Reading the signs: The Herd premieres at the Citadel. A review.

Posted on April 10, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Dylan Thomas-Bouchier, Cheyenne Scott, Tai Amy Grauman, Shyanne Duquette, Todd Houseman in The Herd, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The stage is dominated by a stunning screen — glowing, translucent,  undulating like the prairies, with a graceful open-work lattice (Indigenous Tiffany?). In The Herd the boundary between the present and the past, this world and other dimensions, is porous, as conjured by designer Andy Moro in Tara Beagan’s production.

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A buffalo skull has pride of place, front and centre. And The Herd opens with the thunder of a bison herd, doomed by history, raising dust behind the screen. “It begins with the apocalypse. Every buffalo gone,” a destruction with an infinite reverb for Indigenous people.

“We will return,” say the collective ‘buffalo people’ onstage. Kenneth T. Williams’s new play, a Tarragon Theatre partnership finally getting its premiere at the Citadel after two years of COVIDian stops and starts, is all about that return. And it comes at a complicated, high-traffic intersection of cultural, social, political, economic issues for the young chief (Dylan Thomas-Bouchier) of the Buffalo Pound Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan.

The extraordinary event at the centre of the action is the birth of twin white buffalo calves on the reserve. Is this the fulfilment — the double-fulfilment — of a sacred Indigenous prophecy about hope and spiritual renewal? Is it the result of genetic manipulation by the veterinarian/geneticist Dr. Brokenhorn (Tai Amy Grauman) who has returned to her home reserve to minister to the purity of the herd and filter out domestic cattle genes? 

Prophecies, like miracles, are a tricky call. If they’re created by human calculation — science, for example — are they still prophetic or miraculous? That question is up for grabs amongst the fractious characters of The Herd, and it will be fascinating to learn the reactions of Indigenous commentators. 

Tai Amy Grauman and Todd Houseman, The Herd, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

“You want to know if I made them on purpose,” says brusk Dr. Brokenhorn to persistent Indigenous blogger Coyote Jackson of Red Warrior Media (Todd Houseman), who instantly shows up gathering followers, clicks, and publicity.  

Not only is the twin birth an instant tourist attraction, the situation is further knotted by the First Nation’s business contract with the EU, to supply Euro markets with ‘authentic’ Wild West meat. To Aislinn (Cheyenne Scott), the glossy EU business rep who arrives to protect the investment, talking the win-win talk, the twins are a non-pareil marketing opportunity. “Bisonstock,” she brainstorms with herself. “No, Bisonfest, that’s better.”

And heaven knows, the community could use a prosperity boost. As “Baby Pete” Brokenhorn, the band chief and the good doctor’s brother, points out, the reserve has a perennial housing shortage. And they’ve been boiling water for 20 years since they’ve never had the resources  to tap the aquifer. 

The other character, Sheila (Shyanne Duquette), the aunt of the brother/sister pair and an Elder, is an artist, more measured in her responses. Her creative inspiration apparently comes more directly from the spirit world. If Sheila’s role in The Herd seems more theoretical and less impactful, it’s partly because her encounters with other characters are way less audible (I was in row D).  

Tai Amy Grauman, Cheyenne Scott, Dylan Thomas-Bouchier in The Herd, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

The birth, whether sign from the spirit world or scientific achievement, creates a frenzy of excitement and stresses. “We don’t need more attention,” snaps Dr. Brokenhorn as the crowd of on-lookers escalates alarmingly into a festive camp-out (we see their campfires flicker through the screen and hear their party din). The chief, in Thomas-Bouchier’s appealing performance, is up against it, trying to untangle the knot of contradictory factors.  

Williams’ work, as you’ll see in The Herd, is infused with a sense of humour, however dark the subject matter. Excellent as the increasingly harried and exasperated doctor, Grauman brings her strong, edgy speaking voice to bear as she stomps through her world, not answering calls, cutting through chatter abruptly —   “what are you doing here?” — when self-serving interests camouflage themselves in jargon.  

The play’s most comic character, never without his blogger’s tripod and a selection of warrior poses, is Coyote Jackson, the self-styled “Indigenizer of the net.” Houseman is amusing as the social media star and activist whose Indigenous cred comes under scrutiny in the play. “Very Oka 1990s,” notes the formidable Dr. Brokenhorn eyeing his get-up. Is Colin Jackson of Etobicoke a Pretendian? He’s desperate to make his case. “I’m totally legit!”

Thorny questions of cultural and spiritual identity, both animal and human, are everywhere in The Herd. There is perhaps a surfeit of entrances and exits in the production (and the Shoctor is a big stage). But once onstage the people we meet there argue those questions, weigh the spiritual and cultural price of them, justify their responses, air their doubts. And that leaves them, and us, with a lot to think about.

Meet playwright Kenneth T. Williams in the 12thnight PREVIEW here.

REVIEW

The Herd

Theatre: Citadel Theatre in association with Tarragon Theatre and National Arts Centre Indigenous Theatre

Written by: Kenneth T. Williams

Directed by: Tara Beagan

Starring: Tai Amy Grauman, Todd Houseman, Cheyenne Scott, Shyanne Duquette, Dylan Thomas-Boucher

Running: through April 24

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

 

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The Power of the Drum, a dance theatre adventure into the spiritual heart of the Afro-Cuban experience

Posted on April 8, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

The Power of the Drum, Cuban Movements Dance Academy. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The show that opens Saturday on the Westbury stage takes us on a dance theatre adventure deep into the spiritual heart and traditions of the Afro-Cuban experience. 

The Power of the Drum, a creation of the nine-year-old Cuban Movements Dance Academy, is the story of the rich culture brought to Cuba by West African slaves. “You go to Cuba, with its amazing dance and music and drumming, and you ask ‘where is this coming from?’” says Cecilia Ferreya, the writer, director, producer, and narrator of the piece, choreographed by the Academy’s artistic director Leo Gonzales.

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The Power of the Drum, an expansion of the original 15-minute presentation audiences saw at the 2021 Expanse Festival, is all about answering that question. “We’re telling the story of those roots; we’re connecting people with a tradition and a history” that shed light on “how the ancestors could survive the harshest conditions and thrive, and continue to keep a rich culture that was a source of strength and resilience. … We are reclaiming that narrative.” 

Cuban Movements Dance Academy treated Fringe audiences last summer (me included) to a remarkably flavourful dance musical survey of Cuban culture, a veritable explosion of colour and rhythm. The Power of the Drum, an inspiration nurtured by RISER Edmonton — the first iteration of a national program designed to boost indie producers — is different, as Ferreya explains. “It’s a more serious subject matter,” performed by professionals. 

In the course of this homage to spirituality we will see, in full costume, sacred dances of five Orichas, Yoruban gods and goddesses who connect the human to the divine, linked as they are to Nature, the sea, storms, wind…. 

