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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‘A dream within a dream’: Catalyst’s Nevermore, in a 15th anniversary concert version

Posted on April 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Scott Schpeley as Poe in Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, Catalyst Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

Consider it a haunting (a subject on which Edgar Allan Poe is something of an authority). Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, Catalyst’s much travelled musical play/fantasy/fairytale returns to celebrate its 15th anniversary in a concert version — with the original cast.

Weird and witty, and, yes, wrapped in the chilling mist of the Great Beyond, Catalyst’s original creation — book, music and lyrics by Jonathan Christenson; set, lighting and costumes by Bretta Gerecke — is a kind of theatrical hallucination. It imagines Poe’s doom-laden life as one of his own gothic phantasmagorical thrillers. As the number A Dream Within A Dream has it, “the terrors that troubled his sleepless nights/ crept increasingly into his days…. “

Nevermore, in a stripped down concert version that leans into the story and music, is here for three performances Friday and Saturday. Then the company leaves for a run of a full staged production at Vertigo Theatre in Calgary.

It’s a signature Catalyst piece — boldly stylized visuals and striking physicality, that marries music and text in an off-centre way. And it has a storied history. Co-commissioned by the Luminato Festival in Toronto and the Magnetic North Festival in Ottawa, it had a joint premiere in 2009 at the National Arts Centre and the Winter Garden in Toronto, after a preview run in Fort MacMurray and Catalyst’s former Strathcona black box (now the Gateway Theatre).

Nevermore is a traveller. It’s crossed the Atlantic to the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) and Barbican International Theatre Events (BITE). It’s played the PuSh Festival in Vancouver and the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, among other theatres across this country. Gerecke’s wildly fancily costumes — “a LOT of masking tape, paper maché, landscape fabric, flex glue, and sticks from the back of our old building” says managing director Lana Michelle Hughes — have been to New York twice, and recorded a cast album there, too.

During a four-performance run at the New Victory Theatre on 42nd St. it caught the eye of producers M. Kilburg Reedy and Jason Grossman, and moved Off-Broadway at New World Stages in 2015. The omens were with it: The New York Times reported at the time that ravens, absent from New York for more than a century, had returned.

In Catalyst’s collaborative fashion, the piece has remained in the repertoire and in development, with changes in music, text and design every time out. “And it’s changed again,” says Shannon Blanchet. “It’s never the same. That’s part of what makes the rehearsal process fun.” Garett Ross agrees. “Everything feels new; it’s never complacent.

Speaking as we are of haunting, most of the original cast have remained with the show. Ross and Blanchet have been in every run of Nevermore, from the beginning in Fort MacMurray in 2008. “Every day we rehearsed; every night a different show,” remembers Blanchet, who plays Elmira, Poe’s first love. “Very exciting!” The song Edgar Met Elmira is “one of the least changed numbers in the show.”

The characters have evolved in each iteration. Ross, who plays Jock Allan, Poe’s reluctant businessman stepfather, thinks the character has become fuller since his “Disney villain” days.

The last time they did the show was 2015 in New York. Eight years later, director Christensen presides over a veritable cast reunion. The appeal of the piece and the ensemble remains. “I’ve always loved the macabre, and the darkness of the piece,” says Ross. “And the people, we clicked really well,” he says of his cast-mates (who include Sheldon Elter, Beth Graham, Ryan Parker, Vanessa Sabourin, and Scott Shpeley).

Blanchet, a drama prof at the University of Saskatchewan these days, talks about “the joyful rigour of Nevermore, what it asks of everyone, including the stage manager, production team, design…. It requires a focus that is restorative. That, and the poetry of the language, the mystery of the story. A beautiful piece of alchemy.”

As Poe put it, “there is no exquisite beauty … without some strangeness in the proportion.”

Nevermore In Concert runs live Friday at 7:30 and Saturday at 2:30 and 7: 30 p.m. at the Betty Andrews Recital Hall (Allard Hall at MacEwan University). The Saturday evening performance is also live-streamed. Tickets: catalysttheatre.ca.

