

“What does it need to live on a big stage? Does it have to have a cast of 20? A giant set? What do audiences expect when they come into a big theatre?” There is no one answer, witness the success of Mieko Ouchi’s solo play Burning Mom, on the (very large) mainstage at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, “on a big, beautiful, transformational set,” as Cloran puts it.

playwright Collin Doyle

The Takeoff, which gets a reading Saturday night directed by Dave Horak, is a 10-actor play by Edmonton star playwright Collin Doyle. His stellar archive includes such intense, darkly humorous relationship dysfunction plays as The Mighty Carlins, Let The Light of Day Through, Terry and the Dog — all of them for small casts. Collider is a chance for creation on  a larger scale. Cloran describes it as “a lovely script….. A great intertwined narrative about families, couples, finding love later in life.”

“We’re engaged with the Collider plays all in different ways,” says Cloran of the Citadel’s new play development wing headed by playwright/director Mieko Ouchi.” Just Like Paris, by Jamaica-born Toronto-based Marcia Johnson, is a commission from an idea the actor-playwright pitched a year ago. Set in 1943, it follows a Jamaican nurse who ends up in Lethbridge, home of the largest German prisoner-of-war camp in the country. Patricia Darbasie directs the Sunday 2 p.m. reading.

Blow Your House Down by Edmonton’s Louise Casemore had development time in the Citadel’s Playwrights Lab and Punctuate! Theatre’s Playwrights Unit. It populates the stage with real estate heavy hitters, gathering to speculate and whisper about the workplace and a developing industry scandal. “Hilarity and havoc,” as billed, ensue. Cloran directs Sunday night’s reading.

“None of them are guaranteed to hit our stage,” he says of the four new plays getting Collider one-off readings. “But all are of legitimate interest to us for future production.” And festival also includes workshops and panel discussions for theatre makers (see citadeltheatre.com for a full schedule).

“Our goal was to be  a hotbed of new play activity.… And it seems to be working. Artistic directors are coming to town; people who love the excitement of new play development will want to get themselves to Edmonton for the weekend.”

PREVIEW

Collider Festival 2023

Theatre: Citadel

Running: Thursday through Sunday, with Prison Dancer continuing its run through May 28, and First Métis Man of Odesa through May 13.

Tickets and full schedule: citadeltheatre.com.

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An all-star weekend of choices in Edmonton theatre

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

Dayna Lea Hoffman, A Hundred Words For Snow, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

An all-star weekend of choices in Edmonton theatre. Here’s a selection.

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•At the Citadel, First Métis Man of Odesa, created by and starring real-life husband and wife theatre artists Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova, is a charming, very touching love story at heart — with obstacles you’d have to call major. It’s a version of their own experience as a couple whose path to happiness spans continents, includes a pandemic, and a baby — and is clouded by war, the horrific invasion of Ukraine by Russia and its continuing atrocities. Meet them in this 12thnight preview. And read the review here. Running through May 13. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.

•Last chances to catch Dayna Lea Hoffmann, giving a luminous solo performance in A Hundred Words For Snow at Northern Light Theatre. A highly unusual coming-of-age story set in a sort of kingdom of ice, it’s an adventure into the unknown in every sense, and a journey toward the knowledge that grief is something that can be shared. 12thnight interviewed the star in this preview. And here’s the review of Trevor Schmidt’s production. Running through Saturday. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

John Ullyatt and Gianna Vacirca in Sexual Misconduct Of The Middle Classes, Theatre Network. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

In her Governor General’s Award-winning Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, finally at Theatre Network after a two-year COVID-ian delay, the great playwright Hannah Moscovitch explores something disturbing — and mysterious — that lies in the murky corners of the issue of consent. What possesses a smart, presentable, talented man to do something he knows isn’t right? It’s all about responsibility and the imbalance of power (and age) as Marianne Copithorne’s crack production, with terrific performances by Gianna Vacirca and John Ullyatt, sets forth.  12thnight talked to the playwright in this preview; check out the review here.

