Unsung: Tales From The Front Line, living portraits of the health care people who risked everything to keep us safe. A review

Posted on January 31, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Melissa Thingelstad in Unsung: Tales From The Front Line, Workshop West. Photo by dbphotographics

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What just happened here?

That leading question is the raison d’être of the “performance installation” currently running at Workshop West. In the ongoing COVID pandemic,  frontline healthcare workers have risked everything to do their jobs keeping us safe, week after week, month after month — the soldiers of public health care, battered by their own provincial government, by ideology and political posturing, by public discord.

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Who are they? Unsung: Tales From The Front Line, a joint creation of Heather Inglis and Darrin Hagen, is your chance to meet seven, to find out what they think and what motivates them, to hear their real-life stories in close encounters. They’re played by actors, delivering five-minute monologues transcribed (and edited) verbatim from interviews, all anonymous “living portraits.”  And if you think you know what you think, think again. 

On Sunday afternoon at the Gateway Theatre , wandering through the curtained enclosures of the hospital maze (seven inventive designs by Brian Bast, with that hospital heartbeat/machine hum soundscape by Hagen)), I met people I never get to meet. Like an ICU physician (played by Davina Stewart) who takes the long view of humanity’s place on the planet. “I don’t like our trajectory…. COVID, horrific as it is, is a distraction.” That stopped me in my tracks. 

Melissa Thingelstad in Unsung: Tales From The Front Line, Workshop West. Photo by dbphotographics

In a supply closet, I met an ER physician (Melissa Thingelstad), who takes off her mask to say that she doesn’t want to be a hero because heroes become villains soon enough. And, remarkably,  thinking about COVID deniers and anti-vaxxers who regularly end up in the ER as critical care patients, hurling abuse at the health care staff, she just shrugs.

It’s her job to provide care to everyone, anyone, no matter how much they’ve created their own crisis — drunks who kill people in car accidents, smokers who get lung cancer.… Arguing is not only futile, but beside the point. “I just want to do my fucking job.” Could I have been so dispassionately professional? I think not. 

I met a hospital administrator (Patricia Darbasie), put in an impossibly stressful position by the lack of masks and protective equipment, staff shortages, the never-ebbing deluge of the sick. It left her burnt out and suicidal. And an ICU nurse (Sheldon Stockdale) shaken to see young men, strapping and healthy, who could have been his own brothers, fighting for their lives. 

The single-minded dedication to helping people is a keynote of Unsung. I met a health care aide (Jade Robinson) who watched as the profit motive trounced true public health care in the case of her elderly patients with dementia. “They deserve better,” she says over and over. She paid a price. After every shift she isolated from her own family, never eating with her daughter … until the relief of the vaccine. 

What sort of lunacy is it for a government to pick a fight with healthcare workers during a pandemic, threatening lay-offs, trying to cut wages? A “recreational assistant” (Rebecca Merkley), faced with patients under lockdown, rolls her eyes and wonders. 

Trevor Duplessis in Unsung, Workshop West. Photo by dbphotographics

A paramedic (Trevor Duplessis) is outraged that his line of work — going into people’s homes to rescue sick people, sticking with them in “a steel box” — wasn’t deemed ‘front line’ when it came to vaccines. Getting asked in the bar whether COVID was “real” gets his dander up too, understandably.  

Their stories do intersect with the political sphere, of course, and at varying angles. How could they not? Jason Kenney’s political spin about the “best summer ever”? Frontline workers noted that, along with the sequel, “the worst fall.”

You can visit the enclosures in any order, stay or move on, as you would in a gallery. Meeting all seven people took me about an hour.  The actors, directed by Inglis, are so intensely engaging, eyeball to eyeball you’ll find yourself nodding agreement, or wanting to answer back and ask a question. “My god!” muttered the lady standing next to me at one encounter, slapping her forehead. There is a compelling authenticity about real words, as you’ll know if you visited Inglis’s Theatre Yes performance installation Viscosity, about front line oil patch workers, in 2018,    

On the way out I stopped in the lobby to look at a wall covered in hand-written stickies. What did you lose in the pandemic? That’s the question awaiting your own input. “My faith in humanity,” said one sticky note. “My sense of smell,” said another. “Respect for my fellow citizens.” “Connection with people.” 

What did you gain? “Respect for human life,” said one note. “Respect for healthcare professionals,” said another. They’ve been up against it, these workers in a war where they’ve faced death and destruction, and been undermined by their own leaders. 

You need to hear from them. 

REVIEW

Unsung: Tales From The Front Line

Theatre: Workshop West, in partnership with Theatre Yes and Ground Zero Productions

Created by: Heather Inglis and Darrin Hagen

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Patricia Darbasie, Davina Stewart, Melissa Thingelstad, Jade Robinson, Rebecca Merkley, Trevor Duplessis, Sheldon Stockdale

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd

Running: through Feb. 12

Tickets: workshopwest.org 

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The Citadel announces its upcoming season of nine shows: here’s the lineup

Posted on January 30, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

SIX: The Musical: Divorced. Beheaded. Live In Concert. 2019 photo by Liz Lauren.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Opportunities for people to make theatre part of their lives again!” That’s the mantra under which Citadel Theatre artistic director Daryl Cloran unveiled the upcoming $13 million 2023-2024 lineup Monday night at Edmonton’s largest playhouse. 

“Our goal is to get people back into the building … back into the habit and excitement of coming to the theatre,” says Cloran.

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The demographic appeal is deliberately broad, and so is the embrace of both local and international connections. Of the nine shows Cloran announced, all on the Citadel mainstages, four are musicals, of every size and shape, including one that the Citadel’s Canadian premiere in 2019 played a part in preparing for Broadway success. One’s an old-school big-cast Rodgers and Hammerstein blockbuster with undimmed relevance. One’s a long-running Off-Broadway hit with cult status. And one’s an original Métis song and story cycle.  

It all starts with the summer return to Edmonton of SIX: The Musical, the sassy Edinburgh Fringe project-turnedBroadway hit, in which the six fractious wives of Henry VIII catapult out of Tudor history as girl-power pop stars: “Divorced. Beheaded. Live in Concert.” As Cloran explains, “we’re working with the producers (both U.K. and U.S.) to rehearse a new cast and launch a tour that starts here before it moves elsewhere…. It speaks to the relationships we’ve built, the commercial partnerships, and (witness Hadestown, also developed at the Citadel pre-Broadway) “our reputation as a great place to launch.” 

