Melanie Piatocha: theatre has lost a bright talent and a questing spirit

Posted on February 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Melanie Piatocha in All Shook Up, Mayfield Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In this bleak mid-winter of theatre, heartbreaking news of the January death of actor Melanie Piatocha at 36 seems particularly cruel.

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The abrupt loss of a talent so expansive, and a quester so spirited, so restless, makes the world of theatre seem especially fraught and fragile. Our sense of possibility is dimmed by the tragedy. Exceptional talent, hard work, kindness are recurring motifs as theatre people think of their fellow artist. So is the more elusive theatrical term “sparkle.” 

In a dramatic way, Edmonton-born Piatocha, the beautiful north end kid who found her people at Victoria School of the Arts and Grant MacEwan theatre arts, was the quintessential triple-threat, the actor/singer/dancers who are the essence of musical theatre. And Piatocha had the resumé to prove it. 

When she strapped on those musical theatre single-strap pumps or tap shoes and found her light, there seemed to be nothing she couldn’t do, as 15 years of revues and Broadway musicals at the Mayfield, her most frequent employer, attest. And that archive of work, show after show, runs parallel to striking performances in the challenging off-centre, small-scale musicals, Drat! The Cat! and Little Fish among them, that are the specialty of The Plain Janes. 

But, more than that, as the Mayfield’s Van Wilmott points out, and her Janes’ history reveals, Piatocha was driven to seek unexpected depths under the surface glitter of even the flimsiest revue. For Class of ’63, “a silly revue in which she was brilliant in every scene,” Wilmott remembers sending her the name of a movie to watch. “I asked, simply, if she would still have time to do this. … I didn’t have to tell her what to look; I knew she would know. Twenty-four hours later came her reply: ‘Candy rocks.” So did Melanie!”

“It didn’t matter if she was the lead or in the ensemble, her attention to detail was the same…. She had an unequalled work ethic. She did more evening post-rehearsal homework than any actor I’ve ever encountered,” says Willmott. He valued the “trust and respect” in their professional relationship. “She had no problems pulling me aside and telling me whatever I just said was a bad idea. And she was always right. We miss her terribly.”  

He remembers advice in 2005 from the late Tim Ryan, whose credentials as a talent scout were honed by his years founding and leading the theatre arts program at Grant MacEwan. “You gotta see this girl; she’s terrific!” She landed her first Mayfield show, the Christmas revue, that year. 

The size of the role didn’t affect the unflagging commitment from Piatocha; her ensemble esprit de corps has many testimonials from her fellow theatre artists. In Kate Ryan’s 2018 Mayfield production of All Shook Up, for example — a jukebox musical that’s a sassy cavort through the Elvis canon with Shakespearean storylines — Piatocha was a sparkling lovestruck heroine in men’s garb, à la Twelfth Night’s Viola or As You Like It’s Rosalind. In the Mayfield’s Hairspray, she brought a particular piquancy to the role of the heroine’s nerdy bespectacled BFF; their relationship was one of the highlights of Tracey Flye’s production. In Bob Baker’s Citadel/ Banff Centre production of West Side Story, she threw herself into the tiny but impactful role of Anybodys, the little gang wannabe.

Melanie Piatocha and Chris W. Cook in Drat! The Cat!, Plain Jane Theatre Company

Lead or ensemble, in musical revues or Shakespeare in the park (Freewill Shakespeare Festival), Piatocha was a full-commitment artist. With the Plain Janes, she starred as an 1890s New York socialite-turned-jewel thief who preys on the rich in Kate Ryan’s 2015 Plain Janes production of Drat! The Cat!, a highly unusual Victorian melodrama/caper. As part of the gallery of fractious Manhattanites who surround the angst-ridden protagonist in the John Michael LaChiusa chamber musical Little Fish, she was Anne Frank, of diary fame. 

“Melanie cared with her whole heart,” says director Ryan. “She was a fierce and fragile light onstage and off-. She elevated every story, every moment. She was direct and honest. I loved working with her as a friend and an artist, and miss her terribly….” 

Melanie Piatocha (far right) in The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Catalyst Theatre. Photo by dbphotographics.

Catalyst Theatre’s artistic director Jonathan Christenson who cast Piatocha — as Jack, a crack sniper in the ensemble of all-female secret agents in his original musical play The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, echoes that thought. “She was a truly special talent,” he says. “Fiercely committed, uncompromisingly professional, demanding nothing but the best of herself at all times. At the same time she was phenomenally sensitive, generous, kind-hearted, thoughtful, and despite her exceptional talent, humble…. She threw herself into everything she did.”  She was slated to re-join the cast next month to prepare for a remounting of The Invisible. 

Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt’s first sighting of Piatocha was as a 15-year-old Vic student in an NLT production of The Oedipus Project, an arty deconstruction of the Greek tragedy. “She was shy but the sparkle in her eye said she was mischievous. I adored her immediately.” 

Melanie Piatocha in Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

When Schmidt discovered Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen to launch his NLT season in 2009, he thought of Piatocha, 24 at the time and getting ready for her marriage to fellow actor Mike Zimmerman, to be the title character in a play in which “the third most popular sophomore” reluctantly invades the brainiac world of four math geeks. “It could be played shallow, silly and clueless — like Clueless or Legally Blonde.… But I think there’s a lot of pain in these characters. I wanted Melanie because she’s so emotionally accessible as an actor. I needed her to anchor the whole show, as the central character and the catalyst.” 

“I told her she was the only person I would consider for the role. And if she didn’t want to do it I wouldn’t do it, either,” Schmidt remembers. “Melanie very seriously sat me down, and said that she wanted me to know she was considered ‘slow’ in the rehearsal process by other directors, but assured me she would ‘get there’ by opening.” And indeed she did, in a very funny performance as the popular girl who gets her comeuppance from a bunch of nerds, and then joins them. 

“Her self-awareness of her own personal process was insightful. And her willingness to articulate it was simultaneously extremely vulnerable and brave,” says Schmidt. “’Extremely vulnerable and brave’ are the best descriptions I can think of for Melanie. So talented, promising, kind, and gentle. I felt very protective of her….” 

I remember interviewing Piatocha for the Journal at the time about the show, her first in some time in which dance breaks were not involved. “It was so refreshing,” she said, “because it reminded me that I was an actor first, someone who can hold the storyline, then a singer second and a dancer third.”

