Trying to ‘do gender right’ through the trans lens: Re:Construct, at RISER

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Émanuel Dubbeldam in Re:Construct, RISER Edmonton 2022. Photo by bb collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Playwright Even Gilchrist was in full producer mode at home one morning last week, making a cake for his new play.

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The play? Re:Construct, premiering Wednesday at the Backstage Theatre in RISER Edmonton’s 2022 series. The cake? “the coveted and illustrious rainbow cake mix from the Dollar Store…. Yes, Betty Crocker is coming through today.” 

Be afraid, very afraid, for the cake. The two people we meet in Gilchrist’s Re:Construct have a jostling, playful, competitive relationship with each other and with The Onlookers (that’s us, the audience). Well really, you can’t expect their views on gender, or their pictures of perfect masculinity, to jibe; one of them is a trans man and the other is his idealized cis self.

A “queer, trans theatre creator and designer” by his own description,  Gilchrist, who’s droll and thoughtful, explains that the impetus for Re:Construct came at “a weird impasse of my life.” In 2018, he got a lottery slot at the Ottawa Fringe. “I didn’t think I’d get it,” he laughs. “And then I said ‘O no O no…. Maybe this is a chance for me to write a play, not about me being trans but about a trans experience. And that’s what I did.”

Since Gilchrist immediately set forth west after that run, to do a master’s degree in theatre design at the U of A (Edmonton audiences have seen his designs in The Mountain Top and Bloomsday at Shadow Theatre), the play “became a document sitting in my laptop for a couple of years.” Until now. As he puts it, “he’s been re-investigating and re-delving into what the play was, and what it means to me now.” The “was” and the “is” of the play are very different, he says. And it’s mainly because his feelings about sharing his trans identity openly aren’t the same now. At the time “it was me being more stealth.” 

Designer/ theatre creator/ scenographer Even Gilchrist. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective.

“It was aways a two-hander, never just me onstage baring my soul onstage by myself,” says Gilchrist, who was in the original version himself. “It was always less about ‘the Even Gilchrist experience’, and more about coming to terms with being trans when you don’t want to be.” And the work he shared with the director/dramaturge in Ottawa was to make it  “more of a play and less of a poetry slam dunk.”

“At the time I didn’t want to be known, or perceived, as trans,” says Gilchrist, who has a cheerful candour about him. His friends knew him as a queer artist, but a lot of them didn’t know the trans content of his story. “This was me coming to address and love that part of myself with that play — and sharing it with everyone else.” 

He thinks now that the first version of the play was “very heartfelt and earnest … but way more saccharine” In any case it was a bold move, and brave, to take that personal tension onto the stage in a play. “I was at a crossroad in my life. I was so deeply unsatisfied with my relationships because I never felt people knew me — because I wouldn’t let them get to know me in a true way. A lot of things I couldn’t actually talk about with people because I didn’t want to be outed.” 

By the time Re:Construct hit the Ottawa Fringe, Gilchrist’s family knew, and he’d come out to his friends. And the play, he says, was “the final push to say ‘I’m actually OK with being perceived this way’, to find a way to celebrate that part of the person’” It was, he says “so empowering, and I found such amazing, beautiful, wonderful human beings because of it.”

RISER, a national initiative dreamed up by Toronto’s Why Not Theatre to support indie artists, has been a wonderful boost to re-thinking his play (“it’s the only reason I can actually concentrate on being an artist and not everything else!”). And so is his cast (both Geoffrey Simon Brown and Émanuel Dubbeldam are innovative playwrights themselves). “They have a lot to offer, including their own experience.”  

Geoffrey Simon Brown, Émanuel Dubbeldam in Re:Construct, RISER Edmonton 2022. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective

Under Sarah J. Culkin’s directorship (and dramaturgy) Re:Construct is funnier now than it was, says the playwright, who identifies, puckishly, as an “experimentalist” (witness his Puppet Pub Crawl at the Found Fest in 2021). “Before, there was levity, yes, but I would say not a lot a lot of opportunities to laugh.” And, when you think about it for more than two minutes, as Gilchrist says, “the conceit of gender and gender roles is very absurd” — and not just for queer and trans people.

The subject invites a comic touch, he says. “For me, gender isn’t by any stretch of the imagination dead. It’s not unimportant for so many people, and so not to be erased from conversations. But the appointment of gender by other people, for the convenience of other people, is just ridiculous! When people tell you what you are….”

Both characters in Re:Construct, the trans man and his cis self, “are trying to do gender capital-R Right. And it’s for the Onlookers to decide.” 

Gilchrist sighs. “People are upset if you do things outside the box and they don’t how to label you any more. ‘You look like a girl but you’re saying you’re a boy, and I don’t know what to do with that, so you need to change something about yourself before I can understand’.”

As to whether society or not is finally growing up and out of its  neediness about labelling people, Gilchrist pauses. “Yes and No,” he thinks. “With the age of information, there’s more access to understanding, more chances for people to understand things beyond their experience…. But at the same time there’s still so much anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-woman feeling, people digging their heels in” — arguably more and more, witness the relentless drift to the right across the border. 

“It honours us as humans to address the complexity of human beings.” 

PREVIEW

RISER Edmonton 2022  

Re:Construct

Written by: Even Gilchrist

Directed by: Sarah J Culkin

Starring: Geoffrey Simon Brown and Émanuel Dubbeldam

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

Running: Wednesday through Sunday

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

 

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Creation and destruction: the story of an artist in Stone and Soil, at Nextfest. Meet playwright Gabby Bernard

Posted on June 5, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Gabby Bernard in Stone and Soil, Nextfest 2022. Photo by Amanda Goldberg.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s not random chance that the role Gabby Bernard wrote for herself in her first full-length solo play is an artist character. It’s a sign of the age.

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After all, theatre artists have had two years of punishing isolation to wonder, to doubt, to reassess their profession, their talent, their place in the world. And the 19th century French sculptor Camille Claudel, we meet in Stone and Soil, opening Sunday at Nextfest, spent years in self-imposed lock-up in her studio. Not only did she doubt her own work as an artist, she destroyed it, over and over. 

