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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The Hunchback Variations: the quest for the elusive. Meet director Davina Stewart

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

The Hunchback Variations, Northern Light Theatre. Poster photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The comedy that opens Friday in a Northern Light Theatre production starts in absurdity, a concept that’s taken a beating from reality, times being what they are.

Start with this: The Hunchback Variations is a panel discussion on sound delivered by a pair of history’s most famous Deaf artistes: Beethoven (Ian Leung) and Quasimodo (Dave Clarke), the bell-ringer of Notre Dame.

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In the 11 scenes of the 20-year-old piece by the American playwright Mickle Maher, co-founder of Chicago’s Theatre Oobleck, the unlikely collaborators are working to create “an impossible, mysterious sound.” It’s Chekhov’s elusive stage direction at the end of The Cherry Orchard: “Suddenly a distant sound is heard, coming as if out of the sky, like the sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly dying away.”

“It’s fascinating, uncanny, the shows Trevor (Northern Light artistic director Trevor Schmidt) picks for this time … and the way this piece fits into the world,” says director Davina Stewart. She points to an NLT season devoted to exploring “failure and setback and how we move on from them.” It’s a mapless terrain the performing arts in the pandemic have been forced to confront, over and over, in the last two years.

“Are we living in an absurd world?” Stewart asks the question, and there’s a follow-up. And what does absurdity even mean in an absurd world? In our precarious moment in history, when certainties freeze and snap off (or mutate into variants), every arrival and departure is conditional, with an odds-against clause. En route to rehearsal last week Clarke texted Stewart to advise that he’d be a bit late. It was so cold the doors of the bus froze shut, and he couldn’t get off.

The Hunchback Variations is the third Northern Light production Stewart has worked on since the pandemic, the first two as an actor. Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver was cancelled mid-rehearsal in March 2020. She and Patricia Darbasie did a film version of Something Unspoken, when it became clear that live in-person performance wasn’t an option last May.

In The Hunchback Variations a scene repeats, with small but crucial adjustments in wording and tone, 11 times. Stewart finds an analogy  in the serial Warhol portraits of Marilyn Monroe, each modified in minute but meaningful ways.

In each variation Beethoven does the honours. He introduces himself and his partner, “hunchback and former bell ringer,” and welcomes us to a panel discussion on the mysterious and possibly impossible sound. Quasimodo presides over a selection of noise-making devices and samples a different one. And every time Beethoven says “that is not the sound.”

As Stewart says, a smile in her voice, Clarke as Quasimodo “is re-living some of his life as a sound designer…. ‘How about this sound” No, that’s not it. OK how about this sound? Nope…. Dave says he’s had lots of experience of people telling him that’s not the sound he wants.” And now he’s playing a character who gets that from his creative partner in every scene. Schmidt’s interview with playwright Maher (you can find it on the Northern Light webside, northernlighttheatre.com) reveals that the original inspiration was an unusual project that paired playwright/directors and sound designers.

The broader question, Stewart thinks, is about the ways collaboration works en route to creation. She was glued to the Beatles doc that unspools the hits back to their origin. It takes us into the room with the band “when they have nothing, and ideas are being embraced or rejected. You’re watching that collaboration occur. And it’s so interesting because we have more knowledge than they do. We know what the outcome will be.”

Progress is incremental — or non-existent in the case of Beethoven and Quasimodo, those unlikely collaborators, one real and one fictional. Maher says in his NLT interview that they’re connected “primarily as being notoriously grumpy Deaf guys.” True, they could have worked at Beethoven’s place since he’s the one with the nice digs. Or Beethoven could have gotten around to reading The Cherry Orchard. But Quasimodo says flat out “our failure was certain.” If their artistic quest is doomed, the mystery is the creative drive that keeps them trying.

In these COVID-ian times we know something first-hand about variations. “The way the play repeats itself,” as Stewart muses, speaks powerfully to “what’s happening to us daily, how we’ve been repeating ourselves, what our expectations are, what’s considered a success or a failure.”

As she and the actors have worked on the play, that question has fascinated, and haunted them, Stewart reports, more than the absurd comedy of the piece. “It’s uncanny. Ah, so we don’t get to do something the way we imagined we were going to do it … is it no longer a success? What makes an artistic failure?”

And in an age of cancellations, postponements, and pivots, “what do we do with those pieces of work that don’t get to come to light? Where do they go?” wonders Stewart, cued by the play. As Quasimodo puts it, “where is the room for keeping all the nothings?” The ether must be full of their ghosts by now, she says, “like all the birthdays and Christmases  and concerts missed during COVID. We have two years of that; it’s kind of a blur.”