Running through May 14. Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.com

Nathan Cuckow and Doug Mertz in 10 Funerals, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

•At Shadow Theatre Darrin Hagen’s 10 Funerals does something unusual (for which he has rare credentials as a comic writer and a queer history researcher). It’s a funny gay sitcom for an aging couple who have lived through nearly four decades against a dark backdrop of gay history, marginalization, and … death. Old-school gallows humour: COVID isn’t their first plague, after all. Doug Mertz and Nathan Cuckow play older versions of the couple, Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik the younger ones. 12thnight talked to playwright Hagen in this preview, and reviewed the show here. Running through May 14. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

The Penelopiad, Walterdale Theatre. Photo: Henderson Images

•Walterdale, Edmonton’s ever-adventurous community theatre, has just opened Kristen M. Finlay’s production of The Penelopiad. Margaret Atwood’s witty and insightful play is her take on Homer’s Odyssey, from the perspective of the great adventurer’s wife, the woman who waits and waits. It runs through May 13. Tickets: walterdaletheatre.com.

•AND: starting previews this weekend, Prison Dancer at the Citadel. Look for more about this new musical soon on 12thnight.ca. It runs through May 28, as part of this year’s Collider Festival. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.  

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A gay sitcom with a dark undertow: Darrin Hagen’s 10 Funerals at Shadow Theatre

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Nathan Cuckow and Doug Mertz in 10 Funerals, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The stage (designer: Even Gilchrist) is hung with rows of black jackets, in every style and shape, bling-ed up or classic.

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It’s the fashion item of necessity in 10 Funerals. In each of the 10 scenes of an entertaining new Darrin Hagen comedy with a morbid undertow, premiering at Shadow Theatre, Jack and Maurice are returning home from a funeral. In each scene they take off a black jacket and have coffee (and the cups like the jackets do accumulate).

After all, Jack and Maurice have been together for 35 plus years; they even hooked up at a funeral, a great place to meet someone as the former notes. Which is to say, they have decades of experience going to funerals together, then reviewing the occasion: the deceased, the ‘family’ (and the “chosen family,” an important distinction in 10 Funerals), the attendance, the state of the gay community,  the catering.… And they’re experts at slinging zingers at each other — about gay stereotypes and their own life growing old together, with possible funeral options. “Fine. You want MacArthur Park. Then make a will.”

Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik in 10 Funerals, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

They argue constantly; they hone their wits on shivs, and they’ve made snide into an art form. Jack  and Maurice — Nathan Cuckow and Doug Mertz as the older version and Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik as the younger — are the gay Bickersons. They’re fuelled by long-term couples chemistry, that slow-cooked, specially seasoned combination of amusement and irritation. And they’re well provided with comic ammunition by Hagen, who’s a funny writer. “You talk about funerals like they’re wedding receptions. The flowers, the music, what the corpse was wearing….”

Says Jack,  “if you throw a funeral for me without my permission, I will get up and walk out.” Says Maurice, the more histrionic one, “you have to have a funeral. It’s my one chance in our miserable lives to plan a gathering where you won’t be able to leave in a huff.”

Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik in 10 Funerals, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

It’s old-school gallows humour, and you’ll laugh; the 85 minutes of 10 Funerals fly by. The premise is a Hagen original. It’s a gay ‘sitcom’ over years, with a melancholy streak, where the ‘com’ is dark and the ‘situation’ is a historical review of the ways gay couples have been located in the culture at large through the decades. It’s a challenging dramatic texture,  couples comedy and a love story that play out against a backdrop of struggle and tragedy. COVID, after all, isn’t the first plague that Jack and Maurice have lived through.

After an orchestral prelude, Hagen’s own score for the piece settles into something bleak,  which seems a bit like editorializing in a piece that gets its dark crackle from juxtaposing the comic and the tragic.

Thanks to a quartet of excellent performances in John Hudson’s production, the two characters in each scene banter away easily, tossing off gay (and straight) stereotype jokes and insults, running couple gags, oblique references to the gay cultural markers of the moment — all volleyed against a Kilroy Was Here wall of history that’s riddled with homophobia, violence, marginalization, and unseasonal death.

And it’s for the actors to find the continuity in the couple as they age together through the decades. The breezy flamboyance of Travnik’s Maurice with his “signature hair” becomes the older version of himself in Mertz. Tkaczyk’s deadpan Jack, the activist of the pair,  becomes Cuckow’s version, with his fading zeal, sweater vests, and prim moustache, who still hasn’t come out to his mother. “You used to find me endlessly fascinating,” sighs Jack. “I used to do cocaine,” says Maurice.

