It’s the theatre season, and you have options this weekend

Posted on October 22, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Thomas Tunski, Christina Nguyen, Gavin Dyer, Amber Borotsik, Jesse Gervais in Michael Mysterious. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hey, there’s a Theatre Season (now, there’s a term that’s gotten a little rusty) going on in this town. There’s live theatre in your weekend — two openings Friday night alone — and you have options.

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•We’ve had glimpses, in unexpected places (like Rundle Park at twilight). But finally, Edmonton audiences get to see a full-bodied play by Geoffrey Simon Brown — in a theatre. Pyretic Theatre premieres Michael Mysterious at La Cité francophone. Fierce and funny, it takes us into the fractious and fracturing heart of a family, and makes you wonder about what it means to have one and be home — all seen through the eyes of a mystery teenager. Is family something you make? Inherit? Spend a lifetime trying to shake off? Riveting. Patrick Lundeen’s kinetic Pyretic production runs through Oct. 24 at La Cité francophone. Have a peek at the 12thnight REVIEW here, and an interview with the director and playwright Brown here. Tickets: tixonthesquare.ca.

A “dark, multi-disciplinary comedy about a pipeline”? Really? Bears, Matthew MacKenzie’s bold, imaginative theatre-dance fantasia on our relationship with Nature and, really, the Trans Mountain pipeline, opens Friday in the city where it began. And this time it’s on the big stage, the Citadel’s Maclab. Check out 12thnight’s PREVIEW interview with the playwright here. MacKenzie’s Punctuate! production, starring the charismatic Métis actor Sheldon Elter, runs through Oct. 31. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

Rochelle Laplante and Kristi Hansen in Hiraeth, Bright Young Things. Photo supplied.

•At the Varscona, starting Friday, another new play from Belinda Cornish, the actor/playwright/director who’s both the co-artistic producer at Teatro La Quindicina and the artistic director of the indie Bright Young Things.

Hiraeth is named for an untranslatable Welsh word that has to do with undefinable longing — for something the eludes your grasp or that might not exist. The premiere production, under the Bright Young Things banner, is directed by the Vancouver Arts Club’s Rachel Peake. Playwright Cornish and director Peake are fresh from The Garneau Block, which finally opened on the Citadel’s Maclab stage after an 18-month Covidian delay. 12thnight had a chance to talk to them for this PREVIEW. Tickets: varsconatheatre.com.

Lost Lemoine Part 1, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Adam Kidd.

•If you’re not quite ready to venture forth, theatre will invade your home, and come to you online. There are three filmed Teatro comedies available for streaming through Oct. 31.

Lost Lemoine Part 1 is a sextet of little comic gems by resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, some dating back as far as the ’90s. A Second Round of Seconds: Lost Lemoine Part 2, and A Fit, Happy Life. The eight-actor ensemble  of first-rate comic actors for the Lost Lemoines is directed by the evidently indefatigable Cornish. A Fit, Happy Life directed by Cornish with playwright Stewart Lemoine, stars Mathew Hulshof as a very busy department store bed salesman, with Kristen Padayas as all his customers. Streaming passes: teatroq.com.

•The Citadel production of Mary’s Wedding, Tai Amy Grauman’s Métis adaptation of the classic Stephen Massicotte play, continues online through Nov. 30. Read the 12thnight REVIEW, and a PREVIEW interview with the actor/playwright. Streaming passes: citadeltheatre.com.

Kristin Johnston in We Had A Girl Before You. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

•And in honour of the spooky season, sharpen your appetite for terror and dread by catching the digital version of Trevor Schmidt’s unease-making gothic thriller We Had A Girl Before You, which premiered live last November. Schmidt’s shivery production, beautifully lighted with sound to match, stars Kristin Johnston. It’s available for streaming at northernlighttheatre.com through Oct. 31. See the 12thnight REVIEW if you dare.

  

  

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Finding comedy in deep places: Hiraeth premieres in a Bright Young Things production

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Kristi Hansen and Rochelle Laplante in Hiraeth, Bright Young Things. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The play that premieres Friday on the Varscona stage in a Bright Young Things production, is a test case of sorts for the uncanny way comedy gets a special access pass to the deepest, most serious of subjects.

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Even its title has an elusive smoke to it. Hiraeth, explains playwright Belinda Cornish, Bright Young Things’ artistic director, gets its name from a Welsh word that’s untranslatable into English. “The closest,” she says, “is a longing for a home you never had, or to which you can never return, a longing for something that is out of reach. An exquisite longing.” You feel it; you know it; you cannot define it.

Belinda Cornish. Photo supplied

Hiraeth is a collaboration between Cornish and Rachel Peake, written by the former, directed by the latter. And it came out of comedy — to wit, their work together as playwright/director on The Garneau Block, Cornish’s stage adaptation of the satirical Todd Babiak novel, which closed not long ago.

Two premieres, and three opening nights, in a month: there’s a crazy no-intermission intensity, screwball energy perhaps?, to the theatrical pacing of Cornish’s life during a global pandemic. Since June she’s directed four productions — three on film and the fourth (Fever Land) live — for Teatro La Quindicina, where she’s co-artistic producer.

When The Garneau Block got postponed yet again at the Citadel last March, on the very eve of its first preview, “we refused to be defeated by lockdown,” says Cornish of her friendship and artistic rapport with Peake. “We immediately started working on a new piece together…. To be able to come back 18 or 19 months later at the Citadel was amazing. We didn’t really intend to do two shows back-to-back.”

“It was all about the director/playwright relationship,” says Peake, the exuberant associate artistic director at Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre (she had a similar position at the Citadel for three seasons till 2020). “I wanted it to continue!” She asked Cornish “so what else are you writing?”

“Rachel and I had a very long coffee and ventured into some pretty deep subjects,” says Cornish. They bonded over “a common experience of hiraeth,” for one thing, and for another, a shared affection for dark comedy, says Peake. Post-Hiraeth she returns to Vancouver to launch an Arts Club season that opens with the Dolly Parton musical Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol, and she’ll be back to direct 9 to 5 at the Citadel later this season (“I’m nerding out on all things Dolly”).