Leo Gonzales, founder and artistic director, Cuban Movements Dance Academy. Photo supplied.

The three dancers of the cast — Gonzales himself, with Raydel Martinez Portuondo and Ingrid Díaz Céspedes — are professionals, all from Cuba. And they’re joined by drummer Nathan Ouellette, a Canadian musician who has “learned from the best, in Cuba” and devoted himself to absorbing the spiritual traditions built into Afro-Cuban drumming. “You have to have permission to use the drums,” as Ferreya explains. “It’s very special.” 

The production is designed to be “an immersive experience,” she says. In the lobby beforehand, “to set the tone,” you’ll hear a drumming sound score. And you’ll see an an altar of consecrated drums, and a photography/projection exhibition of Orichas conveyed by dancers and drummers, shot in Havana in December, Ferreya and Gonzales had hoped to bring a contingent of those artists to Canada for the show; COVID intervened.  

Gonzales, a Havana-born professional dancer (“I was dancing in my crib!”), founded the Cuban Movements Dance Academy in 2013. “When I first moved here, I was very interested to see people from many different countries,” he says. “A lot of multi-cultures — I really liked that. I didn’t feel like the only one (from another culture)…. I was very happy to share mine.”

In Cuba, where he was a student at the national dance school in Havana, Gonzales began to choreograph, at first informally. He spent his time in the military (Cuba has mandatory conscription) choreographing a company of soldier dancers. 

Cecilia Ferreyra, writer, director, producer, narrator of The Power of the Drum, Cuban Movements Dance Academy. Photo supplied.

The Argentine-born Ferreya, the manager of the Academy, was drawn to Afro-Cuban dance when she started classes with Gonzales. “It’s a feeling of tapping into something that has been done for hundreds of years. Vibrations, sources of energy, whatever you call it, with Leo you feel it in your heart, your body…. “

“It’s a shared experience. Which is perfect for now. In the pandemic we’ve been locked apart. This is the feeling of connectivity! A celebration of community is a beautiful thing.”  

“Leo is channelling memory, body memory, something more than the movement itself,” says Ferreya of a dance tradition set apart from ballet. “Ballet is something that can be mastered. Afro-Cuban dance is not something to be mastered…. The body becomes another drum, if you like.”  

“Leo isn’t dancing alone; he’s dancing with his ancestors.” 

Gonzales puts it this way: “with ballet you have to execute the (prescribed) positions exactly. An arm goes here; a leg goes there….This comes from your body; it’s reaching inside the body, getting to the spirit.” Afro-Cuban dance performances build, and they’re never exactly the same. In the classes he teaches at the Academy, and in guest gigs at MacEwan University, Gonzales’s goal, he says, is that “the students connect with the music. You feel like the music is moving your body. When the people in the class engage, my energy explodes!” 

Gonzales’s two little daughters, ages five and eight, are the beneficiaries of private dance tutoring, he laughs. Sometimes they come to his dance classes. His other students tell them “you’re so lucky; you go to your daddy’s work and have fun!”

PREVIEW

The Power of the Drum

RISER Edmonton 2022

Theatre: Cuban Movements Dance Academy

Written, directed, produced by: Cecilia Ferreya

Choreographed by: Leo Gonzales

Starring: Leo Gonzales, Raydel Martinez Portuondo, Ingrid Diaz Céspedes, Nathan Ouellette, Cecilia Ferreya

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

Running: Saturday through April 17

Tickets:  tickets.fringetheatre.ca 

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Jane Eyre lives in a haunted world: Erin Shields’ new adaptation at the Citadel. A review

Posted on April 6, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Hailey Gillis and Ivy DeGagné in Jane Eyre, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The opening image of Jane Eyre, currently premiering on the Citadel’s Maclab stage through Sunday, is a solitary little girl reading in a pool of light, enclosed in space by blank window frames.

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The orphan heroine of Erin Shields’ new re-creation of the 1847 Charlotte Brontë novel, lives in a dark, haunted world, pursued through life by abusers, enforcers … and ghosts. And in the feminist focus of the playwright’s storytelling, it will be Jane’s mission, and her achievement, to find her own light in the darkness, to resist capture and shed her demons, to claim love.  

The odds are against it, to be sure. The straight-spoken little orphan with the obstinate streak, first played by Ivy DeGagné and then as a grown-up by Hailey Gillis, is a solo resistance fighter in a world of walls —  Victorian proprieties and the adamantine economic status quo among them.  

In the inventive production directed by Daryl Cloran, Anahita Dehbonehie’s design is dominated by a gauzy back wall, storeys high, through which moonlit trees glint or raging flames flicker. At times it becomes the mysterious Thornfield Hall, the gothic manor with a terrible secret; sometimes it hints of worlds outside and beyond. 

Bonnie Beecher’s lighting is beautiful, and a transformative part of the storytelling as a long and complicated novel takes to the stage and sheds its narration (and its length, down to a fleeting two-and-a- half hours). The family portraits painted in shadow are an ingenious touch for a haunted house mystery. 

Jane Eyre, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

And in Cloran’s resourceful stagecraft, the daily activity of her life whirls around Jane. Window frames are hoisted and reconfigured, staircases are moved, beds whirl and become coaches. And a cast of nine actors become some four dozen-plus characters on the fly, sometimes flung offstage in one guise, re-entering as another. Which is the right moment to applaud Judith Bowden’s costumes, a fanciful class-defining gallery of hats and bonnets, aprons, skirts, frock coats … always fun to look at.

On both theatrical and feminist grounds, the adaptation claims the amusement value of having the male actors of the cast don the subservient bonnet, to to speak, to play the female maids, the cooks, the sidekicks, in addition to their other roles. After a while, gender shmender, you just stop noticing the goatee on the cook’s face (Garett Ross) as she affectionately scolds a couple of playful sisters in a country parson’s household. 

The other indispensable aspect of the theatrical storytelling is the witty movement script created for the ensemble by Ainsley Hillyard of Good Women Dance. The passage of time is in the hands — well, the whole bodies — of the actors, whether the robotic procession of child “inmates” at the prison-like Lowood School or the rote repetition of Jane’s governess days, a rhythm of life as she rolls out of bed and starts again every morning, over and over. 

Novels, especially the 19th century varietals, have built-in duration.  And the creative physicality devised by Hillyard, which never looks like imposed choreography, conjures the illusion of that, without the reality.

Mr. Rochester (John Ullyatt), the abrupt, blunt but somehow still secretive master of Thornfield, makes a startling entrance, dumped from his horse (conjured by an ensemble member with a horse’s head), accompanied by an enthusiastic dog (conjured by an ensemble member with exceptional knee flexibility). 

Hailey Gillis in Jane Eyre, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Gillis is captivating as Jane Eyre, fierce but watchful, a clear-eyed observer of the world who’s capable of moments of real stillness at the centre of perpetual motion. In Jane’s fiery, impatient younger edition, as played by the bright young actor DeGagné, you can see the origins of the older. 