Scenes in the ‘80s and ‘90s, distinguished by apt, witty costume choices and hair (designer: Leona Brausen), are dominated by the death toll of AIDS. It’s funeral after funeral, underscored by fear. Has Wesley lost weight? Will there ever be a cure? Not till straight people start dying, Jack notes grimly.

Nathan Cuckow and Doug Mertz in 10 Funerals, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By 1987, Jack and Maurice have run out of black outfits. And they’re starting to get nostalgic about the pre-AIDS activism of the homophobic ‘70s. Orange juice boycotts because of Anita Bryant? “That’ll be the last homophobic thing that ever emerges from Florida” gets a big audience laugh.

The coke-fuelled gay party life is reviewed post-funeral in 1984. So is the status of the aging activists who had valiantly battled for equality, a battle that seems to need a comeback tour these days. By 2013, after the funeral of a suicidal friend, Maurice is wondering wryly “did we really fight so hard so we could be as annoying as straight people?” And Jack, for his part, says “activism is exhausting.”

By 2016, attendance at funerals has dwindled — laziness? indifference? the de-population of the gay community? “Where was everyone?” asks Maurice. “That was everyone,” says Jack. And their apartment seems to be getting smaller, crowded with ghosts.

Under the playful flash and bitchy surface comedy of 10 Funerals lie fathoms of sadness. A zestful comic writer and a queer activist/historian meet in the writing of 10 Funerals. It’s a rare combination.

REVIEW

10 Funerals

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Darrin Hagen

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Doug Mertz, Nathan Cuckow, Jake Tkaczyk, Josh Travnik

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through May 14

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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What possessed him? Hannah Moscovitch’s clever Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes wonders about that. A review

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

John Ullyatt and Gianna Vacirca in Sexual Misconduct Of The Middle Classes, Theatre Network. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The man we meet in Sexual Misconduct in the Middle Classes has a lot going for him. At 42, Jon is a talented professor who gives good class. He’s a famous author. He has celebrity, good looks, self-deprecating charm, a sense of humour.

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In short, as the acid-tipped title of Hannah Moscovitch’s very clever play hints, he’s presentable. And he knows right from wrong, queasy from OK. Until somehow he doesn’t. 

Jon’s affair with his 19-year-old student Annie isn’t something he’s actively sought out. No, he’s wincingly aware of the middle-aged man/ young girl cliché that reduces girls to “ciphers,” as he puts it. No, he’s attracted to grown-up women, not “little fucking girls,” as he says. The Governor General’s Award-winning play, finally onstage at Theatre Network after three years of COVIDIAN delays, doesn’t let you off the hook that way, in a world where the ripples of #MeToo have spread from the tailings pond of gross sexual criminality from the filthy rich Weinstein-ian classes.

Marianne Copithorne’s crack production takes on a play that’s all about probing further, into the ‘what possessed him?’ — the apparently inexplicably bad behaviour of respectable men who do know better. And you can’t not be actively engaged, since Jon, in John Ullyatt’s performance, is so … engaging as he talks directly to us.   

As Ullyatt plays him, expertly, Jon is wry, “agitated” and genuinely rueful about his responsibility for the “dumpster fire” of his third marriage. Although susceptible to flattery, as he acknowledges, he’s worldly about seeming not to be too high-handed about his authorial fame. He talks about himself in the third person, in an amusing, self-critical observer sort of way.

The affair that’s at the centre of the play isn’t rape, it’s not exactly assault, it’s not exactly a lot of things. The word consensual, though, sticks in the craw.

Annie, the talented first-year undergrad in a red coat played by the terrific Gianna Vacirca, is tentative in an excruciatingly awkward way. Awestruck into shyness by her admiration for the famous writer, she doesn’t so much speak her fandom as blurt it, in retractable fragments. And Vacirca gives her youthful lack of assurance, as both student and  teenager, a movement lexicon (coach: Christine Bandelow) that’s jerky, nervous, almost doll-like. She never quite knows what to do with her hands, her arms, her body. Someone does, though.