Melanie Piatocha and Carmela Sison in Jailbait, Northern Light Theatre, Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Piatocha returned to NLT the following season in another challenging role, a hard-edged tough-cookie of a 15-year-old out clubbing with her more malleable pal in Jailbait.  She appeared in Schmidt’s production alongside Zimmerman. 

Piatocha and Zimmerman moved across the country to P.E.I. five years ago. She described the relocation as personal rather than professional — a quest for beauty and adventure as she described to Alan Kellogg in an interview for Teatro La Quindicina’s AIEEEEE! newsletter.  “I’m embracing not knowing. I might just stretch out and start self-producing in a new city,” she said. 

Melanie Piatocha and Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight!. Photo by Mat Busby.

Piatocha was back in her home town to make her Teatro debut in Ron Pederson’s 2017 revival of Shocker’s Delight, Stewart Lemoine’s  funny/sad love-triangle comedy with its trio of collegiate characters struggling to apply their book learning in the laboratory of real life, and attach it to something as unmappable, unreadable as the human heart. Piatocha was delightful and touching as Julia, the bright, impulsive, forthright romantic heroine.

The word Julia tosses around with her friends through Shocker’s Delight is “unfathomable.” It has an echo for us too, now.  As Christenson says, “we’ve been reeling, as have so many theatre folks across the country, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible and figure out how we move forward without her.” 

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Someone on your side: Berend McKenzie, Catalyst Confluence Fellow, reaches out to outsiders

Posted on February 9, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Berend McKenzie in NGGRFG (would you say the name of this play?). Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“This is about visibility!” declares Berend McKenzie with the kind of go-for-the-gusto velocity that makes time fly when you talk to them. “This is about opportunity! This is about being in the room where it happens!” they say quoting a musical (Hamilton) they admire without actually liking. You’ll have to imagine the way the italics roll out…. 

McKenzie is talking about Confluence, the second annual “creative fellowship” established by Catalyst to support IBPOC artists in creating, honing, and setting forth their own work their own way. They’re this year’s Confluence Fellow, and at some point we’ll be seeing their Confluence project, a new musical-in-progress called In The Centre, set in a care centre for AIDS patients.  

Actually, the word ‘confluence” seems custom-tailored for McKenzie, who’s black and queer, with a tumultuous history and a skill set that seem infinitely expansible (stage and screen actor; writer of plays, sketches, short stories, films).

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Their story, which has more than its share of tragedy, death, setbacks, self-discoveries and reinventions, is a veritable confluence of artistic branches. And it’s a wellspring of raw lived-in material for their plays, which step up fearlessly to subjects like racism and homophobia. 

McKenzie knows what it’s like to be on the outside looking in. They know, as well, what’s like “to have a hero on your side,” as they put it. And, they figure that “reaching out to BIPOC queer outsiders in schools and universities, and being a cheerleader for them” is a part of being a Confluence fellow. 

Berend McKenzie. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Which explains why they’ve teamed up with the faculty of Victoria School and the Black Students Association there for Black History Month and beyond, to orchestrate a series of online conversations for the kids. And they’ve reached out to a wide range of practising artists — ceramicists, trans and two-spirit performers, actors, playwrights (Brad Fraser among them).…

The starting point is three or four questions, says McKenzie, who has an empathetic kind of exuberance about them in conversation. “Things like ‘what does representation look like to you? What does Black History Month mean to you? What would you say to people who feel they don’t have a place in the arts because of the colour of their skin?’” Then the students take it away; they’re in charge.

“It’s a way for kids to feel connection, and get some inspiration.” COVID, as they point out, has ravaged the sense of cultural connectivity, and “destroyed a lot of hopes and dreams.” This month they’re consulting with the theatre students at MacEwan University to launch a similar project. 

“If people don’t feel there’s a place for them, I get it!” says McKenzie.  

MacEwan theatre arts in its pre-university period was their alma mater. Which is where they found their “hero,” the late teacher/mentor/director Tim Ryan, who stood up for them when they heard from others that “you’re not black enough, or you’re too gay…. He saw in me what others didn’t. He’d punch me in the shoulder and say ‘you can do it! I believe in you!’” And it was Ryan who cast them in such Leave It To Jane productions as The Tempest and Measure For Measure. 

Right after graduation, McKenzie, who’d been diagnosed HIV-positive, moved to Vancouver. It was 1991, “before the pills,” as they put it. What followed was a sort of apocalyptic decade-long drugs and alcohol binge, as they describe. “Everyone I knew had died, or was continuing to die. I went to Vancouver to party my face off. I spent the first 10 years waiting for my end, and it never came. No matter what I did.” ”

Once sober, they decided to be a film actor. That at least was the plan. “I did three horrible big-budget movies,” says McKenzie cheerfully. In Angelina Jolie’s Life Or Something, “one of the worst movies ever made. I played her make-up artist.” He was in Connie and Carla, with Nia Varadalos and Toni Collette, “also a bomb,” and Catwoman with Halle Berry, who won a Razzie for her work. “I had to walk by her cubicle and say ‘man sandwich 12 o’clock’,” and they got asked to “be a little less gay!” They laugh. “I mean, what’s my motivation?”

About then, by no coincidence, McKenzie started writing.  

Writing and Edmonton are inextricably linked in the McKenzie story, “The very first thing I’d ever written” was a short play for the Loud ‘N’ Queer festival here. Fashion Police was based, as they describe, on a scene (All That Glitters), from Darrin Hagen’s memoir The Edmonton Queen in which they appeared. In Fashion Police, “the story is judge-y gay people sitting at a table criticizing people about their fashion choices.” 

“Titans of the Edmonton theatre community, Trevor Schmidt and Andrea House, were in it. And they can make anything good!” says McKenzie. The capper was that the actors used puppets. “It was hilarious. When Trevor would lose his line, the puppet would look for it.” 

Bruthe from Get Off The Cross, Mary!. Photo by Darrin Hagen.

Putting the puppets in charge — “they get to decide who manipulates them” — inspired McKenzie’s first full-length play in 2009. Get Off The Cross, Mary! which eminently deserved its exclamation mark, is a queer puppet show for adults. “A bunch of puppets hire actors in L.A. and bring them up to Edmonton to do a queer version of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.”  

McKenzie’s provocative solo show NGGRFG (would you say the name of this play?), based on his own experience of being marginalized, premiered at the Edmonton Fringe. It toured 25 Vancouver high schools and (in a somewhat edited version) 25 elementary schools, and played theatres in the east including Young People’s Theatre in Toronto and the Neptune in Halifax. “After the Edinburgh Fringe (“soul-crushing!”),  I didn’t write for eight years. I had nothing else to give.”