The experience Cornish and Peake shared (one that the playwright had been keeping for theatre “in a back pocket-y sort of way”) was in vitro fertilization, in all its emotional turbulence, longing, frustrations that tilt toward tragedy, the gift and curse of hope. “We found we’d walked the same path in slightly different shoes,” as Cornish puts it delicately. “It’s an odd thing to write a comedy about.” That was the challenge.   

Rochelle Laplante and Kristi Hansen in Hiraeth, Bright Young Things. Photo supplied.

The result is “an odd-couple comedy about a tiny tragedy,” as it’s billed. One of the two characters is a successful 40-year-old business woman (Kristi Hansen) whose career is in top running order, with everything in place — except a baby. Sidi is undergoing IVF treatment to adjust that part of her life plan. “At the apex of stress in her life, a young woman (Rochelle Laplante) moves into the basement.” Says Peake, “she’s charming, she’s joyful, she’s funny, but she turns out to be the quirky neighbour from hell….”

“What makes her tick?” That is to be discovered in the course of Hiraeth. Cornish laughs. “There are a lot of discoveries in this play!”

“I love the idea of the friction, the wrapping something serious around a comedy … finding a way to put something rich, deep, and painful into the basket of comedy,” she says. As Edmonton audiences have discovered, that particular dexterity with the darker hues of comedy has found its way before into such Cornish comic “baskets” as Category E, a Kafka-esque comedy set in an animal testing lab. Or Little Elephants, that takes sparkling family dysfunction comedy into prickly territory. “With comedy you can plumb the (emotional) depths even more, find an even deeper bass note.”

With Hiraeth, it’s “the longing for something you can’t have … and that’s universal,” as Peake puts it. And “a comedy for two women is quite rare.” And so is a production team that except for stage manager Steven Sobolewski is all women.

Premiering a new play is a first for Bright Young Things, an indie christened for the London tabloid nickname for the artsy boho crowd of the 1920s. They’re specialists in the the vintage mid-century repertoire, rarely staged, of the last mid-century — Terrence Rattigan, Graham Green, Ionesco, Noel Coward, among them. “We’re expanding,” Cornish laughs.

But wait, actually there is a roommate from hell — OK, a roommate in hell —  “comedy” in the Bright Young Things archive:  Sartre’s No Exit. With Hiraeth, “a comedy with serious notes,” as Cornish describes, there is an exit, from one vision of the future to another.  But you’ll have to see the show to discover what that is.

PREVIEW

Hiraeth

Theatre: Bright Young Things

Written by: Belinda Cornish

Directed by: Rachel Peake

Starring: Kristi Hansen and Rochelle Laplante

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through Oct. 30

Tickets and proof of vaccine requirements: varsconatheatre.com

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A journey of transformation into the heart of nature: Bears hits the big stage

Posted on October 18, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Sheldon Elter and the Bears ensemble, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Six years ago, in a tiny theatre space deep inside the Arts Barn, we watched a man set forth on a journey from the city into the heart of Nature — through mountains to the sea — transforming magically as he went.

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That was our first sighting of Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears. And it arrived onstage in 2015 assisted by a chorus of dancers, a park ranger who accompanied himself in original cabaret songs … and controversy. Then, as now, multi-disciplinary dark comedies about pipelines, as Bears was boldly billed, weren’t exactly Alberta ground cover.

The contentious Northern Gateway pipeline invoked in 2015 became the contentious Kinder Morgan in the significantly reworked 2018 iteration of Bears at the Backstage Theatre. And now, starting Thursday, having toured the country on big stages and small, urban theatres and Indigenous community halls, trailing some of the country’s most prestigious theatre honours (including multiple Dora Awards and the Carol Bolt playwriting prize), Bears returns to Edmonton where it started.

And this time, the Punctuate! Theatre production is in the big house, on the Citadel’s Maclab mainstage, as part of the season. As MacKenzie says, 7,000 people saw Bears at the Belfry in Victoria, more at the Cultch in Vancouver. In Edmonton, where it all began in tiny venues, audiences for two separate incarnations of Bears amounted to 1,200. “This  isn’t the Edmonton premiere,” says MacKenzie. “But for a lot of the team it really feels that way.”   

The names may change. This time, the Kinder Morgan pipeline, purchased by the feds, is the Trans Mountain. But pipelines and the provocations offered by Bears remain as flammable as ever, maybe more. Never let it be said that Punctuate! Theatre doesn’t earn its exclamation mark.

The route of the pipeline, and the play, is still through the beautiful wilds of Jasper National Park, through high-risk heritage Indigenous land, through the Fraser Valley to Burnaby. And Floyd (Sheldon Elter), a Métis oil patch worker who’s a suspect in a “workplace accident,” is still on the lam along that route, with the RCMP and oil company enforcers in hot pursuit. And the story unfolds in an unusual, imaginative fusion of theatre and dance, a MacKenzie signature.

playwright Matthew MacKenzie. Photo supplied

“When we premiered in Toronto, it was wild,” says the Punctuate! artistic director who crosses the country between West and East with exhausting frequency. “Articles every single day about the Kinder Morgan. And the issue (three years later) is very much a hot one still.” He sighs, and laughs. “I kinda wish it wasn’t, but….”

First Nations land rights, “our spiritual contract with the natural world,” the fragility of the environment … “the stuff Bears is about gets people talking,” as MacKenzie puts it. And “it’s led to a lot of conversations, on a lot of different levels, across the country.” It invokes a specific pipeline, the Trans Mountain. “But it speaks to larger debates and fights that show no sign of going away.”

To wit: Tofino, site of a memorable blunder. “After getting re-elected, on the day he’s created to respect Indigenous folk, the prime minister goes surfing? Really? I still can’t believe it…. Clearly, there’s a long way to go,” says MacKenzie, who’s a wry, politically engaged sort of artist, with a nose for absurdity.