Ullyatt conveys both the alluring confidence and the mysterious restlessness of a man with a troubling secret. There is tangible chemistry between Rochester and Jane for the latter to resist.

The cast is dexterous. In the Dickensian array of macabre grotesques and sweet interventionists who trail Jane from her past, Helen Belay is lovely as Jane’s angelic (and only) friend Helen, with Nadien Chu a memorable brute in velvet as the awful Aunt Reed. Braydon Dowler-Coltman turns in a first-rate comic performance as the pompously  pious parson St. John; you’ll smile to see him take out a watch to limit his romantic fantasizing to exactly one minute.

The build-up of the story feels so detailed and full that the romantic resolution and the unravelling of the mystery in Act II do seem a bit rushed and precipitous by contrast. What? It’s over? And despite their being beautifully written (and delivered exquisitely by Gillis), Jane’s reflections on the imprisoned woman in the attic, the thought that they share an understanding of female confinement in a man’s world, just seem a little explicit and authorial under the circumstances of the play that’s preceded them. 

But these are cavils. I’m coming to the production late (I was away when it opened). But I’m glad I didn’t miss an absorbing evening in the company of a much-loved story that in this new adaptation speaks our language (and in Jonathan Lawson’s score plays both the 19th century and our own time). Shields embraces its spirit of romance and its heroine with her sturdy sense of self. But in her adaptation Jane’s journey is propelled into our own century by the contemporary optic that love is a kind of eye-opening liberation. “You deserve your freedom,” Jane says to Rochester. “You deserve to be loved.”

REVIEW

Jane Eyre

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Erin Shields, adapted from the Charlotte Brontë novel

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Hailey Gillis, Helen Belay, Nadien Chu, Ivy DeGagné, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Garett Ross, Maralyn Ryan, John Ullyatt, Gianna Vacirca

Running: through April 10

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

 

  

 

 

 

   

 

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An Indigenous prophecy and a rare birth: The Herd premieres at the Citadel. Meet playwright Kenneth T. Williams

Posted on April 5, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

playwright Kenneth T. Williams

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Herd, premiering this week at the Citadel, is powered by the rarest of rare events: the birth of twin white buffalo calves on a First Nations ranch. It comes attached to a sacred Indigenous prophecy about hope that reverberates through First Nations peoples across the continent.

But that prophecy is not the story Cree playwright Kenneth T. Williams is telling, as he explains. “It’s what happens afterwards, the excitement, the stresses within the First Nations world….” He laughs,  “As they say, no one fights like family!”

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One of the country’s star playwrights, Williams, expansive and exuberant in conversation, traces his inspiration for The Herd back to “a short story that didn’t go anywhere” and a proposal from Richard Rose, then the artistic director of Tarragon Theatre. “He had an idea for an Indigenous adaptation of (Ibsen’s) An Enemy of the People,” a perennially topical, much adapted 1882 play that digs into the tensions in a spa town unleashed by a water quality whistle-blower doctor. “Richard was thinking resource extraction and pipelines, and all that…. But I wanted it to be internally Indigenous.” 

Adaptations can turn into equivalency checklists of plugging this character into that character, “and you know what’s gonna happen.” Instead Williams “pitched a play set on a reserve, with the same issues that come up in An Enemy of the People, economic and cultural, but adding spiritual and political issues.”  

“And so, six years later, here we are!” declares Williams, who became the first Indigenous grad of the U of A’s master’s playwriting program in 1992. Like so much theatre in the pandemical age, The Herd, a Tarragon commission, had a circuitous route to opening night: three times it was scheduled to go up, three times it didn’t. After its premiere at the Citadel, the production directed by Tara Beagan, an award-winning Indigenous playwright herself (Deer Woman), will run at Tarragon, the National Arts Centre Indigenous theatre, and Persephone in Saskatoon. 

The cultural stakes underpinning The Herd are high, as Williams explains.  “Buffalo are so crucial to the cultural life of the plains people. Even saying it sounds like I’m not giving it enough importance… It was overwhelming, the destruction of the buffalo nearly drove all our people to extinction too. So the recovery of buffalo is huge: not just symbolic, it’s visceral, we feel the physicality of it. It’s central to who we are.”

Which brings Williams to the issue of genetics and genetic purity. The play’s veterinarian character has been hired to look after and “purify” the bison herd, “to weed out the domestic cattle genes.” And pure bison herds cannot be sold commercially. But in the quest for community prosperity, the reserve has a sales contract abroad. Then come the twin white bison calves.  

That kind of tension, cultural vs. economic, finds its way into claims of Indigenous identity and questions of legitimacy, one of the hot issues of the current age. Williams mentions three contentious cases —  University of Saskatchewan research chair Carrie Bourassa, the filmmaker Michelle Latimer, the author Joseph Boyden — whose claims to Indigeneity have been challenged. And during his 15 years as a journalist, including six years reporting for APTN, Williams has done investigative stories of that ilk, wannabes including the fascinating case of one Charlie Smoke, a secret American in love with the Indigenous warrior fantasy, who faked a Canadian Mohawk identity.  

“For me, the question is always the drama,” says Williams. “Once you get to the answer, the drama is done.”

Like his new play, Williams himself, originally from the Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan, took a zigzag route to the stage, as he points out cheerfully. “It’s like separating paint when you’ve already dropped five cans of it together.”

The family moved to Edmonton when Williams was 12, and he went to Harry Ainley High School here. “I did not take drama. I didn’t think theatre was cool; I thought it was stupid.” At the U of A, where he’s now an assistant professor in the drama department, he gravitated first toward creative writing. But it was only when Williams found himself in a playwriting class “I suddenly found a style of writing that made perfect sense to me…. I could write for the stage; my imagination opened up suddenly; it cracked open my brain.” 

“I convinced the drama department to let me into the (masters playwriting program) through sheer force of will,” he laughs. His classmate? Fellow playwright and former Workshop West artistic director Vern Thiessen. 

“I was watching theatre; I was really getting into it, and writing theatre,” he recalls. But he attributes the “rich learning moment” that really changed the course of a career-in-progress to playwright Brad Fraser, enlisted by the drama department to review Williams’s second-year show. “He very bluntly, very clearly asked me ‘what have you done? have you acted? directed?’ Then he told me about my play … and none of it was very good.” 

Williams spent the next few years, before a play of his was actually produced, gathering practical theatre experience, taking workshops, acting in Fringe shows. He did freelance journalism. He played in a rock band. “Feed The Dog was pretty popular in Edmonton for a while. We called it ‘redneck reggae’, a Neil Young/ Bob Marley cross sped up.” And he moved to Toronto. “I really found what I was missing as a writer of theatre…. Learning the mechanics of theatre made me a better writer, a more inventive writer.” 