It’s a far cry, smarter and far more subtle in its set-up, than the very male deck-stacking that goes on in David Mamet’s 1992 Oleanna, an obvious point of comparison, in which a male professor up for tenure gets more or less victimized by a student. I can’t quite imagine a reason to produce it at this moment in history, except maybe as a teaching experience.   

Anyhow, here, the affair starts in an innocuous way. Jon, being a hapless career intellectual, is trying to get his lawnmower started. Annie gets injured trying to climb through a window into her rental digs nearby. And Jon, who’s hip to the optics and thinks of himself as cliché-resistant, is reluctant to invite her inside his place to bandage her scrapes. The settings — Jon’s office, his front porch, his book-lined living room, the fateful door — are fulsomely realized by designer Tessa Stamp, whose costume choices for both characters give you a little shiver of recognition.

John Ullyatt and Gianna Vacirca in Sexual Misconduct Of The Middle Classes, Theatre Network. Photo by Eric Kozakiewica Photography

What  starts with a band-aid and her perusal of his library (Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet springs to hand) ends in sex. And one thing leads to another, however against Jon’s own instincts it is. Darrin Hagen’s serial score, dominated by sadder-but-wiser cello strains (Morag Northey), loops forward and stays the same, a built-in musical metaphor.   

“This, he recognized, was not good,” Jon says to us, as the affair starts. And there’s a moment when we realize that his third-person delivery, which started out as a charmingly critical narrative stance, a male gaze on the male gaze, is actually a way of morally justifying himself to us. This complex, nuanced, guilty relationship with the audience is something Moscovitch has honed to a fine dramatic edge elsewhere in her plays. And it’s revelatory here, as director Copithorne skilfully charts its course.

Meanwhile, Annie’s understanding of the dynamics at play expands in every scene, as Vacirca’s performance recognizes. She comes to know, as a hopeful writer, the missed opportunity of his mentorship, for one thing. And our understanding expands too. The play is all about exploring how on earth a man of discernment and insight, who positions himself in the jokey jaded professor mode — he talks of   “pale and pimpled” students, or the student smell of digesting cheap food — could possibly start an affair with a naive 19-year-old in his class.

It’s Jon, not Annie, who owns the narration, a choice designed to challenge us. And there’s a moment when we realize that Jon’s insightfulness is all about himself. He doesn’t understand his own power, and hence his own responsibility. He doesn’t look outward. In a theatrical twist I must not reveal, power changes hands again in this riveting 90-minute play, which takes its characters some years into the future.     

It’s complex and intricate. And in a way it’s simple. And that combination, an incitement to active thought, has real punch. An exciting night in the theatre with a top-drawer cast.

REVIEW

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes

Theatre: Theatre Network at the Roxy

Written by: Hannah Moscovitch

Directed by: Marianne Copithorne

Starring: Gianna Vacirca, John Ullyatt

Running: through May 14

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

 

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Love and art in the time of war: First Métis Man of Odesa, at the Citadel. A review

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Is this real?” In love and in art it’s the smelling-salts of questions. It can get your attention, startle you, give you a pinch, make you cautious.

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And it gets asked, at every possible angle, with every weight, in First Métis Man of Odesa, a charming, very touching, boldly unconventional play created by and starring husband and wife theatre artists Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova. For one thing, in Lianna Makuch’s Punctuate! Theatre production that arrives on the Citadel’s Rice stage as part of a cross-country tour, the pair play versions of themselves in a version of their own love story — bi-continental, wildly odds-against.

Is this real? Well, their own presence onstage together at the end means that after the play the story is to be continued, backstage so to speak, in real time in the real world. And the real world by the end, against the landscape of continuing Russian atrocities in Ukraine, isn’t what it was, to say the least.

Matt, the stage version of the notable Canadian Métis playwright MacKenzie (Bears, The Particulars, The Other), tells us at the outset that he’s not an actor. We have no reason to doubt him. But it does cross your mind that his performance, stand-and-deliver, wooden in an old-growth tree sort of way, suits his particular kind of wit: deadpan, self-deprecating, based on the humour of understatement and the well-timed pause.