MacKenzie, who’s a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, has talked before of the buried family story that inspired Bears. His grandfather, writer Vern Wishart, included it, as a small and striking annotation, in his 2012 book Tracing My Great Grandmother’s Footsteps. And MacKenzie has spoken, too, of living in Toronto, feeling waves of homesickness for the beauties of the Alberta wilderness, where he regularly repairs to recharge his artistic batteries. He wrote Bears in Canmore (it’s played twice there), where the movements of animals and the appearance of specific wildflowers are the stuff of local top stories, he says.

Can it be that the culture at large is beginning is absorb something of “the Indigenous way of looking at the natural world”? MacKenzie muses. “We’re starting to change our thinking…. The way we’ve commodified everything — dig it up and ship it off — is just leading us down a road that is not tenable….”

MacKenzie’s theatre life, as a kid who went to Vic (the Victoria School of the Arts) and then the National Theatre School, has always had cross-country reverb and network of connections to it. “Punctuate!’s last three productions  have premiered in Toronto and Edmonton back to back…. So we’re already in essence touring.”

Indigenous theatre is arriving on mainstages everywhere in the country, “as it should. And that’s inspiring,” as MacKenzie says. But do Indigenous audiences come? Not always, for a variety of social, cultural and economic reasons. Punctuate! has built a network of Indigenous communities, Saddle Lake and Maskawacis among them, and takes theatre to the people. And “top of our priority list,” MacKenzie says, is “including more communities that might not get a lot of theatre.”

Sheldon Elter and the ensemble of Bears, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

With its relevance, its impressive cast of top-drawer Indigenous artists led by “superstar Sheldon Elter,” who scores off the chart in the likability quotient, and its humour, Bears has been a hit with Indigenous audiences. It’s theatre as event. “Every time we’ve gone into an Indigenous community they always have a lunch or dinner for everyone in the audience and the whole team. Always. It’s never not happened; it’s seen as the normal thing to do….”

Advice on engaging with Indigenous audiences from Dreamspeakers’ Christine Sokaymoh Frederick, who’s in the Bears cast, has been invaluable, says MacKenzie. As one example, “if you have a ‘no latecomers’ policy, there’s a good chance you won’t have anyone in the house when the show starts.” Since child care options aren’t generally available, a ‘no kids’ policy is equally unproductive. “It’s a good reminder that theatre has become more uptight than church.”

Meanwhile, MacKenzie, working mostly remotely from here, has a residency at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre (he’s the Baillie Artistic Fellow), working with artistic director Weyni Mengesha to create a new play development department. The goal, devoting 50 per cent of programming to new Canadian work, is a major departure for Soulpepper, whose reputation is built on re-discovering and producing classics. And MacKenzie, a natural (and indefatigable) collaborator — he’s a kind of cross-country theatre pipeline in himself — is busy hooking up emerging playwrights from across the country with fellow artists and new opportunities.

“I try,” he says cheerfully. “Why else would I be straddling the country like this; it’s so damn exhausting.”

The potential for Punctuate! partnerships is expanding. Ah, and so is MacKenzie’s bi-city life. In the What I Did During COVID chapter of the book of life we’re all writing, MacKenzie’s contribution is a real-life high-speed romantic comedy that’s a race against time and closing borders, set against the backdrop of a global pandemic.

It’s all recounted in First Métis Man of Odessa, commissioned as part of Factory Theatre’s You Can’t Get There From Here audio series of podcasts — and in progress to be a stage play with dates in Toronto, Edmonton, and Ukraine. At heart, it’s this: MacKenzie went to Ukraine on a Pyretic theatre research trip two years ago and fell in love with star Ukrainian actor Mariya Khomutova. When she got pregnant. things got vastly more complicated for a couple in the world. But (spoiler alert) there’s a happy ending: they got married, and Khomutova arrived in Canada just in time for the birth of their son Ivan.

And MacKenzie is the happy, if sleepless, dad of an “incredibly cheery, joyful” 10-month-old. “Having a little being grinning at you every morning is a great way to wake up, even when the world is going to shit.” He expects the family will end up living in Toronto. “There’s just more opportunities….”

And now, finally, Bears is back in the place where its story begins, “the city of former champions.” On the Citadel’s big beautiful thrust stage in the Maclab Theatre.  “I performed on that stage! As the young Macduff!” says MacKenzie of the Robin Phillips’ production of Macbeth of long ago.

“It’s a pretty frickin’ big thrill!”

PREVIEW

Bears

Theatre: Punctuate! and Dreamspeakers at the Citadel

Written and directed by: Matthew MacKenzie

Choreography by: Monica Dottor

Starring: Sheldon Elter, Christine Sokaymoh Frederick, Gianna Vacirca, Rebecca Sadowski, Zoë Glassman, Skye Demas, Karina Cox, Shammy Belmore, Alida Kendell

Running: Thursday through Oct. 31

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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In the house of mismatched dreams: Michael Mysterious. A review.

Posted on October 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Christina Nguyen and Gavin Dyer in Michael Mysterious, Pyretic Productions. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m just a piece of scenery,’ says the 15-year-old title character in Geoffrey Simon Brown’s Michael Mysterious.

In another kind of play by another kind of playwright, there would be a weight of tragic grievance or cynicism or heartbreak attached to a thought like that. But the elliptical insight of the character (and the steady, uninflected gaze in Gavin Dyer’s terrific performance) find a direct route into existential comedy in the play getting its world premiere from Edmonton’s Pyretic Productions.

Michael Mysterious, and Patrick Lundeen’s beautifully cast, crafted, and paced production, capture in an explosive, compelling, and funny way what it means to have a home, to be in a “family,” and to wonder how — and if — to accommodate. Brown, one of the country’s most intriguing theatrical experimenters, explores the interplay of teenagers and adults at close quarters, through the optic of a solitary young teen outsider who’s a mystery to everyone in the play, including himself.

When Michael’s grandmother dies, he’s unhinged in the world, utterly on his own. There’s the kid, sitting immobile under a single lamp, in a room we glimpse at the back of the stage, through the bones of another house. Then Arlene (Amber Borotsik), the mom of Michael’s erstwhile best friend Jeremy (Thomas Tunski) arrives to take him into the family home she’s struggling to create with her new boyfriend Paul (Jesse Gervais) and his teenage daughter July (Christina Nguyen).