“What do you do with a failed recipe? Do you turn it into something else? Do you throw it out and start again? So many people are feeling that the tasks we have are impossible, that we can’t get anywhere. Is the act of doing something, is that success?”

“It happens a lot in TEDTalks, successful people talking about failures and how we build on them….”

Now a play that seems to be tuned to the setbacks built into our lives.  At 45 minutes, “the play is a good length for the world right now,” thinks Stewart. “It’s been a while since we sat in a room and watched things with others. Some people have done it more than others…. I’ve been very fortunate to have the chance to be creating and collaborating with other people!”

PREVIEW

The Hunchback Variations

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Mickle Maher

Directed by: Davina Stewart

Starring: Ian Leung, Dave Clarke

Where: Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns

Running: Friday through Jan 29

  

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Rapid Fire Theatre: back live, and back on their home turf in Old Strathcona

Posted on January 7, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Rapid Fire Theatre has a new home for the new year.

The agile Edmonton improv company, 41 seasons old (but young at heart), de-camped this week from downtown and moved back to their traditional stomping ground, Old Strathcona.

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After eight seasons, the Rapid Fire ensemble of improvisers, some 40 strong, is exiting the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall. For the next year they’re leasing the adaptable ex-warehouse black box theatre on Gateway Boulevard that’s had such distinguished occupants as Catalyst Theatre, the Fringe (as a venue in the summer), and for the last half-dozen years Theatre Network. And after that, they have big still-secret plans in Old Strathcona.

You’ve known it as Catalyst or C103 in its time, the Roxy on Gateway, maybe Fringe Stage 17 or “that space next to the Yardbird.” Starting with a 2022 season launch party Jan. 14, you’ll be calling 8529 Gateway the Rapid Fire Place (I just made that up) or words to that effect. And you’ll be thinking up cues as you watch quick-witted people, in a variety of permutations and combinations, create characters, scenes, sometimes entire plays or musicals onstage, before your very eyes in weekly shows and special events.

Eight years ago Rapid Fire outgrew its longtime home at the Varscona Theatre, where their crammed shows were limited to late-night slots. And they moved across the river to the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall. “It was a great location for us,” says artistic director Matt Schuurman, an improviser of note himself as well as a video and projection designer. “And we had long-term plans for downtown,” including a move to the stalled Artists’ Quarters east of the Citadel.

The pandemic and its uncertainties changed that vision. So did the feasibility study RFT conducted with its fans a year ago, says Schuurman. “The response was overwhelmingly in favour of us moving back to Old Strathcona! That’s where we were for over 20 years. And that’s where we’ve been looking to re-establish, coming out of the pandemic.”

Zeidler Hall, the Citadel’s long, narrow, strikingly non-intimate ex-cinema, isn’t exactly a natural for the kind of audience interaction that feeds improv. The ex-Roxy on Gateway is a much more share-able room in which to return to live in-person performance. “The flexibility of the space, being able to re-configure on the fly, to improvise if you will, is really an advantage right now!” says Schuurman. “When you don’t know what capacity restrictions will come, it allows us to adjust. And it allows for distancing … to respond to a variety of comfort levels, to meet the audience where they are. For all those reasons it’s going to be a great little space for us!”

As Schuurman points out, “Rapid Fire is no stranger” to the ex-Roxy on Gateway. That’s where they’ve often performed The Big Stupid Improv Show and Off Book: The Improvised Musical during Fringes past. In Fringe incarnations, the space has has 120 or so seats. “For the time being, we’re treating it as 75-seat capacity,” he says. The plan for the season is some risers and some spaced cabaret seating, which works well for distancing. “And it looks intentional, not just an empty theatre,” he laughs.

The Rapid Fire crowd, with its younger demographic, is tuned to the vibe of the Old Strathcona entertainment ‘hood. “It feels like the most obvious, most natural fit,” says Schuurman of the move from downtown. “It’s where I first started going to Theatresports,” he says remembering his high school excursions with classmate Amy Shostak, his predecessor in the Rapid Fire artistic director job. “We were going to late-night shows off-Whyte. Our parents loved it because we weren’t going to a bar or a nightclub. We were going out to see some theatre!”

“It has a special place in my heart. And to be living that magic again….”

The season launch on the 14th is a variety show, featuring samples from shows that will be onstage live during the season. “We’re especially excited to bring back Theatresports!” says Schuurman of the team matches that gave that classic improv format its name. “It’s definitely the bread and butter of what we do as a company. It’s a show the audience love, and it’s a show that really strengthens our ensemble too.”

Theatresports had a short run at the Fringe. But when Rapid Fire moved its improv programming online in ingenious ways in response to COVID, they didn’t adapt Theatresports for the digital world. Live interaction with the audience, and direct feedback, were just too indispensable, Schuurman thinks. “We had a lot of success with online stuff, and if that’s the way we have to move, we certainly know how. But that’s what we’ve missed the most, creating an experience together with the audience.”

