The dark pathways to coming-of-age: Boy Trouble at Fringe Theatre, a review

Posted on May 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Maxwell Hanic and Romar Dungo in Boy Trouble, Amoris Projects. Photo by Mat Simpson

Boy Trouble, Amoris Project. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The theatre is dim, lit with a barrage of come-hither text messages: “send a vid”, “wyd”, “join me and a couple buds”, “your cute”, “no pic no chat” “my truck?”.

When the lights come up, you can make out a playground: a sort of treehouse, stylized trees, a bench (set and lighting, both eloquent, by Even Gilchrist). 

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The queer teenage characters of Mac Brock’s explosively performed Boy Trouble ricochet through the liminal space between these axes — the portal between childhood friendship and a shadowy “adult” world of mysterious connections. Both are underscored, in different ways, by secrecy.

Brock’s new play, premiering in Fringe Theatre’s Spotlight Series in a production directed by the playwright, explores the intricacies and ambiguities of coming-of-age. Save the word “bittersweet,” oft slathered on such stories, for some other play. Here it’s a veritable minefield for characters discovering their sexual identity in a world that’s both small and hostile (like school and family), and big and available (like Grindr and the internet).

It’s 2015. And at 16 boyhood friends Kay (Maxwell Hanic) and Anthony (Romar Dungo) are gay, but at different angles. The former, who has white affluence and a mother with a girlfriend on his side, hasn’t fully opened the closet door, just in case. The latter, who has found himself gay friends his own age, is from a struggling immigrant Filipino family with conservative Catholic expectations.       

Keepers of each other’s secrets, allies against bullying, the friends have fallen out. And in the course of the six-year span of Boy Trouble, a completely rewritten version of Brock’s 2019 play, we find out why.

In Brock’s production, two compelling, physically dexterous actors don’t just occupy the stage. They clamour over it at top speed, swing through it, tumble off and under it. They’re in perpetual motion, physically restless even when they (barely) stop to text, upside down right side up  — a test of sturdiness for Gilchrist’s evidently hurricane-proof playground design. They lob cellphones as they go in a way that will make you queasy. The video design by Tori Morrison and Judah Truong is a simultaneous participant.

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

As kids, the performances reveal, Kay and Anthony’s friendship is a perpetual motion game of tag, a choreography of jostling playful movement that will leave you just a bit breathless. And as teenagers this hyperactivity translates, in narrative terms, into a questing for the equilibrium and footing that are heartbreakingly elusive. Moving targets are harder to impale, after all. Rare moments of stillness are genuinely disturbing  in Brock’s production.

The friends have been bonded by secrecy. In the play’s present, secrecy and the threat of exposure, with the attendant shame, have driven a wedge between former allies. What was playful and teasing has an edge, sometimes almost violent sometimes almost sexual. The fight and intimacy direction, a continuity in this play, are by Sam Jeffery.

Coming-of-age has made Kay furtive and cautious, as Hanna’s wonderfully nervy performance charts. Dungo, a discovery for Edmonton theatre, brings a certain sweet boyish earnestness to Anthony that’s turned to unease at the edges. You believe both characters: Kay who’d been a dispenser of advice, and Anthony, who’s taken on that self-assignment. And you really want these queer kids to find some sort of happiness and repose to go with their smiles.

Brock is a sharp-eared writer of staccato dialogue that shoots out in overlapping fragments and shards. In the hands of the actors the text feels convincingly alive — tentative, quickly withdrawn, amended, re-introduced. And the situation feels fraught, twitchy, momentous (which as the news reminds us is by no means an over-reaction). Boy Trouble plants a flag on the tough terrain where the going should be easier than it is, and the path of self-discovery is rockier than ever.

REVIEW

Boy Trouble

Theatre: Amoris Projects

Written and directed by: Mac Brock

Starring: Maxwell Hanic and Romar Dungo

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

Running: through May 27

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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Spinning an urban story on wheels: Thou Art Here opens its season with Cycle

Posted on May 18, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew Ritchie, Cycle, Thou Art Here Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Andrew Ritchie has spent the last year spinning his wheels.

He’s been up on his bike writing the solo play that shares a lane with an audience this weekend for the first time. Cycle, which launches the 2023 Thou Art Here season, is up on its wheels, literally, for a two-night workshop production in Studio B at Fringe headquarters. And Ritchie will be on his bicycle for the duration.

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He’s playing “versions of myself and other characters,” he says. And he’s been experimenting: “spin classes for the first time, intense! Trying a fat tire bike, interviews with people around Edmonton about their bike experiences, a lot of reading about bike history, studying urban design….”

Thou Art Here’s co-founder (with Neil Kuefler) and artistic director, Ritchie has a history with urban bicycling that weaves through his high school years, university, after university. It was his mode of transportation in Edmonton, Regina, and Toronto where he got a master’s degree in directing and theatre creation at York University. His experiences as a bicycle food courier in Toronto were, he says, one of the vivid inspirations for Cycle. “As someone who couldn’t afford a car for a long time, I saw pretty quickly how we prioritize (that) one way to move around a city, how we design our roads, our neighbourhoods….”