Citadel Theatre, graphic supplied.

“By this spring three shows that have come through the Citadel and were developed here will be on Broadway,” says Cloran: Six, Hadestown, and now Peter Pan Goes Wrong, the work of London’s Mischief Theatre. The North American premiere of the latter happened at the Citadel last season. And now it’s Broadway bound; “the set and costumes we built here have been shipped to New York.” 

SIX: The Musical runs Aug. 12 to Sept. 10, a period that overlaps with the Edmonton Fringe. And Cloran hopes to capitalize on Six’s own origins in tandem with that festival; “after all, it’s the ultimate Fringe success story…. Could the queens do a Fringe cabaret?” The idea, he says, is “ if you like theatre, Edmonton is the place to be in the summer.” 

Little Shop of Horrors, Citadel Theatre. Graphic supplied.

Small-scale and retro in its ‘60s score by Alan Menken (lyrics and book by Howard Ashman), the 1982 horror-comedy musical Little Shop of Horrors hasn’t been done at the Citadel in 20 years. We’ll see Seymour and his disturbing relationship with a certain bloodthirsty plant in a Citadel co-production with Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre (Oct. 21 to Nov. 19),  directed by the Arts Club’s artistic director Ashlie Corcoran. 

Announced by the Citadel before the pandemic, The Sound of Music, the Tony winning last collaboration in 1959 of Rodgers and Hammerstein, finally comes to pass March 2 to 31 2024 , in a co-production with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre directed by Rachel Peake (The Garneau Block, 9 to 5). The adult cast of 16 or 18 will move between Winnipeg and Edmonton, joined by local kids in both cities. 

Citadel Theatre, graphic supplied.

Rubaboo (Feb. 10 to March 3, 2024) “continues our commitment to Indigenous programming,” says Cloran of the song and story cycle created and performed by Métis singer-songwriter/actor Andrea Menard (music by Menard and Edmonton’s Robert Walsh). Borrowing its title from the Métis word for a rich stew, Rubaboo is “a beautiful evening, something really welcoming, something really uplifting,” says Cloran of a piece that’s already played the Grand Theatre in London, Ont. and the Arts Club in Vancouver. Alanis King directs.

The official subscription season of six shows opens (Sept. 23 to October 15) with English language theatre’s most perfectly formed, and funniest, comedy, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The Citadel production is directed by Jackie Maxwell (The Humans), the former director of the Shaw Festival, who’s “perfect for this, for her understanding of this kind of wit, and the period,” as Cloran puts it.

“In Jackie’s very first season at Shaw she programmed Earnest,” says Cloran, and then had former festival artistic director Christopher Newton do the directing honours. “It’s a play she’s always wanted to do, and never had the chance.” No word yet on casting for this comedy sparkler.

Citadel Theatre, graphic supplied.

The subscription season grand finale is a stage adaptation, by the American playwright Catherine Bush, of The Three Musketeers. “Big ensemble, big costumes, big swashbuckling, big adventure, big romance…. And it’s also super funny,” says Cloran, who directs the Citadel-Arts Club co-production April 20 to May 4, 2024. “Really lively, really fun.” Casting awaits, but Jonathan Purvis has been enlisted for the swordplay.   

The lineup announced by Cloran also includes a Citadel production of The Mountaintop, a 2009 reimagining by young American playwright Katori Hall of the events in Memphis the night before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. The production (March 30 to April 21, 2024) returns director Patricia Darbasie to the very piece she directed a year ago at Shadow Theatre. “This is us amplifying the work of local artists,” Cloran explains. The play “has been on our list for a long time, and it gives Pat the opportunity to imagine it for a large space and share it with a large audience, with more production resources.” 

Citadel Theatre, graphic supplied

Along with SIX and A Christmas Carol, outside the mainstage subscription series, is the return of Farren Timoteo’s hit solo show Made In Italy (Jan. 6 to 28, 2024). Directed by Cloran, it chronicles in go-for-the-gusto fashion the Italian immigrant experience. “It’s a pure Edmonton success story,” says Cloran. “A great Edmonton artist.”

Made In Italy premiered in 2016 in Cloran’s last year as artistic director at Kamloops’ Western Canada Theatre. “The day after it opened I got in the car and drove to Edmonton” for a new Citadel job.

“We started as a tiny little studio show in Kamloops. We brought it here to the (Citadel’s) Rice Theatre for a weekend, and people liked it, so we brought it back again….” Since those modest origins, Made In Italy has had an unusually lively mainstage life for a solo show  — at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton, the Thousand Islands Playhouse, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, and return engagements by popular demand at the Arts Club.” With more to come. “It’s running all next season,” says Cloran of its multiple engagements across the country, including the Citadel.  

If there are fewer productions at the Citadel next season, 12 down to nine, it’s because the Highwire Series — collaborations with local indie companies (this season The Wolves, Deafy and First Métis Man of Odesa) — is “on temporary pause next season,” says Cloran. “It’s partially because of our focus on the mainstage.” And it’s partly budgetary factors, and time. “Partnerships enable us to do shows we couldn’t afford by ourselves and (indie companies) couldn’t afford by themselves…. But it takes time for indie companies to get grants and do fund-raising, and no one had confirmed funding yet.”

Cloran acknowledges that after two years of cancellations and ingenious pandemical pivoting the much anticipated return of live theatre in the current season hasn’t been without its challenges — “a slower return than we’d thought.” The big regional theatres across the country, the Citadel among them, have reported a drop of 30 per cent or so in audiences in the fall. But there’s been a warming return to sold-out houses for holiday shows. “A Christmas Carol made us very hopeful,” he says of the full houses in December for David van Belle’s adaptation “back in its full glory,” with a fulsome 35-actor including a dozen kids. 

That production returns for the fifth season Nov. 25 to Dec. 23 (making a quarter-century of Christmas Carols at the Citadel), with John Ullyatt back as Scrooge. 

2023/24 season packages go on sale Jan. 30. Casual tickets for SIX: The Musical go on sale on April 6, with the rest of the season on sale by July 12.

