Ruth Alexander in Dead in the Water, Lodestar Theatre and Theatre Yes. Photo supplied
By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca
“There are things that need to be said. And I’m going to say them,” says Ruth Alexander, who has the kind of husky laugh people notice right through Saturday din at an Italian cafe.
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The actor/ musician/ playwright is talking about Dead in the Water, a one-woman play with original songs “that’s been in my head for 30 years.”
It was dislodged from that high-inspiration location by the restrictions of the pandemic, “no outlet for creativity,” Alexander shrugs. And it emerges onto the stage (complete with white grand piano) April 6 at the Varscona, a co-production between Lodestar Theatre and Theatre Yes. The former is the indie company founded and run by Alexander and her director husband Max Rubin; the latter is the indie company the pair have joined as its new co-artistic directors.
“I’d never written anything … well, OK a couple of songs, and scores for theatre,” says Alexander, who’s a funny and candid sort in conversation. “But not a play, not lyrics. I turned 50 a couple of years ago. Twenty-five years ago I didn’t quite know what it was I wanted to say. And now I do!”
In the course of Dead in the Water, a play that’s set up as a cabaret as its playwright and star explains, we meet a woman of a certain age. Amanda Bridges is “a pianist/singer who has been an entertainer all her life, working in lounge bars in Europe and in London…. So, it’s not me, but loosely, very loosely, based on my experience, in my 20s and 30s,” says Alexander, who’s originally from the Highlands of Scotland. She graduated from theatre school, to emerge into the peripatetic world of gigging actor/musicians in English language theatres — Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Vienna, Barcelona among them — across Britain and Europe. It’s a cross-border cultural world that Brexit has all but obliterated.
Actor/ playwright/ musician/ musical director Ruth Alexander. Photo supplied.
And indeed, as Alexander describes, it’s Brexit that drove Rubin and her across the pond to Canada, and to Edmonton in 2017. To say the least, they were highly motivated to stay; the Yes in Theatre Yes seems to be their natural mode. An experienced director already, Rubin did an MFA in directing at the U of A, on a student visa. He even spent three intense months learning French. “We both feel very much done with the U.K.,” Alexander says feelingly. “Being an actor there is different now…. There was no choice. I didn’t want to go home. I don’t even consider it home any more. We haven’t been back.”
And now, the premiere of a new play with 10 songs and original underscoring, by and starring one half of the couple and directed by the other. “It’s a dark comedy that feels almost like a comedy routine,” Alexander says of Dead in the Water. “It’s me at the piano with hand-drawn animations appearing behind me; I’m singing and monologuing, telling the story of my life…. It’s written like a musical, since the songs move the story.” And, she adds, “it’s light-hearted until it’s not…. A woman of my age at a crossroad, talking frankly about her experience of love, sex, men, career, patriarchal expectations, and where all that can lead a person, if they choose to not live a conventional life. To be an artist really. To put your life on hold for art.”
director Max Rubin. Photo supplied
Ah, there’s a subject that resonates with Alexander. She and Rubin, who’s originally from Cornwall, met in Liverpool, in a panto version of Alice in Wonderland at the Everyman Theatre. “I was the Red Queen, and was Jack of Hearts.” And so “a baddie” and “a goodie” got together, and together they created a son and in 2007 a theatre company. Lodestar’s theatrical ventures were wide-ranging — Shakespeare to Hedwig and the Angry Inch — and like Theatre Yes, often involved site-specific inspirations. Lodestar’s Macbeth for the Liverpool Shakespeare Festival, for example, had Act I in the cathedral and Act II in the cathedral graveyard.
For the Edmonton theatre community, the versatile couple has been a real find: actor, playwright, musician, musical director, director under one roof. The Canadian incarnation of Lodestar has done chamber-sized contemporary Shakespeare (including A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Alexander-Rubin front yard). They’ve done Fringe shows. Alexander, who’s appeared in the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol, has been musical director/ composer for an assortment of theatre companies, and recently Opera Nuova.
And now Alexander and Rubin are in charge of Theatre Yes, an indie company in a transition period since the departure of founder/ artistic director Heather Inglis for Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. And Dead in the Water is their introductory Theatre Yes offering, as Lodestar is put to sleep.
“It’s a dream come true!” Alexander says of the chance to run an established company, “a company people know, with an audience base, operational funding, 1700 followers on Facebook.…” And there’s this: Lodestar and Theatre Yes are a good fit, theatre siblings. “Our mandates are pretty similar…. We’ve aways been a risk-taking, provoking theatre.” she says of Lodestar. “We’ve never been a ‘safe’ company. We do things that are a little out of the box. We share a lot of DNA with Theatre Yes. We’ll carry the mantle!”
Dead in the Water is “the perfect opportunity to kick off” this new chapter. “It’s original. It’s not polite subjects matter; it’s got some content that is not comfortable,” as Alexander puts it. “Not put in a way that’s going to make audiences squirm, more the reaction ‘that experience has happened to me’.”
Rubin and Alexander have Theatre Yes plans, already in progress. Next up, The Play’s The Thing, slated for the beginning of October at the Westbury Theatre, is “an experimental event,” says Alexander, who is fully prepared to be surprised, and amused. It’s “a pared down production of Hamlet over two days, in which each of the play’s 20 scenes is presented by a different Edmonton performance company in their own signature style.” She and Rubin have already sent off invitations to theatres including Teatro Live! and the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, dance companies like Mile Zero, improv companies like Rapid Fire Theatre, sketch comedy troupes like Girl Brain…. And the positive reaction has delighted them.
The scenes will be divvied up randomly, “and everyone will rehearse in secret.” Each company gets a fee, and the only Theatre Yes stipulation is that “all the actors have to be paid. Everything else is (each company’s) decision.” The proceeds will go to a charity.
The idea, says Alexander, is double-sided. (a) “to introduce ourselves to the community” and (b) since the indie companies have suffered mightily during the pandemic, “to bring everyone together in a showcase, to celebrate what we can do.” The byproduct is “to dispel the myth of Hamlet having to be a certain way. It’s for everyone!”
So, a new Theatre Yes chapter begins with Yes to a new play designed for touring, followed by Yes to a “a risky performance event, a crazy mad weekend…. We don’t want to do one thing!” And there’s Yes to new work underway, including a contemporary adaptation of a Euro satire of the last century.
The embrace will be wide, says Alexander happily. The goal is “quality work that’s impactful, relevant to today’s audience, that invites the audience to be part of the conversation.”
PREVIEW
Dead in the Water
Theatre: Lodestar and Theatre Yes
Written and performed by: Ruth Alexander
Directed by: Max Rubin
Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.
Running: April 6 to 16
Tickets: on a sliding scale at varsconatheatre.com
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.