Thunderstick, the raucous story of two high-contrast cousins — one a dissolute hell-raiser and the other a frontline wartime photographer, both affected by the toxic residue from residential schools — got its first production in 2001 in Saskatchewan. “It did not go well in Toronto,” he says cheerfully. “In fact, it was universally hated.” 

It was not until the production Edmonton audiences saw at Theatre Network in 2010 — starring Claude Lauzon of Royal Canadian Air Farce and Corner Gas star Lorne Cardinal who switched roles every performance — that Thunderstick caught on. “They turned it into their own show.” It’s since been produced across the country, and remains popular. It’s currently being translated into French. 

“And because of that, people were demanding other plays,” Williams says. “That’s why Bannock Republic (a sequel to Thunderstick) got made, Cafe Daughter (seen at Workshop West here in 2015) got commissioned, Gordon Winter got made.” His career gained momentum; Williams calls it “Diary of a Late Bloomer.”

And now The Herd. He credits artistic directors across the country, who “hung on to it” in challenging times. And “the biggest shout-out to Lorne Cardinal,” says Williams of the actor who is by nature, “a supporter, a builder, someone who helps people’s careers, always on that side of things.”

Most of Williams’ characters are Indigenous, and his writing attacks serious complex subjects with a signature sense of humour. “The Indigenous audience is the audience I have to serve first,” he says. “I want them to see a fun different aspect of themselves…. And they’re my bullshit meter. It has to be authentic to them and to say something to them first. I’m happy that other people can see something valuable in my work, but it has to be first and foremost for them.” 

These days, he’s noticed that more Indigenous people than ever before are finding their way into theatres, as audiences and now, increasingly, as young artists. “Theatre companies are increasingly seeing the value in the stories…. And that will (increase) now we have more content,” he thinks. 

Before the pandemic Williams and his friend Drew Hayden Taylor (whose Cottagers and Indians recently closed at Shadow Theatre) talked about the growth of the Indigenous theatre scene of the last 15 years. “Before, you and I could sit with five other people in the Indigenous theatre community,” Williams said. “And we’d know who was doing what, who was in what, who was writing what…. You can’t do that now. And that’s a good thing.” 

There’s natural rapport between storytelling and live theatre. “There’s a real person in front of you; that’s where the power exists,” as Williams says. “I’ve seen amazing theatre that burns within me years later…. There’s no visual record, no DVD. And if there were, it wouldn’t be the same experience anyway.” 

“Theatre is still the most powerful way to tell stories.”

PREVIEW

The Herd

Theatre: Citadel Theatre in association with Tarragon Theatre and National Arts Centre Indigenous Theatre 

Written by: Kenneth T. Williams

Directed by: Tara Beagan

Starring: Tai Amy Grauman, Todd Houseman, Cheyenne Scott, Shyanne Duquette, Dylan Thomas-Bouchier

Running: through April 24

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820 

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A comedy set in Kelowna? Teatro La Quindicina turns 40 with Caribbean Muskrat, a review

Posted on April 2, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Rochelle Laplante and Rachel Bowron in Caribbean Muskrat, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s telling that the oddball 2004 comedy launching Teatro La Quindicina’s return-to-live 40th anniversary season seems to wriggle out of every known category of their specialty.

I refer of course to comedy. Teatro, after all, is a company devoted (from birth at the 1982 Fringe) to adding shades to the comedy spectrum, elasticizing its usual demarcations — and generally to making people laugh while they’re doing it. This is a goal which in itself, one could argue, puts Teatro outside the theatre mainstream in this country, where comedy has tended to be undervalued.

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Caribbean Muskrat’s nutty title, and a premise actually involving this exotic rodent onstage, suggest madcap activity, likely frantic in pace, and possibly farcical. But Caribbean Muskrat isn’t like that. It’s a comedy — co-authored by Teatro’s resident playwright muse Stewart Lemoine and improv star Josh Dean, a member of Teatro’s young company at the time — in which two women who’ve only recently met sit down to play cribbage (with snacks). And they actually do just that (and keep score). 

It’s a comedy in which we watch a man and a woman watching a video of the latter sleeping. Andy Warhol and his famous five-hour ‘anti-film’ Sleep might cross your mind. But this pair actually ‘re-wind’ to see the funny bits again. 

Rochelle Laplante and Jackson Card in Caribbean Muskrat, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

I feel that ‘quirky’, a fall-back term that’s been laundered out of all significance in the current age, might legitimately be revived for this revival. To boot, it’s a rare, maybe even the sole extant example of a comedy by a well-known Canadian playwright set in Kelowna or really anywhere in the Okanagan Valley. Comedies involving Customs agents are not thick upon the ground either. And unlike the vast majority of comedies in the repertoire, Caribbean Muskrat starts with a lecture on sleep disorders. “Sleep,” says the man who takes the stage at the outset with a clipboard. “ Our topic. Not an imperative.”

Dr. Hadrien Burch (Jackson Card), of The Burch Institute For The Advancement of Repose, is a sleep clinician. Additionally he’s Kelowna’s “third most eligible bachelor” according to The Kelownian. And he’s dating the chic hostess of a chic Kelowna winery/bistro. Cynthia Lodgepole (Rachel Bowron) has won a prize for attending a time-share video in Bimini, and traded with another attendee for the muskrat in question. Which explains why this high-maintenance charmer comes up against Canadian Customs agent Bess Wesley (Rochelle Laplante) of the animal import division. Tactical manoeuvring and a love triangle ensue. 

The production directed by Lemoine gives three actors the fun of taking in hand the staccato pace of quick, often monosyllabic dialogue, interspersed with asides to the audience (and in the case of  Cynthia phone calls via bluetooth direct to her ear). Bowron and Laplante take particular advantage of it in their interplay. 

Rochelle Laplante, Rachel Bowron, Jackson Card in Caribbean Muskrat. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

The former is very funny as the bright brisk take-charge Cynthia, whose role model in wine-tastings is Lucrezia Borgia, as she tells us. Imperious me-first certainties glint through the formidable charm whenever she’s crossed. In Bowron’s performance you can actually see the mental deductions going on behind that dazzling hospitality industry smile.

It’s sometimes designed to disarm other characters; sometimes it’s for unseen bistro customers; sometimes it’s a form of calculated self-deprecation that’s all about making her case with us (which is one definition of charm). Invariably she enters and exits at a trot, high heels drumming into the floor like a percussion score. And Bowron knows exactly what to do with the play’s funniest lines. 

Jackson Card and Rochelle Laplante in Caribbean Muskrat, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Laplante, one of the discoveries of the season, commands a more sardonic deadpan as Bess, the surprisingly resistant Customs agent. Her asides to the audience, replete with ever-so-slightly grim smiles and minutely skeptical eye rolls, are a cross between knowing we’re there and a kind of musing. Customs agents, after all, are professionally immune to charm. And mere high-end frittata, even with perfect hollandaise, is unlikely to change that.    