The 2023-2024 Citadel lineup at a glance:  

Mainstage subscription series: The Importance of Being Earnest (Sept. 23 – Oct. 15, 2023; Little Shop of Horrors (Oct. 21 – Nov. 19, 2023); Rubaboo (Feb. 10 – March 2, 2024); The Sound of Music (March 2 – 31, 2024); The Mountaintop (March 30 – April 21, 2024); The Three Musketeers (April 20 – May 12, 2024)

Summer musical:  SIX: The Musical (Aug. 12 – Sept. 10, 2023)

Holiday production: A Christmas Carol (Nov. 25 – Dec. 23, 2023)

Special presentation: Made in Italy (Jan. 6 – 28, 2024)

 

 

 

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Deaf, and an expert in the absurdities of the world: Chris Dodd’s Deafy at the Citadel, a review

Posted on January 30, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Deafy, currently running in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre, we meet a man with a fine-tuned sense of the absurdities of the world. In his wry way he’s an expert in negotiating obstacles both large and niggling, rolling with the punches, deflecting them, exercising his eye-rolls on them.

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He’s had lots of practice. Nathan Jesper is Deaf. And life is complicated when you’re Deaf. At the start of this hit tragi-comedy by and starring Chris Dodd (the founder and artistic director of SOUND OFF, the influential national festival of Deaf arts), he gets flung onto the stage barefoot, by some sort of blast, forces beyond his control. Dave Clarke’s terrific sound design has a heartbeat to it, the kind of pulse you feel in your ribcage, with top notes of industrial buzz. 

“O shit, where are the interpreters?” Nathan is played by the playwright, who’s an exceptionally physical, expressive, rubber-faced actor (armed with a vivid movement score by choreographer Ainsley Hillyard). Nathan has a job to do and he’s running way late (“Listen, I’m sorry, I got bumped”). He’s picked up a gig as a Deaf public speaker and Deaf educator, who negotiates the world in three languages, spoken English, ASL, and captioning. As for the latter Nathan’s adversarial relationship with his captions (and a laugh track gone askew) is one of the comic motifs of a show that’s very funny, and also insightful and moving.  

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Who Are You? demands the caption. Good question, and we don’t know if it’s for Nathan or for us.  

I saw Ashley Wright’s appealing production, as rhythmic as a dance, at the 2021 Fringe and loved it. And I enjoyed it again in this revival for the Citadel’s Highwire Series, the first play by a Deaf playwright ever on a Citadel stage in the company’s 58-season history.  

Chris Dodd, creator and star of Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

It struck me again that what breaks your heart about Deafy is also what gives the show its eye-watering comic edge. Nathan’s asks aren’t big. His dreams are modest: hang out with friends, go to the bar and have a few beers while the hockey game’s on TV, get his driver’s licence, take the train. What could be less demanding?  

Things have a way of going off the rails for Nathan in his tricky negotiations with the hearing world. The bartender claims he can’t turn on the TV captions for the hockey game. Nathan’s friend Len is outraged. Then the Motor Vehicles clerk says Deaf people aren’t allowed to get drivers’ licences. Wrong. Then, it transpires that no interpreters are allowed for drivers’ tests, which makes no sense at all. So Len comes up with a lunatic work-around involving a blanket and a garden gnome (my lips are sealed). This episode has the kind of cracked deadpan hilarity, in the telling, that will remind you of Bob Newhart’s celebrated driving lesson sketch. 

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

“Let me tell you about the last time I rode the train.” The episode involving Nathan and a persistent accordion player busking in a train car will make you wince-laugh, too. Dodd is an ace storyteller, a master of those wry eyebrow lifts and rueful shrugs that, along with precision comic timing, set the old-school comedians apart.

Nathan’s stories get darker, sadder, more fraught as his hard-won hegemony between the Deaf and hearing worlds begins to fall apart, and leaves him adrift, increasingly isolated from both. Who are you? asks the caption again. And there’s no answer forthcoming for the outsider perpetually looking in. A silent encounter with a homeless man in an airport — “no destination, no passport, a man without a country, a man like me who doesn’t belong” — will twist your heart. 

What is it like to be Deaf? This is a personal invitation into that experience: artfully constructed and enlightening.

See 12thnight’s PREVIEW with Chris Dodd here.

REVIEW

Deafy

Theatre: Citadel Highwire Series

Written by and starring: Chris Dodd

Directed by: Ashley Wright

Running: through Feb. 12

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

 

 

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Enough, the aerial view of a mysterious dread, at Northern Light. A review

Posted on January 29, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston and Linda Grass in Enough, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I am the image of escape,” says one of the two globe-trotting flight attendant characters in Enough, getting its Canadian premiere in the Northern Light Theatre season. There they are, trim and calm and smiling, 30,000 feet above their lives on the ground. “Glamour and grace … a symbol of sex appeal and sightseeing.”

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And yet breaking the bonds of earth is exactly what Toni (Kristin Johnston) and Jane (Linda Grass) cannot do in this strangely poetic, genuinely disturbing play by the Scottish playwright Stef Smith, a prize-winner at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a captivating piece of theatre in the Trevor Schmidt production, unsettling in the way it captures, from the aerial view, the indefinable but palpable anxiety that it’s the end times … of something. 

But what? The ripple of knowledge that their lives, the ground below, perhaps the planet itself are crumbling and cracking five miles below them?  

As the playwright herself notes, being a flight attendant is is a kind of theatrical performance in itself, fake cordiality dancing brightly on the lethal knowledge that it takes exactly three minutes for an airliner to fall through the air from 30,000 feet to the ground. 

And at the outset, you’ll be amused to see Grass and Johnston, all lipsticked-up, tripping onto the stage in their high heels and  their nicely tight blue suits, pulling those perfectly neat little carry-ons. They pause to pose in silhouette to paste on a perfect smile for their public, as they carry on their own private conversation. They move and stop in sync (the witty work of choreographer Ainsley Hillyard), automatically adopting that angle thing models do with their hips. 

Linda Grass and Kristin Johnston in Enough, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

They share a recurring chorus (and endless streams of chardonnay). “When I walk into a room, in my uniform,” says one. “There’s a look that gets thrown my way,” says the other.

