SOUND OFF, the groundbreaking Deaf theatre fest, dances back for a seventh annual edition

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Connor Yuzwenko-Martin in Carbon Movements, SOUND OFF Festival of Deaf Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Across the country, and the continent, there isn’t anything quite like the groundbreaker of a festival, born in this fair theatre town, that’s back for a seventh annual edition Tuesday.

SOUND OFF, Canada’s unique and influential national festival dedicated to Deaf performing arts, artists and their stories, gathers artists and companies from across the country, this year B.C. to Nova Scotia. And, in a model of accessibility, SOUND OFF welcomes both Deaf and hearing audiences to its seven mainstage performances, multiple workshops, staged readings, and panel discussions.

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The festival is the brainchild of multi-faceted Edmonton theatre artist Chris Dodd, who was the U of A’s first Deaf drama grad in 1998. We caught up with SOUND OFF’s engaging founder and artistic director, a playwright/ actor/ director/ activist/ mentor (Citadel audiences recently saw his dark and enlightening solo comedy Deafy), to find out more about the multidisciplinary, multilingual (ASL and English) six-day festivities.

This year’s “hybrid” edition of SOUND OFF includes both live in-person performances and online content, in shows, workshops, staged readings, panel discussions, talkbacks. There’s a striking variety of theatrical forms, from clowning to docu-drama, puppetry to improv to sketch comedy, in the line-up and a variety too of collaborations between Deaf and hearing artists. Has a theme emerged for 2023?

“It’s been an interesting mix of submissions for this festival…. last year we had a special focus on artists from Quebec, and we hosted our first performance in LSQ (the sign language of the Deaf in Quebec). This year, our focus is on dance. And we have two external venues for the first time, occupied by two different hearing and Deaf dance collaborations, Carbon Movements (at Mile Zero Dance) and When The Walls Come Down (at La Cité francophone).

As well we have another Deaf/hearing dance collaboration (Montreal-based) roots2reach, to lead a dance discussion workshop (Fringe Theatre’s Studio Theatre). All this, plus we have a panel with our Deaf and hearing artists to discuss their experiences and how they make art together as artists from different backgrounds.”

With its use of “vibrotactile elements” and its “tactile score,” Carbon Movements sounds like a wildly innovative dance experiment, starring Deaf artist Connor Yuzwenko-Martin of the collective The Invisible Practice (After Faust) for Deaf and hearing audiences. How does it work?

“Essentially we’ve taken the traditional dance performance and it on its head by removing the music and instead making a sensory experience that happens through vibration and the visual elements of the production. … It has a vibrotactile score created for us by Jim Ruxton and David Bobier of the VibraFusion Lab in Ontario… The vibration itself is channeled through a special material we selected through a painstaking elimination process; our Deaf dancer Connor Yuzwenko-Martin interacts with it. The show is the brainchild of local choreographer Ainsley Hillyard and it’s over two years in the making.”

Caroline Hebert in When The Walls Come Down, SOUND OFF Festival 2023. Photo supplied.

In When The Walls Come Down (performed live this year after an online iteration in 2022), hearing dancers join Deaf artist Caroline Hebert onstage, in a show that’s innovative in other ways (it features an animation from a five-member team of artists from Vancouver Film School). Can you explain how it works?

“It features two professional hearing dance artists from the Vancouver company Dance Novella, who have partnered with Vancouver Deaf artist Caroline Hebert. They’ve taken her personal story of struggles as a Deaf parent, and transformed it into a piece which centres on her experience and expresses it eloquently through dance.”

At This Hour, billed as “a doc-drama investigation into the causes of the Halifax explosion,” chronicles the collision of two ships in Halifax harbour in 1917, causing “the largest human made explosion before the atomic bomb.” In the production, a Deaf and a hearing cast perform simultaneously, using verbatim text to tell the story of the explosion. Is simultaneous performance something you’ve worked with before?

“I actually saw At This Hour in its original production in Halifax two years ago. By the time it was over, I knew I needed to bring it to the festival. It is a unique slice of East coast life and it focuses on a very tragic and important moment of maritime history. The show features three Deaf artists and three hearing artists, and they each interpret and complement each other. It’s a really fascinating thing to watch.”

The MaryRobin Show, SOUND OFF Festival 2023. Photo supplied.

The MaryRobin Show by and starring Elizabeth Morris and Hayley Hudson — online on demand (in ASL with English voiceover and captions ‚ is, as billed, a showcase of “comedy skits, ABC storytelling, visual vernacular, monologues, and dancing.” What’s “visual vernacular” ? “ABC storytelling”?

Visual vernacular is a specific style of Deaf performance that uses a cinema style to create the sense of watching a movie, but without the use of actual sign language. When done right, it’s an incredibly engaging and evocative way to tell a story without words. In ABC storytelling, an artists tells a story and uses all the hand shapes of the ABC alphabet, A through Z, and it’s up to the keen-eyed audience to catch them all!”

SOUND OFF’s Theatresports shows with Rapid Fire Theatre have teams of Deaf and hearing improvisers. And they’re a perennial hit with both hearing and Deaf audiences. How do they shake down?

“We try the level playing field…. We make language forbidden. This means actors can’t use spoken speech or sign language, and instead have to act out audience suggestions through their bodies alone. Even though the hearing artists from Rapid Fire are already experienced improvisors, I have always found our Deaf artists naturally excel at using their bodies for communicating…. Plus, we’re pretty damn hilarious too.”

Are more hearing people becoming aware of, and seeking out, Deaf artistry in the seven years since you started SOUND OFF?

“ASL interpretation is slowly becoming something of a norm in Edmonton, which I think is a fabulous thing. I have always said that access should be as normal as getting a drink from the bar before the show. When I first started this festival in 2017, I had to work hard to scrape together three different groups; there weren’t many Deaf artists at the time actively practising their art. Things have changed in leaps and bounds since then, and we now have a very strong community of Deaf artists who collaborate, mentor, and teach. And our community will only continue to grow from here.” 

SOUND OFF Deaf Theatre Festival 2023

Where: Backstage Theatre, Mile Zero Dance, La Cité francophone

Running: Tuesday through April 2

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

 

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How the West was won: Gender? I Hardly Know Them at Expanse Fest, a little review

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Syd Campbell and Elena Eli Belyea in Gender? I Hardly Know Them, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Nico Humby

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

As their own song goes (you’ll have to imagine the ukulele accompaniment and the cheery tone), “Alberta’s tough for prairie queers.”

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But somehow, amazingly, they haven’t let this place, harsh, marginalizing, and right-sliding as it can be, get them down. I caught up with Gender? I Hardly Know Them onstage on opening night of this year’s Expanse Fest in the new updated edition that’s been on a cross-country tour. The queer sketch comedy duo, Elena Eli Belyea and Syd Campbell (joined for the occasion by musician Miranda Martini), have an unsquelchable sense of absurdity and mischief, witness this very funny, playful, and welcoming show.

And, as you might expect from their duo name, Belyea and Campbell, charming and infinitely likeable performers with a goofball streak, have something to say about gender, its orthodoxies and its assumptions. “Gender is dead. Welcome to the funeral!” 

In one of the personal monologues about growing up Albertan that weave between the sketches and change your viewing angle, Belyea (they/she) says, “my gender is fluid. It dances around.” If every other aspect of yourself can evolve, why not that? she argues.   