Newcomer Card is likeably hapless as Hadrien Burch, the sleep clinician reduced to personal insomnia by a female dynamic he imperfectly understands. But the performance seems pitched to another kind of comedy altogether than the kind where a sleep clinician presents a point of view about sleep that “it’s like being unconscious, but better for you.” Or notes, of the muskrat’s future home in Cynthia’s two-bedroom lakeview condo, that the exotic critter “might even get his own room.” Or report back from the Customs agent that he “was unable to slake her endless thirst for answers.”  

Instead Hadrien, in this reading, seems like someone who just stumbled into his line of work and is scrambling good-naturedly to present as a pro. Or maybe it’s just that arch is not his thing. 

Anyhow, welcome back to live action, Teatro. And in an era full of sleep disorders for the performing arts, this season waker-upper, apparently assembled from a frittata of assorted improv cues and including mimosas, is fun.

REVIEW

Caribbean Muskrat

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Stewart Lemoine and Josh Dean

Starring: Rachel Bowron, Jackson Card, Rochelle Laplante

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through April 17

Tickets and season subscriptions: teatroq.com

 

   

 

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The Citadel announces a new Size Large season, led by two new Canadian musicals

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Almost A Full Moon, a new musical by Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman and Hawksley Workman, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

After two contortionist years of stops and starts, indefinite postponements, cancellations cast hopefully as delays, re-bookings, digital work-arounds, the Citadel Theatre has cheering news. And it’s on a grand scale.

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“It’s big and it’s busy … a full season!” — in the time-honoured, pre-pandemic sense of that phrase — as artistic director Daryl Cloran said (with unmistakeable top notes of jubilation) in announcing the  Citadel’s fulsome 2022-2023 lineup of 12 live productions at Edmonton’s largest playhouse Monday night. 

Six mainstage shows, three Highwire Series collaborations with local indie companies in the Rice Theatre, a summer show, the fourth return of David van Belle’s ‘40s adaptation of A Christmas Carol — and “a special event.” Of the dozen shows destined for Citadel stages for the upcoming season, some were previously planned and announced, then postponed, then re-booked, and some are new to the lineup.

Three of the six mainstage productions are musicals, two of them are new and Canadian, and the third an international hit that continues to top the jukebox musical charts. 

Almost A Full Moon, commissioned by the Citadel and built from scratch, teams notable Canadian playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman and indie rock star composer/lyricist Hawksley Workman. It weaves three generations, and three time periods, into a holiday musical set to Workman’s title Christmas album of 20 years ago with some additions from the Workman canon.  

“In the tradition of Six and Hadestown (both honed at the Citadel before hitting Broadway), it’s a thrill to be launching a brand new Canadian musical,” says Cloran, who directs (Nov. 5 to 27). “It’s the project we’ve worked on the most through the pandemic” — workshopped first at Sheridan College’s Canadian Musical Theatre Project (where Come From Away was first honed), then in the Citadel’s debut Collider Festival of last year, and most recently, in a concert version that played the theatre for a couple of nights in December.

Prison Dancer, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

Prison Dancer, the mainstage season finale (May 6 to 28, 2023) is the premiere of a new musical by the Filipino-Canadian team of Romeo Candide and Carmen De Jesus. A collaboration between the Citadel and commercial producers, it’s inspired by the 2007 video, which instantly went viral on YouTube, of a large group of Philippines prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The beating heart of a piece full of catchy pop tunes, says Cloran, is “how dance changed the prisoners’ lives….. It’s our chance to get better connected with the large Filipino community here.”

It took persistence (and blue-chip connections) to get the rights for the jukebox musical Jersey Boys, a large-scale 2005 Tony Award magnet. “Finally!” laughs Cloran of the acquisition coup. “I’ve been working on this for a while….” He credits his connection with Jersey Boys original director Des McAnuff (Cloran was his assistant director for a few seasons). 

Jersey Boys gets its dramatic traction from telling a real-life story, a music industry classic, of the rise from obscurity to top-40 stardom of The Four Seasons, four guys from blue-collar New Jersey. And it’s studded with an impressive array of contagious hits (Sherry, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like A Man among them).

Director/choreographer of the Citadel production (Feb. 11 to March 12, 2023) is Toronto-based Julie Tomaino (who directs 9 to 5  later this season).

Network, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

The pandemic put Network, originally announced in 2020, on a long pause. Now, the upcoming mainstage season opens (Sept. 17 to Oct. 9) with the award-winning 2017 stage version of the celebrated 1976 film. As Cloran points out, you need have no fear that a high-tech satire “about our relationship with media and truth” is past its best-before date. Things have “only gotten weirder.” 

The Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production, directed by Cloran as planned, is the first post-Broadway incarnation of Network. And it’s designed to re-imagine big-budget techno-snazziness for smaller-budget regional theatre productions across the continent. The 16-actor cast is led by Shaw Festival star Jim Mezon as TV anchorman Howard Beale (a role originated onstage by Tony-winner Bryan Cranston) whose meltdown in front of millions — “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more” — is a modern cultural touchstone.

“If I’ve learned one thing since I’ve been here, it’s that our audience really love classic romances,” says Cloran of the new stage version of Jane Austen’s spirited and spiky Regency novel Pride and Prejudice in the upcoming season. The adaptation by American playwright Kate Hamill (her adaptation of Little Women is part of Theatre Calgary’s 2022-2023 season). 

Cloran describes it as “very much in the (theatrical) mode of Jane Eyre (the Erin Shields adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel currently onstage at the Citadel). A cast of nine plays some 50 characters. “Funny, boisterous  … it tells the story everyone wants, in a fun way.” Mieko Ouchi directs the Citadel production (March 11 to April 2, 2023).

Trouble in Mind, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied,

Trouble in Mind, by the Black playwright Alice Childress, revisits a powerfully timely play about racism in the theatre; it has lingered in obscurity for nearly 70 years — ever since its premiere production in 1955 Greenwich Village — until its recent Broadway and Shaw Festival revivals. 

As Cloran explains, “this great play” takes us backstage where rehearsals for a melodrama about lynching set in the Jim Crow South — white writer, white director, black star — are underway. Childress’s play was en route to a Broadway opening in the ‘50s, and would have been the first by a Black woman to arrive there. That never happened; the playwright refused to make the changes demanded by white producers. “Really smart, insightful, and also surprisingly funny,” says Cloran.

Audrey Dwyer, the accomplished Black writer/ actor/ playwright who’s the associate artistic director of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, directs the Edmonton-Winnipeg co-production (March 27 to April 16, 2023).  

Originally slated for a Citadel run last January and postponed two weeks before the start of rehearsals, The Royale by the American playwright Marco Ramirez is presented as “a special event” (outside the mainstage subscription season because of ticketing complications). The 2016 play chronicles the struggles of a Black boxer in a segregated world in the early years of the 20th century, and his quest to be the heavyweight champion of the world. 