It’s an incantation in a world designed with elegant aptness by director Schmidt. Roy Jackson’s lighting captures the strangeness of being in a bubble, everywhere and nowhere, and the quick flips between “onstage” at work and “backstage” at home and in indistinguishable hotel rooms. And Dave Clarke’s sound design, too, conjures that world of  air travel, with its anxieties, fake good cheer, phoney consolations.

The production’s theatrical accoutrements are fun and witty, full of allusions. The play has been called a tone poem, and I get that — the rhythms of its choral repetitions, the continuity between introspection (one character ‘narrating’ the thoughts of the other) and dialogue — and the imagery of a mysterious sort of dread. This sounds elusive and hard to follow, but it’s not. Both actors slide into this poetic complexity expertly, and their chemistry underpins the evening.  

Linda Grass and Kristin Johnston in Enough, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Toni and Jane return from the sky temporarily, day after day, into the great cities of the world — which is to say its hotel rooms. Sometimes they get to go home. Ah, and what emerges, gradually, in a text that shares the narration and shifts  effortlessly between first and third person, is that their lives and their sense of home, and what it means to be there, are very different. 

Jane is married with kids, flailing herself, as we see in Grass’s performance, with the notion of perfectibility: the perfect family, the perfect house, the perfect colour for the bathroom. Toni is single, and as Johnston conveys expressively (there’s stress behind that breezy demeanour), the freedom of that single life is an illusion. She’s trapped in a relationship with an abusive boyfriend she’s ashamed to reveal to her friend (“his face is gasoline and I’m the match”).  

Linda Grass and Kristin Johnston in Enough, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

What’s infiltrating their consciousness from their aerial perch, as they fill the drinks trolley and demonstrate the use of the seatbelts, is an eerie thunder below them, the frisson of fear that the centre will not hold. They feel “the low rumble of something deep and dark, something working its way to the surface.” Is the ground cracking? they wonder. “Is the world disappearing?” Have offences to the environment finally turned the earth into sand?

It’s the unexplained link — I really liked that it’s unexplained — between the planet itself and the lives of women, gazed upon and never seen, that gives Enough its mysterious resonance. That, and the potential power of female friendship to be, as the title suggests, enough. Enough to withstand the gathering tremors and turbulence in a scary uncharted universe. 

It’s a weird and cool play. And Northern Light does it proud. 

Check out the 12thnight PREVIEW, an interview with director/designer Trevor Schmidt here.

REVIEW

Enough

Theatre: Northern Light

Written by: Stef Smith

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Linda Grass, Kristin Johnston

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

Running: to Feb. 4

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

 

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Judy Unwin: curious, feisty, fun, and tirelessly passionate about theatre. A big loss for Edmonton theatre

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Judy post-meeting at the old Varscona, 2003

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Hi. It’s me, Judy. Listen, I’m at the theatre; I’ll meet you there….” 

She was outspoken, opinionated, generous, and funny — an artist herself who stood up fiercely and in all kinds of ways for live theatre, its creators, its practitioners. A sense of disbelief still hangs over the sad news this month that Judy Unwin is gone, at 77. It’s unreasonable; it just doesn’t compute;  And I bet many people in the Edmonton theatre community share that feeling. 

Judy Unwin

In one energetic, energizing person, this theatre town has lost an actor, a director, an artistic director, a board member, a fund (and fun-) raiser and donor, an advocate and volunteer, a theatre lover extraordinaire. In the old-fashioned sense Judy was a patron, an enabler if you like, of live theatre, and infinitely creative and practical about how to do that. Her loss is a terrible blow.  

I’ve lost a friend, the kind who takes you out for a Christmas martini, or calls you up late night to discuss the 11 o’clock number in a musical or a surprising performance, or whether there should have been an intermission. We first met, 35 years ago, in the mid-‘80s when Judy was directing the premiere Edmonton production of Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God at Walterdale, Edmonton’s extraordinarily ambitious community theatre. Judy learned ASL, found interpreters, drummed up sponsors, and retained connections to the Deaf community throughout her life — at a time when accessibility was rarely discussed.

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At Walterdale Judy was a force to be reckoned with. She’d grown up in a prominent Edmonton arts family; her father Jack Unwin was a notable director, and the founder of the Walterdale tradition of the annual Klondike melodrama. At 19 Judy was the wide-eyed dimpled ingenue in the first of these, in 1965: Nellie Lovelace (“as true as she is tender”) in Tempted Tried and True or Dirty Work at the Crossroads. And after many appearances as the ingenue she graduated to directing the melodramas.    

Judy is a multi-talented presence in the Walterdale archive. She acted in Walterdale shows; her memorial last week (beautifully arranged by her sons Scott and Steve Tilley) was a veritable reunion of the cast of Exit Who? of 1986. It was Linda Karenko’s theatre debut, she says. “Judy taught me everything…. I said ‘what’s upstaging?’ And she said ‘you’re doing it!’” ” Judy directed Walterdale shows. She sold tickets; she ran the box office; she raised money. She was on the board, she was the artistic director. 

Tempted, Tried and True or Dirty Work at the Crossroads, Judy Unwin’s debut in a Walterdale Theatre Klondike Melodrama 1965. Photo from Walterdale archive.

Actor/broadcaster Chris Allen remembers Judy asking him one day “how much do you love Walterdale?.” Thinking she was after him to purchase a seat as part of the theatre’s renovation campaign, he said “’a lot!’ And Judy said ‘Good! you’re directing the melodrama!’” He was terrified, but she was a very hard person to say No to. “She was a very clear, motivated and productive member of Walterdale and by example gave me lessons in how a working theatre should function.” 

Judy was feisty about supporting artists. In 1980, as playwright Brad Fraser remembers with undimmed appreciation, it was Judy who stood up for his early play Mutants at an emergency Walterdale board meeting called to discuss cancelling the production as too risky. “‘We can’t censor this boy. He’s been working with us for years; we asked him to do this, and he did what we asked. We cannot be censors’…. She was an amazing person.” 

Chef Judy, cooking for Varscona silent auction winners, 2017

By 1996, Judy was on the board of the Varscona Theatre, across the avenue from Walterdale. And later she was deeply involved in the renovations that resulted in an old-new Varscona in 2016, with opinions on every brick and staircase. The most popular item on the Varscona’s silent fund-raising auctions was invariably the multi-course dinner prepared by Judy, a great cook, in the home of the purchaser, and served by an elite team of chatty Edmonton actors.  