In this MacKenzie stands in contrast to his wife, star Ukrainian actor Khomutova, who exudes easeful theatrical charisma onstage. Her performance is supple, engaging in every puckish aside and skeptical smile to the audience. Masha is teasing and fierce, romantic in a way that “the peculiar fellow with kind eyes and a big forehead” as she describes him, is not.

They engage the audience in different ways. Métis Man of Odesa has an appealingly oddball performance chemistry that finds its parallel in the story itself. In the courtship chapter, that’s fun, and funny.

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown

Romantic comedies find their love stories in the attraction of couples who are unlikely, separated by obstacles to be overcome. Here, there are hints of dark global currents in the opening scene, and the chance meeting of the pair in a theatre in Ukraine, in a workshop production of Barvinok, by Métis Man of Odesa director Makuch. It’s based on real-life interviews with volunteer Ukrainian soldiers in the 2014 Russian invasion, and their ominous (and ignored) reminders that the Russians will not stop there.

True, Matt and Masha are both ‘theatre people.’ But MacKenzie comes from the world of indie Canadian theatre, with its embrace of the personal, the real-life confessional. Masha, on the other hand, is a creature of ‘high culture’, the classical theatre and its traditions. In art, the question “is this real?” has very different meanings for them.

The beautiful and witty design, by Daniela Masellis and projection specialist Amelia Scott, is a series of frames, with allusions to the red velvet drapes, the pillars and panels, of classical theatre.  There’s a gauze curtain too, which the characters pull across the stage intermittently, as a signal of separation and disconnection, stage business that doesn’t quite land, so far, in the production.

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

The banter and cross-cultural asides of the characters are amusing. “A premiere without champagne is … a field without wheat,” she teases him. In Canada, the good luck theatre mantra is “break a leg.” In Ukraine, it’s “I hope you don’t get a single feather,” equally enigmatic. I’ll just have to think about that one, and get back to you.

Mariya Khomutova and Matthew MacKenzie in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown

Hundreds of FB messages later, the Atlantic gets crossed, both ways. For Matt, Odesa means euphoric starlight strolls by the Black Sea. And his future father-in-law likes him:. “He thinks I look like Paul Giamatti. And I’m not an alcoholic.” For Masha, “Toronto is amazing!” she declares. Pause. “I can’t believe she thinks Toronto is amazing,” declares Matt.

When the pandemic enters the story, a romantic comedy darkens, and the pace gets breathless, as the production conveys. Just as Masha discovers she’s pregnant, borders close, passports and nationalities and health care become real obstacles. And in a suspenseful race to “sneak into Ukraine” amid travel restrictions, to have a wedding so that Masha can come to Canada for the birth, Matt becomes an unlikely action hero. The wedding dance to the strains of Céline Dion, feels triumphal (recounted in hilarious shared fashion by the bride and the groom). And so does the birth of Ivan. This is the COVID love story iteration of Métis Man of Odesa we heard in a 2021 podcast from Factory Theatre.

And then the tone and the pace change again. When a story is stage-managed by “the real” that’s apt to happen, of course. A couple has been propelled by circumstances into each other’s arms before they’ve gotten to know each other, beyond differing views on the colonialist residue of classical theatre. At breakneck speed they’re an insta-family, married, with a perpetually sleepless baby, living in Toronto.

Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

Matt is suddenly a dad, with responsibilities. And Masha is a stranger in a strange land, who’s left everything and everyone thinking that it’s temporary until their return to Odesa. Which is when war breaks out, the stunningly brutal Russian invasion of February 2022. And Masha, as Khomutova conveys so heartbreakingly, is shattered, guilty about being so far from her family and her friends. For “everyone I have ever known,” life is now a matter of “Before and After,” as she says, longing for the time pre-Matt pre-Ivan “before life got real.”

The disconnect between the couple grows, not least because of the presence of Masha’s mom, rescued from Odesa. And when Matt suggests making a play from their experience, Masha accuses him of being a sort of trauma adventurer. “I’m not going to be the source of inspiration for your next play.”

We know that there’s a resolution, in love and art if not in war. We are, after all, watching that play, and Khomutova is the co-writer. What is the connection between art and life supposed to be? If ever there was a play that wondered about that relationship, it’s this one. It doesn’t fit together neatly, and director Makuch gives it room to be its own play, a captivating swirl of comedy, romance, dreams and setbacks, the personal and the geo-political. The proposition on offer, demonstrably, is that revealing the human side of terrible events in art is worthwhile, a cause for hope. And as the news rolls on, inexorably, we root for real people struggling to have a normal life.