“What drives a person to destroy their own work? Where does that anger come from? What level of loss and grief, and not getting the life you think you deserve?”

Bernard discovered Claudel on an art museum immersion trip to Paris just before the pandemic. It was a tiny sculpture in the Musée d’Orsay that caught Bernard’s eye. Of the three figures grouped in The Age of Maturity, the one in the middle, as Bernard describes, ‘is a young woman reaching out to a man who’s turned away. Over their shoulders is an older woman hunched over above them….” The blurb below explained that Claudel was a brilliant artist in her own right but better known as a more famous artist’s lover and muse. 

Gabby Bernard in Stone and Soil, Nextfest 2022. Photo by Erin Pettifor.

“The image really struck me,” says Bernard, most recently seen by Edmonton audiences as another troubled artist character, in Michelle Robb’s Tell Us What Happened at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. The piece, she says, “is often interpreted as (representing) the relationship between Rodin and Claudel; the looming figure is the woman he wouldn’t leave for her, the woman who tore them apart.”

A MacEwan University musical theatre grad with a BFA in acting from the U of A, Bernard tucked the character into the back of her mind. Or perhaps Claudel invited herself there, and moved in. And when the pandemic struck down live theatre in early 2020, Claudel and her tragic story were Bernard’s inspiration to turn to writing.  

“At the time I was heartsick about not being in a theatre with others, not knowing when the next project would be, thinking if I could write a role for myself, what would it be? I kept coming back to her….”

“I was drawn to her boldness, her sensuality,” says Bernard. “And there was a stubborn-ness about her. You had to be so settled in your convictions, so passionate … there were so many obstacles.”

Gabby Bernard, Stone and Soil, Nextfest 2022. Photo by Erin Pettifor.

Claudel’s story, in movies and novels, “is always structured that she fell in love, had her heart broken, went mad, locked herself away, got dragged away to an asylum” where she spent the rest of her life…. I was interested in picking that apart a bit.” What she was moved to explore was the way “history has often shortchanged talented opinionated women,” relegating them to the male shadow. “They’re not taken quite seriously, not given the support they need, ultimately shunted off to the side.” 

Bernard has found Claudel “a big challenge to embody… as an actor and a writer.” She fashioned Stone and Soil, workshopped online in last year’s digital edition of Nextfest, as a ghost story of sorts. A ghostly incarnation of the artist returns to her final studio, smashing her sculptures over and over.” In the play she’s addressing “the other woman,” the lover Rodin wouldn’t leave — and the audience is collectively cast in that role.

Stone and Soil isn’t Bernard’s debut in writing. “I wrote a lot as a kid — short stories, poetry … my introduction to storytelling.” Then acting took over. “And in the last couple of years, I’ve picked up writing again,” she says of the challenge of “adapting narrative storytelling into theatrical storytelling.” 

The proverbial “learning curve” and “journey of self-discovery” find a natural home at Nextfest, as Bernard has discovered. She’s been at the festival before. First it was as an actor: “my  first Nextfest show after graduating (in 2018) was Mark Vetch’s Pretty Boy The Musical.” In 2019 she co-wrote a small cabaret piece for Nextfest’s clown festival, exercising her attraction to “bouffon style clowning,” dark and satirical.    

“There are so many creative young artists in this city, And Ellen (Nextfest director Ellen Chorley) and the whole team create an environment to try things out,” says Bernard. “It’s great to have the support and the platform to take artistic risks…. A lot of things are taken care of at Nextfest. So we have more time and room to do the creative things!”   

“My first full-length piece in a brand new theatre! How exciting is that?”

Stone and Soil runs Sunday, and also June 7, 11 and 12 on the Lorne Cardinal stage in the new Roxy Theatre. Tickets and times: nextfest.ca.

 

 

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Strangers on a train: the real-life story that inspired Omisimawiw, at Nextfest. Meet playwright Shyanne Duquette

Posted on June 3, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Omisimawiw by Shyanne Duquette, Nextfest 2022. Post image supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Strangers on a train. Imagine the scene (with special thanks to the ETS): a young woman on the LRT, heading towards class at the university, notices another young woman on the LRT. There’s just something about her, something familiar. 

“I’m a bit of a blunt person,” laughs 23-year-old Shyanne Duquette, an exuberant voice on the phone from Toronto, where she’s in the cast of Kenneth T. Williams’ The Herd at Tarragon Theatre. “So I walked over and went ‘hey, is your dad my dad?’. And that’s how she met her sister. “Sometimes you just know,” she says simply. 

In the real-life encounter Duquette not only found a sister, but also the inspiration for her first play. Omisimawiw, Cree for “elder sister,” breathes its first public air Saturday at Nextfest on the Nancy Power stage at the Roxy Theatre. When Duquette, who had been in Williams’ classes at the U of A in the course of getting a B.A. in drama, told him the story, “he said ‘that’s a play in itself’.” Nextfest artistic director Ellen Chorley had much the same reaction: “It’s got to be a play!”

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“I grew up with my mom and two sisters from my mom,” explains Edmonton-born and -raised Duquette, whose mother is white ( and step-father Indigenous). Gradually, “I came to hear of many more siblings from my (Indigenous) father … in total 15.” She “never really knew” that father, but “I’ve always had a bit of an awareness that there are more of me out there,” as she puts it in her engaging way.

“As soon as I met her,” says Duquette of her fateful LRT encounter with her sister, “it lit everything on fire in terms of Indigenous identity and my questions around that…. It brought up a lot of emotions.” And “various nuances” about her father find their way into Omisimawiw. For one thing he never signed her sister’s birth certificate, which created endless issues when it came to applying for First Nations status. 

playwright Shyanne Duquette, whose play Omisimawiw is at Nextfest. Photo supplied.