“She had a lot of drive and a lot of connections; she did know everyone in town,” says Jeff Haslam, a longtime Judy friend, Teatro Live leading man and sometime Teatro artistic director, who was on the Varscona board for a time. The thought is echoed by the Varscona’s current executive director Kendra Connor. “She was such a good connector; she knew everybody,” and was fearless about using her manifold connections on behalf of theatre. “She could get (the Citadel’s late founder) Joe Shoctor on the phone,” says Connor. And on the phone to some VIP (or potential sponsor) Judy, as we all knew her, became “Judge Tilley’s wife.”

Trying out seat in the new theatre, 2016

In Judy’s veins flowed a kind of old-school volunteerism, public service that asks “what do you need?” and then just steps up and makes it happen. “She never thought twice,” as Haslam says. “She saw things through.”

And so it was with the Sterling Awards, an annual celebration of excellence on Edmonton stages. Nobody realized how many jobs she did to keep it going until she stepped away in 2017. 

I remember being at Judy’s table at the Mayfield Theatre on many Sterling nights, as she snuck off her party shoes and put on her bedroom slippers. She’d already been part of arranging the jurors, and the elaborately anonymous voting system. She’d hired the venue; she’d argued about the menu (insisting that you can’t have a proper buffet without the prime rib). She arranged the ticketing. And the sponsors. She’d supervised the building of the Sterling trophies, at $250 apiece, along with the winners’ plaques. 

Judy Unwin and actor/choreographer Jason Hardwick. Photo by Jana Hove.

During the day she’d brought sandwiches to the backstage crew, the director, the stage managers. On the night, she was overseeing the 50-50 tickets, fretting about the trophies and the no-shows, paying the band, fielding complaints…. 

It was an endless list. And as a theatre celebration it was “barely break-even,” as Connor says, “always a struggle.” When it didn’t add up, Judy would put the outstanding Mayfield tab on her VISA. “And by the next year’s Sterlings, we’d paid her back.” 

There’s a showbiz gene in Judy’s makeup. In her ‘60s she took up tap-dancing, along with her friend Betty Grudnizki; they tried Taiko drumming. For multiple summers Judy was even a fellow Fringe reviewer, for Global. I’d see her in the Fringe press room, or previewing shows with Betty at the Saskatoon Fringe. They’d make a road trip of it, and brought a startling array of fancy snacks and booze, laid out like a buffet in their hotel room. Back in Edmonton, before each TV hit Judy would change — upgrade only her top since they only shot from the waist up. Which made her, I guess, an early precursor of the Zoom meet-up.

Judy adored her granddaughters; we all knew that. And there were many strands to her life beyond theatre, as I keep discovering. In the swinging ’60s she was a Wardair flight attendant on the London route in the halcyon days when air travel was still exciting. She was accepted to the National Theatre School, but didn’t go when she fell in love with someone in Edmonton. She loved Hawaii… .There are many secret (to me) chapters folded into the Judy life origami. “She loved it, she really loved it, and she had a passion for keeping it going,” says Haslam of Judy’s attachment to the theatre. “She was fun. She was curious.”

Judy was passionately devoted to the principle that “the arts should be celebrated, upheld whatever it takes,” says Connor. “She had a deep love of artists. She was committed to that.” 

Hold that thought, and pay it forward.  

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Negotiating a route through the Deaf and hearing worlds: Chris Dodd’s Deafy, at the Citadel

Posted on January 26, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Chris Dodd, creator and star of Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The production that opens tonight at the Citadel is in its own special way a groundbreaker. For the first time in its 58-season history a play by a Deaf playwright will occupy a stage at the glass-and-brick playhouse downtown.

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That play is Chris Dodd’s Deafy. And in his funny, moving solo tragi-comedy, the playwright himself stars as Nathan Jesper, a Deaf public speaker who lives in three languages (spoken English, sign language, and captioning), in a world fraught with absurdities, and obstacles large and small. Deafy invites us into that world, and Nathan’s quest to belong. 

12thnight last connected with Dodd and his longtime director Ashley Wright about Deafy on the eve of its run at the 2021 Fringe. Have a peek at that piece here.

There are many firsts in Dodd’s career. He was the first Deaf student at Vic, Edmonton’s arts high school; he was the U of A’s first Deaf drama grad in 1998. He’s the founder and artistic director of SOUND OFF, the immensely influential seven-year-old national festival dedicated to the Deaf performing arts. Deafy, which made waves nationally at the 2019 edition of Toronto’s curated SummerWorks Festival, was the first play by a Deaf playwright to be pubished by Playwright Canada Press. The list goes on.  

And now, Deafy is at the Citadel, in the Highwire Series designed to enhance the profile and fortunes of indie artists and companies. We caught up with the exuberant theatre artist this past week to get an update on his work, and on Deafy. 

Chris Dodd, creator and star of Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Nathan is so funny, so acerbic about the obstacles put in the way of a sense of belonging, to either the Deaf or hearing worlds. Can theatre embrace both? “Deafy is very much a play for both hearing and Deaf people. Everyone can equally participate … as it incorporates the spoken word, ASL, and captions. We’ve carefully crafted it in a way that ensures both groups can appreciate it equally. This aligns with the struggles of the play’s protagonist Nathan Jesper as he navigates his intricate existence between the hearing and Deaf worlds. Deaf audiences will identify with Nathan and his journey and hearing audiences will come away with a new appreciation of what it is like to be Deaf.”

Did you become a playwright because you didn’t find plays that reflected your experience? “I love writing plays that are accessible for all audiences. I really want my own work, along with the work of other Deaf artists, to reach wider audiences, one of the catalysts of founding SOUND OFF. Really, Deaf writers need to be the authors of their own stories. It is rather unfortunate that many tales that make it to mainstream theatre featuring Deaf themes or Deaf characters, such as Tribes or Children of a Lesser God, are written by hearing writers. So when we write our own stories, we are taking control of our own narrative….” 

What are you working on at the moment? “I have a commission from a local company, as well as an ongoing project to help write a collective work featuring Deaf youth, a new version of a Young Audiences play Alicia and the Machine, with support from Roseneath Theatre. Plus I was selected by the Citadel to be one of four local writers for their Playwrights Lab.   