Cycle explores the links between bicycling and some of the hot urban issues of our time. “There’s been a shift in thinking in North American cities, due to increasing population, inflation, the climate crisis catastrophe,” says Ritchie. “It’s about how do we design our cities to be more people-focused and less car-focused.”

“There’s a reason Whyte Avenue is the way it is, the density of businesses and activities. And there’s a reason there isn’t a Whyte Avenue in Windermere right now.”

If you’ve casually dropped “bike lanes” into dinner conversation lately, you know what it’s like to create a provocation. Ritchie, who does have a car (and drives in the city and loves road trips), points out that there’s frustration about traffic, too. “People say bike lanes take over their parking or driving lanes. But for every person walking or biking, there’s one less car on the street. And it’s a huge difference…. There are more people biking in Edmonton since bike lanes were introduced. Way more.”

Let’s face it, you had to be a risk-taker extraordinaire to be a cyclist in the Edmonton traffic of yore. “As we take on the infrastructure to make it safer, it’s more likely that families, the elderly, e-bikes for people with different mobility levels, are going to be out and about.”

And Ritchie doesn’t buy the winter argument that Edmonton weather should negate civic spending on bike lanes. “There are tons of things we use for different seasons — ice rinks, outdoor swimming pools that are well loved and open for a couple of months in the two months in the summer…. We’re a winter city. I think the possibilities exist if you open your mind to it.”

Cycle is the start of a new identity and mission for Thou Art Here, a 12-year-old theatre collective that took Shakespeare to the people wherever they were … rarely in conventional theatre spaces. The season is comprised of all new Canadian work, in-progress for full productions to follow.

Performed atop a bicycle along with some members of the audience also on bikes, Cycle does reference the old Thou Art Here, though, since it is, in its own way, site-specific. Ritchie, along with director Kristi Hansen and choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, “have been exploring all the kinds of movement I can do on a bicycle.”

Besides, you can’t help thinking that if there had been bike lanes between Verona and Mantua, that whole misunderstanding in the Capulets’ tomb could have been averted. And Romeo and Juliet would be alive today.

PREVIEW

Cycle

Theatre: Thou Art Here

Written by: Andrew Ritchie

Directed by: Kristi Hansen

Choreographed by: Ainsley Hillyard

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

Running: Friday and Saturday

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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Anahita’s Republic: a thriller takes us into the world of Iran and the struggle for women’s rights

Posted on May 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The thriller that gets its Alberta premiere Friday at the Backstage Theatre takes us to a tense world where “freedom” reverberates at a frequency very different from our own. The disparity between its application to men and to women is dramatic. And so is the separation of public and private life.

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Welcome to Iran. AuTash Productions, a new indie theatre based here and named for the Farsi word for “fire,” takes us there.

The title character of Anahita’s Republic is a wealthy and accomplished woman of business who refuses to wear the hijab. She decides to build her own republic, “where she can dress how she wants, speak how she wants, and have all the liberties she’s always dreamed of,” as playwright Hengameh E. Rice puts it.  “And she manipulates her brother to do things for her” out in the world — because as a man he can.

Hengameh E. Rice is actually a writing duo: one is Iranian-born, the other from Edmonton. And their preference, in these complicated times, is for the collective designation. “It’s female-focused,” says the Iranian partner, “to show the impact the regime has had on Iranian women…. But it’s not a political play; it’s a very human play.”

There is heightened global awareness of the fight for women’s rights in Iran — witness the protests world-wide that attended the terrible fate of 22-year-old Mahsa Amina in 2022 at the hands of the Iranian morality police for wearing her hijab improperly. But the struggle goes back generations.

“I’ve lived here most of my life,” says the Iranian half of Hengameh E. Rice, who emigrated to Edmonton with her family in 1978. Her mom got accepted to do a PhD in economics at the U of A, just before the Islamic revolution of 1979 that made the hijab mandatory. “I’ve kept my Iranian identity separate from my Edmonton/Canadian identity,” she says. It’s never been easy to explain to people “just how defiant and brave Iranian women are.”

A turning point for her was the 2009 election, 30 years after the revolution. There was widespread hope of Iranians for a moderate candidate and a new age of civil liberty, “a regime to free Iran from its isolationism, and give women more rights.”

She went back to Iran to vote, “and there was dancing in the streets…. Then all hell broke loose the next day as the results came back and it became clear the election had been rigged by ultra-conservative forces. “People demonstrated, millions protested in Azadi Square (ironically, it translates as “Freedom Square”) in Tehran. “We were at the university and we couldn’t leave.” A week later, the day she and her mother finally left, Neda Agha Soltan was killed, a 26-year-old just going to visit a friend. “Those memories haunted me for a long time.”