And the pair have something to say — something serious, delivered with a light touch — about pronouns and what heft pronouns have in the universal self-discovery quest. Campbell auditioned theirs, on their cat Lola first, they report.

The Tiny Bear Jaws show, directed by Paul Blinov (who’s done some of the sketch writing), is a highly unusual combination of sketch comedy and reflective monologues that come at us directly. We meet a series of vivid prairie characters. The banker at Pride flogging her ‘woke’ credentials to sign people up for rainbow-coloured credit cards. Or Stan and Greg, a couple of prairie dudes who have a deeply buried subterranean attraction to each other. Belyea and Campbell imagine subtext come to life, as one admits to “fearing an actual moment of intimacy and vulnerability….” Before they go back to cracking a beer and being laconic. 

The monologues aren’t a catalogue of trauma and oppression. There are parents who really try to adjust their pronoun habits. There are hetero friends who come to the rescue in fraught moments. These are satirists at work, true, with a lot of material to work with, but there’s a warmth about them. In its way Gender? We Hardly Know Them is all about liberation, about freeing yourself to discover your own identity and letting it change, while doing six jobs and trying to find love.    

One of the many theatrical astute things about Gender? I Hardly Knew Them, as this edition demonstrates under Blinov’s direction, is the way Belyea and Campbell exit from a sketch, or wander off from a monologue. They don’t insist on being conclusive, and nailing down the lid to prove a point. In that respect, the show reminds me a bit of the ‘Talk of the Town’ short bits in The New Yorker. And that sits well in a show that’s all about not being prescriptive — either for yourself or other people.

Breathe, people, breathe.

Gender? I Hardly Know Them has two more performances at Expanse, tonight (March 25) Saturday and Saturday April 1. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

  

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Expanse Fest is back to celebrate the body in motion

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Syd Campbell and Elena Eli Belyea in Gender? I Hardly Know Them, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Nico Humby

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The 10-day movement arts festival that returns Thursday for an 19th annual edition starts with the body in motion. All bodies in motion. And then it expands.

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That’s Expanse, the nimble, elasticized (and well-named) festival of physical performance curated and presented by Azimuth Theatre. And the theme is a declaration attached to an open-ended question: “The Future Is Ours … What Are We Going To Do With It?” .

Sue Goberdhan and Morgan Yamada, co-artistic directors of Azimuth Theatre, at the season launch. Photo supplied.

Collaboration,” declares Morgan Yamada, Azimuth’s co-artistic producer (with Sue Goberdhan), of the flag under which the company flies. Experienced and emerging artists, and underrepresented  communities, “working together to achieve a common goal….” The quintessential Expanse production, she says, is “something that explores the margins, stretches expectations, celebrates new work, or work in a new phase of development.” 

Increasingly, Expanse has generated buzz amongst indie theatre creators, reports Yamada. Witness the sheer number and variety in style and voice of submissions (“we were overwhelmed by the response”) — sketch comedy to wordless puppetry,  performance theatre to aerial arts to dance.  

Opening night on the mainstage, for example, features the latest from Tiny Bear Jaws’ Gender? I Hardly Know Them, a re-vamped edition of the politically savvy, theatrically inventive, very funny queer sketch comedy duo Elena Eli Belyea and Syd Campbell. “We get to be their Edmonton stop,” says Yamada of a tour that’s just finished a run in Calgary. “We need to laugh, to be to find some joy in activism.” 

Dot by The OKO, Expanse Festival 2023. Photo supplied.

Also on the MainStage is DOT, the work of the Calgary puppetry collective The OKO (produced in collaboration with Calgary’s Festival of Animated Objects). As Yamada describes, the imaginative text-less piece “uses water, projections, reflections, geometric shapes … even wind, to tell the story of a dot, a spec on a surrealist adventure, a journey from the molecular to the galactic. It’s so wonderful.”

Azimuth’s Works in Process series is launched with two productions, each with three performances at Expanse. “We’re seeing a need for indie projects as a testing ground,” says Yamada. “So we provide the MainStage resources for artists to bring a draft to fruition.”

Creature of Habit, Sophie May Healey, Expanse Festival 2023. Photo supplied.

Creature of Habit created and performed by Sophie May Healey (currently appearing in Karen Hines’ All The Little Animals I Have Eaten at Shadow Theatre), is one. As billed it’s “a solo piece that is part clown, dark comedy, satire, and cabaret.” I

It’s “inspired by the feminine masks of Noh, Franz Kafka, and people who write articles about their internet addictions,” as the author says in their notes, it follows the fortunes of a young woman isolated in her apartment, struggling with loneliness. 

Mohamed Ahmed’s Who Shouldn’t I Be, produced by Jstbyourself, follows an oil painter who moves to a new city. Inspired by the song What Shouldn’t I Be by the English singer-songwriter Sampha, Ahmed, a musician themself, is joined by a three-person ensemble (David Meadow, Jaylin January, Joeseph Dancey onstage. “Music, a DJ onstage, very cool,” says Yamada.

“We still highlight dance and movement,” says Yamada of Expanse in its incarnations since she and Goberdhan arrived at Azimuth in 2020. “We’re trying to stretch expectations of that.” 

Fragmented Journeys by Fragmented Journey Collective/ Sandra Olarte, at Expanse Festival 2023. Photo supplied.

Molly McDermott (with guidance from Good Women Dance) has curated a trio of high-contrast dance offerings under the banner Interchange. Fragmented Journeys, interdisciplinary in inspiration, combines aerial circus arts, contemporary dance, and theatre. It was born in aerial arts, and grew, as fashioned by Philip Hackborn (writer), Deviani Andrea (dance dramaturgy) and Sandra Olarte Mendoza (director/producer). And the eight-member performance ensemble embraces Hackborn and seven aerial artists.

Where The Tide Meets The Stream is produced by Christine Ullmark in collaboration with Tia Ashley Kushniruk, who performs it. The third Interchange show fulfills the tradition that the winner of Good Women Dance’s new work award one year premieres a piece at Expanse the following year. The multi-faceted Cree dancer/ actor/ performer/ choreographer Skye Demas is that artist. That’s why we get to see ᑲᓇᒋᒋᑫᐃᐧᐣ  Kanacicikewin – Cleanse. After the Sunday March 26 performance, the audience is invited to a free improvised movement workshop onstage. “See dance and experience it!” says Yamada. 

As always the Expanse lineup includes workshops, all given by festival artists. This year the subjects treated include movement and expression through aerial arts (Sandra Olarte Mendoza), floor work basics (Tia Ashley Kushniruk), interactive Interchange (improvisation with Molly McDermott), accessibility in the arts (a panel that includes both Yamada and Goberdhan as well as Carly Neis and Bret Jacobs.

“And the Lobbyists are back!” says Yamada. They’re the ensemble of movement artists whose inspirations in the Westbury Theatre lobby happen before and after the shows, the sinews that tie an evening at Expanse together … “and celebrate what it’s like to be nimble!” 

Expanse 2023 runs Thursday through April 2 at the ATB Financial Arts Barn (10330 84 Ave.). Tickets and full schedule: azimuththeatre.com. All tickets are pay-what-you-will, at fringetheatre.ca. 

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Springboards, Workshop West’s new play festival, springs back

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Springboards 2023

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

After its return last year for the first time in more than a decade, Springboards springs back this week.

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And with this edition of Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s signature new play festival, works-in-progress by some 19 playwrights, at every stage of their evolution en route to opening night, will get staged readings and catch their first public oxygen. It all happens at the well-named Gateway, Workshop West’s new home for five nights starting Wednesday. 