“It’s exhausting,” says Duquette, “especially after your culture’s been ripped away from you, and the struggle to regain it is (made) so difficult.” As she points out, “when you apply for a passport, a (federal) legal document, the turnaround is, what, two weeks. Applying for status (also a federal legal document) can take years…. I touch on that a bit in the play.” 

On the subject of Omisimawiw, “I almost think I should have sat on it a bit longer before I presented it to the public. But this is a great opportunity. And it’s a story that needs to be told…. I’m really trying to communicate with this play the idea that you can connect to your culture without connecting to family members that can cause harm out trauma to you…. “ 

As she describes it, Omisimawiw is a play that explores “questions of nature vs nurture, self-determination,” what family means, feelings of cultural disconnection. The family dynamic Duquette taps for her play s nothing if not complicated. 

“I grew up with the nickname Pocahontas, of course,” she says with a  shrug in her voice. “When I was younger I had friends whose families really liked me … because I was quiet and, you know, more assimilated, though they wouldn’t quite vocalize it like that.” Her stepdad’s father was a victim of residential schooling. “So that’s kind of a touchy topic.” Now that she’s written her first play, “I think there are many more plays within me.… I’m lucky that (as a culture) we’re at the (start) of wanting to hear these stories.”

There’s a wealth of material to draw on, as Duquette points out. Writing it has been important to her. “It’s a big thing, it’s re-affirmed who I am, that my experience as a Cree woman is valid.” And Omisimawiw is just the start for her. “Even non-Indigenous people can connect to not feeling you belong, now knowing where you’re from, not knowing where you’re going.”

As for her sister Majada, “I now have a relationship with her because of my directness,” Duquette laughs. “She was a little startled, yes. But we’ve met up since and had a few conversations….” And other siblings have reached out too.” She pauses. “It’s crazy how similar people can become without knowing each other.” 

Meanwhile The Herd, which played the Citadel in March, has another couple of weeks to run at Tarragon (minus the COVID break of this past week). Duquette had landed a gig as apprentice director of Tara Beagan’s production when she suddenly found herself in the cast and onstage at the Citadel. “I didn’t expect it,” she says with cheerful modesty of her sudden initiation into acting, “but it’s great. I’ve never really trained as an actor too specifically…. I feel more comfortable offstage.”  

When The Herd closes Omisimawiw will get a workshop as part of Tarragon’s Young Playwrights Unit. So Duquette she won’t be able to be in Edmonton for Nextfest. But she’s eager to find out “what really resonates with audiences, with the community. I can’t wait to see what people think.” 

Edmonton is a place Duquette loves. “As I get older I’m thinking about staying,” she says. “I’m getting great opportunities to create. And I’m very interested in continuing to revitalize the Edmonton scene…. I often think about where I would be if I didn’t have theatre, and hadn’t been introduced to it at a young age.” Her entry point as a kid was improv, in junior high and then high school. And acting followed, though “I was never able to really sink my teeth into it,” till The Herd. 

Theatre and theatre people have inspired her, she says, “and I’d like to be that kind of figure to some people if possible some day.” 

At the invitation of Josh Languedoc, the Fringe’s director of Indigenous strategic planning, Omisimawiw will get “a partial performance” in the Fringe’s Indigenous programming this summer. Duquette is thinking of directing it. And it will be part of RISER Edmonton’s 2023 lineup too. 

And as for the journey of discovery the play is about, for Duquette it’s not finished yet. Not by a long shot. “I’m still on that journey of identity…. I don’t really think the action of this play is done in my life.”

Omisimawiw runs at Nextfest 2022 Saturday, plus June 7, 9, and 11. Times and tickets: nextfest.ca.

 

 

 

 

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The building of Pressure, at Nextfest. Meet playwright Amanda Samuelson

Posted on June 3, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Playwright Amanda Samuelson, Nextfest 2022. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Amanda Samuelson remembers the moment Pressure began to build. 

Her play, which gets a workshop reading at Nextfest Saturday and then becomes Nextfest’s first-ever official Fringe show in August, began in the winter of 2018. In a playwriting course at NYU, where Samuelson went to school (and got her BFA), the pressurized assignment was “to incorporate three ingredients into a two-page scene…. Hunger,  astrology, a synthetic body part.” What could be more playful, or more impossibly daunting?

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Pressure has changed, and grown, and expanded incrementally from two pages to a fulsome 80 since then, as the playwright, now in her mid-20s, describes. But that first two-page scene, between protagonist Grace and her non-binary ex-partner Ricky, is still in place; in fact, Pressure opens with it. And, amazingly, “all the ingredients are incorporated,” Samuelson laughs.

In its non-chronological scenes — present-day Grace, Grace at 15, the last time Grace spoke to her father, Grace and Ricky break up … — Pressure charts “one woman’s  experience of depression” Says Samuelson, it’s “based on my own experience,” says Samuelson. “I tend to do that, to get inspired by real life, and fictionalize .” 

“In your mind, having thoughts like ‘everyone hates me’, or ‘this person must think that about me’…. It’s living too much in your head. And your thoughts take you into some other reality, the worst possible scenario. It’s not true, but you convince yourself to believe things that are bad about yourself.” 

Astrology? “It’s incorporated through the entire play,” says Samuelson of the “fake horoscopes,” written by Grace herself and reflecting her state of mind. “Today’s horoscope: you’re a big fat failure.” 

Synthetic body part? When her partner leaves to go to school, they give Grace a hand to hold while they’re gone.” 

In this, Samuelson has flipped the real-life experience of a long-distance relationship when she left her home town of Grand Prairie, and her boyfriend of the day, to go to NYU to be an actor. And like Samuelson, Grace is an artist: “I made her a struggling writer,” whose lack of confidence prevents any enjoyment of success. “When her play is selected for production in New York, she doesn’t want to get her hopes up; she’s sure something will go wrong.”

In successive incarnations, Pressure gained not only length but a third character, Grace’s mother, who’ll be played by Kate Ryan in the Nextfest reading directed by Emma Ryan. And the play’s mother-daughter relationship is fraught with push-pull tensions.