NGGRFG, Young People’s Theatre. Photo by Daniel Alexander.

These days McKenzie is back in Edmonton, where it all began. Vancouver became too fraught with memories when his partner of 28 years passed away. When COVID hit in early 2020, McKenzie reached out to out-of-work filmmaker friends — “here’s 500 bucks; teach me what you know” — to teach him how to translate a short story they’d written for an AIDS anthology into a 10-episode web series, Hockey Night in Canada. Then, with help, they turned it into a feature film — which won them a place in WarnerMedia’s debut X Global Access Academy’s Writers’ Program. Now their script Angry Little Black Man is under option by Warner.

“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. And it’s really changed my life,” says McKenzie. And change is their mantra, he says, as a Confluence Fellow: change in the behind-the-scenes power structure of the arts, change in the granting bodies that support them, change in the gate-keeper structure of artistic directorships.

“The main work is letting other IBPOC artists and queer outsiders know there is a place for them in a more inclusive arts community…. We’re here,” McKenzie says. “And we’re not going anywhere.”

 

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Get rhythm at the Mayfield: Nashville Outlaws. A review

Posted on February 6, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Roman Pfob, Duane Steele, Jefferson McDonald and (top) Melissa MacPherson in Nashville Outlaws, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

With Nashville Outlaws, the Mayfield returns to a hit revue it created and premiered some 15 years ago. And why not?

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In these isolating, leaden times, an homage to country music renegades Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, has life advice for us. When you get the blues get rhythm (it will put a rock and roll feeling in your bones). Who are we to argue with The Man In Black, in this regard at least?

Fashioned by the ever-mysterious Mayfield muse Will Marks with Sara-Jeanne Hosie (seen here recently as Patsy Cline), the entertaining show currently running at the Mayfield assembles a generous hit song list and a really excellent band (led by virtuoso guitar licks from Harley Symington). Ah, and a trio of performers who capture signatures  aspects of a legendary trio of cultural renegades. 

Melissa MacPherson, Duane Steele in Nashville Outlaws. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The enthusiastic narrator (Melissa MacPherson), who will step out of the super-fan frame and up to the mic impressively as June Carter and Jessi Colter, brings a nicely ironic edge to her lofty assessments when she describes the title outlaws as “a travelling Mount Rushmore of country music icons.” 

But not before she’s called them, variously, “raw” and “uninhibited,” and paid tribute to the ways the “outlaws” went up against the sanitized corporate Nashville record establishment. “Whatever country is, some of us ain’t,” says one. 

We will learn that the three had in common blue-chip credentials in substance abuse and serial divorces (not unrelated), and touring stardom that came with trimmings like “women throwing themselves at them.” But the music is what the show is all about. And the performers capture the individual styles, cadences, attitudes of the three without resorting to mere impersonation, with its parody potential. 

As Cash, statuesque, deep-voiced Roman Pfob, who can wear a black top-coat (designer: Leona Brausen) with the best of them, returns to the Mayfield in the role he occupied in 2007. Jefferson McDonald (seen here recently as Jerry Lee Lewis in the Mayfield’s Million Dollar Quartet), takes on the chipper, quirkier persona of Willie Nelson. And he captures the reedy, nasal quality of that distinctive voice and sweet-and-sour style.  As Waylon Jennings (“the biggest rebel of them all,” declares the narrator without explanation), Duane Steele wraps great country pipes around the songs with ease. 

“He just couldn’t hang on to his women,” says the narrator cheerfully of Jennings. Or was it just that he “was feeding his soul on experiences he could write about”? The narrator is amused. Thanks to MacPherson, the narrative glue that sticks Nashville Outlaws together has a certain sense of humour as it bounces between off-the-rack adulation, biographical snippets, poetic clichés like “his fire burned out,” and teasing provocations. 

Intermittent interplay between the narrator and the “characters” is part of the show. “What could go wrong?” she wonders, just before the IRS hands Nelson a tab for $16 million in back taxes, or Cash checks into the Betty Ford and gets dried out. or Jennings gets diabetes and loses a foot. “Don’t worry about me; I can still kick ass,” the super-star assures us.  

Nashville Outlaws, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

That rhythm is captured, too, in Carmon Arlett’s set, an atmospheric saloon with a decorative cannabis flag, Southern flags, and a giant Jack Daniels bottle. And the hits roll out — Folsom Prison Blues, I Walk The Line, On The Road Again, Good-Hearted Woman, Luckenbach Texas and the rest — under a fascinating projection-scape of real-life black-and-white shots of the three designed by Matt Schuurman.

You’ll see Cash, Jennings and Nelson as little kids (they’re all adorable), and the former, the most photogenic of the three apparently, in concert at San Quentin. You’ll even see an unnerving shot of him smiling. 

As always, the music and sound quality in Mayfield revues is top-notch; the opening night audience was pumped. I would leave more detailed assessments to true country music aficionados. But from the theatrical point of view, the thought of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings as carousing roommates, the former making biscuits, seems like a missed opportunity for a comedy sketch. Just saying.

REVIEW

Nashville Outlaws

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written and compiled by: Will Marks and Sara-Jeanne Hosie

Directed by: Van Wilmott

Starring: Melissa MacPherson, Jefferson McDonald, Roman Pfob, Duane Steele

Running: through April 3

Tickets and COVID protocols: mayfieldtheatre.ca

 

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New faces in theatre: meet theatre creator/ designer Even Gilchrist

Posted on February 5, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, adaptable, and creative. And as theatre returns in this late-pandemic grind, and the doors open to live audiences, we’ll be seeing the work of these theatre artists light up, and transform, the scene here, on- and backstage. You’ll meet some of these sought-after up-and-comers in this annual 12thnight New Faces series. Here’s designer/ theatre creator Even Gilchrist, in a continuing 12thnight series that began with designer Beyata Hackborn , actor Rochelle Laplante, and composer/lyricist Simon Abbott.

Designer/theatre creator/ scenographer Even Gilchrist. Photo by Janice Saxon.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

EVEN GILCHRIST, designer/ theatre creator/ ‘experimentalist’

If you found yourself in a back alley in Strathcona last summer chatting with a stranger — who happened to be a puppet running a bar in a parking lot (don’t you love when that happens?)— you were experiencing theatre dreamed up by Even Gilchrist. 

The 27-year-old designer/ theatre creator, an “experimentalist” as he identifies, found a way to restore something that had gone AWOL in these pandemical times: a sense of connection.