For playwrights, Springboards is a crucial way to test their work in front of a live audience. For audiences, as Workshop West’s artistic producer Heather Inglis has pointed out, Springboards is a kind of backstage pass into the world of play creation and development. And that celebration of the process is at the heart of the 45-year-old theatre company, devoted to expanding the new Canadian theatre repertoire, honing and showcasing it, supporting its creators.   

“In Springboard’s first year back in 2022, we concentrated on local playwrights,” says Inglis, a theatre maker herself whose first professional theatre gig, in the ‘90s, was directing at the festival (“I was terrified”). “This year we’ve broadened it to include provincial and national writers….Which takes it back to the first years of the company.” It’s a way, she thinks, of “providing exciting opportunities to local playwrights and connecting to the theatre community across the country.” Theatre Yes, the strikingly well-connected little indie theatre she founded and finally left to take up the Workshop West job, is a model in spreading the word nationally (witness the cross-country roster of writers who contributed to Anxiety and The Elevator Project). 

Submissions from Workshop West’s multiple playwriting programs find their way into Springboards — the Script Reading Service that Darrin Hagen oversees, the Edmonton Playwrights Circle run by Beth Graham, the Creative Incubator (for BIPOC artists), the Playwrights Exchange for senior playwrights, Graham, Hagen, Collin Doyle, Cat Walsh, and Mieko Ouchi among them. 

Three playwrights, one from Edmonton and two from Calgary, are featured in the full-evening readings at Springboards. And all three plays, a trio of high-contrast offerings, are “ready and produceable,” says Inglis. 

playwright Conni Massing

From Edmonton’s Conni Massing comes Dead Letter, the fifth of her plays to be developed at Workshop West, where four have premiered. Inglis calls it “a comedic mystery,” small in scale. The protagonist,  “hungry for omens,” discovers mysterious connections between mundane occurrences that the less insightful would write off as happenstance. It’s very funny, and “there’s lots of food,” says Inglis. Massing’s long-time collaborator Tracy Carroll directs Friday’s staged reading. 

playwright James Odin Wade

Everyone Is Doing Fine, by the young Calgary up-and-comer James Odin Wade, came to Springboards from Workshop West’s script-reading service. Inglis describes the comedy-drama as “really exciting, fast-paced, contemporary, edgy, sexy,” an “urban exploration” set at the intersection of art and capitalism. It follows the fortunes of two art school friends who get a job with a hedge-fund manager. Thursday’s reading is directed by Margaret Muriel, a recent arrival in Edmonton from Halifax.  

playwright Stephen Massicotte

Stars on Her Shoulders is the latest by the notable Canadian playwright Stephen Massicotte, the author of the hit Mary’s Wedding and an expert in World War I history. An exploration of heroism, it happens after the 1918 bombing of No. 3 Canadian Stationary Hospital, where a group of nurses are patients. Inglis directs a cast of five women in the Saturday reading. 

The festival opens Wednesday, in partnership with Alberta Playwrights’ Network, with an edition of EDMONten. Five finalists of APN’s 10-minute playwriting competition are featured. Bridgette Boyko,  Victoria Kibblewhite, AJ Hrooshkin, Linda Wood-Edwards, and Calla Wright undertook the crazily difficult task of penning a play with a 10-minute duration between curtain up and curtain down. Andrew Ritchie directs. 

The grand finale Sunday night, in celebration of World Theatre Day, is the Springboards Cabaret, in association with Script Salon, curated by Darrin Hagen and directed by Davina Stewart. It’s a showcase of excerpts from new plays-in-progress by 11 Albertan playwrights, from relative newcomers to established voices. The playwrights include Trevor Duplessis, Naomi Duska, Gavin Dyer, Linda Grass, Jacquelin Lamb, Danielle LaRose, Nicole Moeller, Shawn Marshall, Sabrina Samuel, Celia Taylor, Cat Walsh.

And a bonus: after Saturday night’s reading of Stars On Her Shoulders we’ll find out the winners of a Workshop West brevity challenge even more extreme than the 10-minute plays of EDMONten. Final Draft has solicited 54-word plays destined to be printed on Analog Breweries beer cans. That’s 54 words including the title and the name of the author. 

In the interests of accessibility, all Springboard tickets are pay-what-you-can at the door. 

Workshop West is throwing an inaugural Swing Into Spring fund-raising bash April 1. The entertainment is headlined by Girl Brain, the hit Edmonton sketch comedy trio fresh from their recent engagement at Toronto Sketchfest. And DJ Funkasaurus (aka actor/ director/ playwright Chris Bullough) will be in charge of the music. The proceeds are destined for a new and flexible $60,000 riser system (the current risers are on loan from the City of St. Albert). Tickets: workshopwest.org. 

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The dizzying optic of All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, a new Karen Hines satire at Shadow. A review

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Dayna Lea Hoffman, centre, Elena Porter, Noori Gill, Coralie Cairns, Sophie May Healey in All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You won’t have seen anything quite like All The Small Animals I Have Eaten, the play that’s now running in the Shadow Theatre season. And because it’s by Karen Hines, a brilliant original of a satirist, you shouldn’t miss it.

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It’s funny, it’s provocative, it’s downright eerie in the jagged angles and weird psychic lighting of its sharp-edged satire.

You could call it a hallucination of sorts in the mind (the “psycho-shtetl” as she puts it) of our sleep-deprived grad student server at La Ferme, a swanky concept bistro attached to a sustainable all-woman condominium with its own actual farm. And, as you’ll find out in Alexandra Dawkins’ lively production, constantly in motion, it’s a swirling vision that’s fed (so to speak) by locally-sourced fragments. 

Frankie (Dayna Lea Hoffman) is onstage with a quartet of mobile alter-egos that haunt her (“my exploded self”). And they populate the hilarious female conversations of the urban professionals Frankie overhears at her tables talking in a stream of non-sequiturs about banking, real estate, insurance while she’s taking the drinks orders. “I’m thinking of becoming a pantheist….”

All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson

The chorus provides a companion in Frankie’s own post-shift conversations with a fellow server, talking about everything from golden retrievers to lawyers’ brains to unattainable real estate prices. They’re in charge of the stage directions that are also the captions of the paper Frankie is struggling to finish for her Fifth Wave Feminist Film Theory and Criticism 555 class, a graphic novel in the form of an origami fortune teller. You remember those, from grade school recess? The “pussy posse” inhabit the ghosts of dead feminist writers, Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, Frida Kahlo and others, too.

The Bechdel test shadows the play and its all-female cast — and Frankie as “a star student of the feminist forum.” You remember the test? A litmus to determine gender bias in film and theatre by asking whether at least two women, named, talk to each other for at least a minute about something other than men. All The Little Animals I Have Eaten is a pass with flying colours, to say the least. But with its keen capture of consumerist cadences (something it shares with Hines’ Pochsy plays), its appetite for absurdity, its scathing assessment of market-driven feminism, Hines’s dark and witty comedy wonders ‘what then?’. 

Riding the post-Bechdelian fifth wave (“the fourth was not as funny”), saddled with crushing student loans and dreams she increasingly fears are dead ends, Frankie wonders how on earth to participate meaningfully in life’s great adventure. And in a fine comic performance, Hoffman captures the addled, fracturing, traumatically distracted quality of a young woman who’s a beleaguered server to the feminist success story. A funny Virginia Woolf throwaway is attached to this: A Room of One’s Own, updated to A Condo of One’s Own. You have the feeling Frankie suspects that everything might be a digression to the main event of the closed door. Ah, and she really really wants that not to be true. 