Stephanie Bahniuk’s design, dramatically meaningful, conceives of the family house as a skeletal framework with flimsy translucent walls, perpetually unfinished: like so many things about living together, an imperfect, adjustable compromise between the individual and the collective.

Its short scenes, 35 of them numbered and named in projections like the chapters of a 19th century novel (“scene 9: the part where no one plays the piano”), cumulate into a texture of scratchy cross-hatched absurdities, hostilities, mismatched temperaments, conflicting takes on the “anything could happen” of the future. Needless to say, it’s a far cry from the idealized reverb of home and family everywhere in the modern entertainment industry. The dynamic is particularly inflammatory over the dinner table, where any remark no matter how innocuous — “so, how was everyone’s day?” — is fire starter. Which makes you wonder how on earth anyone ever digests anything en famille.

Thomas Tunski, Christina Nguyen, Gavin Dyer, Amber Borotsik, Jesse Gervais in Michael Mysterious. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

Anyhow, the characters are a sort of group portrait of “family,” in which the individual participants won’t stay put. They keep exiting the frame, chafing to break free, bursting back in resentfully. The scene in which Arlene badgers everyone into posing together wearing the decorative hats she makes, for a website photo, is a hilarious still capture of collective bleakness.

Michael, who’s a kind of opaque non-reactive surface, a mirror to reflect the needs, hopes and disappointments of everyone else, has an answer for everything he’s asked: “I don’t know.” What’s his favourite band? Does he like smoking weed? Is he an artist? Would he like a guitar? What’s his favourite song? Or “Are you, like, adopted now?”

Gavin Dyer and Amber Borotsik in Michael Mysterious, Pyretic Productions. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

Has the animation been sucked out of him by loss? As Dyer’s performance conveys so compellingly, he’s waiting “for something to happen,” in the weird time-freeze way anticipation feels when you count backwards down to the big blast-off and … nothing. His stories, when he’s exhorted to tell one, are inconclusive, meandering, unshaped by any sense of a climax much less an ending.

His introduction to family life (Scene 3: where Michael comes to the house”) has a kind of stringent hilarity all its own. “Michael needs a good place to be for now,” says Arlene who hasn’t warned her cohorts. “What’s up, guys?” says Paul warily, followed closely by “what’s your favourite band?” Jeremy, played to scowl-y perfection by Tunsk, objects to the loss of the spare room. “I was going to put my drums in there…. I’m sorry about your Grandma, but …. fuck!”  From July it’s the welcoming “what the fuck are you doing here?”

What’s compelling about the play is the easeful way that the playwright individualizes the characters, teens and grown-ups both — in fleeting exchanges, eruptions of friction, throwaway remarks, the transparently ingratiating ways adults try to create rapport with the teenagers around them, the more straightforward darts from the teens. Arlene’s twitchy boyfriend Paul, for example, in Gervais’s very funny and astute performance, nervously struggles to negotiate between asserting himself and a frantic desire to not seem assertive. It’s a kind of dance (one step forward, two back, with apology). And he knows, at some level, he looks ridiculous,  the two-step comi-tragedy of trying too hard.

Borotsik, who is a luminous presence onstage, turns in a lovely, nuanced performance as a woman who makes things at the mall, and has challenged herself to “make” a family out of the human assortment at her disposal, including the mysterious Michael.

A house full of mismatched dreams is a tumultuous place to be, as Michael Mysterious reveals, in its dark sense of humour and its anxieties. Their dreams aren’t sized quite right for any of the characters in the play; they’re either too large, like Jeremy’s, or too small, as in Arlene’s “tiny hats.”

Gavin Dyer, Christine Nguyen, Thomas Tunski in Michael Mysterious, Pyretic Productions. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

Jeremy, amusingly, has decided to be a basketball star undeterred by the fact he doesn’t play basketball. The scene in which he earnestly reveals his capitalist plans via pre-emptive bulk buys on Amazon (“I’m never going to have to buy condiments again”) to prepare for adulthood is a comic gem, beautifully played by Tunski and Dyer.

In Nguyen’s agile performance, the quicksilver temperature changes of July (the month of summer storms, after all) come to life with convincing force. She wants to be somewhere else so she can be someone else.

For Brown’s non-generic trio of teenage characters, revelations come only when no one’s listening, or everyone’s talking about themselves, or passed out. And serious conversations happen only when they’re drunk, or high. Under those circumstances Michael even allows himself a modest dream of his own, as he wonders if he’s real. “I wish I was better at something.”

To call attention to the subtleties of a play as raucous as Michael Mysterious will seem counter-intuitive, I know. And it does make you wonder about the amazing human capacity to be a teenager and survive. But this new play is an impressively subtle look at the continuity between people looking forward and people looking back — people poised on the brink of tragedy, where possibility lives and it’s better to hold hands and not look down. It’s an exciting place to be.

REVIEW

Michael Mysterious

Theatre: Pyretic Productions

Written by: Geoffrey Simon Brown

Directed by: Patrick Lundeen

Starring: Gavin Dyer, Christina Nguyen, Thomas Tunski, Amber Borotsik, Jesse Gervais

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 Rue Marie-Anne Gaboury

Running:  through Oct. 24

Tickets: tixonthesquare.ca

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Finding a family in the quest for happiness: Michael Mysterious premieres in a Pyretic production

Posted on October 11, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

(Rear) Jesse Gervais, Gavin Dyer; (front) Christina Nguyen, Thomas Tunski, Amber Borotsik, in Michael Mysterious, Pyretic Productions. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve with this play,” says Geoffrey Simon Brown of Michael Mysterious. 

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 One of the hottest of the country’s younger generation of playwrights, Brown is musing on the play, years in the creating and honing, that premieres Thursday at La Cité francophone in a Pyretic production. “Other plays of mine have come from a question or a subject or something I really wanted to explore.… This one comes from my love of these characters and my love of this world.”