Now that live theatre has resumed, will it jettison online platforms? “We’re still living in the age of digital performance and I don’t see that changing any time soon. The pandemic has really shaped howe we interact with the theatre we’ve usually gone to see live…. Even with most basic accessibility through automatic captioning over Zoom, this has opened a whole range of ways to participate that weren’t previous available for individuals like myself.”

Chris Dodd, creator and star of Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

COVID cancelled exciting destinations for Deafy (including the 2020 Edinburgh Fringe, an Ontario tour and Toronto dates). Are there new plans for Deafy going forward? “After the Citadel we have an invitation to the IMPACT Festival at MT Space in Kitchener in the fall, then possibly a festival in Australia. We aim to be touring this show in the next few years in different cities across Canada, and we’re already in discussions with a number of companies.”

What’s happening with SOUND OFF this year? “Our seventh annual festival returns to the Arts Barns this year, March 28 to April 2. We’re continuing with our hybrid format … both live and online shows and events. We have a huge line-up for this year, which will feature two new dance performances in separate venues (La Cité francophone and the new Good Women Dance studio). We’ll also continue our partnership with Rapid Fire Theatre, and will bring back our popular Theatresports show adapted to both Deaf and hearing improvisers. All this plus staged readings, workshops, panels, talk-backs, and more!” 

Deafy runs at the Citadel the Citadel through Feb. 12. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

  

    

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Fresh Hell: in Conni Massing’s new play an unusual case of female bonding. A review.

Posted on January 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Sydney Williams and Kate Newby in Fresh Hell, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You’ll never guess who Dorothy Parker ran into the other day. On a stage. In Edmonton.  

Of all the historical figures that you might reasonably expect the New York wit, poet, satirist to conjure at a moment of extremity, Joan of Arc is pretty much off the chart of official possibilities. But in the particular limbo imagined by Conni Massing’s new play Fresh Hell, premiering at Shadow Theatre, Dorothy somehow summons Joan, the inspirational heroine of the Hundred Years War, to Manhattan 1923 from a battlefield in 1429.

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Both are in that hitherto unexplored liminal space where 20th century Central Park and the 15th century French countryside meet. And for Tracy Carroll’s production, designer Daniel vanHeyst has figured out how to create a shimmering timeless moonlit space with a glinting silvery New York skyline cutout and the kind of ethereal foliage you might dream if you dreamed in pewter hues and were constructing a mental tapestry.  

Both women are hovering between life and death, on a time-out in their respective bios. Joan arrives onstage, dramatically, with a banner and an enemy arrow in one shoulder. Dorothy has just slit her wrists. Which makes them blood sisters, I guess. “I admit you were on my mind,” says Dorothy. “Stop praying; you’re making me nervous.”

Even in the world of unlikely encounters of which theatre is inordinately fond — where nuns and gangsters get stuck in elevators together, tykes and octogenarians meet on park benches, and Samuel Beckett and Shakespeare hang out — Fresh Hell is boldly out there. And Massing, a witty writer with an ear tuned to Parker-type wisecracks, has to work, possibly a bit too hard, to be playful about an improbability that’s so obvious, a contrast set forth in such primary strokes.  

In the terms of Fresh Hell (a title spun from Parker’s famously all-purpose “what fresh hell is this?”), why on earth would Joan of Arc be a muse for Dorothy Parker? Joan is on a short break from her divinely appointed job freeing France from the English. Dorothy is suicidal because she’s up against a deadline for a magazine piece on saints and martyrs. Even in New York publishing circles this seems an extreme reaction to deadline pressure, but hey, we don’t judge. Or she’s wearied by her own “obligation to be facetious”? Or “I can’t think of a reason not to”?

Joan, needless to say, is not impressed. “You are taking your own life?” she says, shocked at this egregious violation of the Church party line on mortal sin. “Who better?” is Dorothy’s rejoinder. 

Fresh Hell aims to be both funny and touching about this exotic and wildly unexpected case of female bonding. And it often is. But I do wonder if Carroll’s production might have been better off to give itself over more fully to the comic possibilities of the mis-match. The play belongs, after all, to Dorothy Parker and her case of “the glums”; and the show might unspool that fun a bit more en route to its ending.

Kate Newby as Dorothy Parker in Fresh Hell, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

In a performance that captures the sense of a quick wit getting frayed at the edges, Kate Newby has a Dorothy voice with a patina of Upper West Side cocktails and smoke. She nails a world-weariness that is a combination of existential ennui, puzzlement, and a certain self-mockery (in 1923, after all, she has experience as a reviewer). And one of the delights of Newby’s performance is the way Dorothy, even in melancholy self-lacerating mode, seems to be unstudiedly quick-witted.   

Sydney Williams, a newcomer to keep watching, is Joan, resilient, girded with certitudes, and surprised, but not that surprised,to find herself in a world she doesn’t understand. That’s 15th century France for you, incomprehensible even to its inhabitants. In Williams’ performance, Joan is always looking upwards towards her heavenly guides and employers, just like Tevye 500 years later (this is the first and only time Joan and Tevye will ever be mentioned in one sentence, and I’m already regretting it). 

Dorothy turns out sparkling short stories, memorable free-floating witticisms, poems that actually rhyme, but she dismisses them all. She has writer’s block where, in her mind, it really counts: the creation of a great American novel à la Hemingway or Fitzgerald has eluded her. She feels sure at some visceral level that the novel is her mission (and Joan is sympathetic at least to that; Joan is big on missions). “The fear of writing badly” is paralyzing.  

Sydney Williams and Kate Newby in Fresh Hell, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The idea of a woman caught in the cogs of the male machine is there, of course, in both stories, though it seems a little too obvious to be really play-able. For Dorothy the attraction of such a hard-core muse is at least partially Joan’s certainty about her career choice, and her Voices. Dorothy could use a few of those. “My Voice has abandoned me,” she declares of her failure as a novelist. “I’m stuck, empty-handed.” And in the play’s other two scenes, one set in 1932 and in Act II 1964, that sense of failure weighs down on her. “I feel stupid and sad and washed up.” Newby seems to have physically aged at intermission.