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Gilchrist, the Found Festival’s 2021 Fresh AiR artist-in-residence invited half a dozen fellow artists, of every stripe, to create puppets who “come to life and greet you” to tell original stories, in a series of encounters in unexpected locations. Theatre for one cohort group at a time. COVID nixed the original idea of random meet-ups in crowded Strathcona bars, so it was improv time for the puppets. “And there was something fun about going around in back alleys and parking lots….” 

Puppet Pub Crawl, Found Festival 2021, Photo by Mat Simpson

The idea of “found theatre,” up close in locations you’d never expect to find artists, is highly appealing to Gilchrist, who arrived here from Ottawa in 2019 for the U of A’s design program. “There’s something scrappy about it,” he says. “I really appreciate limitations and parameters…. What does the space sound like? What does the space smell like?” 

“Sometimes it’s way more enriching as an experience than sitting in a dark theatre and breathing silently with a bunch of other people,” thinks Gilchrist. “I like those experiences too, don’t get me wrong…. But there’s something electrifying about serendipity!” 

Naturally, Found was a true find for the Edmonton newcomer; so was Catch The Keys Productions, specialists in site-specific, immersive, ambulatory theatre like Dead Centre of Town. “Hang on! That’s exactly the kind of thing I want to be doing!” he says of his preliminary research into the scene here.

Gilchrist’s entry point into theatre wasn’t the seductive portal of the limelight. No being onstage, singing the title number, sucking up applause fr him. “It was the exact opposite of stardom,” he laughs. He’d arrived in high school in Barrie, Ont. “without ever really seeing a proper professional production of anything.” His introduction to design, though he wouldn’t have used the word at the time, was his alma mater’s contribution to the Ontario-wide school competition, the Sears Festival. It’s a memory of late-night hilarity. “We had to find something free,” he says of a play called Ten Thousand Cigarettes. Fifteen kids auditioned; 15 kids got into a play with four characters. 

Something had to give. The creation that resulted, “a strange ensemble piece,” had “people in black suits, buildings made of cigarettes, smoking zero-nicotine e-cigarettes … white masks from the Dollar Store. Something that would be in a Euro-farce!”

Gilchrist was the stage manager, and “the quasi-co-director…. the other director bailed. It became (about) creating with friends. That was the start of it.” And lo and behold, “we won the municipal round.… We had to saw our cardboard set in half in order to get it on the bus.”  No one had measured.

“I was the one trying to build the set; I didn’t realize I was designing it. I was the one putting together the costumes; I didn’t realize I was designing them….” He was working the lighting board. “I was everything that wasn’t Actor.” 

It was Gilchrist’s introduction to the multi-tasking rigours of indie theatre, and, needless to say, the concept of working all night. “It was training me from the very beginning,” he laughs. “My understanding of theatre, what it looks like, what it does, was broken open when I went to university…. I wasn’t jaded about theatre or the scene in Canada. It was a fresh new page in the book.” 

That happened in Ottawa, where he went to university and “theatre in unconventional spaces is part of the bag,” a given, says Gilchrist. 

Since his arrival in Edmonton, he’s gravitated to indie theatre, in a variety of design assignments, including such high-profile off-centre projects as Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play (You Are Here Theatre), Tracks (Amoris Projects), All That Binds Us (Azimuth Theatre). 

Patricia Cerra and Ray Strachan in The Mountaintop, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Ironically, for a designer attracted to the off-centre architecture of devised projects, there’s a rigorous sense of reality attached to his most recent design assignments, at least as a point of departure. One was the dingy Memphis motel room in which Shadow Theatre’s production of The Mountaintop unspools. On Martin Luther King’s last night on earth, cheap lino cedes to magic realism and it suddenly starts to snow, and conjure a vision of the future.

And at the U of A, Gilchrist’s  degree project was Patricia Darbasie’s production of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, a play that chronicles the declension into moral chaos of two couples in the recognizable setting of a bourgeois living room.Meanwhile, Gilchrist’s own play Re:Construct, which he began before coming to Edmonton, is getting its next stage of development as part of RISER Edmonton, a national initiative designed to support and enhance the profile of indie theatre. The premiere at the Backstage Theatre, originally slated for February, has been delayed till spring courtesy of the pandemic.

God of Carnage, Studio Theatre. Photo by dbphotographics

The stops and starts of the pandemical world have been cruelly destructive to theatre, as he readily concurs. But, “overall, I do remain optimistic,” Gilchrist says. “I really am hopeful. We are tired, and we hate the word ‘resilient’. But theatre endures. There’s no way we can not do art. It’s been that way from time immemorial.” 

“Theatre is certainly exhausting. But it’s not dying…. Our need to see it is way more urgent than it was before — for our brains and our hearts!”  

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New faces in theatre: meet composer/lyricist Simon Abbott

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, adaptable, and creative. And as theatre returns in this late-pandemic grind, and the doors open to live audiences, we’ll be seeing the work of these theatre artists light up, and transform, the scene here, on- and backstage. Meet some of these sought-after up-and-comers in this annual 12thnight New Faces series. Here’s composer/lyricist Simon Abbot, in a continuing 12thnight series that began with designer Beyata Hackborn and actor Rochelle Laplante.

Musical-writing team Simon Abbott and Byron Martin, on the set of Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

SIMON ABBOTT, composer/lyricist

In a terrible year in Alberta, when everything was going from grim to grimmer and we the people were sliding around on the spectrum between fury and despair, something unexpectedly kooky, cathartic and, well, fun happened onstage in Edmonton.

The sound of laughter was heard in the land.

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A musical satire with the doom-laden name Jason Kenney in the title, containing a power ballad for the least popular premier in the country? Really? Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer sold out, before it even opened. Grindstone Theatre’s production was held over three times. By then end of the  “fourth wave” this past weekend, 11,000 masked people had seen it.

If you cheered and sang along to Fuck Kenney, a catchy rock number, or you left the theatre still humming Ottawa, a sassy assortment of multi-syllable rhymes in a duet for Rachel Notley and her boyfriend Justin Trudeau, you were hooked by the work of Grindstone’s Byron Martin and his musical-writing partner composer/co-lyricist Simon Abbott.

Simon Abbott (centre) with bandmates Erik Mortimer and Jesse Crowley, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. Photo supplied

The latter, onstage at the keyboard with a crack band, is a newcomer to the scene who says with startling modesty that “I feel like I’m not really a theatre guy …. completely without theatre training.” There’s a kind of remarkable instinct about a not-theatre guy who creates whole musicals with smart, funny, well-positioned songs, not to mention whole Broadway-style production numbers. Abbott credits the savvy and experience of his writing partner Martin.