In the 35 scenes of Michael Mysterious we meet five characters who are living together, having dinner together, struggling to be themselves, be there for each other, and somehow be happy in a fractious add-on “family.”

Two are grown-ups; three are teenagers. At the centre is the mysterious Michael, a neglected 15-year-old who’s been left alone in the world — “falling through the cracks” as director Patrick Lundeen puts it —  when his grandmother dies. The mother of his childhood best friend gathers him into the home where she lives with her new boyfriend, her kid, and her boyfriend’s kid.   

Brown, genial and thoughtful in conversation, is a founder of the experimental artist-run Major Matt Mason Collective (named whimsically for a Mattel action figure) with roots in Calgary and a national profile in attracting young artists and young audiences not traditionally much given to theatre-going. Edmonton audiences have seen Brown’s work before. But sightings have been rare here, and (amazingly) never in a theatre.

There was the eerie gathering in Rundle Park at dusk last June to meet (from our cars, with the radio tuned to FM) in Night someone haunted by the encroaching wilderness, who feels themself transforming into a wolf. Before that, Air, an intense and scary four-hander, happened at the 2015 Found Festival, devoted to unexpected theatrical encounters between artists and audiences. Brown’s partner playwright/ actor Elena Belyea (of Tiny Bear Jaws and the sketch duo Gender? I Hardly Knew Them) was one of the founders of Found. “And when we started dating it was my introduction to the Edmonton scene,” says Brown.

And in the kind of impromptu hospitality that is a Found theatrical scenario in itself, the festival bonded Brown and Pyretic’s Lundeen too, as the latter recounts, amused. Because he was the Found artistic director at the time, “having trouble finding a house people were willing to give to a bunch of actors to trash,” it transpired that 60 people crammed into Lundeen’s own hot and air-less living room in the middle of summer for Air. He and his playwright wife Lianna Makuch moved all their furniture into the garage so that Major Matt Mason “could turn my house in a drug den.”

The upshot was that “I really liked this guy and I was blown away by the play,” says Lundeen. “He doesn’t hold back.” He went to Calgary to see Brown in his high-profile play The Circle, set at “a high school garage party Friday night in suburbia.” And ever since, Lundeen has been keen to direct one of Brown’s plays. “It was a toss-up for me between The Circle and Michael Mysterious. “I found myself gravitating to (the latter’s) characters. I felt like I grew up with them, I knew them, the adults too….”    

“I was thirsty to get into a nitty-gritty drama,” says Lundeen, an actor grad of the National Theatre School (Brown is a playwriting alumnus) who has turned to directing (Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears and The Other, and Makuch’s Blood of Our Soil among his productions). “And I find this play absolutely freakin’ hilarious…. Geoff and I are still debating whether I can use the word comedy to describe it.”

“There’s a Chekhov quality to it,” he thinks. “Laughing at our own miseries is so key to it.”

Brown traces Michael Mysterious back to his NTS days. “I was writing a play about a guy who has an endless memory… It was written all out of order; I tracked his whole life, and wrote a lot of scenes about when he was a teenager.”

“When I gave it to my dramaturge, the late great (and colourful) Iris Turcotte, she said ‘you fucking dumbass, you wrote two different plays!’…. I cut out all the teenage characters and scenes and put them away.” On a month-long writer’s retreat in France at the end of 2014, “I thought I was going to write a detective play,” says Brown. “I kept trying and while I was procrastinating I kept coming back to these characters in this world…. By the time I left I’d written a whole draft. And, typical of me, I spent the next three years meticulously editing and re-writing.”

“I’ve taken a lot from my life , my friends, my family, things I’ve been feeling about the world,” says Brown. He adds, “my (own) immediate family, we’re very close; I love them dearly. I’d hate for people to think that the moments that are less than lovely are about my family.”

Michael Mysterious, Pyretic Productions. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

“Who is your immediate family? Who is your chosen family? The ways in which people come into and out of your life …” these questions engage the playwright who’s now reached his 30s. And what of friendship? “A commonality in all my plays,” Brown says, “is I tend to write about people who are lonely and not quite able to find connections with others. Or are just starting to find that connection … not just the teenagers but the parents too.”

“Especially in my early ‘20s I gravitated to teenage characters…. I need a little time to process what I’ve been through before I can write about it. … I feel like I could look back and understand where I’d been as a teen.”

“So many people are going to see aspects of themselves in some, if not all, of the characters,” says Lundeen, who’s spent three years “working and dreaming” to make the premiere happen. “The awkwardness of growing up, the way teens are sometimes more mature and know better than the adults….”

It resonates powerfully with him. “I had a bit of an interesting family life growing up,” says Lundeen, who left home at 15. “My parents were not the most functional and healthy people. I’ve managed to go back and rebuild those relationships, but there’s something about these teenagers who have to grow up faster than they need to.… I identify with this boy who didn’t know where he was supposed to go, who needed a community, or someone, or something to give him a leg up.”

For Lundeen, that something for his lost, confused 15-year-old self, was theatre, first at Vic (Edmonton’s performing arts high school) and then at the NTS. “That’s what’s so amazing about theatre,” he says of the exponential creativity — “the energy and blood flow” as he puts it — that his cast and designers have brought to Michael Mysterious. “So often it’s something we hadn’t even thought of.… It’s a collaboration! Everyone is involved!”

The house (designed by Stephanie Bahniuk) is “almost a character in itself,” says Lundeen. “A pressure cooker of everyone’s objectives … to co-exist, to be happy and make room for other people to be happy — to find that ideal life that we’re all supposed to have. But there’s something going on that prevents their objectives from being realized.”

Is Brown, in the end, an optimist, times being what they are? “I ride the line,” he says. “The message of most of my plays, this one included, is that world is chaos. And all we have is each other. It’s so important that we really strive to look out for each other. Otherwise we’re lost.”