Dayna Lee Hoffman (top), Coralie Cairns, Elena Porter, Sophie May Healey, Noori Gill in All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson

What gives the play its original queasy brilliance is the dizzying optic of the very particular, down to the molecular, located in a vast universe with a receding horizon. In an amusingly off-centre scene between an insurance adjustor and her client in the aftermath of an accident with an elk, the latter says “I can hear the fascia in your fingers…. I can hear the fluid in your brain when you tilt your head like that….” You think of Pochsy, connected to her IV pole, envisioning sickness as a squid where her heart should be, with tentacles that shoot algae into her veins. 

It’s not species-specific, this Hines vision of mussels squirming out of the bowl, or legs waving from the crayfish bisque, or lambs about to head for the plate discussing being and nothingness. If I hadn’t sworn off any use of the word “surreal” till the end of the calendar year, I’d be using it now. 

The chorus of four — Elena Porter, Sophie May Healey, Coralie Cairns, Noori Gill — in pink-hued workers’ jumpsuits (designer: Leona Brausen) deliver boldly comic performances, in a variety of permutations and incarnations, human and animal. They’re inventive (and Gill makes an outstanding Virginia Woolf), but I do wonder, though, if Dawkins’ production doesn’t occasionally force its comedic hand in theatrical playfulness, and delivery that’s sometimes leans into comical delivery, miming props, or synchronized choral movement at the expense of deadpan.

Funny, yes, but sometimes the busy-ness is counter-productive to the hilarity of the scenes in which professional types are overheard blithely revealing themselves as smug capitalists, amoral competitors, shrewd investors, faux-self-critical about their part in the screwed-up zeitgeist. “Must I take some blame for the fading global image of generosity and openness, blah blah blah?” 

Ami Farrow’s lighting and Dave Clarke’s soundscore are more unerring, in their mix of mystery and progressive age-y calming motifs.

Hines’ sense of humour seems to work in juxtapositions, lists (a realtor-type description of a condo or Frankie’s list of the qualities, including orthodontics, that got her the gig), and anti-climax. And the playwright doesn’t eschew goofball throwaways either. “What is chickweed? A weed chicks eat.” It’s fun and it’s provoking to experience a satire that’s lit in such an unusual way, with a wicked capture of the modern woman soundtrack, doubts about the aspirational quest for “home,” and a skeptical vision underpinned by a serious feminist humour.  

It’s all very well, says All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, to grasp the urban professional mantra assumed by smart, progressive women, of identifying your goal, then pursuing it like a tiger sniffing carpaccio, as the play and Frankie recognize. But then there’s the big question of the goal itself, shrouded in questions and mystery, refusing to align itself in a linear way, wriggling out of grasp. What to want? What to wish for? Shouldn’t it have something to do with the world, a better future for humanity? 

That’s something to put on your fork.

REVIEW

All The Little Animals I Have Eaten

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Karen Hines

Directed by: Alexandra Dawkins

Starring: Dayna Lea Hoffman, Coralie Cairns, Noori Gill, Elena Porter, Sophie May Healey

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through April 2

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org, 780-434-5564

 

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The screwball elixir: high spirits and rom-com gold. Pride and Prejudice at the Citadel, a review

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Morgan Yamada, Ben Elliott, Nadien Chu, Garett Ross, Beth Graham, Gianna Vacirca in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Dust off the Regency, and what will you find? Fun fun fun, my friends. 

It is a measure of the comic high spirits of the version of Pride and Prejudice currently cavorting its way up, down, and across the Citadel’s Maclab stage (and slamming the odd door too), that the single word “single” is a show-stopper every time it’s spoken.  

That, my friends, is stakes. And it’s rom-com gold, or at least fab bling. If “single” is applied to a man, red flag: it incites chaos all around him; as applied to a woman, it’s a catastrophe in search of an intervention. As per the first line of Jane Austen’s evergreen 1813 novel, wearing its 210 years lightly in this 2017 adaptation by the American actor Kate Hamill, “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

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Director Mieko Ouchi and a dexterous cast of eight make a frantic screwball comedy of it. And I have to admit to some doubts going in, since making a farce from what is already a sparkling comedy is a tricky business. But in the process,  Ouchi’s smart production has its cake and eats it too: a very modern sense of unravelling romantic comedy chaos, heartbreak and triumph … that comes with all the Georgian trimmings, so there’s fun to be had in the juxtaposition. There’s a classically symmetrical two-tiered two-staircase set (by Scott Reid), lighted in ice cream colours by Kevin Humphrey, and a cast dressed to kill in Deanna Finnman’s lavish, imaginatively tweaked Regency gear. No obvious jukebox jokes here: there’s a spinet (a pianoforte?) and period music.

And I’m here to report that it’s a riotous concoction. The audience cheered, and gasped at setbacks, groaned at obstacles, enjoyed the gender-bending of dexterous actors. And laughed, a lot and out loud, me included. The way people talk over each other might be enough to give a die-hard Jane-ite the vapours but this is a rollicking night out, amongst comic characters who are blind to their folly, to a variety of degrees. In fact, the show begins with a game of blind-man’s bluff. 

In a wonderfully judged comic performance by Gianna Vacirca, Elizabeth Bennet leads proceedings as both wry, amused, oft exasperated observer and a slightly reluctant, increasingly dizzy, participant. Along with her dad Mr. Bennet (played by Garett Ross with the amusingly beleaguered air of a man trapped in an out-of-control female merry-go-round), Lizzie is the most sensible young person in the room. Till she’s not. 

This is, after all, a romantic comedy. And Lizzie will meet a mysterious man, aloof, smart and arrogant Mr. Darcy (played with stand-offish gravitas by Karl Ang), who’s as prickly, romance-averse, and primed for a comeuppance as she is. He is “the last man in the world on whom I could ever be prevailed to marry.” And by the velvet-gloved but iron-clad terms of the inevitable rom-com resolution we’re all hoping for, her declaration that she’ll never marry because marriage is “fundamentally flawed” will turn out to be hollow. By the end she has to admit that “till this moment I never knew myself.”

Lizzie and Mr. Darcy (plus Mr. Bennet trying unsuccessfully to hide behind the print medium, possibly a cautionary tale for newspapers) are surrounded by comic grotesques. The general in charge of the Bennet household, with its plethora of marriageable daughters, is the raging motormouth Mrs. Bennet, her dander (and her volume) perpetually up in Nadien Chu’s fearlessly outsized, self-dramatizing performance. She’s funny, but it will cross your mind, from time to time, to fantasize about throwing one of the production’s rugs over her and nailing the corners down. 

Mrs. Bennet’s appointed task in life is to see her daughters advantageously hitched to real estate and annual incomes that are by necessity attached to men, worthy or not. And the arrival of a rich, eligible bachelor and his sister next door, Mr. and Miss Bingley, is the occasion of much maternal rejoicing. A campaign begins; it’s party time!. The general tone of the adaptation? Mrs. Bennet shrieks “Balls balls balls! I can’t get enough of them.”