“We’re bringing back a lot of audience favourites, shows that were cut short, or didn’t happen, due to the pandemic,” says Schuurman. Chimprov, for example —  veteran performers creating long-form improvs in virtuoso formats, fuelled by audience suggestions — is back.

The RFT ensemble embraces a variety of smaller troupes with improv specialties (Gordon’s Big Bald Head, Sphinxes, Improvised Dungeons & Dragons among them). They’ll rotate through the season. The Late Night Double Feature Improv Show, “two of our troupes doing their thing,” starts Jan. 15. The sketch troupe Marv N Berry is back in June with a run of the show they never got to finish in March 2020. You can expect a run of Off Book: The Improvised Musical later this winter.

And the season includes the return of RFT’s festivals, including Wildfire (for student improvisers across Alberta), Bonfire (RFT’s experimental long-form improv lab), and the international Improvaganza. Valentine’s Day, April Fool’s … Rapid Fire celebrates all the known high holidays with special shows.

New this year is Kidding Around, a series of Saturday matinees for kids, directed by RFT’s Joleen Ballendine, a new parent herself. “We were inspired by our proximity to the Old Strathcona Farmer’s Market,” says Schuurman.

Rapid Fire does 300 shows a year. Find the schedule, as it unfolds, at  rapidfiretheatre.com.

  

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Getting excited about Edmonton theatre in 2022, a how-to guide

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Two Headed/ Half Hearted, Northern Light Theatre. Poster photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

I sometimes have to wonder if my annual ‘what to look forward to in theatre’ piece in January has become speculative fiction in our pandemical world. A universal disclaimer seems to hang over everything like ice fog.

Last January I even declared fearlessly that among all the upcoming unknowns and uncertainties, at least we could be sure of one thing: 2021 was bound to be a better year than the devastating shitstorm of 2020.

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Yeah, well…. Don’t hold that over me. But Edmonton theatre did return to live this past year, to surprise, excite, and delight us. And its hold-your-breath/ cross-your-fingers pencilled-in calendar of postponements and cancellations, plans, re-plans, un-plans, backups to backup plans, online experiments was a validation of the sheer persistence, the force of will, at work in theatre as the parameters of live engagement — on and offstage and in the audience — changed, and changed.

So here it is, in the spirit of positivity: a sampling in no particular order of theatre to look forward to, and be excited about, in 2022. The exact “when” might change. So might the “how,” as we’ve seen from ever-more ingenious ways of making stages from platforms. But theatre artists, those amazing acrobats of creativity, will make it happen. It’s what they do.

And, my fellow theatre-lovers, this is just a selection, to whet your appetite. Expect other productions, already in the wings or dreaming their way into existence, or as yet unforeseen.

•Northern Light Theatre premieres Two Headed/Half Hearted, an original small-scale musical by artistic director Trevor Schmidt and actor/composer Kaeley Jade Wiebe, a young Métis up-and-comer artist. As billed, it’s “a gothic prairie song cycle” with particular (and extreme) demands on its co-stars since it’s jointly narrated and sung by conjoined twins Venus (Wiebe) and Juno (Rebecca Sadowski). It chronicles their life and death, along with stories from history and mythology. Speaking as we were of artistic acrobatics, we will see them jointly play the guitar. Two Headed/Half Hearted runs April 22 to May 7 at Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barn.

•Cottagers and Indians is the latest from by the notably quick-witted playwright/ storyteller, satirist/ journalist Drew Hayden Taylor, a member of the Anishinaabe First Nation. It’s inspired by a real-life dispute over water between Ontario cottagers and the Indigenous locals who are trying to revive old traditions by planting wild rice on a lake shore. The Shadow Theatre production, running March 9 to 27 at the Varscona, stars Trevor Duplessis and Davina Stewart.

Jane Eyre, Citadel Theatre, Photo supplied.

•One of literature’s most compelling heroines has bided her time. And now: Jane Eyre, originally slated for last March, will finally premiere at the Citadel, the theatre that commissioned it (March 19 to April 10). The 10-actor adaptation of the 1847 Charlotte Brontë masterpiece is the work of star Canadian playwright Erin Shields (Paradise Lost, The Lady From The Sea), who’s demonstrated a particular gift for adaptations, as director Daryl Cloran has pointed out. Jane Eyre, he says, both embraces the period and has contemporary feminist resonances for audiences. The production stars Hayley Gillis and John Ullyatt.