The much-travelled Abbott, who grew up in Quebec and spent time in Germany, arrived here from Halifax by chance three years ago — just as Grindstone was opening its comedy theatre/bistro in Strathcona. He hit it off with Martin, and found his way into Grindstone’s popular The 11 O’Clock Number, a fully improvised show with the formidable challenge of creating a full musical on the spot. “So hard. A lot of fun.”

“I’d decided to try music full time,” he says of an unusual career that has included playing in bar bands and a scholarship in organ (he still has a church gig to supplement his income).

The Abbott route into musical theatre is uniquely zigzag, as he tells it. He’d taken piano lessons as a kid, “hated it, and quit, and got back into jazz in high school,” he says. “I’d started musical-directing, I guess because I could play piano and sing a bit,” he says casually. “And I ended up doing that a lot, pushing 35 musicals at this point. At a certain point you just know the genre well enough, I guess.”

As to why he’d started writing songs, Abbott thinks about it. “I’m definitely not a songwriter or composer,” he says. The score of Hot Boy Summer, which embraces a wide and complex variety of music from hard-driving rock to G&S-style patter songs, romantic ballads, character-driven musical theatre-type odes, is a counter-argument. Abbott is the antithesis of lofty pronouncements. “You conduct, you direct, you accompany. And then, ‘we need some songs for this’ and you’ve just got to do it….”

“The real miracle is that it went up in six weeks,” he says of Hot Boy Summer. “Just crazy. Nuts. Basically, we just wrote down an improvised musical, and then edited it.” What started in comedy sketches, for Donovan Workun as Jason Kenney and Abby Vandenberghe as Dr. Hinshaw, grew and grew. What Martin and Abbott originally thought of as a one-act sketch comedy show, “a four-hander maybe, got way out of hand!” Abbott laughs.

“A lot of the writing was still happening before the casting was finished…. It was half workshop half rehearsal, right up until opening night.” And, says Abbott appreciatively, “we got lucky.” The cast is diverse. “There are (serious) theatre actors, amazing musical theatre talents, a bunch of improvisers (many from The 11 O’Clock Number) — a big mash-up of people.”

Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer.

The creators were inspired by the performers. Half of the eight-actor ensemble, the ‘80s frat boys on a crusade to ensure that The Best Summer Ever will happen, are female. “How do you write something that sounds male when half of them aren’t: it’s tricky,” says Abbott, who shared the lyric-writing with Martin.

The first song they wrote, “before we knew the plot,” was a big 11 o’clock number for Workun as Jason Kenney, Unify My Heart. Then they tackled the flamboyant opening song-and-dance production number, Upsilon Kappa Pi. “We were looking for tropes to parody, says Abbott of the goofy ‘80s collegiate setting of the characters, younger versions of names we know. “As Byron says, it’s not funny if it’s malice…. Everyone knows who Kenney is. There’s no point in just doing that.”

Donovan Workun and Abby Vandenberghe in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre.

“I didn’t appreciate how hard the character stuff would be,” says Abbott of the most challenging part of lyric-writing. “To get stuff to feel natural and line up right. There were a lot of versions….”

And since the show is by its very nature topical, things changed. Towards the end of the run “we had new stuff about Kaycee Madu,” laughs Abbott. “That cabinet (sigh) … they write this stuff for us.”

Meanwhile the pair is considering new options for another musical they wrote together. If it hadn’t been for the pandemic ThunderCats, a fusion of “Cats the musical and ‘90s cartoons about cats, in space, fighting aliens,” would have toured.

And Abbott has turned the randomness of his arrival here into a positive answer to the question “why Edmonton?” for himself into the future. “Edmonton is a great place,” he says. “There’s tons of work here … most of it in musical theatre. And I’ve pretty much given up playing in bars; it’s just not worth it….”

And here’s “a further testimonial to what a great city this is”: Abbott doesn’t own a phone (too distracting, he says). “If you can make it as a freelancer here, and not have a phone….”

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New faces in theatre: meet actor Rochelle Laplante

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, adaptable, and creative. And as theatre returns in this late-pandemic grind, and the doors open to live audiences, we’ll be seeing the work of these theatre artists light up, and transform, the scene here, on- and backstage. Meet six of these sought-after up-and-comers in this annual 12thnight New Faces series. Here’s actor Rochelle Laplante, in a continuing 12thnight series that began with designer Beyata Hackborn.

Laura Raboud, Nadien Chu, Rochelle Laplante in Macbeth, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Rochelle Laplante, actor

If you caught a clever, unexpectedly funny version of the Scottish play last summer on its travels through town (and possibly in your own backyard), you saw a raffish trio of bouffons play all the characters, provide stage directions, recruit audience members directly, sing a selection of biting satirical songs….

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That was Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s black comedy/ tragedy/ satire mash-up take on Macbeth, which charted the endlessly repeating cycle of power grabs, corruption and assassination. And in Dave Horak’s high-speed production, newcomer Rochelle Laplante was, among her other roles, an impressively confident Lady M. How often does an actor who’s also a musical theatre triple-threat get to reveal that skill set … in Shakespeare?

actor Rochelle Laplante

It was her “first big stage thing” out of theatre school, “a clown version, with songs!” And “I absolutely loved doing it!” says Laplante, now 24, who has one of those deep, husky, amused voices you associate with golden age of Hollywood stars. “Going out, travelling around town and showing people some Shakespeare!”

“People could rent us,” Laplante laughs. “One of our last shows was for eight people in a backyard, so ‘OK, we’re not going to get the most audience interaction but…. In smaller spaces you realize you’re making eye contact with the same people over and over.” She found fascinating the reaction of diverse audiences to the disconcerting weirdness of finding themselves laughing, “the slow burn from the thought that, hey, this is a tragedy; what’s happening right now?”

Laplante grew up in Edmonton, a theatre kid who “loved to sing and dance — all the time! Finding theatre was a good thing.” “What really drew me into it,” she laughs, “was I saw my  sister in an acting class. And ‘little sister jealousy’ took over: ‘I could do that!’”

Inevitably she went to Vic (the Victoria School of the Arts), and found herself in the big musicals Greg Dowler-Coltman directed there. She was in musicals with the Citadel’s Young Company. The distinctive voice was a distinctive asset; greetings from alto section of the ensemble. Fringe audiences saw Laplante in a modern dress production of The Importance of Being Earnest from the clever indie theatre Empress of Blandings Productions in 2018. Then came the National Theatre in Montreal. “I was lucky to not be in school during the pandemic.” She emerged with a career waiting to happen: “things booked, all cancelled by the pandemic.”