PREVIEW

Michael Mysterious

Theatre: Pyretic Productions

Written by: Geoffrey Simon Brown

Directed by: Patrick Lundeen

Starring: Gavin Dyer, Christina Nguyen, Thomas Tunski, Amber Borotsik, Jesse Gervais

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 Rue Marie-Anne Gaboury

Running: Thursday through Oct. 24

Tickets: tixonthesquare.ca

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Makings of a Voice, Dana Wylie’s story about storytelling is back to live, at the Arden

Posted on October 9, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Dana Wylie, creator and star of Makings of a Voice. Photo, March 2021 filmed production, by April MacDonald Killins.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“We need to know we have a story…. We need to know we are a story.” — Makings of a Voice

When Dana Wylie returned to the world of theatre last March from a decade as a singer-songwriter, she came bearing a story about  storytelling.

Makings of a Voice, the feature production of the 2021 SkirtsAfire Festival, was all about the heroic family backstory she thought she’d inherited, then had to jettison — and the more personal story she found in a journey of self-discovery.   

Vanessa Sabourin’s production adapted to the pandemic realities with a film version shot in the empty Army & Navy store in Strathcona, a dark and mysterious echo chamber of a space. Striking though that film experience was, Wylie’s “theatrical song cycle” comes more fully into its own, in the medium for which it was originally created, when she arrives, live, on the Arden Theatre stage Oct. 16.

Makings of a Voice will have a live, in-person audience. And, crucially, it’ll have a live three-member onstage band. “What it means for me, not to have to carry the whole show by myself, is huge!” declares Wylie happily of her three onstage companions (Kirsten Elliott on flute, cellist Christine Hanson, and guitarist Billie Zizi). “That support for the dramatic elements, in underscoring, and also (stage) business…. I’m in the middle of a monologue, with everything going on but I have to somehow get my guitar. Or when other people can start the song and I can keep talking….”

“I can do the songs by myself of course. But something magical happens when I have another person onstage with me. That onstage interaction adds so much for me…. There’s always something new, something I didn’t expect to hear. It’s an acknowledgment that music only exists in that moment. It’s never the same thing twice.”

And, for Wylie, who loves telling stories even in musical gigs, there’s the eye contact with the people in the house seats. “All the monologues are there; the stories are there,” she says. The change in going live is in “how I address the audience, where they are in space with me, and where I am with them. And how I want that to work.”

Makings of a Voice eludes all the usual theatrical classifications. It’s not really a play, though it has characters (including a protagonist named Dana) and a dramatic arc. You wouldn’t really call it a musical revue or a cabaret either, though it’s full of Wylie’s original songs. It has a more dramatic shape (and a lot more music) than a memoir.

The impetus, as Wylie has said, was the impending birth of her second child in 2019. She felt urgently need of a family story, to locate herself in an inter-generational maternal lineage. And she was sure she’d found one, by chance, in an anecdote about her feisty great grandmother Millie, who’d marched in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

It fell through, for reasons you’ll discover in the show. And the setback is part of the story Wylie tells in the show, too, of a struggle to find another, one closer to home with a quieter kind of shared heroism about it.

The show, she thinks, lives in the “fluid space” between the immediacy of telling a story to people — “I’m here and we’re not pretending you’re not there” — and a more dramatic space in which she conjures the past. “It rides between these two worlds.”

“The Dana of the present of the show is on a journey to figure all this stuff out … trying to find connection, trying to find her story,” says Wylie. “And that takes me into moments in the past that become more dramatically immersive.”

Like many musicians, Wylie spent the second pandemic summer doing outdoor gigs, for small gatherings on front porches and yards, some as part of the Folk Fest initiative in taking music to the people on location. The Arden, a 500-seater, is a return to a big theatrical space. It’s a challenge for intimate storytelling, she says. But “the space really comes into its own in the theatrical parts of the show…. There’s a thing about being on a big stage, with lights in your face, that makes you want to be larger than life.”

And, though, the pandemic hasn’t inspired a raft of new Wylie songs, she says, she’s set herself a creative task. “I started a Patreon (campaign). And once a month I’m choosing a poem to set to music.” She’s ranged widely, starting with Aphra Behn, the 17th century English playwright, Mary Oliver, and most recently an English translation (by her boyfriend) of a Pedro Rocha poem. Shakespeare might be next.

Makings of a Voice is live, and in a theatre. “And I love working on the show with Vanessa, working the actor muscle I still have,” says Wylie, who trained in musical theatre at MacEwan long before getting a degree in musicology at the U of A. But it doesn’t represent a drift back to a life as an actor in the theatre world, she insists. “Every five years!”

“I guess I’m not really an actor; that’s not really what I do best…. A story about storytelling: to do something like this is perfect for me.”

Check out the 12thnight interview with Dana Wylie last March here. And a 12thnight review of the online show here.

PREVIEW

Makings of a Voice

Co-presented by:  SkirtsAfire Festival and the Arden Theatre

Created by and starring: Dana Wylie 

Directed by: Vanessa Sabourin

Where: Arden Theatre, St. Albert

Running: Oct. 15 and 16

Tickets:  tickets.st.albert.ca

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Workshop West: the playwrights’ theatre is back, live, with a new season

Posted on October 8, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Workshop West Playwrights Theatre announced a 43rd season

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre turns 43 this season with a live, all-Canadian lineup, dubbed “Daring Greatly,” that includes two premieres by Edmonton playwrights, the return after a decade to a signature WWPT new play development festival, and a special local edition of a national storytelling initiative.

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As announced by artistic director Heather Inglis Thursday, the only producing theatre in the country with ‘playwrights’ in the title launches their season next month with a homegrown love story. And it’s of a sort that speaks powerfully to us as the pandemic grinds its way through our lives. In Darrin Hagen’s new solo play Metronome, the Edmonton playwright/ actor/ director/ composer tells his own “origin-story” — the story of a boy, growing up queer in small-town Alberta, whose life is transformed when he falls in love …  with music. The life-changer is his cherished first piano, an Ennis & Sons. It’s the instrument for big events, young Darrin’s move to the big city, and his entry into a tumultuous, high-risk new world of performing and creating.

Darrin Hagen. Photo supplied.

“A lot of the art we consume isn’t local,” as Inglis points out. “Darrin’s work is so grounded in this place, Edmonton specifically.” And a story about “the transformational power of art and how it draws people together is a story we need to tell right now. People are craving art. They need to laugh and cry….”