It was in the course of her studies in New York that Samuelson discovered herself as a writer. In the NYU studio where she happened to be placed,  Playwright Horizons, “you take all the classes — acting, directing, movement, design, playwriting. So I got a full (theatre) education, and that’s where I took my first playwriting class. After the first year I found I liked playwriting a lot more, and I started focussing on that. I realized hey, this is something I might actually be good at and really enjoy!” 

By the time Samuelson got back to Edmonton, she was a veteran creator of very short plays. Gate D-98, about two people in an airport, and My First Greek Sunset, about a sexual assault, were chosen for successive years of EdmonTEN, an annual showcase of that very difficult achievement of storytelling in a 10-minute span. Pressure, which had started as a two-page scene, became a 10-minute play, then a short one-act play which would have premiered at the U of A’s Stagestruck Festival in 2020 had it not been for The Great Pause. 

“I took a break from it for a while; I was feeling a bit stuck,” says Samuelson. Then came an invitation from Workshop West’s Heather Inglis to bring Pressure to the Springboards Festival in March. The 20-minute excerpt Inglis chose  “happened to be the newest scene I’d written…. I ended up changing the entire scene.” 

“Being able to hear it out loud, this play that had been inside my head, was super-helpful,” Samuelson says. “And now it’s at a point it really needs an audience,” so Saturday’s Nextfest workshop reading comes at the best possible moment…. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s as good as I can get it for now.”

Trained as an actor, Samuelson has been in both Fringe and Nextfest casts. But as for Nextfest’s debut venture into presenting at the Fringe, Samuelson is happy to not to be in Pressure herself. “I want to be able to experience it from the outside, to watch someone else bring the character to life in their own way. That for me is the most exciting part.”

Pressure happens in Nextfest’s Workshop Reading series Saturday at 6 p.m. in the Roxy’s Rehearsal Hall. Look for it in the Lorne Cardinal Theatre, a BYOV at the Fringe. 

Further information, tickets, full schedule at nextfest.ca.

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Nextfest 2022, live and under one roof, at the new Roxy

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

When you ask Nextfest artistic director Ellen Chorley what’s new at the festival this year, she laughs. “Everything!” she says of the 27th annual edition of the influential multi-disciplinary festival that showcases and celebrates emerging artists.

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“Really, the whole thing is about being new — new projects, new artists, new connections, new building!” Yes, after two years of its creative captures of live-ness online, not only is Nextfest back live Thursday, it’s in a deluxe new building, Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre on 124th Street. “Really, the only thing that’s constant about the festival,” as Chorley says, “is that it’s still 11 days (and nights).” 

Starting Thursday, Nextfest will be happening “in a wealth of venues … under one roof!” And not just under but on that roof. “It’s so beautifully built for a return to live; we’re so excited to be gathering! There’s nothing like being in the same room with people,” says Chorley, from her new location in the glass-walled office on the Roxy’s second floor. “Folks can show up at 10 a.m. and stay in the building all day long. And pop out to The Duchess for a coffee and a treat and then keep going with us till 2 a.m.!”

Nextfest artists, who number just over 500 at the moment, are poised to invade every nook and cranny of the building. No, there’s nothing officially programmed in the deluxe, very elegant Art Deco-inspired bathroom at the moment. But the curators of Nextfest’s signature themed performance Nite Clubs “are talking about it… Maybe you’d go into a stall and have a moment to write down your biggest fear or something like that,” declares Chorley, a multi-faceted theatre artist herself (actor/ playwright/ director/ producer/ mentor) who’s an indefatigable talent scout and perpetually in brainstorming mode.

Photo by Theatre Network

As she explains, three of the six mainstage theatre offerings, and all the dance (some nine new pieces grouped into three productions), happens in the Nancy, the 200-seat Nancy Power Theatre. The three other mainstage theatre productions, and all the high school theatre shows, are in the Lorne, the re-configurable “close and personal” downstairs black box Lorne Cardinal Theatre. It’s attached to the lobby bar where Nextfest artists and audiences will congregate.   

The multi-disciplinary festival and its 50-plus “events” are our window into the creative minds of the next generation of artists: game-changers in theatre, music, dance, film, visual arts, comedy, poetry…. and the performance art that resists every category. 

It all happens under the banner “come for the art, stay for the party.” Says Chorley, “meeting new people, introducing people, making new connections and starting collaborations that go on for decades … is a big part of what we do.” She points to her own theatre career which dates back to high school involvement in Nextfest.

“Nothing is based on ticket sales…. It’s a presentation model. We pay projects an honorarium to be part of the festival (Theatre Network keeps the ticket sales), and they divide it how they want…. Artists just have to be in charge of making the art, not the selling of the art, filling seats, marketing.”

Theatre at Nextfest exists in a three-tiered way, tailored to scripts at every stage of development. The bright, airy above-ground rehearsal hall is the site of four ‘workshop readings’. For a playwright, “it’s a first opportunity to hear their play read out loud to an audience — by actors, not just the voices in their head,” as Chorley puts it.

Nextfest director Ellen Chorley.

There are three ‘progress showings’, which Chorley describes as involving “a little bit of tech … a bit past a workshop reading but not a whole mainstage production.” Two of the three creators have been at Nextfest before, with other projects. For the last two years Lauren Brady, for example, has done “clown-based movement work in our online festivals. InterWEBBED, billed as “a sci-fi clown thriller,” capitalizes on that experience. It’s “a solo show about the uses of technology through the eyes of a clown,” as Chorley describes the piece, en route to a fully realized stage version. 

The six high-contrast “mainstage shows” each with four performances, vary in their Nextfest history and development. Gabby Bernard’s Stone and Soil, for example, has a Nextfest history: it was an online reading last year. One, Host Town, is a concert/ song cycle. Chuckle Ruckus is sketch comedy. Moonie and Maybee is set in a graveyard by moonlight. The Shadow and the Fool; a Progress Showing for a Process Growing is billed as a “hybrid lecture-performance.”