In the last scene of the play, Dorothy is at Broadway and 76th in 1964, and Joan is in a Burgundian prison in 1431, faced with a no-win choice: renounce her beliefs and spend the rest of her life there, or refuse to recant and get burned at the stake. She’s bereft to find that her sustaining Voices have abandoned her, and she’s suddenly confronted by the vision of all she will miss if she goes up in flames at 19, having failed, she thinks, to achieve her divine purpose of freeing France. 

As a modern person Dorothy can offer the historical long view; France will soon be its own country anyhow (now “it’s almost unbearably French” ). And Joan will have a legacy: “you have no idea how many lives you will touch.” Though unpractised at consolation, Dorothy tries to offer some personal solace too. Sex? Well, there’s no denying that’s exciting (Joan responds with a blank look). But love? marriage” Over-rated, says Dot, you might not have liked them. It’s Joan’s moment to say hey Dot, lighten up; novels aren’t everything, short stories are worthy too. Not gonna happen.

There’s fun to be had in Fresh Hell‘s cross-century juxtaposition of certainty and skepticism, the unequal weight of inspiration and job satisfaction, and the behind-the-scenes look at the frustrations of a famous writer’s life. But there’s a more vivid comedy waiting to bust out of this one.

REVIEW

Fresh Hell

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Conni Massing

Directed by: Tracy Carroll

Starring: Kate Newby and Sydney Williams

Where: Varscona Theatre

Running: through Feb. 5

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

 

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Unsung: Tales From The Front Line, real-life stories from health care workers in a new ‘performance installation’

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Heather Inglis and Darrin Hagen, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Ben Franchuk, supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There are dramatic schisms in history that divide our lives into the Before and the After. 9-11 was one. The pandemic is another, says Heather Inglis. “It’s the defining moment of our lifetime.”

“Something significant happened and it changed our lives forever. And of us have been touched by it.”

That, says the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre artistic producer, is the inspiration of Unsung: Tales From The Front Line, the ‘performance installation’ created by Inglis and actor/ playwright/ memoirist/ queer historian Darrin Hagen. It opens Friday at the Gateway Theatre.

“Last spring, in this political climate,” says Inglis, it felt like the contributions of health care workers hadn’t been honoured — people who had risked their lives for months and months, the incredible trauma of that.… Many people had died, and there’d been no moment to mark what had happened: no AIDS Quilt, no Vietnam war memorial.” 

There are reasons to sidle around the subject of COVID in theatre, of course, not least because of the familiar weight of existential dread and anxiety we’ve pocketed. “‘O gawd, please gawd, don’t let it be about COVID’ … both of us had heard that mantra over and over,” says Hagen. And yet, “we kept coming back to the idea of COVID as our defining moment…. How do you not make art about that? WTF are we supposed to be doing as artists if we’re not making art about that?” 

“Our goal,” says Inglis , “was to create a space to process what people had given and what they’d lost.” And for this, Workshop West’s new Gateway was ideal for brokering interaction between people beyond the stage — an Inglis specialty, witness such immersive theatre experiences as The Elevator Project, Flight,  Anxiety, all in unconventional spaces.

In interviews of anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours Inglis and Hagen gathered the stories of seven health care workers, from a variety of professions, demographics, genders, socio-cultural backgrounds. And Hagen created monologues using their words. For the safety (of jobs and patient information) their stories are all anonymous. In Unsung, which you visit like a gallery, moving around, choosing the order of your five-minute connections, you’ll meet them up close, telling their stories in their own words — as performed by seven actors. An ER doctor, an ICU nurse and an ICU doctor, a hospital manager, a paramedic, a health aide worker in a seniors complex among them: “they were in the jaws of the beast, and their experiences were radically different.”  

“It’s the difference between politicians talking about a war, and actually hearing from someone in the trenches,” as Inglis describes verbatim theatre, a form in which she and Hagen are experienced practitioners. By using their real words, verbatim theatre “allows people to speak the way they speak,” without the intermediary of characters and dialogue. 

In structure Unsung echoes Viscosity, a 2018 Theatre Yes initiative in which Inglis and her team gathered the first-hand stories of oil patch workers, and created monologues using their own words, performed by actors. I arrived at the show figuring I knew about oil workers and how they would think. And my preconceptions were pretty much exploded by the variety in what I encountered.   

“That’s one of the things theatre offers us,” says Inglis, “the opportunity to explore nuance and complexity in a way that can’t (exist) on social media platforms … to contemplate things from different perspectives and to offer voices to people that see things in a way most of us don’t.” 

Curating verbatim text is something of a Hagen specialty, too (“I am a writer created by the AIDS epidemic”), not only in The Queer History Project, but in his plays too. Witch Hunt at the Strand, for example, is built on real court transcripts in its exploration of a sorry chapter in Edmonton queer history. The Empress and the Prime Minister uses Trudeau speeches and the real words of gay activist ted northe to imagine a 1969  encounter that changed Canadian law. Even in a roistering Guys in Disguise entertainment like BitchSlap! Hagen was at pains to use real words from Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. “There’s something about that kind of authenticity,” he says.

“My mind has been blown,” he says of interviewing people for Unsung. “We’ve heard things that are so much deeper, darker, more intimate, more personal than anything the media has portrayed…. I don’t like the way the media dumbs everything down.” Not only is it repetitive and lazy, it hands the human narrative over to politicians. Inglis adds, “it’s a  cautionary tale, warning us against considering that all blocks of people all think the same.” 

“I felt so lucky,” says Hagen of his experience listening to real-life stories from people. “While doctors were out there saving lives I spent the pandemic in my pjs composing music and writing a play, and learning to use Garage Band. I was so insulated.”

As health care professionals began to understand, and see first-hand, what was happening, “some of them said they re-wrote their wills…. They left for work knowing they might not come back. That’s war!” Or they lived in isolation from their families, in the basement. Many spoke to the emotional moment of The Vaccine, says Hagen, “the relief of it, of knowing they could be around their families again.”

The interviews happened this past October and November, and reflect the world events of that time, too. “It’s really current,!” says Inglis. “Theatre in this (verbatim) form lends itself to that; documentary theatre can be very immediate.” There was a lots to work with. The biggest challenge was parting with “brilliant dramatic material” in the interests of fashioning a workable, performable theatre experience. Will Unsung have a future as a series? a podcast? a book? Inglis and Hagen are considering. “It’s tempting and maybe unavoidable,” says the latter.