Meet the co-creators (and stars) Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in this 12thnight PREVIEW.

REVIEW

First Métis Man of Odesa

Theatre: Punctuate! Theatre in the Citadel Highwire Series

Written and performed by: Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova

Directed by: Lianna Makuch

Running: through May 13

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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‘Legal but complicated’: Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, at Theatre Network

Posted on April 27, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

John Ullyatt and Gianna Vacirca in Sexual Misconduct Of The Middle Classes, Theatre Network. Photo by Eric Kozakiewica Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You cannot shoot vampires during the day,” says Hannah Moscovitch, from a car across the world in Prague at 5 in the afternoon.

The star Canadian playwright is driving past beautiful old buildings and cherry trees in blossom. She’s en route to her nocturnal working day — in the pressurized world of television. Heading to the set where season 2 of Interview With The Vampire is in its third week of shooting. Last season, part of it spent in L.A.,  she was in the story room of the AMC series adapted from the hot Anne Rice novel, “working on scripts, pitching ideas.” This time, on a shoot that lasts till August, she’s on set as a co-executive producer, “a sort of writer/producer” she explains.     

“Vastly different from theatre,” says the Ottawa-born author of Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, the Governor General’s Award winner of 2021, finally opening at Theatre Network Thursday. Moscovitch’s Canadian theatre life, of writing alone “during daycare” hours, has changed, dramatically. Nightly she sits on set, supervising scripts, “surrounded by 400 people, “people with 20 or 30 years of experience in television, people who worked on Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Crown….It’s like 12-hour cue-to-cue days” (the relentless technical countdown week to opening night in live theatre), but it’s for months at a time. “It’s like a year of being in previews.”

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And (blame vampires for this) again we’ve found ourselves talking about time: the way it turns night into day, or compresses itself to squeeze through cracks, or can be made — even if, like Moscovitch, you really don’t have any. Or not made. After all, she has never even had time to see the hefty two-part six-hour stage adaptation of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s sweeping novel Fall On Your Knees that she and director Alisa Palmer co-created in the course of 13 years, as it finally opened in four big Canadian theatres this season.

Last time we talked, five years ago, Moscovitch was in New York, for the Off-Broadway opening of the klezmer musical/ song cycle/ folk tale Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, her hit collaboration with Ben Caplan and (her husband) Christian Barry of Halifax’s 2b Theatre.  It was the eve of Infinity at Theatre Network, a veritable Edmonton home for Moscovitch plays (their shared history that includes What A Young Wife Ought To Know, Little One, East of Berlin). And time was on her mind, not least because Infinity is a love story embedded into a time capture, the ultimately futile quest of a theoretical physicist to prove that time is “a persistent illusion.”

playwright Hannah Moscovitch

With Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, the playwright is struck, she says, by its defiance of time. “A play I started writing in 2014, before Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo, before and Jeffrey Epstein” has, if anything, gained topicality.

Time has passed. Moscovitch’s theatre career has expanded explosively — into opera (Sky on Swings, 10 Days in a Madhouse) and onto the screen. Little Bird, co-created by Moscovitch (its executive producer) and Jennifer Podemski for Crave and APTN begins streaming May 26). As for Sexual Misconduct, originally planned and in rehearsal as the Canadian premiere at Theatre Network in 2020, the pandemic has delayed it again and again. The play has been produced across the country since then. TN, where time is no “persistent illusion,” has built and opened a entirely new theatre from the ground up in the time since Marianne Copithorne’s production was first programmed.

Gianna Vacirca in Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, Theatre. Network. Photo by Ryan Parker

At the centre of Sexual Misconduct is the dynamic between a charismatic hotshot professor/ author at the end of his third marriage, and the talented 19-year-old student who’s a big admirer. Sexual attraction ensues, and escalates. The provocative edge is that Moscovitch has given the voice of the play to Jon, not Annie.