•The Freewill Shakespeare Festival celebrates its 35th summer season with a double-bill: one of Will’s most perennially popular comedies, alternating with a rarely staged one. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Dave Horak, runs in rep on the Heritage Amphitheatre  stage opposite Nancy McAlear’s production of Measure For Measure, framed through a #MeToo lens. It’s Freewill’s first foray into Shakespeare’s dark, unsettling mid-period comedy.

The shows alternate June 16 to July 10 (auditions happen Jan. 14 through 17). And unless the city re-thinks its radical decision to close the entire park for three YEARS (seriously?) for renos, this coming summer may be Freewill’s grand finale at that location.

•Teatro La Quindicina’s live four-production 2022 season of comedies (opening at the Varscona in April with Caribbean Muskrat), includes Evelyn Strange, an elegant noir-ish 1995 Stewart Lemoine mystery/ thriller of the Hitchock-ian persuasion, originally slated for a 2020 revival.  Shannon Blanchet, the original Evelyn Strange, directs the Teatro production in which Gianna Vacirca stars as a beautiful amnesiac on the loose in ‘50s New York, along with Oscar Derkx and Belinda Cornish. And there’s a Wagner joke. (The season, incidentally, includes the first-ever revival of Lemoine’s 2003 Margin of the Sky, which hinges on a piece of music by Stockhausen).  

•Ayita by Teneil Whiskeyjack is the mainstage production at this year’s 10th annual SkirtsAfire, an ever-expanding theatre and multi-disciplinary arts festival dedicated to showcasing the stories, voices, and talents of women and non-binary artists. Billed as “a fusion of theatre and Indigenous contemporary dance,” Ayita follows three generations of Cree women. And with its cast of three actors (the playwright, Christine Sokaymoh Frederick, Janira Moncayo) and a chorus of four dancers, it unfolds in a fusion of text and movement.  Co-directed by Lebogang Disele and choreographer Sandra Lamouche, the SkirtsAfire production runs March 3 to 13 at the Westbury Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barn.

In May Workshop West Playwrights Theatre and Theatre Yes premiere a new play that ventures boldly into the messy tangled contemporary terrain where public and private space intersect. Tell Us What Happened, by actor/playwright Michelle Robb, tackles sexual assault, friendship, and the internet: the premise could hardly be more challenging. Heather Inglis directs a cast of five in a production that runs Mary 12 to 22 (location TBA), two years after this 2020 Alberta Playwriting Competition Novitiate winner was announced.

RISER participants (clockwise) Cuban Movements Dance Academy, NASRA, Even Gilchrist, Tai Amy Grauman. Photo supplied.

Thanks to RISER Edmonton, one of the brightest ideas of 2021 (the E-town branch of a national initiative by Toronto’s Why Not Theatre to support independent theatre), we’ll see the premieres of four indie projects next month at the Backstage Theatre. The artists couldn’t be more different: the Cuban Movements Dance Academy, Even Gilchrist, NASRA, and Tai Amy Grauman. They’ve been supported by the technical and creative resources of the theatre community, and a year of mentorship from the Edmonton Fringe, the Citadel, Azimuth, and Catalyst. The first two run in rep for two weeks starting Feb. 4, the other two after that.

•AND IN THE SPIRIT OF ANTICIPATION, here’s an exciting morale-booster, in two parts:

The new Roxy Theatre, in progress on 124th St.

(a) Times may be dauntingly tough for theatre, but Theatre Network is getting ready to open the new Roxy, on the footprint of its old ex-cinema home on 124 Street, felled by fire in 2015. And Edmonton will have not one, but two new theatre spaces, a 200-seat MainStage house named after Nancy Power and a 100-seat studio/rehearsal black box named in honour of actor Lorne Cardinal.

(b) Rapid Fire Theatre, Edmonton’s deluxe 42-year-old improv company, is leaving its headquarters at the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall and moving into new digs. Catch their plethora of weekly shows at the ex-Catalyst Theatre ex-Theatre Network space in Strathcona (8529 Gateway Blvd., next to the Yardbird Suite). Opening night is Jan. 14.

Hunter Cardinal in Lake of the Strangers, Naheyawin and Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied.

•Wishful thinking: a very large — well, boundless — department for all of us, but start with this. One of the most haunting productions of the season so far, Lake of the Strangers, a collaboration between Edmonton Fringe Theatre and Naheyawin of the play by the brother-sister team of Hunter and Jacquelyn Cardinal directed by Murray Utas, ran for only one night, Dec. 11. It should have a full run.

•So, you see, intermission is nearly over. Grab your vaccine proofs, theatre-goers. Northern Light’s production of The Hunchback Variations, starring Ian Leung and Dave Clarke, is up and running starting Jan. 14 at the Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barn. And Shadow Theatre’s The Mountaintop, with Ray Strachan and Patricia Cerra opens at the Varscona Jan. 20. More about them anon.

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