“It’s important to us to meet a project where it’s at,” says Chorley. Shyanne Duquette’s Omisimawiw (Cree for older sister) tells a remarkable sibling story, “one that’s really important to the playwright so we didn’t want to rush it…. It was about getting the script in front of the audience and getting their feedback.” It will be on the Nancy Power stage as a workshop reading.

You’ll meet Nexfest playwrights in upcoming 12thnight posts. 

In an age where creating and producing are more closely linked than ever before — and on the extremely persuasive theory that producers are taught not born — Nextfest’s new “emerging producer” program fills a niche. The two traditional routes — maxing your credit card for a Fringe show (“I’m still paying it off!” says Chorley) and taking arts admin at MacEwan University — aren’t accessible to everyone.  

Six participants took Producing 101 every Monday evening starting in January. And now, thanks to a provincial multi-cultural Indigenous inclusion grant, they’re “assistant producers” in charge of hands-on projects at festivals (Nextfest,  SkirtsAfire, Found Fest, and the Fringe). 

“The pandemic forced people to ask themselves what kind of artist am I going to be? And how am I going to get my art out there?” says Chorley, a playwright who started a kids’ theatre company and a burlesque troupe to produce her own work. “I love producing! And producing really changed the game for me,”   

When you come to Nextfest you can see visual art exhibitions and installations in three gallery spaces. You can watch films made by up-and-comers (or save those experiences for online). There’s a choose-your-own-journey podcast (created by playwright Hayley Moorhouse); there are talkbacks, workshops, showcases. There’s even online content (“we had to learn so much the last two years”). And back live, which is where they work best, there are four niteclubs (including the time-honoured Smut Cabaret and a Pride night), fashioned and produced by young arts presenters and troupes. They’ll have the run of the building.

But first there’s opening night. It starts across 124th St. at The Lot Thursday night, and moves back into the Roxy. Says Chorley, “a lot of artists will be in the building for the first time during the festival. I betcha by next year, there’ll be a show in the elevator, or on the stairs!” 

PREVIEW

Nextfest 2022

Theatre: Nextfest Arts Company

Where: Theatre Network‘s Roxy Theatre, 10708 124 St.

Running: Thursday through June 12

Tickets and complete schedule: nextfest.ca

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Art will prevail: a change of venue for L’UniThéâtre’s season finale

Posted on May 30, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If the last two years have taught us anything it’s that art will prevail. And so will Art, the, er, art-ful 1994 Yasmina Reza hit comedy that is  L’UniThéâtre’s season finale. 

Last Friday night’s storm and the sewer back-up that followed have meant that the theatre at La Cité francophone, L’UniThéâtre’s home base, is unusable for the time being. Josée Thibeault’s production of Art will open Wednesday and run through Saturday, exactly as scheduled. But there’s been a last-minute change of venue: Art will happen instead at the Gateway, Workshop West’s new theatre in Old Strathcona. 

“We were just finalizing the set,” sighs L’UniThéâtre artistic director Steve Jodoin, who’s a member of the three-actor cast. Since Jonathan Beaudoin’s design for the play involved walls (the location is an apartment) and they’d been built onstage, they couldn’t be moved. So a play about the reaction of three friends to a minimalist white-on-white painting just got more minimalist, in the production re-worked for its run at the Gateway. 

“No walls….That works!” says Jodoin, of a play, returned to its original French (with English subtitles), in which a three-way friendship fractures spectacularly over modern art, and the big money laid down by one of them for an all-white  canvas by a famous artist.  

He notes that the occupants of La Cité, including Le Café Bicyclette, have been given “a 10-day window,” with reassessment then about the timeline for repairing the damages. La Cité’s patio and wedding season schedule are on hold; the busy Fringe season awaits. 

Art, starring Steve Jodoin, Bernard Salva and François Pageau, runs Wednesday through Saturday at the Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca 

 

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A comedy thriller with a Wagnerian reverb: Evelyn Strange at Teatro, a review

Posted on May 28, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Gianna Vacirca, Oscar Derkx in Evelyn Strange, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A beautiful amnesiac in a trench coat finds herself in a grand tier box at the Met c. 1955, sitting through a performance of Wagner’s five-hour Siegfried. She needs time to think and, hey, The Ring Cycle is ideal for that.

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“I’m happy things aren’t going too fast,” she tells another occupant of that darkened box. “I can’t be rushed. Not tonight.”

That’s the unusual opening scene of Evelyn Strange, Stewart Lemoine’s witty, high-style 1995 comedy/ thriller/ romance/mystery, now getting a revival in Teatro La Quindicina’s 40th anniversary season. The opera-loving playwright has concocted a Hitchcockian mystery plot with Wagnerian reverb, in which a reluctant Siegfried will rescue a strangely somnambulant Brunnhilde with no ID. True, the mysterious Miss Strange (Gianna Vacirca) isn’t catching zzz’s behind a wall of flame, but her mind seems to be on indefinite pause. 

Jesse Gervais, Gianna Vacirca, Oscar Derkx, Evelyn Strange, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Evelyn Strange is more homage than parody, to be sure. It’s a ticklish thing to wrap noir-ish suspense around comedy (or possibly vice versa). And it’s fun, and funny, to see it done so neatly, and with so much pizzaz, in the production directed by Shannon Blanchet (who made her professional debut in the title role of the play’s 2006 revival).  

Lemoine’s worldly sophisticates are ideally suited to breezily tossing off their views on opera (opera jokes aren’t everywhere in Canadian theatre, I find). Nina Ferrer, the tigerish Westchester society matron  played to a perfect cutting edge of sharpness by Belinda Cornish, isn’t short on views on the subject. In one of my favourite pieces of worldly advice ever, she advises Perry Spengler (Oscar Derkx), the sub-editor who works for her publishing magnate husband, that with Wagner there’s no real need to read the program notes in advance. It’s better to prepare by “practising breathing as slowly as possible so you can lower your heart rate.”

Nina bolts at the first intermission (Siegfried is amply supplied with those). Spengler, a young man with an adorable open-faced charm about him in Derkx’s funny performance, opts to stay: “I wouldn’t mind seeing the dragon in Act II.”