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The Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s new home for the summer: a vintage spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Cristal Palace Spiegeltent, where Freewill Shakespeare Festival will perform this summer. Photo by West Coast Spiegeltents

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For their resident playwright, it’s the big 4-5-9. For the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, it’s season 34, and full of mid-play dramatic developments.

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Evicted from their home stage by the lunatic City plan of a three-YEAR closure for Hawrelak Park renos, the Freewill company has have been scrambling to find its footing on the move. As of Shakespeare’s birthday Sunday they have exciting news of a new home for their upcoming two-play rep edition — Twelfth Night alternating with Romeo and Juliet — that will rescue them from a life of wandering this summer.

A tent is involved. But no one (sane) would call it camping: it’s a vintage spiegeltent (Flemish for mirror tent, or travelling dance hall), built in Belgium in 1947. As Freewill artistic director Dave Horak explained at Will’s birthday bash Sunday at Metro Cinema, the hand-made spiegeltent where you’ll see a besotted duke declare “if music be the food of love, play on” and Juliet wonder “wherefore art thou Romeo?”, from Aug. 8 to Sept. 3, is a real beauty, a work of art in itself. This “Cristal spiegeltent,” as this example is called, is lined with hundreds of mirrors and stained glass; it has French oak floors. And it will house an audience of about 220.

Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by West Coast Spiegeltents.

Explore Edmonton’s arts programming manager Fawnda Mithrush explained that the tent — one of only three actively touring spiegeltents in North America (32 in the world) — will be set up at Edmonton EXPO Centre (7515 118 Ave.) for the entire summer. Rented from West Coast Spiegeltents, it will house shows during a reimagined version of Klondike Days and more; the lineup will be announced by Explore Edmonton in the next few weeks.

Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by West Coast Spiegeltents

The Shakespeare productions will be trimmed to suit the smaller spiegeltent venue. And both will happen in the round, surrounded by the audience. As Horak explained, a cast of 10, a mix of veterans and newcomers, will be in both productions, in the bold contemporary Freewill house style. He himself will direct Romeo and Juliet for the first time, “a beautiful quick, passionate, hot play,” he says. And Twelfth Night, a mysteriously manic and multi-hued blend of melancholy and joy, mistaken identity and self-discovery, will be under the direction of up-and-comer Amanda Goldberg. The comedy, she says, is a wonderful opportunity “to explore gender identity through the queer lens of today.”

Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen are Romeo and Juliet, star-cross’d victims of a long-standing generational feud. In Twelfth Night Nguyen is Viola, one of Shakespeare’s most resourceful and agile heroines, with Kristin Unruh as Olivia, Scott Shpeley as Orsino, and Troy O’Donnell as Malvolio. The double-duty Freewill cast also includes Brett Dahl, Dean Stockdale, Graham Mothersill, Nadien Chu, and Yassine El Fassi El Fihri.

Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night alternate between Aug. 8 and Sept. 3. Tickets (already on sale!) and the full performance schedule are at freewillshakespeare.com.

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Happy 4-5-9 Will! Brush up your Shakespeare with our quiz

Posted on April 23, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You get to know a lot of people in 459 years. And vice versa. It’s Shakespeare’s birthday today. And the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, evicted from their usual home in Hawrelak Park for a three-YEAR City of Edmonton reno (another story), announces their 34th annual summer season of two plays (Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet, as revealed in a January 4 12thnight post) this afternoon. It’s obviously the moment to test your knowledge of Freewill’s resident playwright, the heavy-hitter from Stratford. Try our little 12thnight.ca quiz. (Answers are at the bottom).