The time-honoured Edmonton theatre DYI principle has evidently been an inspiration. At the digital edition of Nextfest last year, audiences saw her solo creation Homegrown, “an audio-visual exploration of the connections between my natural hair and different plant life.”

Rochelle Laplante (top) and Kristi Hansen in Hiraeth, Bright Young Things. Photo by Mat Busby.

Bright and charismatic onstage, Laplante has caught the eye of veteran theatre artists, including Horak, Belinda Cornish and Rachel Peake. In Hiraeth, the new Cornish two-hander comedy that premiered last fall in Peake’s Bright Young Things production, Laplante co-starred as a mysterious and kooky young neighbour-from-hell who moves into the house of Kristi Hansen’s accomplished mid-career professional woman. Who is she, really? A reveal/withhold situation that Laplante handled expertly.

It’s an odd-couple comedy of a sort, and it unfolds in surprising ways — with in vitro fertilization as its centrepiece.“I had a great time,” says Laplante. Both the playwright and the director “wanted us to be open with our ideas…. It’s such a personal story for them, and it felt like such a beautiful thing to be part of it!” And Laplante was amused to realize that “hey, I’ve worked on a play about IVF before!”

There’s an exclusive subset of Canadian theatre: Hiraeth was her second new Canadian play about pregnancy. As part of their last year of training, NTS actors appear in plays by their playwriting classmates. Her assignment was in Jacob Margaret Archer’s Think of the Children, “a story of a trans man who accidentally gets impregnated by his boyfriend.”

The future is in many ways mapless terrain for young theatre artists. But Laplante has upcoming work, details as yet unannounced, at the Citadel and Teatro La Quindicina. She does imagine being based in Edmonton for a while. “I lived in Toronto for a year after graduation,” she says. “And I found out how exhausting it is to be part of the grind of a big city, trying to have enough money to live, but also wanting to start my career. Here, I can find acting jobs that interest me, and I can enjoy doing theatre!”

“Yes, I do feel positive!”

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UnCovered: The Music of Dolly Parton alights here (digitally), courtesy of Catalyst

Posted on January 27, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Jully Black, UnCovered; The Music of Dolly Parton, The Musical Stage Company. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here they come again…. Some of the country’s top musical theatre talent has a date Saturday night — at your place.

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Toronto’s Musical Stage Company returns with a digital version of their hugely popular annual “signature concert.” For this 15th incarnation of UnCovered, hosted here by Catalyst Theatre, the six-person cast of artists, filmed in performance at Koerner Hall, presents the music of Dolly Parton.

As you’ll know if you had the fun of seeing last year’s concert, UnCovered: Notes From The Heart — which plumbed a repertoire from Leonard Cohen to Billie Holiday, Carole King to Bob Marley —  The Musical Stage Company has a highly entertaining way of letting musical theatre stars loose on the pop repertoire. The results are fascinating.

The cast of UnCovered: The Music of Dolly Parton, photo by Dahlia Katz.

For 2022, it’s hits by the queen of country (and COVID hero), reimagined in inventive original arrangements by the company’s musical director Reza Jacobs. And with it, the Toronto company again pairs with Catalyst, a theatre with its own highly original take on musical theatre, as we know from such hit productions as Frankenstein, Nevermore, Vigilante.

The “digital tour” arrives chez vous at 8 p.m. Saturday, with a cast that includes Jully Black, Beau Dixon, Sara Farb, Hailey Gillis, Kelly Holiff, and Andrew Penner. Tickets ($30 per household) are available at catalyst theatre.ca.

•In other theatre news, Die-Nasty, Edmonton’s award-winning improv comedy troupe, has bid adieu to the Stroganoffs, that fractious, treacherous, angst-ridden Russian clan. The deluxe improvisers of Die-Nasty return Monday night — and every Monday night through March 31 — with the second half of their live improvised season at the Varscona: Murder at the Off-Whyte Lotus Hotel. The notably quick-witted Edmonton murder mystery novelist Janice MacDonald co-directs. Tickets: varsconatheatre.com.

•Shadow Theatre has delayed this week’s performances of their current production The Mountaintop till Tuesday, due to positive COVID tests. Tickets (and ticket adjustments) for the show, which imagines in an encounter with a motel housekeeper Martin Luther King’s last night on earth, are available at shadowtheatre.org. Check out the 12thnight review here.     

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New faces in theatre, six bright up-and-comers: meet designer Beyata Hackborn

Posted on January 25, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, adaptable, and creative. And as theatre returns in this late-pandemic grind, and the doors open to live audiences, we’ll be seeing the work of these theatre artists light up, and transform, the scene here, on- and backstage. Meet six of these sought-after up-and-comers in this annual 12thnight New Faces series. First up, designer Beyata Hackborn.

Metronome, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

BEYATA HACKBORN, designer

Here’s an artistic puzzle (maybe even an existential one) to challenge the wits of any theatre designer:

A new solo memoir/play that tells the story of a gay small-town prairie trailer park kid and his life-changing relationship with a piano — in which the instrument itself does not appear onstage.

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The piece, which premiered at Workshop West this past fall, is Darrin Hagen’s Metronome. And the beautiful design solution, both object and metaphor in Heather Inglis’s production, was the work of Beyata Hackborn. We see Hagen, Metronome’s creator and star, under a giant rainbow of piano fragments, keyboards, sounding plates, strings. One end of the arc is anchored to the ground with an accordion; the other floats, unhinged in space, full of possibility.

theatre designer Beyata Hackborn

“Darrin made it very clear early on he wasn’t going to want to play the piano,” says the cheery voice of the designer, on the phone from Niagara-on-the-Lake where she’s contracted by the Shaw Festival for the 2022 season as an assistant designer. “So, does the piano live onstage even though he’s not playing it? What does it represent?”

“Oh no, how am I going to do this?” Hackborn remembers asking herself. “How to have the presence of a piano that is never played but is always talked about being played?”

Her solution has been one of the memorable designs of the season.

“I like discovering design during the rehearsal,” says Hackborn, who graduated from the U of A’s BFA-in-design program in 2019. “I want design to be be really engrained into the words of the script …” and changing along with it. And so it went with Metronome. Hagen was actively developing and editing his play, in rehearsal, when a new line about his irresistible attraction to the piano keys themselves — “something about piano keys has always pulled me in” — hit a chord with Hackborn. “It informed exactly where I put (them) in the set…. I love theatre because it’s so live, so ever-changing!”