In 2017, Sexual Misconduct got a reading at Seattle Rep. “#MeToo hadn’t started; it’s almost impossible to stretch your mind back” to the before, says Moscovitch. “I was really frightened the entire audience would side with Jon, and despise Annie for exposing him…. And they didn’t! The opposite happened.”

“Maybe it was because it was Seattle? Maybe my own paranoia about how the story would be received by the audience? But I’ve never been so wrong, so fundamentally wrong, about audience reaction to one of my plays,” says Moscovitch. “They booed him at the end.”

The audience of 150 included a lot of female students. “And 30 or 40 stayed afterward to talk to me, one by one, about their similar experiences…. It was familiar to them; they knew what this was about.”

In retrospect, she can’t help but think “#MeToo was in the air, poised to happen. This was a precursor…. I hadn’t understood, in my mind, there had been a cultural shift. And people were thinking differently about whether it’s OK to sexually assault women. Because for so long it’s been kind of, you know, OK.”

“Sexual Misconduct walks such a line,” says Moscovitch. “What happens in it isn’t illegal. It’s not rape. It’s not statutory rape; she’s 19. It’s consensual…. It’s one of these relationships in which there’s this massive imbalance of power. And also an age difference.” She says “I wanted to go after something that’s legal, but complicated.”

As Moscovitch points out, “it calls into question whose perspective through which we view these kinds of romances…. We’ve always watched them from a male perspective. And If you shift to a female one, you go ‘Oh? Really? What is happening? And why do we think it’s OK?” In a situation where a man has “a massive amount of power, to what degree does that sway one’s ability, truly, to consent?”

“I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was growing up, there was Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. And I know who took the blame. She was an intern and he was the president of America. She gave him a blow job and got called a slut and a whore and it ruined her life, and he came out of it beautifully. We know who’s to blame when any sexuality happens, consensual or not….”

“So that’s what I expected would happen with my play. And that’s NOT what happened,” says Moscovitch, returning to the idea of a cultural shift.

Cole Humeny and Merran Carr-Wiggin in What A Young Wife Ought To Know, Theatre Network. 2018 photo by Ian Jackson.

Moscovitch has explored blame, revenge, and guilt in other plays, among them What A Young Wife Ought To Know (directed at Theatre Network by Marianne Copithorne in 2018) with its cautionary perspective on reproductive oppression, and Bunny, in which a young woman reviews her sexual history. And the slide to the right and regressive social currents in the U.S. feel like they come from a similar place, Moscovitch thinks. “It’s fine to blame women for sexuality; it’s fine to punish women for having sex, for rape, for unplanned pregnancy, for sexual assault, for sexual harassment….” There’s an audible sigh from Prague on the phone.

So why hand the ball to Jon, like many of Moscovitch’s narrators aware that there may be some challenges from the audience? Why give him so much leeway to try and justify himself? “That’s the dominant perspective; that’s how our culture works. We’re all going to be on his side, “says Moscovitch. “I didn’t want to write a female point of view play. I wanted to make everyone shift their perspective at a certain point.”

“One of the funniest outcomes has been that men sometimes mansplain that I should have done it all through the female perspective. That I’m not a good feminist. Which makes me laugh every time.”

PREVIEW

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes

Theatre: Theatre Network at the Roxy

Written by: Hannah Moscovitch

Directed by: Marianne Copithorne

Starring: Gianna Vacirca, John Ullyatt

Running: through May 14

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

 

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After the funeral: Darrin Hagen’s dark comedy 10 Funerals premieres at Shadow Theatre

Posted on April 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Nathan Cuckow and Doug Mertz in 10 Funerals, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Funerals,” says the booming baritone voice on the phone, “are so weird.”

Darrin Hagen is something of an expert. And if there ever was a year to confirm it, it’s been this one, allegedly (but only allegedly) post-COVID, says the playwright/ actor/ director/ composer/ sound designer/ queer activist/ historian. Funerals are a recurring Hagen motif, in life as well as art: scattering his father’s ashes, losing his best friend Catherine, mourning Richard Gishler, the skilled comic actor for whom he’d created a role in a dark comedy about funerals (and writing him a requiem instead). And there’s co-creation of Unsung, an immersive theatre piece he researched and co-created with Workshop West’s Heather Inglis that documents the experience of Alberta health care workers during the pandemic as the provincial government dithered and the death toll mounted.