1.  Which of the following phrases was NOT created by Shakespeare? a. “let them eat cake” b. “sick at heart” c. “what the dickens” d. “the world is my oyster” e. “clothes make the man” f. “it was Greek to me” g. “from here to eternity”

2. Name the Shakespeare play that begins with … a. “O for a Muse of fire …”  b. “If music be the food of love, play on …” c. Who’s there? d. “Two households, both alike in dignity/ In fair Verona, where we lay our scene …” e. “Now is the winter of our discontent …”

3. Which of the following book/play titles is NOT taken from a Shakespeare play? a. The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie b. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner c. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley d. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. e. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

4. Which of the following Shakespeare plays has never been produced by Edmonton’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival? a. Titus Andronicus b. Two Gentlemen of Verona c. All’s Well That Ends Well d. The Merry Wives of Windsor

5. To avoid terrible luck, according to theatre lore, which Shakespeare play should never be named aloud within a theatre? a. All’s Well That Ends Well b. Coriolanus c. Pericles d. Macbeth

6. Shakespeare was playwright-in-residence, for most of his career, at which theatre company? a. The South Bank Players b. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men c. The Stratford Little Theatre c. The Theatre Royal

7. Shakespeare is associated, most famously, with the Globe Theatre in the London entertainment district south of the Thames. But what was the first London theatre where Shakespeare’s company put on plays? a. The Theatre b. The Rose c. Blackfriars Theatre d. The Wintergarden

8. The first Globe Theatre burned to the ground in 1613. What caused the blaze? a. Groundlings smoking b. A dropped torch in Act I of Hamlet  c. The Great Fire of London d. a stage cannon igniting the thatched roof during a performance of Henry VIII

9. In which Shakespeare play do the following events occur? a. A man’s eyes are gouged out b. a queen is served a meat pie into which her sons have been baked c. a forest moves d. two pairs of lovers get re-matched when magic juice from a flower gets sprinkled on their eyelids.

10. Which Shakespeare character said …  a. “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” b. “all the world’s a stage …” c. “what’s done is done …” d. “once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more …” e. “we are such stuff as dreams are made on …” f. “but soft! what light through yonder window breaks?”

11. On the theory that “the man from Stratford” — an actor from the sticks who didn’t go to university — couldn’t possibly have written the Shakespeare canon, scholars and miscellaneous cranks have put forward a variety of names as alternative candidates. Which of the following names isn’t one? a. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford b. Francis Bacon c. Ben Jonson d. Sir Walter Raleigh e. William Stanley, Earl of Derby f. Christopher Marlowe

12. How many stand-alone sonnets did Shakespeare write? a. 226 b. more than 1,000 c. two dozen d. 154

13. Which Shakespeare play contains the following plot devices? a. a bear b. three caskets (one gold, one silver, one lead), a pound of flesh, and 3,000 ducats c. two sets of twins with the same name d. a bracelet, a trunk, a tranquillizing potion, and a headless corpse e. yellow stockings, cross-gartered

14. Which of the following Shakespeare plays involves a woman disguising herself as a man? a. Cymbeline b. Twelfth Night c. As You Like It d. The Merchant of Venice e. Two Gentlemen of Verona

15. Shakespeare’s dad was … a. a lute-maker b. a thatch-roofer c. an entertainment lawyer d. a glover 

16. In Shakespeare’s will he famously left which of the following to his wife Anne Hathaway?  a. a ruff from the premiere production of Twelfth Night at court b. his second-best bed c. his favourite quill pen set d. the script for a now-lost play called Cardenio e. his broadsword with the fancy hilt inscribed by Queen Elizabeth I

17. Which Shakespeare play has the most lines? a. King Lear b. The Comedy of Errors c. Hamlet  d. The Taming of the Shrew

And here are the answers: 1. a, g. 2. a. Henry V, b. Twelfth Night, c. Hamlet, d. Romeo and Juliet, e. Richard III. 3. d, e. 4. c. 5. d. 6. b. 7. a. 8. d. 9. a. King Lear, b. Titus Andronicus, c. Macbeth, d. A Midsummer Night’ Dream. 10. a. Hamlet, b. Jaques, c. Lady Macbeth, d. Henry V, e. Prospero, f. Romeo. 11. c., 12. d. 13. a. The Winter’s Tale, b. The Merchant of Venice, c. The Comedy of Errors, d. Cymbeline,  e. Twelfth Night. 14. all of them. 15. d. 16. b. 17. c.