Anahita’s Republic was born in that haunting. “I had a story in my head.” And every visit back to Iran reinforced her commitment to telling it. “I had to wear a hijab; as a woman in that world I was constantly told that I had to be very careful how I acted…. No man gets harassed in that way.”

She wasn’t a playwright, but her Hengameh E. Rice (and real-life) partner, a veteran writer who’d worked at ACCESS TV, was. They met at Walterdale. And she “just got the theatre bug.”

The Edmonton half of the pair — the Rice half — says the play started with “a long one-person monologue, with six or more characters all played by one person…. We crunched it together.” Now the play has four characters, two men and two women, including Anahita and her brother Cyrus. “And the balance of power shifts constantly,” in ways that reflect “gender, generational, and class conflict.”   

They acquired the services of the distinguished Canadian director/dramaturge/ actor Brian Dooley, who’s headed the Citadel’s new play development program and became the artistic director of L’UniThéâtre for a time (he’s now Montreal-based). He organized the first workshop of the play, and encouraged them to continue.

“They were passionate. And dogged!” Dooley says of the play’s history that includes a workshop at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, the Stratford Festival 2022 writers’ retreat, and a Toronto production from Bustle & Beast directed by Brenley Charkow. When Hengameh E. Rice asked him to direct the production of Anahita’s Republic that Edmonton will see, his first reaction was “you do know I’m an old white guy, right?”

He’s experienced Iran in person, twice. In 2010 he was at Fajr, Iran’s venerable international theatre festival (where Nassim Soleimanpour, creator of White Rabbit Red Rabbit, was his interpreter). Later he led mask workshops for men and women, an all-ages crowd, in Iran. “Nobody was wearing hijabs,” he says. “The hijab as metaphor for the desire for freedom … that interested me about the world of the play.”

He found the the premise on which Anahita’s Republic is built, the gap between public and private lives in Iran, real and fascinating. “The secrecy, the deceit…. It’s what they have to do to survive, and get things done.” The covert smuggling operation, the family business that Anahita runs, is “absolutely real,” he says. “The interaction between female and male characters, the way they share status, and exchange it in order to move forward….”

“The big question,” says Hengameh E. Rice, “is who do you trust?” And after all, that’s a question, as Dooley adds, “that resonates beyond the world of the play, in this age of disinformation, AI, surveillance….”

The action of the play, and the explosive question of trust, is triggered when a woman wearing a chador comes to the gate of Anahita’s headquarters, bearing a dangerous secret. Dooley calls it “a suspenseful drama.” Hengameh E. Rice calls it “a very entertaining play.”

“When you say you’re going to Iran, people always say ‘isn’t that dangerous?’,” says the playwright as Dooley nods. But there’s so much more to it, as they both point out: the history, the ancient culture, “the bravery of the people, their warmth, their honesty.” Persian hospitality is storied, and in the absence of bars and the attendant aspects of Western culture, theatre has a crucial importance. “It’s such an old country, and the people are fascinating.”

“In Anahita, you see a woman fighting for change in her country,” says the playwright. “She’s not leaving her country; she’s fighting to live in her country…. And women are the engine of change,” she says, pointing to the Woman Life Freedom movement. “It’s run by the younger generation, the 20- 25- 30-year-olds. This regime is all they’ve ever known. And they’ve had had enough!”

“It’s very important to tell the story. The news will only tell you so much….”

PREVIEW

Anahita’s Republic

Theatre: AuTash Productions

Written by: Hengameh E. Rice

Directed by: Brian Dooley

Starring: Roya Yazdanmehr, Jennie George, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri, Michael Peng

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

Running: Friday through June 4

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

Prison Dancer The Musical

Theatre: Citadel and Prison Dancer Inc.

Created by: Romeo Candido and Carmen De Jesus

Directed by: Nina Lee Aquino

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

Running: through May 28

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

Boy Trouble

Theatre: Amoris Projects

Written and directed by: Mac Brock

Starring: Maxwell Hanic and Romar Dungo

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

Running: May 16 to 27

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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

Posted on May 9, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

FLOP!

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

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

Where: Rapid Fire Exchange, 10437 83 Ave.

Running: May 18 to 28

Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com 

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

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

playwright Collin Doyle

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

Collider Festival 2023

Theatre: Citadel

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

Tickets and full schedule: citadeltheatre.com.

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An all-star weekend of choices in Edmonton theatre

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Penelopiad, Walterdale Theatre. Photo: Henderson Images

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

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

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

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW

10 Funerals

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Darrin Hagen

Directed by: John Hudson

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

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through May 14

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes

Theatre: Theatre Network at the Roxy

Written by: Hannah Moscovitch

Directed by: Marianne Copithorne

Starring: Gianna Vacirca, John Ullyatt

Running: through May 14

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

 

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