“Darrin is as close to a local ‘celebrity’ as we get. He’s a classic storyteller, and a charismatic guy.”

Inglis directs the production, which runs Nov. 11 to 21 at the Backstage Theatre. Hagen’s fellow musician Jason Kodie, who works frequently in theatre too, designs the sound.

playwright Michelle Robb. Photo supplied.

The other premiere in the Workshop West season is by a newcomer to the scene, Michelle Robb, a recent U of A theatre school acting grad. Her play Tell Us What Happened, winner of the 2020 Alberta Playwriting Competition Novitiate Prize, is a bold foray into tangled contemporary territory: “sexual assault, friendship, the way the internet affects our lives, its real-world consequences, the knotty implications of what we post in public space,” as Inglis describes.

“It’s a challenging play, and she’s not afraid of that,” Inglis says of the playwright, now in her mid-20s, who began writing it at 21. “I’m a real fan of writers not posing easy solutions to complex problems.”

The Workshop West premiere arrives onstage May 12 to 22, due to COVID fully two years after it was originally announced under the Theatre Yes flag. The upcoming co-production with that indie company has a cast of five, directed by Inglis.

The Springboards New Play Festival, March 21 to 27, is a return to a popular cabaret-style event that is “a pretty perfect expression of Workshop West’s raison d’être,” as Inglis puts it. The company, dedicated to the nurturing of playwrights and the development and production of new Canadian theatre, connects with playwrights of every level of experience all season long through a variety of writing circles and workshops. It last produced a Springboards in the 2011-2012 season.

For playwrights Springboards’ series of public staged readings — and the workshopping with actors, designers, and dramaturges that precedes them — is a chance to hone works-in-progress. For audiences, as Inglis says, “it’s an invitation into the heart of the creative process…. It makes them part of it.”

“My goal is to hire a whole lot of Edmonton artists,” she says of a line-up that will include offerings from 15 or so playwrights.

The finale of the season, The Shoe Project (June 16 to 19), is Workshop West’s part of a 10-year-old national initiative to showcase in performance the experiences of immigrant women from around the world. Under the mentorship of playwright Conni Massing, six participants learning English write and then perform their own stories of arriving in Canada and adapting to a new life. Their experiences of travel and dislocation are focussed through the image of a pair of shoes they’ve worn.

Inspired by a 2020 instalment of The Shoe Project at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, Inglis launched an Edmonton edition last year at Workshop West, but performances had to pivot to online. Of the four live performances this season, two are by women in last year’s group and two in this year’s.

“It’ll be a remarkable evening of getting to know people in the community,” says Inglis. “Very emotional and moving.”

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The artist as work-in-progress: Azimuth Theatre has a new program for that

Posted on October 4, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Sue Goberdhan. Photo by Janice Saxon, with permission from Work Plays Schools Program.

Morgan Yamada. Photo by Janice Saxon with permission from Work Plays Schools Program.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the creative world of what-if’s where theatre lives, here’s an alluring one: “Wouldn’t it be great if … instead of a part-time job to pay for your theatre training, you had a part-time job that IS your theatre training?”

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Morgan Yamada and Sue Goberdhan, the agile new joint artistic producers at Azimuth Theatre, have created a pilot project for that.

AZ-MAP (Azimuth’s Apprenticeship and Mentorship Program) is a horizon-broadening blend of instruction and self-guided learning for emerging theatre artists of any age: mentoring, “theatre process shadowing,” apprenticing with the Azimuth production team — and, crucially, a real-live eight-month contract for 20 hours a week. And it’s ready to be custom-made for the two participants who will launch the program.

A life in the arts requires passion, yes, but also versatility and resilience as this past year-and-a-half has demonstrated in such a visceral way. “A very small percentage of artists can wear just one hat and self-sustain,” as Yamada says. “The journey we get trapped into in the theatre-school mindset is that you can only do one thing (act, direct, stage-manage…). Otherwise you are letting go of a dream.”

Goberdhan riffs on the thought they pursued with a development team. “We’re trying to give people the opportunity, the knowledge, the resources, to be able make work that represents their identity, their journey.”

Performance is the focus. But writing, design, dramaturgy, directing, collective creation, auditioning, the business of theatre in its are all part of AZ-MAP’s instructional spectrum. For this, and one-on-one mentoring, the program gives the two lucky participants access to  the resources, talents, and skills of Edmonton’s theatre community, professional artists and theatre companies.

And it’s a win-win for Azimuth, as Goberdhan says. The AZ-MAP contract is offered “in the spirit of reciprocity…. What can we offer (the participants)? What can they offer us?” The opportunities to learn on the job include “supporting us in the running of the company.”   

In their own ways, as their strikingly varied resumés suggest,  Yamada and Goberdhan are poster people for the proposition that there isn’t one map for the artist’s journey into creation, performance, producing. Yamada is a U of A theatre school grad, fight choreographer, with a bent for physical theatre. Goberdhan’s route into theatre has been less formalized, more hands-on with indie and improv companies, with a bent for musical theatre.

“Sue and I are performers who branch out in other things,” says Yamada simply. “That’s why we built the program…. What would have been useful to us on our journey? We’re ‘wouldn’t it have been cool if we’d had something like this?’ We can’t create something if we don’t know how it could serve people like us!” Says Goberdhan, “we want people to be able to explore who they are and what they want.”

AZ-MAP is a very Azimuth sort of initiative, say Goberdhan and Yamada of their joint vision for the company. At Azimuth “we want to build relationships,” says Yamada. “Our whole job in theatre is about creating and sharing stories.” And there are stories that have yet to make it to the stage. “This program allows us to connect with the community and with other theatre companies…. It’s about how to build the community we want to see. ”

It is, they hope, “a tool kit for other organizations,” as Goberdhan says.” On the scale we’re able to offer, there are two participants. Imagine if six companies were able to offer this … something that can make a huge difference to the community.”