 

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An incandescent performance in the kingdom of ice: A Hundred Words For Snow, a review

Posted on April 23, 2023 by Liz Nicholls
Dayna Lea Hoffman, A Hundred Words For Snow, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Dayna Lea Hoffmann in A Hundred Words For Show, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

We surround an ice floe that seems to float in a sea of white. It’s overhung by translucent icicles. And there on a pillar of ice, lit from within, is an urn.

Alison Yanota’s design for A Hundred Words For Snow, with Matt Schuurman’s projections and Daniela Fernandez’s otherworldly sounds, creates a kind of chimerical kingdom of ice. And the young character we meet in this solo play by the English writer Tatty Hennessy imagines it, dreams of its magical snow bears, conjures it for us. And propelled by grief, she sets forth towards it, a 15-year-old on her own, sans mom. It’s an adventure into the unknown, a coming-of-age journey in honour of her dad.

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He’s the occupant of the urn. At the outset Rory introduces us. “And this is Dad. Say hello, Dad…. He’s shy. Used to be a lot more talkative.” In life Dad was a geography teacher captivated by the idea of exploration and the great snow-enshrouded mystery of the North. “You never got to go, but I can take you.”

That’s her gift to him. His to her is a shared wonder about a world of ice, its magical white bears, its five North Poles, its mythologies to either embrace or debunk (the one about the thousand words for snow falls into the latter category), its “beardy” old-school explorers like Shackleton and Peary. This is a dad who read his kid Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen instead of a bedtime story.   

It’s a complicated, not to say virtuoso, theatrical challenge to which Dayna Lea Hoffmann rises impressively in Trevor Schmidt’s production. In an incandescent performance this terrific actor creates and fully inhabits a dimensional teenage character who’s simultaneously telling us a story, remembering it, annotating it, and actively participating in it in the present moment. Rory is resourceful but naive, endearingly candid and witty about the fragility of self-esteem, and that acute teen feeling of being an outsider looking in, hoping to pass muster: starchy and confident one moment, tentative and doubt-filled the next.

The play is the voice of a teenager exploring the world outside and the world within, and both are exotic. Hoffmann’s performance effortlessly captures the teenage cadence — “mortifying” and “obviously” occur again and again. Rory’s no pushover; she’s quick to spot adult bullshit, environmental warming that threatens to strand the inhabitants of the ice kingdom, cultural prejudices, sexism (like the token display, on a pink board, of a woman explorer in the Tronsø Polar Museum in Norway). A smart kid, Rory’s a magnet for information and she enjoys her knowledge (the more arcane the better). But she’s open to revelations, including a seminal vision of joining the continuity of generations of women.

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

Rory’s fall-back position, as a teen skeptic, is wit. But she’s open to enthusiasm, too, as Hoffman’s engaging performance conveys. I’m thinking of Rory’s capture of the eerie experience of vast whiteness, in all its variegation, and her review of apparent  nothingness, on a scale and with a history: “It’s pretty amazing. Nothing. Amazing nothing. Nothing people died finding. Nothing full of bleached bones and tiny creatures and singing ice.”

Schmidt’s production has a rhythm of perpetual motion, with moments of stillness that Hoffmann’s performance animates with thought, and reassessment. Rory’s preparations to go to the North Pole, armed with a book, a backpack, and her mother’s credit card, have some fateful shortcomings, as she confesses. She’s a repository of obscure nordic information, true, but she needs to be rescued. And in the end, in a  touching way, she comes to realize that grief is something that can be shared.

Rory talks, more than once, about “the skin of the world.” It’s a reference to ice, but it resonates with the idea of exploration beneath the skin. It’s a play that speaks to the coming-of-age experience of loss, and how to remember someone you love — in their enthusiasms, in what they taught you, in what they’ve inspired you to teach yourself.

It turns out, as per Nansen, that “love is life’s snow”: is one of the mythical hundred words for snow “love”? As Rory says, “wherever we are we’ll always have been there.” It’s a mantra for theatre, so ephemeral and so indelible.

Check out 12thnight’s PREVIEW interview with Dayna Lee Hoffmann.

REVIEW

A Hundred Words For Snow

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Tatty Hennessy

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Dayna Lee Hoffmann

Where: Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn

Running: through May 6

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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