Gianna Vacirca and Ben Elliott in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Lizzie’s sister Jane, sweetly played by Morgan Yamada, falls hard for Mr. Bingley, and vice versa, much to her mother’s glee. In Ben Elliott’s amusing performance, Mr. Bingley is an amiable ninny, panting, pawing the ground, as eager to please as a puppy (his friend Darcy does toss him a ball). You feel perhaps he’s had an alternate life as a street performer. Elliott as Mary, the solemn bookish sister who doesn’t get much ink in Austen, is the show’s funniest running sight gag, which occasions a succession of ingenious costume changes. She’s a lugubrious lodgepole who pops up unexpectedly everywhere — high dudgeon made flesh — scaring her sisters, and airing her sibling grievances and a grim sense of the disaster-bound world.

The double-casting of Mr. Bennet and Lizzie’s earnest best friend Charlotte (“my parents have no money, and the clock is ticking”) is the production’s quietest pairing. And Ross is affecting in both roles, improbably exiting as one and simultaneously entering as the other. To Charlotte belongs the hard-headed Austen insight that society runs on real estate, income, and the vulnerability of women.  

The youngest Bennet sister Lydia, a dippy little nitwit in the novel — she elopes with the blackguard Wickem — gets a highly original comic turn from Beth Graham, who doubles as the snooty aristocrat Lady Catherine. In a strikingly physical performance Graham plays Lydia as a loose-limbed marionette of a naif, unhinged in body and mind, always on the wrong foot, flopping into chairs as if her bones had given way. Marriage stiffens her spine, physically; so does her accusation that she’s just been following the advice she’s been given that marriage is a game to be won at all costs.  

Braydon Dowler-Coltman and Ben Elliott as Miss and Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The production’s busiest actor is Braydon Dowler-Coltman, who re-defines triple-threat. He’s the snobbish Miss Bingley, a tippler in a looped wig that’s a veritable comic prop in itself. He’s Mr. Wickham, the alluring military man, who swaggers his way effortlessly, a double-entendre on legs, into the Bennet household (“can I touch your musket?” asks Lydia). And in a virtuoso turn, he’s Mr. Collins the cleric, a rubber-legged narcissist in perpetual pursuit of the right word. His courtship method is a veritable physical comedy in itself. Kudos to movement director Ainsley Hillyard. 

“It’s all so ridiculous,” declares Lizzie, disconcerted by the dislodging of her own prejudice, an “immoveable dislike” for Mr. Darcy. Can two people make a go of it as a couple, when one of them has chosen to be amused by the world and the other has firmly declared that he “does not enjoy being an object of fun?” When all other resolution seems too fraught and verbally inaccessible, even in a particularly articulate age,  there’s … dance. 

And that’s where a delightful evening ends.

REVIEW

Pride and Prejudice, adapted from the Jane Austen novel by Kate Hamill

Theatre: Citadel

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Gianna Vacirca, Karl Ang, Nadien Chu, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Garett Ross, Ben Elliott, Beth Graham, Morgan Yamada

Running: through April 2

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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All The Little Animals I Have Eaten: a carnivorous Karen Hines satire, at Shadow Theatre

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Dayna Lee Hoffman (top), Coralie Cairns, Elena Porter, Sophie May Healey, Noori Gill in All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

My name is Frankie, and I will be your server tonight….

All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, the dark and intricate Karen Hines comedy that unsheaths its cutlery tonight at Shadow Theatre takes us to a trendy high-end bistro with a menu so locally sourced you can have a philosophical discussion with your lamb before it gets to your plate (with a demi-glaze).

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La Ferme, attached to an all-woman condominium, is a magic kingdom where well-heeled urban professionals and creative types — real estate agents, plagiarists, insurance adjustors, hedge fund daughters, influencers, an ‘equine masseuse’ — can be overheard exercising the “accelerated feminine consciousness” in conversation. In short it is the kind of place that Frankie, a debt-ridden thesis-throttled student in the throes of writing a 3-D feminist paper formed as an origami fortune-teller (“The search for literally and figurative women’s spaces, from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to the contemporary real estate market space”) will never ever be able to afford to call home. 

Suicided writers — Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, Frida Kahlo among them — are there, too, along with plucky mollusks and lamb existentialists, and Frankie’s trio of versatile alter-egos. Hines, on the phone from Calgary where she’s based, calls it “a night gallery, a Bluebeard’s castle.” 

Dayna Lea Hoffman, centre, All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

With its all-female cast of people, assorted animals, ghosts, it lands in a collage of scenes as dialogue, or captions, or lists, with women talking about real estate, about insurance, about plagiarism, solar power and whether tilapia is farmed … about, well, everything except men. Hines traces the origins of All The Small Animals I Have Eaten  back to her discovery of the Bechdel test, once new and still relevant. Named for the cartoonist and graphic artist Alison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, it’s a cultural test for sussing out gender bias in film and theatre by noting whether at least two (named) female characters talk to each other, about something other than men.

playwright Karen Hines

“I was fascinated,” says Hines, musing that Cats passes the test and Shakespeare most often does not. “And I thought about the things I’ve written and the things I’ve performed in … and the memory of doing The Newsroom in the ‘90s.” 

Hines got cast in the superlatively funny Ken Finkleman series when the comic actor Jeremy Hotz “got whisked away to L.A. to do Speed II and make a zillion dollars and I was pulled in to play him, basically,” says Hines. “I did the first season of that show saying Jeremy’s lines … I got to say everything that Jeremy would have said and I LOVED IT. Because I was playing a producer who wasn’t a ‘girl producer’. I was in meetings with the guys and I was toughing it out with them. And I was only talking about the job, the news, and the food we were going to eat for lunch.” 

“Next season, when I was talking about my boyfriend and having lunch with the other female characters, wasn’t nearly as much fun.… I was a ‘female producer’.” Hines says “that was a real spark for me.”

The play, which premiered at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary in 2017 (Blake Brooker directed the One Yellow Rabbit production), was slated for a Nightwood Theatre production in 2020 that fell victim to the pandemic 10 days before opening night. A Zoom fund-raising edition, “everyone in their bedrooms,” inspired Hines to create one of the country’s first big Zoom plays thereafter: Get Me The Fuck Out Of This Zoom Play, later re-named The River of Forgetfulness. 

Dayna Lea Hoffman in All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

For the Alexandra Dawkins production of All The Little Animals I Have Eaten we’ll see at the Varscona, Hines has made some changes from 2017— new scenes, big cuts, minor updates that include athleisure-wear and barre classes but do not, she assures (laughing) jump to include AI. “The server everything orbits around, questioning her place in that feminist lineage, and her origami fortune-teller, and her quest for feminist conversations, is very much still there.”

“A few things no longer felt relevant,” Hines says. But to her surprise, “so much of it didn’t feel dated…. Are we moving more slowly? Is it because we went into a deep freeze for three years? So many things that were edgy or new in 2017 are part of our lives now…. Interesting.” 

The play is the third of what Hines calls, a wicked smile in her voice, her “real estate trilogy.” The term “Kafkaesque” far outpaces “cautionary” in describing Crawlspace, a 2015 solo comedy based on her grotesque real-life nightmare of buying a tiny house in Toronto. Drama: Pilot Episode, 2012, like Little Animals I Have Eaten, unleashes magic realism in a live/work condo space, this one in a western oil town: “bison skulls everywhere, all the floors made of stone, used to be an abattoir.” 

“Real estate has become a fascination for me,” she says wryly. “Now that I don’t have any.”