“The story is powerful,” says Cloran, “and it’s told in such a highly theatrical, smart way. .. a very dynamic, heart-pounding kind of show.” And, remarkably, there’s no actual boxing in it: “it’s all told through choreographed movement, dance, clapping — and language,” as he’s said. Philip Akin, the former artistic director of Toronto’s Obsidian Theatre, will direct (Feb 4 to 19, 2023). “And we’re hoping most of our (original) cast will be available,” Cloran says.

The Citadel’s Highwire Series in the Citadel’s smallest house, the Rice, was introduced two seasons ago to provide riskier alternative fare and amplify the audiences and profile of smaller local companies. It opens Oct. 8 to 30 with The Wolves (originally planned for 2020), a collaboration with the indie company The Maggie Tree. The Pulitzer-nominated play by the young American writer Sarah DeLappe takes us into the world of teenage girls on a soccer team. 

Vanessa Sabourin directs the 10-actor production (nine young women, one soccer mom) that puts us on the sidelines of a soccer field. Says Cloran, “we’re only able to do something on that scale in the Rice because of the partnership.” 

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Follow The Signs Theatre. Photo supplied

Deafy, a richly entertaining Fringe hit of last summer (one of my favourite Fringe shows), brings to Rice the work of the charismatic Deaf playwright/actor Chris Dodd. The multi-lingual production (spoken English, ASL sign language and captioning) starring Dodd is our invitation into the complicated world of the Deaf, from the inside out.

“They have touring plans,” says Cloran of Ashley Wright’s production (Jan. 21 to Feb. 5, 2023). “So it’s a chance for us to help with that, get them get in front of a bigger audience!”

With the Highwire finale, First Métis Man of Odessa (April 22 to May 14, 2023), Punctuate! Theatre, an Edmonton company with an escalating national connections, returns to the Citadel (after last season’s production of Matt MacKenzie’s Bears). The play, first aired as part of Factory Theatre’s You Can’t Get There From Here audio series last year, is a breathless real-life cross-continent pandemic love story — a high-stakes race against time and borders, fraught but not without its screwball features. It belongs personally to two theatre artists, the Canadian actor/playwright Matt MacKenzie and his  wife, Ukrainian theatre star Mariya Khomutova. 

The pair themselves take to the stage to tell how they met, how they fell in love and got married, how things got even more complicated when she got pregnant, an how they got to Canada before the borders closed. Now terrifying world events have galvanized them to work on an Act II to their story. Punctuate!’s Lianna Makuch directs. 

Formally, in the way the co-playwrights create characters who are stage stand-ins for themselves, the play reminds Cloran of A Brimful of Asha. “I love theatre that plays with (its) relationship with the audience.…I’m so pleased to be able to amplify the work of a company with a growing national profile.”

So, a Size Large live season returns to the Citadel’s three stages. After a pandemic pivot to film in 2020 and a reduced-scale version in 2021 A Christmas Carol is back (Nov. 26 to Dec. 23) on the scale originally imagined by playwright van Belle. 

But first, a summer slapstick comedy mystery of the who-dunnit stripe (July 16 to Aug. 27). Nancy McAlear directs a cast of 10 in Clue, Sandy Rustin’s stage adaptation of the 1985 film, based on the evergreen board game. Be there, or find yourself an alibi.

Season subscriptions: citadeltheatre.com. 

 

   

   

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‘What makes us laugh?” Teatro La Quindicina launches its 40th season with Caribbean Muskrat

Posted on March 25, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Comedy. That was the only stipulation when Teatro La Quindicina got a joint commission in 2003 from a short-lived comedy festival in Edmonton and the prestigious High Performance Rodeo in Calgary. That open-ended proposition was meat and drink for a theatre company that’s always been about that very subject, comedy in all its classic routes, madcap back roads, and quirky byways.

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“It wasn’t a ton of money. So let’s just have an adventure!” That’s what Teatro resident playwright and muse Stewart Lemoine was thinking of a trio of the company’s younger actors, all in their early ’20’s, when he said to Josh Dean — one of them and a star improviser too — “let’s sit down and write a play and see what happens.” 

The result was a comedy, sort of a screwball but sort of not, with a mysteriously oddball title: Caribbean Muskrat. As live theatre bounces back after a long and punishing pause, Teatro turns 40 by launching a four-production 2022 season with a revival of that very play, the kooky comedy Lemoine and Dean wrote together nearly 20 years ago. Caribbean Muskrat opens April 1 on the Varscona stage. 

“Josh sat beside me, and I did the typing,” says Lemoine. And together, as he recalls, they operated on the strict, time-honoured improv imperative: “what are things that make us laugh?” So … occupation? Sleep therapist. 

Yup, there is one in Caribbean Muskrat: Dr. Hadrien Burch, Kelowna’s third-most-eligible bachelor. “He’s dating a woman who’s a hostess at a high-end winery/bistro. And she’s won a Caribbean muskrat for sitting through a time-share demonstration in Bimini…. She didn’t like the prize she got, so she traded with the woman sitting behind her.” 

The catch is that the rodent in question has to be sent separately, animal quarantine and all that, and go through Customs. Which is why Caribbean Muskrat has a customs agent character, Bess Wesley.    

Location? No offence Okanagan Valley, but Caribbean Muskrat might be a very rare example of a Canadian comedy by a notable Canadian playwright to be set in Kelowna, a city not hitherto known for its hilarity. 

And since Caribbean Muskrat premiered at the Rodeo in the Engineered Air Theatre, with its wide, shallow stage, a space that lends itself particularly to lectures, it seemed like a good idea to have one of those, for starters. Hadrien Burch does the honours with an informative lecture on sleep disorders.

You never know what might lodge itself in a playwright’s mind. The name of the play’s bistro hostess, Cynthia Lodgepole, was inspired, explains Lemoine, by a highway sign you see driving to Jasper, which indicates the distances to both Cynthia and Lodgepole. He remembered that sign when it came time to write a new and exotic comedy, For The Love of Cynthia, in honour of the grand opening of the renovated Varscona Theatre in 2016.

Caribbean Muskrat is pretty much category-resistant, says its co-author, whose archive includes every shade and colour of comedy from screwball and farce through “Ibsen-esque comedy.” This one is “more of an indie,” Lemoine laughs. “Quirky, light, an introductory taste of what’s to come in the season” — a season that includes the Hitchcockian “comic mystery” Evelyn Strange in May, the four-door three-actor farce A Grand Time In The Rapids in June (a play, by the way, with its own “etiquette expert”), and in August at the Fringe a moving exploration of artistic creation, The Margin of the Sky.