The idea has already demonstrated its appeal to both potential  participants and the community of professional theatre practitioners eager to share their knowledge and skills. Goberdhan and Yamada have received dozens of applicants from both. “There’s always been a clear and present need for mentorship in the arts,” says the former. “Why gate-keep the information? Just open the doors. There’s no good reason not to…. “

A jury will assist in the final selection of AZ-MAP participants. Azimuth has actively sought applicants from marginalized communities, “people who have had access barriers traditionally.” Says Goberdhan, “we want to make sure we’re giving the opportunity to someone who can utilize it to its full potential.”

“A sense of validation changes everything!” she declares. “It’s about having people in your corner,” says Yamada.   

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EDMONten is back, to showcase full-length 10-minute plays

Posted on September 29, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

They’re new, they’re full-length, and, impossibly, they’re 10 minutes long, curtain up to curtain down.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

EDMONten is back this week, live and online from the Grindstone Comedy Theatre, for a second annual showcase of six original fully formed 10-minute plays. Their brevity, ideal for us theatre-goers whose attention span has been eroded by 18 gruesome pandemical months, is an improbable artistic achievement in itself. (Though not a playwright Mark Twain was on that wavelength: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”).

Playwright Calla Wright. Photo supplied.

playwright Gavin Wilkes. Photo supplied.

The Short & Suite Collective — two playwrights (Conni Massing and Michele Vance Hehir, and dramaturg/director Tracy Carroll — chose six from the ample response to their blind call for offerings. And, as happened last year, the playwrights turned out to be a mix of veteran and emerging artists: Not Yet by Alexandria Fortier, The Dark Web by Nicole Moeller, Same Time Tomorrow by Zack Seismagraff, My First Greek Sunset by Amanda Samuelson, Clippers by Gavin Wilkes, and Hair, But No Teeth by Calla Wright. Honourable mention: Dante’s Door by Carmen Morgan.

The four-actor ensemble who will present the staged readings are Daniela Fernandez, Beth Graham, Todd Houseman and Corben Kushneryk.

EDMONten runs Friday 7:30 p.m. and Saturday 1:30 p.m.The $10 tickets, either in-person or live-streamed, are available at grindstonetheatre.ca.

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Awwright! Hanging with the guy who can walk on water, and other lessons at the Play The Fool Fest

Posted on September 28, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Rebecca Merkley in Jesus Teaches us Things, Play The Fool Festival. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

So, how was your Monday? Me? I went to a festival (online) and met Jesus.

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It was a learning experience. “The man who can walk on water,” as billed (for, like, forever), turned out to be a real extrovert, an exuberant, self-deprecating, user-friendly guy: big hair, big sense of humour. Why he isn’t headlining in Vegas is an epic mystery not covered to my knowledge in Luke.   

Anyhow, Jesus has been enlisted to step in and substitute-teach the Holy Bible Assembly’s second grade Sunday School class. And he’d promised Pastor Greg to  “stay on-curriculum this time.”

“Please put your hands together for ….”

Jesus Teaches us Things, the only show at this year’s online Play The Fool Clown and Physical Theatre Festival with a “blasphemy” warning, is the solo creation of Rebecca Merkley. As audiences know from her Merk du Soleil series — and the sublimely kooky Merk du Solapocalypse finale that premiered at the Fringe — Merkley has real affection for old-school showbiz, the good-natured groaners, the mouldy puns, the sense of sussing out the crowd, clowning around and improvising with them….

Naturally Jesus opens with some quick miracles. OK, not for me to provide spoilers but, hey, “I also make a damn fine shiraz.” “Awwright!” declares Jesus cheerfully, moving on to a teaching moment about a central subject: “I’ve nailed the subject: any guesses?”

“Let’s all head over to the story board and I’ll tell ya all about it….” Merkley has one of those textured brass-band comedy voices, and hearing it applied to kid pedagogy has its own particular hilarity. “Sharp objects don’t belong in pockets!” declares Jesus remembering his teaching brief when the big moment comes with the nails and a hammer. “As the Good Book says, Luke chapter 9 verse 7, safety first!”

Inspired by her own unsatisfactory experiences at a bible college (as per her program notes on playthefool.ca), Merkley, who’s a fearless performer, turns a clown show into a satire. Her target is the repressive, marginalizing, persecuting way that religious institutions operate when they lose track of the heart of the matter: the loving embrace of humanity. As the Big Guy says from time to time, “it’s all good!”

Kiana Woo in Inga and the Date, Play The Fool Festival. Photo supplied.

You can catch Jesus through Thursday online. And while you’re at it, meet an adorable red-nosed clown who’s sharing her nervous excitement as she gets ready for a big date. Inga (Kiana Woo) speaks a fragmented kind of English as she gleefully shows off the party version of herself — her party duds, her date shoes,  her “special date juice,” the date ambience in her new apartment.

We the audience are her mirror in Inga and the Date as she primps and poses; her self-delight is contagious. The clown’s powers of invention are undimmed by every setback — and there’s a big one.

Good Morning Darkness, created by and starring Adam Keefe, is a sophisticated take on our collective sense of waking up to an isolating world that just doesn’t seem to work right any more. Or are we still asleep? Every time the man in the bathrobe sticks a toe out to venture forth, a buzzer sounds; every time he’s flung back. Even his attempt to fashion himself a dialogue, by creating a puppet companion, is doomed. Is this Beckett in pjs?

I also enjoyed an expert mime, Zillur Rahman John, a Bangladeshi-Canadian performer whose Hope For Life arrives at a more explicit sense of the pandemic world. He begins in a tour of nature, skilfully conjured, then ventures into the circus world, and then is wrapped in anxiety as the world closes in around him.

The clown optic is on the present. And not coincidentally, death seems to be part of every clown’s thinking at this year’s edition of the festival. Neech, the clown star of Barry Bilinsky’s film He’s My Brother, is looking, without much hope, for resurrection when his best friend, a hydrangea, cacks out rather decisively. For a more upbeat view, consult Jesus.

The short on-demand digital offerings of the Play The Fool Festival continue to stream through Thursday. Tickets: playthefool.ca.

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