The play came together in scenes. In the first she wrote, as an experiment, two women are drinking, and one remembers suddenly she has a dog she’s forgotten about (“well, it’s very small”). “I wrote another one, not in the play but I miss it!, where a woman has been mauled by a cougar in her condo. And the new buyer had found out about it after buying…. Maybe I was too close to it!” laughs Hines, thinking of her own real estate PTSD. “Maybe I should put it back in.” More scenes followed, unconnected at first, “and I thought they could be related if they were all in a restaurant, all connected by the server. So I started writing bits and pieces for her to say. And it just grew, sort of reverse writing.”  

Hines’ razor wit and zest for macabre hilarity is something Edmonton audiences know about. We first met her in 1992 at the Fringe, as the director of two horror clowns, Mump and Smoot, and in person as a smudge-eyed chalk-faced pixie named Pochsy attached to an intravenous pole, a toxic repository of consumerist dreams, self-help slogans, and the market-driven appetites of the age. In Pochsy’s Lips, and its sequels Oh Baby and Citizen Pochsy, we followed the fortunes of the chipper doomed employee of Mercury Packers (a subsidiary of Lead World). 

She remembers her introduction of three decades ago to the Edmonton Fringe. Her two horror clown compatriots Michael Kennard and John Turner insisted on camping. “One night, and we woke up and it was snowing. In August. And I bailed (instantly), to a hotel. I remember handing out flyers in the snow!” 

The three had met at Second City in Toronto, where Hines performed (and wrote sketches) and Kennard and Turner took courses. And “we just had chemistry…. I was their outside eye from the beginning,” she says. And she held the video camera for their first outing, an application to a comedy festival, “a weird nightmarish (early) version of Mump and Smoot in terrible gibberish. They wore boxer shorts and that’s all!”

Mump and Smoot in Something with Thug

Mump and Smoot were officially born in workshops with the celebrated clown guru Richard Pochinko. Hines, though, didn’t find her clown in that course of studies. In fact, “I was a terrible clown,” she insists. “Saccharine sweet, and way too cute. I just couldn’t grab it,” though she found it really good for directing Mump and Smoot. Pochsy is more of a “high-performance” creation, with elements of bouffon, she thinks. “My (creative) triangle,” she says, was “bouffon, clown, and Second City…. The thing I hated about clowning was that I wasn’t being satirical, I was being honest.”

Satire, the darker the better, is in her DNA. “It was all over our house,” Hines says of her Toronto upbringing. “I grew up in a household where Tom Lehrer was on the record player, and my brothers read Mad Magazine.” says Hines, who’s been Calgary-based for the last few years. 

It was at the High Performance Rodeo this year that the petite but lethal mercury packer returned to the stage, in the premiere of Pochsy IV, directed by Kennard. Satire, Hines sighs, has been in tough for the last couple of years; reality has seen to that. “It took me a long time to figure out the angle of entry for this piece, but I did.” And the show will venture forth from Calgary to theatres elsewhere next season.

Meanwhile we’ll find out what our consumerist landscape looks like through the dark comic muse of a master satirist. And (prepare for a bloodbath), she’s hinting about the prospect of a new Mump and Smoot, now in progress.

PREVIEW

All The Little Animals I Have Eaten

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Karen Hines

Directed by: Alexandra Dawkins

Starring: Dayna Lea Hoffman, Coralie Cairns, Noori Gill, Elena Porter, Sophie May Healey

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through April 2

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org, 780-434-5564

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Young and in love: a playful rom-com version of Pride and Prejudice at the Citadel

Posted on March 14, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Gianna Vacirca and Morgan Yamada, Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Ah, young love. The play that opens Thursday at the Citadel takes us into the heart of “rom-com-land,” as Gianna Vacirca puts it, amused. “And we’re not watching grown-ups, adults with lots of romantic history, people who really know themselves, make big mistakes in love.” Au contraire.

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Vacirca is sitting in a sunbeam at the Citadel on the Saturday morning of the first preview of Pride and Prejudice this past weekend, reflecting on the version of Jane Austen’s sharp-eyed 1813 comic masterwork we’ll see, in a Mieko Ouchi production. 

It’s an ingenious (and by definition playful) eight-actor adaptation by the American actor Kate Hamill, who’s made something of a specialty of re-moulding  classic novels — Sense and Sensibility, Little Women, Vanity Fair among them — for the stage. High speed? “We’re still working out some of the truly virtuoso costume changes.” And Vacirca plays clever, spirited Elizabeth Bennet, the most independent-minded of five sisters in a household with a double-sided crisis (a surplus of marriageable daughters and a shortage of cash).

“This is an adaptation that really highlights the classic rom-com quality of the novel,” says Vacirca, an artist whose multiple talents extend to acting, dance, choreography, and the creation of bespoke hand-made pasta for her own company bell’uovo.

“It’s very bright,” says the show’s Lizzie. “And it doesn’t ignore how young and naive these people are, people with no experience of love and romance, people who are incredibly awkward and have terrible relationship models…. And they’re in a situation where they’re having to marry to secure their own safety for the rest of their lives!”

“You know when you see a Hamlet, and you’re watching a 45-year-old, and then you read the play and realize he’s supposed to be an 18-year-old? It changes a lot, (with) his age, his lack of experience, his naïveté, when you watch someone with very little life experience make huge mistakes,” declares Vacirca, who alights in the world of Austen direct from the mean streets of Jersey (she was assistant director/ assistant choreographer for the Citadel’s Jersey Boys). The same with the youthful characters in this version of Pride and Prejudice, she argues. “It’s less Regency drama, more modern farce!”

Braydon Dowler-Coltman and Ben Elliott in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Not, needless to say, that doors will be slammed or plates of sardines will appear and vanish à la Noises Off, as Vacirca points out. “But people are playing many characters; it’s not natural realism. We’re definitely in a heightened theatrical world. Live music. Lots of gender-bending going on….” Partly there’s a point to be made, she thinks, about the way “there is masculine and feminine in all of us.”And partly the playwright “is messing with a story we all know: how do you make it interesting for another time, have another go at it?”

 Among Braydon Dowler-Coltman’s several roles, for example, is Miss Bingley, “the perfect woman,” a nicely ironic touch. Lizzie’s best friend Charlotte is played, straight and with no vocal adjustments, by Garett Ross. “I think people will be surprised how quickly they forget the gender of these folks,” says Vacirca.

“How the actors are approaching the work is from a place of naïveté, lack of experience, raging hormones — in contrast to the beautiful intellectual language, the gorgeous wit and cleverness.” She laughs. “It’s one of the magic tricks of Jane Austen, how people make these humongous mistakes, but they’re able to communicate these humongous mistakes so beautifully.” 

Morgan Yamada, Ben Elliott, Nadien Chu, Garett Ross, Beth Graham, Gianna Vacirca in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

As for the parental generation, Mrs. Bennet (Nadien Chu) “runs the family like a military regiment of girls.” Vacirca describes her as “a bad clown … Mother Goose on steroids, such a huge personality. All she cares about is marriage; she takes it very seriously. And in many ways she’s very good at her job.” 

Vacirca finds  that Lizzie’s personality, in part, “is based on not being her mother…. When you’re forming who you are, and your only landmark of personality is to not be something, I feel like you can’t help but be cynical, scrutinize everything around you, and say that nothing matters.” 