As for Caribbean Muskrat, “in 2003 when we wrote it, it was the post-Seinfeld era,” so … a contemporary, fairly breezy comedy about people who maybe misbehaved a little bit, were a bit self-absorbed in the modern world but see things in an interesting way. Not a high-style comedy.” Says Lemoine, “it was a little bit of its era.” But the 2022 revival lives now, without much adjustment, apart from the sleep clients handing over computer sticks instead of VHS tapes.

Lemoine’s cast of three includes Teatro fave Rachel Bowron and (in accord with continuing company practice practice) introduces a couple of newcomers. Rochelle Laplante, a bright presence recently in Bright Young Things’ Hiraeth and currently onstage in Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Citadel, makes her Teatro debut as customs agent Bess Wesley. Recent U of A theatre grad Jackson Card is Dr. Burch the sleep clinician. 

Bowron plays bistro hostess Cynthia Lodgepole, a character described by the co-playwright as “a hilarious bundle of contradictions, completely self-absorbed, runs on her own logic, but so charming.” 

“It’s a great way to ease back into this,” as Lemoine says of Teatro’s much-delayed return to a live season. And who knows, maybe Teatro will get invited to tour Caribbean Muskrat to Kelowna. “It’s pretty positive,” says Lemoine. “The bus service is mentioned very favourably.”

PREVIEW

Caribbean Muskrat

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Stewart Lemoine and Josh Dean

Starring: Rachel Bowron, Jackson Card, Rochelle Laplante

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: April 1 to 17

Tickets and season subscriptions: teatroq.com

   

 

 

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More theatre news: Expanse Fest is back and Grindstone’s hitting the road

Posted on March 21, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Marshall Vielle in Where The Two-Spirit Lives, Expanse Festival 2022. Photo by Jamie Vedres

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Generations” and “generational stories”: that’s the connective tissue of this year’s edition of Expanse, Azimuth Theatre’s annual “celebration of the body in motion.” 

For 2022 the agile festival with the Expanse-ive embrace returns to the live in-person stage Thursday through April 3, after last year’s exclusively online incarnation. And after that, April 12 through 27, Expanse has an Act II — a digital edition that includes much of this lineup, along with curated additions, captioned and with described video options. 

For Azimuth’s co-artistic directors Sue Goberdhan and Morgan Yamada, the linkage between generations and their stories is an apt fit. As Yamada says, the pair arrived in their joint gig in 2020 with a question,“how do we inspire the next generation of artists?,” attached to a mission: finding that next generation in marginalized and under-represented communities.

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The Azimuth-ian drive towards greater diversity and inclusivity is reflected in the range of offerings at this year’s Expanse, all with ASL interpretation. Marshall Vielle, for example, an Indigenous actor/ director/ drag artist from the Kainai Nation in southern Alberta, brings their show Where The Two-Spirit Lives — “part memoir part drag extravaganza” as billed — to the festivities. “The fun, the energetic spirit” of the show’s dexterity in  intertwining themes of  queerness and colonization was part of the attraction, says Goberdhan of its playful creator and star. Barry Bilinsky directs. 

Kunji Ikeda in Sansei: The Storyteller, Expanse Festival 2022. Photo supplied.

Sansei: The Storyteller, Calgary-based Kunji Ikeda’s exploration of his ethnic roots, the experience of being a third-generation Japanese-Canadian (“sansei” means third), had particular meaning for Yamada, who’s fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian. “It’s a beautiful, super-impactful exploration of Canadian history,” as Yamada describes the piece, which fuses dance and theatre, and leans into humour.

The protagonist of Tune to A, by Carly Neis, Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks and Cameron Kneteman and premiering at Expanse, is a disabled 13-year-old music lover. Designed for young audiences, it was inspired by Neis’s own real-life experiences growing up with cerebral palsy, and negotiating her way through the school system and the theatre world.

Neis co-stars with Michelle  Diaz and Graham Mothersill in the production directed by Patricia Cerra. 

Michener Park, Expanse Festival 2022. Poster image by Sam Mendoza.

Michener Park, a solo play by and starring Natércia Napoleāo (her playwriting debut), is named after the U of A’s late lamented international family housing complex, now a demolition-in-progress.  It gets a one-off live staged reading at Expanse. The play assembles real-life experiences and stories from a unique international community, to shed light on the immigrant experience in all its emotional complexity. Carmen Aguirre directs.

In Local/Live, Good Women Dance Collective curates original movement pieces from four Alberta artists: Deviant Andrea, Lebogang Disele-Pitso, and the team of Kaili Che and Alyssa Maturino. 

When you’re out at the festival, happening live in an assortment of found spaces in and outside the Westbury Theatre and lobby in the ATB Financial Arts Barn, expand your Expanse experience by catching The Lobbyists before and between shows. The four-member performing ensemble — Janira Moncayo, Lauren Murray, Colby Stockdale and Zachary Strom — are led by Amber Borotsik and Sophie Healey. 

In addition Expanse reaches out with workshops, performance labs, panels and talkbacks. 

Show details, tickets (all pay-what-you-will) and the full schedule of events are at azimuththeatre.com.

Abby Vandenberghe and Donovan Workun in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Darla Woodley, Red Socks Photography

•After four extended, sold-out runs in Edmonton, Grindstone Theatre’s original musical satire Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, is venturing out of town and hitting the road. 

Yup, it’s true (and who could have predicted it?). The most unpopular premier in the country — and the perpetrator of the infamous mantra “the best summer ever” — is the hero of a bona fide hit. And Grindstone is determined to spread the laughter. It opens in Calgary at the Martha Cohen Theatre Wednesday (through Sunday), followed by dates in Red Deer (April 8 to 10), Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray before it returns home to Edmonton April 27 to May 1 at the Orange Hub.

And here’s an art-life synchronicity to make you smile: Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer is playing in Red Deer on the very weekend of the UCP leadership review. 

You may have noticed that Alberta leadership has been a sadly neglected subject in musical comedy. Grindstone’s artistic director Byron Martin and composer/lyricist Simon Abbott, co-creators of the show, are on it. So the un-Edmontonian parts of Alberta will get to see the Jason Kenney (Donovan Workun) and the ever-compliant government doctor Deena Hinshaw (Abby Vandenberghe) as ‘80s college kids c. 1983 at Alberta University. 

The newly elected Summer Session Students Union President, memorably played by Workun, is a goofball frat boy whose tiny mind is completely consumed with throwing the hottest summer rodeo party ever. In this (and all things) his nemesis is Rachel Notley, played on this Alberta tour by singer-songwriter Dana Wylie. And her boyfriend Justin Trudeau (Malachi Wilkins, who also plays Pierre) gets one of the funniest numbers, a multi-syllabic patter song ode to Ottawa. 

Tracy Allard, Tyler Shandro, Sarah Hoffman and the newly even-more-infamous Kaycee Madu are in the show too, in their ‘80s collegiate incarnations. Have a peek at the 12thnight review here. Tickets for all tour dates at at grindstonetheatre.ca.  