Oscar Derkx and Gianna Vacirca in Evelyn Strange, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

It’s a fatal curiosity. Perry Spengler will find himself fascinated against his better judgment by the mysterious stranger who doesn’t know who she is and how she got a ticket to the Met. And he’s cornered, by his own instinctive helpfulness and good manners, into squiring her through her journey of self-discovery.

In the great theatrical repertoire of comically awkward first “dates,” their après-opera time together at the Automat has a special place. “Chicken,” he notes, watching her dismember a pot pie, “makes you happy in a way Wagner never could.”  

In her smart, stylish performance as the mysteriously blank Hitchcock blonde, Vacirca charts Evelyn Strange’s calibrated course through a world in which everything is perplexing and unfamiliar until, gradually, it’s not. She graduates from dazed to cinematic. “There’s nowhere to go but Manhattan,” she sighs dramatically. “And I’m a stranger there.” 

Jesse Gervais is riotously manic as Perry Spengler’s  work-mate at the publishing house, and a self-styled roué and man about town. Lewis Hake positively glints with malicious glee; seductive poses are his specialty. When the time comes for pyjamas, and a sex scene at his place, you will laugh out loud. And you’ll have further  opportunities for public laughing in a theatre when you see Cornish as Ferrer, entering a room on high heels propelled by her own shopping bags, or hear her tartly advise Miss Stranger that if she needs lunch she should have a rum flip. “It has an egg in it.”  

This pair have a hilarious scene together at Grand Central Station for reasons I must not divulge, where they both come unglued, but in different registers. “If a train for South America passes, I will catch it,” she snaps frantically. 

The fun of all this unravelling is enhanced by the visuals: a tip of the fedora to Leona Brausen’s glamorous ‘50s costumes, witty in themselves. Chantel Fortin’s set pieces produce the Met, the Automat, Grand Central Station, in the most economical way, appearing onstage by human agency. 

A special word is de rigueur for Narda McCarroll’s lavish and suspenseful film noir lighting, all shadows and sidelights. It makes red velvet curtains and fedoras especially worthwhile. 

The bonus, of course, is that the comedy unfolds to a score by Wagner, whose moments of making audiences laugh have hitherto been few and far between. And there’s this: you don’t have to actually sit through Siegfried to hear the highlights.

REVIEW

Evelyn Strange

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Shannon Blanchet

Starring: Gianna Vacirca, Oscar Derkx, Belinda Cornish, Jesse Gervais

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through June 12

Tickets: teatroq.com

 

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The one-way time portal into war: Alina, a review

Posted on May 27, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Christina Nguyen in Alina, Pyretic Productions. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Trains, they’re like time portals,” says the title character of Alina, who steps into one at the outset. On a train you leave one world and you arrive in another. 

The question the drives the gripping new play by Ukrainian-Canadian playwright Lianna Makuch, premiering in Patrick Lundeen’s veritable barrage of a production, is whether you can ever come back.

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Makuch’s story of Alina and her milieu of extraordinary “ordinary” people who step outside their lives and volunteer to fight for Ukraine’s future — inspired by on-location research in Ukraine —are a powerful indicator that in war there are no return tickets. The “real world” and the you who moved through it cannot be found; they no longer exist.  

Lundeen’s Pyretic production, in the tiny Studio Theatre venue, is a test case for theatrical invention in flinchingly close quarters. It’s a bone-rattling first-person solo evocation of the horrifying multi-sense assault of war, and the nightmare strangeness of PTSD — in sound (electronic composer Noor Dean Musani and sound designer Aaron Macri), in lighting (Stephanie Bahniuk), in virtuoso movement (choreographer Amber Borotsik), and in a remarkably vivid performance by Christina Nguyen.  

Nguyen literally ricochets through a world framed by the sandbags and stark collapsible beams of Bahniuk’s set. She stars as the fierce, impatient, hot-tempered 19-year-old university kid who boards the train that goes to the front line of a war: the escalating battleground near Donetsk Airport in eastern Ukraine, during the 2014 Russian invasion. She’s armed with a backpack, supplies for front-line volunteers, and the memory of a 2013 student protest in the main square of Kyiv that was brutally suppressed by police enforcers of the Russian puppet regime and “changed nothing.”

Christina Nguyen in Alina by Lianna Makuch. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

What motivates Alina? It’s a play of double-negatives that don’t cancel each other out: “I can’t do nothing any more,” Alina declares. “This will not all be for nothing.” War, in short, is something you can’t not do when the chips are down, which is where they’ve been for countless years in Ukraine.   

Alina, though, doesn’t explain — and arguably doesn’t set about explaining — the mystery of a restless character with an impressive, built-in defiance about her, a certain pressure-resistant pro-active anti-authoritarian streak, and a short fuse. At 19, she takes on everything that’s stacked against her choice to go to war —  her mother’s objections (and safety), her friends’ easy compliance with the status quo (“the front? the front of what?”), even the volunteer brigades who initially refused “a 19-year-old girl” on the grounds of both age and gender. 

She’s not an easy person, as Nguyen’s performance, unafraid of harshness, amply conveys. “I never want to be you!” she says on the phone to her worried factory-worker mother (Lora Brovold, who has a late-play cameo). Then she hangs up on her, and refuses to respond to her messages.

Significantly, the only softness to Alina is a certain rapport with children, and the lingering childhood memory of a sun-dappled day in Independence Square in Kyiv. 

Hers is a story full of adventures (all culled from real-life interviews), which unfold to a sound track of booms, explosions, and echoing thuds, the electronic pulse of tension, weird vibrations, a sheen of industrial buzz. The sound provided by Musani and Macri is an outstandingly dramatic participant in the storytelling. And the eerie glow, flashes, and  shadows of Bahniuk’s stunning lighting design conjure a shattering world of terrors. 

Christina Nguyen in Alina, Pyretic Productions. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective,

Alina poses as a journalist and is found out and arrested as a spy (“c’mon, I have 2,500 Twitter followers”). She jumps from the third floor of a burning building. Without either military or medical training, she’s suddenly a front-line medic, flailing in blood, struggling to find the vein and give a horribly wounded man an injection.