Gianna Vacirca and Ben Elliott in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

At the outset her first thought for Lizzie was Beatrice, the witty verbal fencer and romance-avoider of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Vacirca played her in a Thou Art Here production of a few seasons ago, and there are certainly similarities. Like the Shakespeare heroine Lizzie has “a sharp wit, she sees hypocrisies, she hates the double-standard … and can enjoy the beautiful pleasure of eviscerating someone.” But Lizzie is much younger, much more naive. And, hey, she falls for two men in the course of Pride and Prejudice; “she is a human being, very fallible, with a real beating heart.”

For Vacirca, thoughtful and energetically engaged in thinking about whole plays and not simply roles, it’s been a “beautifully varied” year of investigations into the way people behave inside romantic relationships. Ah, and speaking of romantic relationships and marriages, just before New Year’s she got married “at a wonderful party” to the actor Oscar Derkx, currently in the production of Trouble in Mind that ran in Winnipeg and arrives onstage at the Citadel in a couple of weeks. 

After Teatro Live’s season-opener Evelyn Strange (in which Vacirca played an amnesiac searching for her past and finding a future), Jersey Boys, and Pride and Prejudice comes Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes at Theatre Network — a disturbing and nuanced exploration of the relationship between a professor (John Ullyatt) and a student.

Vacirca’s entry point into theatre came via dance, her hard-working single mom “an incredible dancer herself … raised in a very humble farming family. That’s where it all started…. Instead of paying a babysitter, extra-curricular were our babysitters. So I had a lot of ballet, modern dance. Imagine a six-year-old doing Martha Graham!” Then, fatefully, she made a friend, another single-mom kid, and they got Lois Hole scholarships to the Foote theatre classes at the Citadel. “A young Annette Loiselle was my first acting teacher!” 

The Vacirca bent has always been for the the physical. She played sports, including soccer at a competitive level. It was when she got into the BFA acting program at the U of A that “my life changed,” she says. “I could tell I had a very different background than my classmates, less conventional training. And it only made me more comfortable to be experimental with movement in shows…. ‘what if we do this? what if we do that?’” 

Gianna Vacirca, Garett Ross, Morgan Yamada in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The Pride and Prejudice cast may be decked out in Regency period wear, as she says, but “there are definitely screwball comedy moments. And being comfortable physically is so important.” It means that she isn’t daunted by suggestive stage directions like “she has a heart attack” or “her brain melts out of her ears.” Says Vacirca, “you attack with physicality.” Ditto asides like “getting weak at the knees” or the feeling of wanting to kick yourself after an awkward encounter.

As a choreographer and movement director with directing in her future — “I really like stories; I really like trying to figure out people why they do what they do” — Vacirca finds her theatre analogies in  team sports. “I find acting and making plays is an athletic team sport … needing facilitation, outside coordination, physical energy.”

Theatre, she thinks, is “a huge risk. It’s live, it’s happening before your very eyes. The only other thing that does that is sports…. Theatre and sports are so similar. You have a general idea of the outcome but it really is very different every time.” 

Theatre is “passing a massive ball of energy around the stage for someone’s amusement…. When you have a really good play and a lovely team of creators, it’s as alive and exciting as a big game. And as unpredictable. Even after the pandemic, putting a show on for people is a kind of beautiful pressure.”

“If you believe that everyone is trying to be good but capable of massive mistakes, the best way to treat work is to make the characters as real as possible, real multi-faceted people as opposed to the scorned woman or the victim or the villain….”  

And when they believe, audiences respond and buy in. “Humans have an incredible barometer for what is authentic, genuine, believable,” says Vacirca. “Even if it’s coming at us in a crazy shape we don’t recognize.” 

PREVIEW

Pride and Prejudice, adapted from the Jane Austen novel by Kate Hamill

Theatre: Citadel

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Gianna Vacirca, Karl Ang, Nadien Chu, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Garett Ross, Ben Elliott, Beth Graham, Morgan Yamada

Running: through April 2

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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‘I sing my sorrow and I paint my joy’. Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl at Theatre Network, a review

Posted on March 12, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl. From left, Kristi Hansen, Cathy Derkach, Christine MacInnis, Cayley Thomas, Chariz Fulmino. Photo by Ian Jackson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m not a weeper, I’m a snarler,” Joni Mitchell in old age tells us in the “theatrical collage” in her honour at Theatre Network. “I put the weeping in the songs…. I sing my sorrow, and I paint my joy.”

The sorrow and joy, the music and the painting, and the philosophical reflections that go into “snarling,” as she puts it in her sharp-edged way, are all part of Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl, named for a Mitchell compilation album for Saskatchewan’s centenary in 2005.

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The creation of Wild Side Productions artistic director Jim Guedo isn’t exactly a play. And you wouldn’t call it a stage biography, a revue, or a song cycle either, though with generous elements of all of the above. It’s an imaginative kind of multi-angled multi-hued composite portrait painted in music and the legendary protagonist’s real-life spoken words — in different eras by five actors. And it’s set in motion, forward and backward, by memory and the passage of time. 

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The portrait of the artist that emerges from the dabs and brush strokes is of a true original, restless in spirit, exploring the corners of the canvas, wriggling out of categories as soon as they’re imposed. An unusually talkative and self-aware artist, Joni refuses to sit still for anything like a conventional linear rendering of her story. “If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing,” she’s said in one of the interviews that yield up the text of the piece. “But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.” 

Guedo’s inspiration is to defy chronology and superimpose five Joni’s of different ages on each other onstage — the Ingenue (Chariz Faulmino), the Free Spirit (Cayley Thomas), the Explorer (Kristi Hansen), the Critic (Cathy Derkach). So the oldest of them (Christine MacInnis, who has valiantly stepped into a large and dauntingly wordy role at the last minute, script artfully placed onstage) can confront her younger selves, and vice versa.

And they all sing together, as solos with back-ups or ensemble numbers, an insightful and well-chosen songlist of 22 from the Joni canon. The actor-singers are accomplished, and so is the excellent onstage band. Friday night’s performance was plagued by persistent (and I’m sure eminently correctable) sound problems, but the show feels musically fulsome. 

Mitchell is a questing spirit, an artist who searches. And together the actors, assisted by her self-portraits, create a sense of experience getting gathered in the service of art. The bright exuberance of Fulmino (Yellow Taxi) co-exists with Thomas as the Joni who wrote Blue, and the thought that “songs are like tattoos/ you know I’ve been to sea before/ Crown and anchor me/ Or let me sail away….” 

To Hansen as the Explorer goes the idea of leaving safety behind, expressed in Don Juan’s Reckess Daughter as “the eagle and the serpent are at war in me … these hectic joys, these weary blues.”  And in Derkach as the Critic, closer in age to the Sage, you can see the lines drawn by anger and socio-political outrage in The Three Great Stimulants, accompanied by Mitchell’s self-portrait as Van Gogh with the bandaged ear.     

Intriguingly, Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl is the second offering in Theatre Network’s inaugural full season at the new Roxy about a prairie-born artist with a starry international career. Like the first, Eugene Stickland’s The Innocence of Trees (an encounter between the older and the younger incarnations of the Saskatchewan-born painter Agnes Martin), Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl gathers the multiple selves of the artist. And it wonders about art, where it comes from, what it’s for, how it’s made.  

Both Martin and Mitchell (who grew up in Saskatoon) capture something of the prairie landscape in their artistic sightlines. It’s the singer-songwriter, a voluble master of the apt and witty turn of phrase, who airs her views directly — on art and the influences and contradictions of the artist in an often hostile world. The big questions of life, love, and art appear, more elliptically and poetically, in Mitchell’s songs. 