  

 

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Springboards: a signature new play festival returns home to Workshop West

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a felicity of timing, an alignment of stars, that our first chance to visit Workshop West Playwrights Theatre in their new home in Old Strathcona is Springboards.  

The festival of staged readings, workshops and cabarets that runs March 22 to 27 at the newly christened Gateway Theatre marks the return to Workshop West after a decade of a signature event for a company that’s devoted to the discovery, development and showcasing of new plays and their writers.

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“It’s what makes us unique,” says Workshop West artistic producer Heather Inglis. Springboards “is a celebration of the (play) development process itself… by inviting audiences into the middle of it.” 

Contrary to popular assumption plays don’t just leap onto the stage on opening night fully formed, all dressed up, fresh from the page. How do they get there?

They’re seeded; they develop; they’re trimmed and honed, tested and re-thought. Springboards is all about that: it’s the prequel to opening night, the audience’s backstage pass to the process of artistic creation. “None of the Springboards plays has premiered,” says Inglis. “The playwrights are working on them as we speak! So we’re connecting the audience to the core work of our company.” 

Think of it as a specialized form of audience participation, “where you get to be part of the process of creation.” Says Inglis, “it’s super-exciting for audiences. Staged readings engage the audience’s imagination in ways a fully realized production doesn’t. You get to imagine the (future) production, along with the artists.” 

For playwrights, having actors and an audience is a crucial part of a journey towards full production that can be long, winding, and rocky. The audience reaction as a script breathes its first public air is always revealing, says Inglis. “As soon as someone’s watching, you can tell very quickly if it’s working.”

The festival, an inspiration of the 1990s, has a storied history at Workshop West. And it’s played a tangible part in expanding the Canadian theatre repertoire. Plays by such premium Canadian playwrights as Conni Massing, Brad Fraser, Collin Doyle, Kenneth Brown, can trace their roots back to Springboards past. Restoring the festival after 10 years’ absence was a top priority for Inglis when she got the Workshop West job just before the pandemic struck live theatre down. 

Heather Inglis, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre artistic producer, at the Gateway Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

“It’s a big little festival,” she says of the scale of this return edition of Springboards (Heritage Canada kicked in, crucially):  23 playwrights, 33 actors, a production staff of 10. Inglis has made a point, she says, of including work in the line-up, at every stage of development, from writers involved in Workshop West’s multiple playwriting initiatives, circles, exchanges. 

The festivities open March 22 with a staged reading of FUMBO by writer/ director/ dramaturge/ theatre scholar Mūkonzi wa Mūsyoki, Kenyan by heritage and a specialist in post-colonial African theatre. Mūsyoki, who leads Workshop West’s BIPOC “creative incubator,” worked on the play, set in Nairobi, in WWPT’s Playwright Assembly for emerging writers last year. Vern Thiessen, a former WWPT artistic director and a playwright himself, directs the staged reading. 

playwright Josh Languedoc

IN-COR-RI-GI-BLE: The Legend of Thundervoice is the work of actor/ playwright/ theatre creator Josh Languedoc (Rocko and Nakota, Feast), a member of Saugeen First Nation and Workshop West’s youth education coordinator. Based on the memoir of his Ojibwa father, who was adopted off the reserve, it unspools as a comic book-style chronicle of  two young Indigenous brothers, survivors of the ‘60s scoop. “A big project, at seven actors, and dear to his heart,” says Inglis of the Blyth Festival commission. The notable Indigenous theatre artist Yvette Nolan directs the stage reading (March 24). 

playwright Cat Walsh

The Feast of All Saints by Cat Walsh (The Laws of Thermodynamics, Do This In Memory of Me) is the closest of the Springboards plays to being production-ready, thinks Inglis. It embraces the playwright’s signature affection for horror films, and unfolds at a family memorial on Halloween night. Jim Guedo, head of MacEwan University’s theatre department, directs (March 25). 

As its title suggests, Liam Salmon’s Subscribe Or Like couldn’t be more topical: it’s set in the treacherous terrain of the internet and social media, where identity is fluid and cruelty is rampant.  As Inglis says “it’s what’s affecting our lives and changing our culture the most…. Is who we are on the internet really us?” 

playwright Liam Salmon

The two characters are a couple of struggling millennial under-achievers who turn to “the digital frontier, the (new) Wild West,” as Salmon puts it, for their kick at self-creation and fame. As they say,  “the self you present on social media is a performance; there’s a real threat of being lost to the persona.” And, they points out, there’s a horror story in that. The third character, “the spectre of the digital,” reads the stage directions. Inglis directs the March 26 staged reading. 

There are two cabaret nights. Act I of Under Pressure (March 23), directed by Amy DeFelice, features excerpts from three plays in development, by Marina Mair-Sanchez, Amanda Samuelson and the team of Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundelland. Act II is a short one-act play, The Light Fishers, by Leslea Kroll, billed as “a meditation on compassion and compassion fatigue.”  

Alive and Kicking Cabaret, the grand finale of the festival (March 27, presented in partnership with Script Salon and curated by Darrin Hagen, who knows his cabarets), features excerpts from 13 plays by writers at various stages of their careers — from new voices like Brett Dahl to Edmonton theatre’s most experienced playwrights, among them Collin Doyle, Nicole Moeller and Trevor Schmidt. And there will be songs.

PREVIEW

Springboards New Play Festival

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: March 22 to 27

Tickets and full schedule of events: workshopwest.org

 

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Live theatre’s back, hurray, and 12thnight has an urgent request

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Hello theatre friends! 

It’s been almost exactly two years since the moment, unimaginable in advance, that the curtain came crashing abruptly down on live theatre — sometimes in the middle of a run, sometimes mid-rehearsal —  and time stopped. After those two l-o-n-g years of devastation and challenges for the performing arts, when Edmonton’s valiant artists rose to the occasion in a variety of inspiring, ingenious ways, live theatre is really coming back to us — as we knew it would. And we find ourselves in the room where it happens, together again. 

Through it all, dear readers of 12thnight.ca, you’ve stuck with me, as I’ve tried to remind theatre-lovers that the Great Pause was just that, not the end of the play. Finally it’s 2022, and, hungry for the live in-person experience of theatre, Edmonton’s most exciting arts industry, we’re full of hope.

It’s the moment after a hard winter to thank you for your support and encouragement in continuing to cover theatre here, in this wonderful theatre town. I hope you’ve enjoyed the content which, so far, has been free. And I’m hoping, as well, that as theatre begins to make a full comeback, you’re up for chipping in a monthly amount to my Patreon campaign to enable 12thnight theatre coverage to continue. That’s what makes it possible. Here’s the link: www.patreon.com/12thnight. Please spread the word (theatre people, I know you have great projection!). 

To those of you have already signed on as 12thnight patrons, my deep gratitude for your support. 12thnight can’t continue without it.

Meanwhile, we’ll see each other, more and more in person, in the theatre; we’re ready for excitement.   

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