“Don’t worry,” says a fellow volunteer. “It’s not brain surgery. (Pause). Most of the time.” To the soundtrack is added the script’s repeating chorus of gruesome injuries – shrapnel wounds, concussions, collapsed lungs, frostbite, wounded bodies coded 300 for saveable, 200 for dead. 

Between assignments when she returns to the civilian world, Alina doesn’t recognize her former life. It’s an aggressive chaos of grotesque noise, people drinking and talking about nothing in clubs, a disconnection conjured by the production. “I pass people just living, smoking, laughing, kissing. And they look through me like I don’t exist.” She’s furious one moment, and struck by the strangeness of tiny things — a cat, the sight of two old men in caps — the next. 

She can’t get rid of the metallic taste of blood on the tip of her tongue. And eeriest of all, over and over, when she looks in the mirror she sees a death’s head. The image of Alina impaled between the V of two poles in a spotlight is a graphic theatricalization of PTSD and an overpowering sense of unreality. That this is all delivered by Nguyen in motion and in the present tense as it’s happening, a mode of storytelling fraught with the risk of artifice, is a startling (and aerobic) achievement in physical theatre.  

Since Alina was written before the current deluge of Russian invasion atrocities in Ukraine, the frame and shape of the play have undoubtedly changed. And the ending of the play, infused with a certain hope for healing and the passionate belief that solidarity counts, has darkened considerably. What was hopeful is now heartbreaking.

“There is no future right now,” says Alina. “We’re in between…. We’re fighting for a future.” It’s never been more in doubt. 

Read the 12thnight interview with the playwright here, including details about donating to Ukrainian humanitarian efforts.

REVIEW

Alina

Theatre: Pyretic Productions in association with Punctuate! Theatre

Written by: Lianna Makuch

Directed by: Patrick Lundeen

Starring: Christina Nguyen and Lora Brovold

Where: Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn

Running: through June 5

Tickets: pyreticproductions.ca 

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Destination Fringe: Edmonton Fringe Theatre is back with a moniker, a live festival, and a curated season of productions

Posted on May 26, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Edmonton Fringe is back, live, this summer, for a big 41st edition, in a place where that really matters. And its name speaks volumes: Destination Fringe.

Yes, fellow travellers, as live theatre emerges from the most punishing and chaotic time it’s ever known, you have a festive destination this August (11 to 21). And after last year’s 40th birthday edition, Together We Fringe: A Fringe Event, creatively trimmed for safety to some 64 live shows in a dozen venues, our summer theatre extravaganza in 2022 is a destination that feels wide and unpredictable in advance. Just the way we like it.   

While its dimensions aren’t as gargantuan as the 2019 Fringe, with its record-breaking 260 shows in 50-plus venues, Destination Fringe feels expansive, as Fringe director Murray Utas and Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart outlined it Thursday: 160 shows in some 27 venues, eight of them programmed by lottery and 19 BYOVs, acquired and outfitted by artists themselves.

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The Fringe is a destination for kids: The Kids Fringe, on hold for a year, is back (and free), directed by Girl Brain’s Alyson Dicey. International groups, who couldn’t bring their shows to Edmonton for the last two summers, are in Destination YEG mode, restoring a missing dimension to the show lineup. And the Fringe will be a more expansive destination for Indigenous artists too. Instead of last year’s one venue (pêhonân) dedicated exclusively to Indigenous shows (and highly successful), Indigenous artists will perform across the Fringe — on its outdoor stages, its late-night cabarets, in roving performances leading audiences to the Indigenous Art Park, in short, “anywhere you Fringe,” as Dart says. 

Fringe Revue has returned, too. At Wednesday night’s launch, live and on Fringe TV (one of the great successes of pandemical times), Utas and Dart outlined Fringe Theatre’s curated 2022-2023 season of productions, a destination for some of Edmonton’s most adventurous young indie artists. 

Actor Emma Houghton turns playwright with her adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates 2003 ‘young adult fiction’ novel Freaky Green Eyes, “a coming-of-age crime drama” as she describes it,  for the stage as a one-woman play. “The Great Pause empowered me to create my own work,” she told the audience Wednesday. The production runs in January at the Backstage Theatre. 

André Moreno performed an excerpt from Botticelli in the Fire, Jordan Tannahill’s queer theatrical fantasia on the life and times of Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli as he works on his masterpiece The Birth of Venus. The large-cast production runs in April, directed by Sarah Emslie and produced by Common Ground Art Society’s Mac Brock. 

The Fringe Theatre curated season also includes Evandalism by MC RedCloud, the very engaging co-creator of Bear Grease, the hit Indigenous adaptation of the famous musical that sold out every performance at last summer’s Fringe and has toured across the border to full houses since then. His new play is spun from MC RedCloud’s own life; Utas directs. Dates to be announced. 

But first, Destination Fringe. “It’s a fuller-scale festival this year,” as Dart puts it, simply. After two years of creative work-arounds and resourceful online adaptations — no theatre company has been more supple at improvising workarounds —  our Fringe is again a destination for artists, audiences, and live experimenting by both. Our theatrical GPS is on course: straight on till August.

Tickets for Destination Fringe go on sale Aug. 3. Check out fringetheatre.ca for more information.

 

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The strange cycles of theatre: Shannon Blanchet returns to Teatro to direct the vintage comedy thriller Evelyn Strange

Posted on May 25, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Oscar Derkx, Gianna Vacirca, Belinda Cornish in Evelyn Strange, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Every once in a while the world of live theatre pulls off one of those satisfying but fanciful multi-strand time loops that wouldn’t be out of place in a play. Opera is involved; so is comedy. Shakespeare has a supporting role. How often does that happen? 