Hackborn grew up in Camrose, in a family with an artistic bent. “My mom, who went to school for cartography, encouraged all of us kids to go into the arts — yup, none of us are making money!” she laughs. Musicals were her entry-level showbiz hook, after school with the company About Time Productions.

And she was always drawing. “When you’re eight, if you can draw a coherent smiley face or a coherent firetruck, everyone’s like ‘o my gosh, an artiste!’” When you’re always drawing and you’re in high school, you might, as Hackborn did, get asked to start designing for shows.

“Early on I knew I wasn’t going to be my happiest onstage,” she says. She remembers painting a set one year when a pal said “it was the only time they’d seen me happy…. Wow, dark, dude. That’s when I knew I should probably be pursuing design.”

Bug, Studio Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Even before she graduated from the U of A, Hackborn had landed assistant designer gigs with the Banff Centre and Shakespeare in the Park. She remembers a university production of Tracy Letts’ Bug in her last year at the U of A as the one “when everything came together…. A really visual play, a lot of fun and campy psychosis that can bleed its way into the design.”

E Day, Serial Collective, Photo by BB Collective.

But “I have a very large nostalgia for big musicals. At the other end of the spectrum from Metronome, and its evocation of memory and sound, was Hackborn’s ultra-realistic design for E Day, her first professional production out of university. Jason Chinn’s political comedy, which premiered in the fall of 2019 in Theatre Network’s Performance Series, took us behind the scenes of the 2015 provincial election that swept the NDP into office. And Hackborn created a grassroots pop-up constituency office in an anonymous strip mall, the clutter detailed in every way — from cheap coffee maker, jars of pencils, post-it notes, fold-up tables, down to the hand-lettered sign ‘Make Sure Coffee Pot Is Turned Off At The End Of The Day’. 

Hackborn had fun with the details. “Really ugly things!” she says happily. “I kept adding little gems! The team was so good, so friendly and flexible. ‘Here, try on this dress I got two seconds ago!’”

Julius Caesar, Malachite Theatre’s Winter Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied

Hackborn spent much of 2020 supporting herself by making models (she bought herself a 3-D printer as a graduation present). And just before the crushing entry of the pandemic, she designed Malachite Theatre’s Winter Shakespeare Festival productions of Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Holy Trinity Church in Strathcona, a challenging space for both sight lines and acoustics.

“I have a very large nostalgia for big musicals; that’s what I grew up on,” says Hackborn. “The whole show is written in the music; you can hear when certain design elements are supposed to happen, a real rhythm.” As an example she points to that indelible keyboard arpeggio in the overture to Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George. “That’s when the painting reveals itself….”

But site-specific theatre, immersive productions, theatre that the audience moves through (Catch The Keys’ Dead Centre of Town series in the river valley, for example) … they’re Hackborn’s particular jam. “So much possibility, making the world so close up to people….” Productions in freezing warehouses with dirt floor and no fixed seating? “O my gawd, that’s what I want!” she laughs.

The configuration of all theatre careers is always pencilled in. But for artists now, the future is unpredictable as never before. Hackborn, now in her mid-twenties, is thinking of being based in Edmonton. “There’s so much potential here. And it’s a close-knit community. In a bigger city it would be harder to get that support.” Besides, she says, “I have a household of roommates and dogs I love!”

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A mysterious encounter en route to the Promised Land: The Mountaintop opens the Shadow season. A review

Posted on January 21, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Ray Strachan and Patricia Cerra in The Mountaintop, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Why America is going to hell … ” repeats the man before us, testing different ways of rolling off each syllable for a speech-in-progress.

It’s a sonorous voice gone scratchy around the edges by hard use (and Pall Malls). A road-weary Martin Luther King (Ray Strachan) is just back from delivering his celebrated I’ve Been To The Mountaintop speech at the Mason Temple in support of striking sanitation workers.

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He’s in a depressingly dingy Memphis motel room (designer: Even Gilchrist, who evidently knows bleak beige lino when he sees it) on a stormy night, checking for hidden microphones, trying to phone his wife. And, as the recipient of innumerable death threats, King jumps at every crack of thunder as he waits for his colleague Rev. Ralph Abernathy to return with cigarettes.

We’re backstage in the life of a hero, where the mundane and not the momentous rules. But everything about it seems portentous, not anti-climactic. It’s April 3, 1968, King’s last night on earth, imagined by American writer Katori Hall in her 2009 play The Mountaintop. The Shadow production directed by Patricia Darbasie at the Varscona is the theatre’s first live show in two years, and launches a three-show season.

The next day, April 4, will bring a terrible, defining moment in American history and the violent story of the civil rights movement. King will be assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Meanwhile, the play sets forth an encounter that reveals the human dimensions of a larger-than-life hero.

Patricia Cerra and Ray Strachan in The Mountaintop, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

A motel housekeeper arrives at the door of room 306 on her first night on the job, bearing coffee and, as it turns out, a surprising identity. Camae (Patricia Cerra) is sassy and flirtatious, mysteriously feisty, knowing, and skeptical as she engages with the great man on subjects like protests, heroism, America’s defaults in living up to its professed sense of self. “Tomorrow,” she says looking at the date on the late-edition newspaper she’s been assigned to bring him, “is already here.”

The performances in Darbasie’s production are compelling and vivid. Strachan has the tricky assignment of capturing both the grandeur of King the star performer whose cadences are an indelible part of our collective history, and the self-doubt and vanity of the lonely, human-sized man who lies to his wife and has holes in his socks. And he does; he inhabits a portrait that is, in that sense, sculptural.

There’s an escalating strangeness about Camae. Cerra shines brightly as a mystery character with an unexpected confidence about her, an enigmatically intense stare, pauses that have their own incantatory quality too. I can’t tell you more about Camae without spoiling your own discovery, but Cerra is terrific.

As captured by Darbasie’s production, the rhythms of the encounter, are disconcerting, always surprising till they’re not. A play that spends a lot of time (possibly too much time since it feels long) being play-ful, The Mountaintop starts in the valley — the ultra-realism of that cheap motel, the flirtatious maid, the tired man with the smelly feet, the wandering eye, and the cough — and climbs to something else. Magic realism takes us out of the play’s present and into a vision of the future. The video and the ominous sound design by Dave Clarke have a kind of suspense and tension to them that the play itself, which has its cumbersome moments, can’t quite sustain on the ascent.