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Yes, the author of 10 Funerals, finally premiering Thursday at Shadow Theatre after a two-year pandemical delay, has a history with funerals. After all, when he bolted from small-town Rocky Mountain House into the big city in the ‘80s, and was baptized into the flamboyant drag queen world, the AIDS crisis claimed cast-mates, friends, acquaintances, one after another. So much has changed, and so much hasn’t.

10 Funerals had double roots, as Hagen describes. One inspiration was comic: Vicious, a TV sitcom starring Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi, about an old gay couple who’d been together for 50 years. “Why isn’t there more out there about aging gay couples?” wondered Hagen, who found it hilarious. “What about the end of the story?”

Then “I went to a funeral for a friend in 2016, and was just saddened by how few people were there, compared to the old Flashback days.” Unexpected perhaps, considering these more “enlightened” times.  “But there was a sense of community then, a defiance about showing up for the ‘chosen family’” when birth families often didn’t.

“Wouldn’t it be interesting,” Hagen asked himself, “to watch a couple aging through funerals…. Kevin (Hagen’s life partner Kevin Hendricks) and I were completely different people in the ‘80s. Funerals were a marker of our own development.”

Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik in 10 Funerals, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

That idea has found its way into the structure of 10 Funerals, which follows a gay couple returning from a funeral in each of the play’s 10 scenes, “moving forward three years at a time from when they were in their 20s.” They’re played by Doug Mertz and Nathan Cuckow as the older couple version, Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik, in a succession of wigs (costume designer: Leona Brausen), as the younger.  

Hair is ephemeral. Weight? Well, you never know. Time has its effect on life goals, relationship dynamics, ideas about mortality. “Only height doesn’t change,” laughs Hagen.

“Am I obsessed with death?” he wonders. 10 Funerals isn’t exactly his first rodeo in that respect. “Funerals are everywhere in the first thing I wrote, The Edmonton Queen (play and book),” says Hagen of his memoir of the small-town kid’s coming-of-age in the drag scene in Edmonton. Guys in Disguise’s first Fringe appearance Delusions of Grandeur  — “a two-hour drag show with a play at intermission” as he puts it — happened in 1987 on “the night a friend was murdered.”

But the show must go on, as that unforgiving theatre mantra has it. “That’s what kills me about this fucking business,” he sighs. Hagen, who’s “worked non-stop since last June” (his documentary about the 25th anniversary of the Vriend decision comes out this June), thinks that vis-à-vis death, “theatre is all embrace/denial. We can’t stop.”

playwright Darrin Hagen. Photo supplied.

Hagen’s Tornado Magnet, whose protagonist Dotty is the queen of the trailer park, opened on the 10th anniversary of Black Friday, a day of elemental fatality at the Evergreen trailer court. Pile Driver, inspired by the gay prairie wrestling circuit, marked one of the last theatrical appearances of Joe Bird, who passed away far too young in 2009. The list goes on.

Have the three pandemical and death-centric years that have intervened since the creation of 10 Funerals and its first workshop in 2018 changed the tone, the weight, the colours of a play created as a black comedy? Hagen considers. “When Richard (Richard Gishler) died, that changed everything,” he says finally “I was crushed, saddened…. It’s as if we’re just an accident of timing. I think how quickly life can change. And it really sent that home to me.”

“It’s such a cruel robber of our dreams. Richard’s last performance was his Zoom reading of my play. And it’s just not fair…. He died during that dark time. And the pandemic has made us all re-evaluate.”

“There’s a real-ness to the play now that can’t be avoided,” says Hagen. “And some lines get a new resonance.” A casual remark of the couple returning from an AIDS funeral, that “they’d never let that happen again” echoes with a new irony now in COVIDian times.

10 Funerals, after all, was written “pre-Black Lives Matter, pre-#MeToo, pre-schisms in the gay community,” says Hagen. “We’ve emerged back into a world that’s radically different. But after the Forced Pause, I still think it’s a comedy.”

PREVIEW

10 Funerals

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Darrin Hagen

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Doug Mertz, Nathan Cuckow, Jake Tkaczyk, Josh Travnik

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through May 14

Tickets: 780-343-5564, shadowtheatre.org

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