Evelyn Strange, the Teatro La Quindicina revival that opens Friday on the Varscona stage — in a darkened box on the grand tier of the Metropolitan Opera — returns Shannon Blanchet to the theatre town where she made her busy career as an actor till last summer. Back to the company where she has a long history as a leading lady, and where she got her first professional gig out of U of A theatre school. And back to the very play in which that happened.

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Blanchet played the title role in a 2006 revival of Stewart Lemoine’s 1995 mystery/ thriller/ comedy/ romance, as the beautiful amnesiac who discovers an opera ticket in her pocket. This time Blanchet won’t be onstage. She’s making her directing debut with Evelyn Strange, set in 1955, in which Wagner’s opera Siegfried, part three of the Ring Cycle, is the opening gambit. (Gianna Vacirca is the new Evelyn Strange). 

The distinctive Blanchet voice, with its interesting edges and hints of husky (BioWare was quick to appreciate that voice in video game gigs) is on the phone. She’s explaining a move to Saskatoon last summer to take an assistant professorship of voice and acting in the University of Saskatchewan drama department. 

“It’s a bit of an odd thing to move to a new city in the middle of a pandemic,” she concedes. But it’s “exactly what I went to school for,” she says of her U of A master’s degree in “voice pedagogy,” a field that is not, contrary to popular opinion, about singing. It’s a line of work Blanchet summarizes as “personal trainer meets drama teacher meets speech pathologist meets public communication coach.”

The soft ‘50s cadence of the Evelyn Strange characters is right up her alley, “the fading trans-Atlantic dialect, the slightly elongated vowels … everything took a little longer then, the tune of the language.” 

Blanchet entered the Teatro ensemble via … Shakespeare. First it was the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s glam Hollywood McCarthy era production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, with Blanchet as Rosaline. Then it was a Studio Theatre production of As You Like It, with Blanchet as the witty cross-dresser Rosalind. Lemoine and Jeff Haslam saw both shows; they’d found their Evelyn Strange.

“I just remember the fun of it,” she says of the experience of playing the mysterious character who knows nothing about herself except that she’s sitting through Siegfried at the Met. “I tend to be a serious, no, intense, person…. It was a revelation to me that (theatre) could be fun, after being so serious for so long.” And she remembers being “wholly intimidated” by her Evelyn Strange castmates (Haslam, Davina Stewart and Ron Pederson), “lovely and welcoming though they were.” 

The first Teatro show she’d seen was The Vile Governess, Lemoine’s “Ibsenesque romp,” as he’s described it. “I remember laughing till my sides ached, thinking ’what the hell IS this? It was like nothing I’d ever seen before….”

“Actually, most of Stewart’s plays have an element of ‘what the hell is this?’” Blanchet muses. “He mixes and stretches and pushes and pulls genres…. Many dimensions of comedy, a word you come to realize (with Teatro) is more a category and not really a descriptive.” 

Jesse Gervais, Gianna Vacirca, Oscar Derkx, Evelyn Strange, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

And so it is, she thinks, with Evelyn Strange. “You have opera, you have a mystery, and you have romance, and you have comedy. And it’s fantastic to figure out how far to lean into all those elements at any given moment.” There are noir-ish affinities to Hitchcock — Kim Novak in Vertigo — as Blanchet points out. “And what a yummy thing for design… But how do you balance that so people know they can laugh?” 

It’s tricky. And so is memory, she finds, coming back to a play she loves after a decade and a half. “I’m sure there was a wall. No, there were no walls…. Then, wait, ah I remember, it was on the old pie-shaped stage (in the old pre-reno’ed Varscona). Different theatre.” Blanchet is happy about the proscenium (framed) stage in the re-born Varscona. “A proscenium is really where it’s meant to be. It starts at the Metropolitan Opera, so it makes perfect sense for there to be big beautiful drapes!”

Oscar Derkx and Gianna Vacirca in Evelyn Strange, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

It also makes sense for there to be music, of course. And as in so many Lemoines, it’s part of the story, a life-changer. “The first thing I wanted to do was listen to the music, she’s found in her inaugural directing assignment. “You hear the opening tymp roll, hmm, and then you jump to the end, the high C and the rejoicing, and OK, so there’s the journey of the play!” She reports that Vacirca and co-star Oscar Derkx actually sat through all five hours of a German production of Siegfried the other night, a testament to extreme commitment. “Mine doesn’t extend that far,” she laughs. 

Someone in the crew, Blanchet reports, observed that “you’d think the music was written for the play, and not the reverse. Reverse engineering!” She remembers how much hearing the music helped her understand her character —“a romantic vision in some other character’s head” — in another Lemoine, The Adulteress.  

Gianna Vacirca, Oscar Derkx in Evelyn Strange, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

“I’m always amazed at designers,” Blanchet says. “I’ve asked Chantel (set designer Chantel Fortin) for the moon. And she has really delivered…. Narda (lighting designer Narda McCarroll in her Teatro debut) says ‘wait, o, do you want the moon?’ Amazing.” And a play set in the ‘50s unleashes Teatro’s costume designer Leona Brausen in a period she loves. “The costumes tell you how to move; there are certain things you cannot do in a suit from 1950. Nope, you won’t be lifting your arms that way.” 

As Blanchet knows from first-hand experience, the actor’s ultimate nightmare is playing an amnesiac, a character with a blank slate of motives and no back story. “It’s really really hard to accept ‘do less do less do less do nothing’…. You have to think all the thoughts but don’t do anything!” 

She herself is revelling in her own back story of “growing up wth a company, and being trusted with increasing levels of responsibility,” as she puts it. We haven’t lost her to university life. “It’s especially important for people to remain active, in the industry and the community.” She’ll be back. Meanwhile she’s preparing to direct a university production of Lemoine’s The Margin of the Sky in Saskatoon at Greystone Theatre, slated to happen just after Teatro’s own season-ending revival here for the Fringe. 

“Ask me where I’m local,” she says. “That feels like a good question.” 

PREVIEW

Evelyn Strange

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Shannon Blanchet

Starring: Gianna Vacirca. Oscar Derkx, Belinda Cornish, Jesse Gervais

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Tickets: teatroq.com 

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