The stage designed by Guedo is an inviting memory chamber — candles, cushions, flowers, lamps, a grand piano — framed, and lighted by Larissa Poho, like a painting. And as in Joni Mitchell’s 1995 painting Middle Point (the image of a solitary woman in silhouette gazing out at the sea), you can make out the words Idle, Idyll, Ideal, Idol written on that frame. From time to time the Joni’s lean out to peruse us, or perch on it and look back into the ‘painting’ to watch each other. 

The back wall is a curved and shimmery surface across which a fascinating array of images — many of them Mitchell’s own self-portraits — dissolve into each other, or morph into her landscapes. The multi-media design is Ian Jackson’s, and it’s a beauty. 

The “present” of Guedo’s piece is the Joni who returned to performing in 2022 after seven years of learning to speak, walk, and sing following a near-fatal brain aneurysm in 2015. And her often acerbic commentary is well matched with MacInnis’s forthright air of abrupt judgment and wry amusement/bemusement about the hypocrisies of the world — the absurdities of national identity (is a salmon American or Canadian?) or chronological order (“a terrible idea”), false humility (“I prefer real arrogance”) or parental ideas about propriety, Saskatoon (“where I learned about bigotry”) or the patriarchal music industry status quo.

In the course of the evening with Joni, we learn about an impoverished childhood, a difficult mother-daughter relationship, and a battle with polio age nine (“a rehearsal for the rest of my life,” as she said), friendships across the racial divides of Saskatoon, the wayward streak of the artist-in-progress who habitually struck out for the roughest parts of town — mainly because the music was better.   

A period of abject scrambling destitution in Toronto, and the kind of desperation to survive that would lead a 22-year-old to give up a baby for adoption — these are emotional peaks of a struggle-filled ascent from obscurity to celebrity. “Human nature … it’s all I had to work with.” You have to wrap your mind around Mitchell’s insistence she only took up music instead of pursuing her real love, painting, in order to cobble together enough to live. And as for folk music, she says, it just happened to be the currency of the time.

Mitchell’s imagery, both in her spoken insights and her lyrics, has a surprising wit to it. She says she emerged from the three-year period after the adoption feeling like “a cellphone wrapper on a cigarette package.” Her philosophical studies, pursued in solitary during a hermit period in B.C., include the thought that Nietzsche gets a bad rap, and “the Western mind has been playing half a deck for a long time.” 

She spars at length with her younger selves about the tension between sensuality and clarity, the heart and the intellect in art. Apparently it’s a continuing concern, and the balance, as she explains (she’s a gift-of-the-gab explainer), gets adjusted at every age. 

Mitchell’s life story, told in a non-linear way in the artist’s own words, is the context for the songs. And the presence onstage of the older Joni as a watchful observer, amused or skeptical, gives the whole enterprise the theatrical resonance that it’s happening in her mind.  She is her own most insightful critic. 

The show is a fascinating way of marrying an articulate multi-dimensional artist’s life and work. Both are ongoing, and both invite the audience to react in a personal way. “And there is a song for you/ Ink on a pin/ Underneath the skin/ An empty space to fill in….”

Check out 12thnight’s PREVIEW Q&A with creator/director Jim Guedo here.

REVIEW

Joni Mitchell: Songs Of A Prairie Girl

Theatre: Theatre Network in association with Wild Side Productions

Created, directed, and designed by: Jim Guedo

Starring: Cathy Derkach, Chariz Faulmino, Kristi Hansen, Christine MacInnis, Cayley Thomas

Running: at the Roxy through March 26

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

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‘Musicians gone wild’: the Mayfield’s upcoming five-show season

Posted on March 7, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The air of creative nostalgia floats over the upcoming 2023-2024 season at the Mayfield Theatre announced by artistic director Van Wilmott Tuesday.

The five-show line-up capitalizes on the strength, stylistic versatility, and expertise of the theatre’s musical forces  — “music is a huge part of what we do at the Mayfield,” as Wilmott says. The season launches a new series,  Musicians Gone Wild, designed to celebrate seminal eras in pop culture history. Part one Rock The Canyon, a creation of Wilmott with playwright Tracey Power, takes audiences to fabled Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, in the late ‘60s early ‘70s the incubator of a generation (or two or three) of superlative popular music. 

“The story of Laurel Canyon,” as Wilmott puts it, is a whole genealogical narrative, a veritable commune threaded with starry names —The Byrds, The Turtles, The Doors.… “that begat Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Crosby Stills and Nash.” Ah, and the recurring motif of an instrument, the Rickenbacker 12-string guitar (inspired by A Hard Day’s Night), and the invention of the “California sound, reverberating through time in a gallery of hits.

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The production, which runs Sept. 5 to Nov. 5, has a cast of 10, “all musicians.” Wilmott, who likens the Laurel Canyon era to Paris in the ‘20s, says the idea isn’t impersonation, but the capture of a time and its music — as Joni Mitchell has it, “pouring music down the canyon.”

The longest run of Mayfield seasons is claimed by the holiday show. Canada Rocks: The Reboot, which runs Nov. 14 through Jan. 28,  featuring “celebrated Canadian artists” of every era. Fearless prediction: it’ll be the only show of the season where Don Messer shares a stage with Leonard Cohen; ditto Stan Rogers with Justin Bieber. Says Wilmott, the new revue revisits (updates and refines) the idea of the Mayfield’s 2018 Canada 151. It’s a big bash in honour of all things Canadian, starting with the music but including our collective personality quirks and cultural motifs, street hockey to cod-kissin’.

One Night With The King is an Elvis tribute show, in which the story, the legend, and the short, storied career come together. The Mayfield production Feb. 6 to March 31 2024 stars Matt Cage, whom Mayfield audiences saw as Elvis in the Mayfield’s 2019 Million Dollar Quartet. 

The Mayfield’s spring musical returns us (no matter our age) to our collective alma mater, Rydell High, and the year of 1959. Grease, which premiered in a Chicago night club in 1971, has been part of the cultural DNA ever since. It takes Wilmott back to the summer of 1993, when he was visiting from a Calgary gig, “the first time I ever set foot in the Mayfield,” he says. In the cast were a mother and daughter duo of actors, Maralyn and Kate Ryan. It’s the latter, the artistic director of Plain Jane Theatre, who directs the Mayfield production that runs April 9 to June 16.

Wilmott has a particular fondness for the evergreen 1979 comedy that runs at the Mayfield in the summer of 2024. “I’m a sucker for On Golden Pond,” by the American playwright Ernest Thompson, which taps the rich reservoir of family and intergenerational dynamics. And as film and TV adaptations attest (Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda for the former; Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Glenne Headly  for the latter) — the juicy roles have always attracted stars. The director and cast of the Mayfield production (June 25 to July 28) are yet to be announced. 

After that, in August, “we get out of the way,” says Wilmott, because of the mighty Fringe and “respect for its artists.”

Upcoming this current season, there’s Rock of Ages — a good-time jukebox musical with a redeeming air of self-mockery about its eminently danceable gathering of ‘80s hits (along with a Queen’s ransom in hair products). Kate Ryan directs the Mayfield production April 4 to June 11.  

And June 20 to July 23 at the adventurous dinner theatre, Clusterflick: The Improvised Movie undertakes exactly that improbable feat. Three of the most deluxe improvisers anywhere — Mark Meer, Ron Pederson and Jacob Banigan of Gordon’s Big Bald Head — will improvise an entire movie before your very eyes, inspired by cues from the audience.

Mayfield subscriptions and tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

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