“I’m terrified for a world where we don’t have universal health care,” says Inglis. “It’s being undermined in Alberta now…. I’m angered that people who have chosen radical compassion have been derided, punished, their waged and conditions degraded, people who wanted to help people.…”

The idea of Unsung  is “to bring people into a world the aren’t familiar with,” as Inglis puts it, “and let them move around in it.” Arrive any time between 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., and choose your own path through the human gallery.

PREVIEW

Unsung: Tales From The Front Line

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Created by: Heather Inglis and Darrin Hagen

Where: The Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Friday through Feb. 12

Tickets: workshopwest.org

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Another F!*#@$G Festival! It’s at Theatre Network and the headliner is the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes

Posted on January 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Little Willy photo supplied by the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Not Another F!*#@$F Festival! You say that, Edmonton, but you know you love them. Theatre Network is launching a new festival at the Roxy, of the adult contemporary multi-disciplinary stripe, Feb 7 to 12. You get to name it. And here’s the capper: the great Ronnie Burkett is back, back in a theatre town where he has a huge following. The headliner is The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, with his latest production, Little Willy, currently premiering at the Cultch in Vancouver.

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Little Willy is a raucous version of Romeo and Juliet, as performed by the cast of The Daisy Theatre. All the leading ladies of the company, much loved by audiences, are contenders for the coveted role, including burlesque star Dolly Wiggler and that most jaded of divas Esmé Massingill. Audience faves Schnitzel and Mrs. Edna Rural, those noted Shakespeareans, are in the show as well. And as you’ll suspect from the title, the Bard himself will venture onto the marionette stage — if he dares. 

Ronnie Burkett

Theatre Network and Burkett have a history together that goes back to 1990, and Awful Manors, an startlingly intricate large-cast Gothic mystery thriller. And the distinguished, much awarded, highly original playwright, actor, artisan, designer, marionettist extraordinaire has been back at the Roxy with many other of his shows. 

Other productions and performances in the new festival will be announced in the coming weeks, says Theatre Network. Meanwhile Little Willy tickets are available at theatrenetwork.ca/events/littlewilly. And you can submit your brilliant idea for naming Another F!*#@$G Festival  either online at theatrenetwork.ca or in person at the Roxy. There’s a cool prize: a Theatre Network 49th season flex pass. 

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I feel the earth move under my feet … Enough gets its Canadian premiere at Northern Light Theatre

Posted on January 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Linda Grass and Kristin Johnston in Enough, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“In every season there’s one show that scares me,” says Trevor Schmidt. “One show that challenges me as a director or designer. And this is the one.”

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Northern Light Theatre’s artistic director is talking about Enough, the intricate two-hander by Scottish playwright Stef Smith that gets its Canadian premiere Friday in the Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barn. “Really difficult!” he says cheerfully. 

Enough is more than enough, theatrically speaking, as Schmidt explains. “It’s structurally unique. There’s first-person narrative, third-person narrative; there’s (dramatized) scene work, there are monologues, there’s movement, there’s repetitive beat poetry stuff, poetic imagery, huge themes, surrealism…. And it all switches on a dime!”

Sometimes one character addresses the audience personally; sometimes one character narrates. Sometimes they have naturalistic scenes together, with dialogue. “The performers have to be super-adept…. It’s a giant jigsaw puzzle.”

So what is this play with an enigmatic title and “a weird omniscience” that loops characters from the climax back to the beginning to fill in the blanks ? Air travel, infinitely aggravating, unreliable, anxious-making as it is in this part of the century, is the backdrop to Enough. In the play, a prize-winner at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe, we meet two flight attendants, long-time friends, who preside professionally, with calm, smiling reassurance, over a contained world 30,000 above the ground. Welcome aboard.

Safety demonstrations abut “fanciful flights of imagination.” And a kind of existential dread has come to haunt two capable women — one married with kids, the other single in an unhealthy relationship. Something ominous is happening five miles below them, they sense. As Schmidt describes, “something on the earth is shifting, changing; they feel it, a kind of groaning under the earth. Something is coming and they don’t know what it is. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety, stress, disaster, impending doom….One reaches into her purse and her purse is filled with sand.”

Enough follows the solo horror show Squeamish in a three-production Northern Light season where all the roles are for women (the finale in April is the one-woman A Hundred Words For Snow, starring Dayna Lea Hoffman). And Schmidt thinks that “so much of this play, though written before #MeToo, is about womanhood,” and society’s impossible demands on women to be “beautiful, confident, sexy, wives, mothers…. How can you possibly be all of these?” 

Schmidt muses on the questions of the play, filtered through its characters. Why do women have to be jealous of each other? the characters come to wonder. “Why do people think that’s the only emotion we can have? I’m not jealous. I’ve made choices that are different than yours. I don’t want your life….”  

“At its core Enough is a play about female friendship, about women supporting each other,” Schmidt says. “We don’t see plays about platonic love very often…. I want to celebrate my female friendships.”

Speaking of which, for Enough Schmidt has paired two favourite actors with whom he’s frequently collaborated: Kristin Johnston and Linda Grass. “I am very fortunate! I get to choose who I work with,” says Schmidt. “Both actors are extremely funny in real life. Both are kind; both have the same kind of work ethic and come really prepared; both are flexible to direct.” Schmidt was sure they’d enjoy working together. “I want us to be happy,” he says of his directorial mantra. We’re not getting enough money to not have fun!”

The complications of the play have required a particularly intense kind of collaboration, says Schmidt. Movement designer is Ainsley Hillyard of Good Women Dance (and soon to be artistic director of Brian Webb Dance Company — “so kind, so creative about articulating movement in a way actors are comfortable to pick up.” She’s been part of the  production from day 1, he reports. So has sound designer Dave Clarke ,  “so joyous so clever. There’s always something witty about his designs.”  

There contributions aren’t mere interesting add-ons, says Schmidt. “For this one you actually need all these elements, or you don’t have the magic…. I think it’s going to something! I think it’s going to be exceptional.”

PREVIEW

Enough

Theatre: Northern Light

Written by: Stef Smith

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Linda Grass, Kristin Johnston

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

Running: Jan. 20 to Feb. 4

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

   

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