In his last monologue, King tells us “everybody said we’d never get there. But then again nobody thought we’d get this far.” Ah, that expansive multi-faceted vista on the future: it’s been a few years of marching forward, but also rolling backwards. The ending of the play, with its exhortation to pass the baton into new hands, feels a little blurrier than it did in 2009. Black Lives Matter, yes, gives the vision a new resonance. But an assault on the Capitol by white supremacists; a concerted campaign, undertaken by the Republican party, to disenfranchise Black voters in a clear assault on the civil rights movement of the ‘60s … the list goes on. “The Promised Land is so close, and yet so far away, so close and yet so far away so close and yet.…”

REVIEW

The Mountaintop

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Katori Hall

Directed by: Patricia Darbasie

Starring: Ray Strachan, Patricia Cerra

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 6

Tickets, schedule, COVID protocols: shadowtheatre.org

 

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The Mountaintop: a human portrait of a hero and the landscape of dreams, at Shadow Theatre

Posted on January 17, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Ray Strachan and Patricia Cerra in The Mountaintop. Photo by Morris Ertman for Rosebud Theatre

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Like most men you ain’t gone be able to finish what you started. — The Mountaintop

The play that launches Shadow Theatre’s delayed three-play live season Thursday is named for one of Martin Luther King’s most celebrated speeches. And the great man himself (Ray Strachan) is one of its two characters. The other is a mysterious, surprisingly un-awestruck housekeeper (Patricia Cerra) on her first day on the job.

The Mountaintop, a 2009 play by the then-unknown young American playwright Katori Hall (who won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for The Hot Wing King), takes us to room 306 in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the site of a seminal moment in the history of American civil rights. It’s April 3 1968, the night before King’s assassination, in the city where he has just delivered a speech in support of striking sanitation workers.

The history of the play is unexpected: it premiered, oddly enough, in a London fringe theatre before its starry Broadway incarnation (Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett). And surprising, too, is the way the encounter between King and the housekeeper Camae unfolds into a confrontation with a  magic realism reverb (the secret of that route is something I must not reveal).

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It surprised director Patricia Darbasie, too, the first time she read the play. Since then she’s read the book by King’s close associate Rev. Ralph Abernathy, with its dimensional human portrait of a hero. “On the last day of his life he spent time with three women; he was a bit of a player,” says Darbasie of “one idea that the playwright ran with.”

It’s not as if you have to hunt for reasons in 2022 to revisit the terrible events of the ‘60s. After all, as Darbasie points out, even King’s passing observation in the play that the looting in the wake of a peaceful demonstration ‘just  gives the police an excuse to shoot innocent folks’ “is as true in America today as it was in 1968.” Consult the news for proliferating evidence.

“What appeals to me,” says Darbasie, “is that the play calls on all of us, the baton passes on. Other men, the movement, will carry it on. King’s final monologue to the audience is about our responsibility…. If we’re actually going to change things significantly, it’s up to each individual. It’s not a one-man show. And things are not going to change on their own.”

“King really was a visionary…. He really did understand (the interconnection) of civil rights, human rights, and poverty. You can’t solve things with just one of those.”

As an artist of colour Darbasie, a first-generation immigrant from Trinidad (she arrived here at age seven with her family), has had more than a few occasions to consider that “a lot has changed, and a lot has not changed. I think we forget that.” She tells the story of a Black Canadian friend who’d gone down to Alabama for a family reunion and been advised by a relative that “we don’t go to that part of town after dark; it’d be inviting trouble.” The friend, taken aback, said something about Obama being the president, and the rejoinder was “well, Obama ain’t here in Alabama.”

“It’s so much more subtle here in Canada,” says Darbasie, whose commissioned play West Indian Diary (about the experiences of Caribbean immigrants here in the ‘60s and  ‘70s) premiered in 2011. She notes “the issues” that attended Black and South Asian candidates who went door knocking during the most recent civic election campaign. As a new arrival in Canada as a little kid, she remembers “hostility, but with negotiation. The thing about Canada is that (incidents) surprise you. In Alabama it’s been that way since the Civil War. In Canada it’s ‘O, I did not see that one coming’.”

The Mountaintop, which was produced at Rosebud Theatre in 2019 (with Strachan and Cerra), was announced by Shadow in 2020, when the pandemic still seemed like a minor blip. It was a couple of months before the murder of George Floyd changed the landscape of awareness here and internationally. “It was a seismic shift (in awareness). People had to notice. We were all home by then, watching it unfold,” as Darbasie points out. And we were locked down with our screens when the story of mass graves of Indigenous children finally emerged. “The pandemic has shone some light on the uglier race relations in our history…. The ‘news’ became unavoidable.”

Ray Strachan, Patricia Cerra in The Mountaintop. Photo by Morris Ertman for Rosebud Theatre

The Mountaintop is a challenge, both for its actors and director Darbasie, as she says. The Shadow production is the third in which  Winnipeg-based Strachan has played King (in addition to the Rosebud production, he starred in a recorded version at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre). And his task is to capture “the cadence, the rhythm, of a real person”  as revealed in some of the great performances, and speeches, of the 20th century.

The play “takes a figure who has been mythologized, larger than life, and makes him human size,” says Darbasie. “There’s vanity there. And ego…. And we forget that for anyone in the public eye, there is a cost. As Camae tells him ‘you’re maybe only 39 but you have the heart of a 60-year-old’.”

“I love that he is real, that he is human and therefore not perfect.” Paragons do tend to be a drag onstage. “And Camae is very human too.”

That the actors are returning to a play, and roles, they’ve done in other productions is something of a challenge, too. “I love peeling the onion. We’re able to go deeper in the work, and I think they’re enjoying it too,” says Darbasie of her cast. “They’re being so gracious.”

An actor herself, Darbasie says “I try really hard in my own directing process to ask questions so the actors find their own way to fill a moment…. I’ve been directed by directors who want the actors to do exactly what they would do (in the role). I’m not interested in that.”

Directing, she thinks, “is a matter of asking questions. What’s the question that needs to be asked? So bring me your best, and we’ll see how it fits with everybody else.” And then there’s the exhilaration of choosing, she laughs: “I want that, that, and not that, and a bit of this…. I get to choose. It’s kind of how I cook.”

PREVIEW

The Mountaintop

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Katori Hall

Directed by: Patricia Darbasie

Starring: Ray Strachan, Patricia Cerra

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 6

Tickets, schedule, COVID protocols: shadowtheatre.org

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