A theatrical adventure at home: Mountain Goat Mountain at the Kids Fest

Posted on May 27, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Mountain Goat Mountain, Theshold. Photo by Lakshal Perera

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I think you’re going to like it. I really do…. It’s designed, choreographed, and performed by you.”

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A bright and empathetic eight-year-old (Henrietta Mettler), is leading us through our Act I preparations for a family alpine adventure that will have us sallying forth together into caves, leaping across rivers, encountering strange creatures — in our own home.

We do the creating en famille in Act II, following a narrative soundscape. And all we’ll need is an audio device (computer, cellphone or tablet), a bed sheet, a blank piece of paper, and a pen or pencil.

Mountain Goat Mountain, an “audio theatre” production for families by the innovative young Australian company Threshold, is one of the featured virtual performances at this year’s all-digital 40th annual edition of the International Children’s Festival. And, says Theshold co-director Tahli Corin, it was especially designed to address the disconnectedness of this isolating time in which we live.

Zooming from the “Australia performing arts market” in Adelaide, Corin explains that even before the pandemic hit, she and her Threshold producing partner Sarah Lockwood — theatre artists with small children who live and work in Kyneton, a small town of 8,000 an hour outside Melbourne — “had already been pondering accessibility.”

“How can we bring theatre to the ‘regions’ in a way that doesn’t rely on travelling vast distances?” Kyneton isn’t far from the big city, “but that’s significant when you’re taking kids to the theatre.”

Mountain Goat Mountain, Theshold. Photo by Lakshal Perera.

The pandemic, with its attendant shutdowns and travel restrictions,  was “an opportunity to stretch the form,” says Corin, who thinks of Mountain Goat Mountain as “digital prompts for real-world interaction…. Not something you watch, instead something that connects you with the people you share space with. Lots of theatre companies have turned to streaming. But we wanted to do something different, something that connected people to each other in their homes.”

And in COVID-ian times, connection is a rare and precious commodity. “When you have small children,” says Corin, an actor-turned-playwright, “in a lockdown you become everything — the mother, the grandmother, the playmate, the teacher.” Theshold “wanted to create a little circuit-breaker to that, and let adults drop into play with their children.”

“And everything you need is in the room.… We need to be reminded of that in times of anxiety and uncertainty.”

Named with the aim of “looking at life’s big moments,” Theshold was designed from birth in 2019 “to use theatre to create moments of connection,” as Corin puts it. “Sometimes that’s with digital tools, sometimes with analog.” Theshold’s Feather Quest, for example, sends theatre-goers a set of cards through the mail that “lead families through an (interactive) quest in their homes.”

After weighing the options, the Mountain Goat Mountain team opted for audio over screen-based experiences. For one thing, “it democratizes the family…. You don’t have to know how to read to follow the prompts; adults don’t need to be the boss .” For another, you’re not shackled to a screen; you’re free to move away from the device, a liberation in itself.   

Corin cites seminal American research into why people attend cultural activities. Eighty per cent of respondents (“a powerful statistic for us!”) put connection with their event-going companion(s) as their chief motivation, ahead of the event itself. For Corin and Lockwood, the attractions of immersive, interactive, intimate theatre far outweigh the theatrical illusions created in traditional proscenium theatres.

From its premiere in the darkest days of the pandemic mid-May 2020, Mountain Goat Mountain has caught on with audiences across Australia, in Europe, and in North America. “We made it for our own families, our own community, our own state (Victoria, in strict lockdown at the time),” says Corin. Since then, it’s been hosted by festivals and theatre companies across six English-speaking countries (the Kids Fest in St. Albert is its 18th engagement). And it’s currently being translated into Mandarin.

The thing Corin misses, she allows, “is the ability to observe audiences, hear them as they gasp and laugh or clap so you know you’re on the right track.” But “our job in this form is to create the structures that allow audiences to connect with each other and have those moments of magic and delight that theatre is for!”

PREVIEW

International Children’s Festival of the Arts

Mountain Goat Mountain

Theatre: Threshold

Created by: Tahli Corin and Sarah Lockwood

Starring: you and your family

Where: online

Running: available now, tickets good anytime for 30 days following ticket purchase (last day to purchase a ticket June 6)

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‘Just write your truth’: Songs To No One, a new audio song cycle from Dammitammy Productions

Posted on May 25, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In one way, of course, it’s been a suffocating year for artists. In another, an invitation to unusual breakout pathways of creativity.

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“It feels like I’m holding my breath,” Chariz Faulmino sings in the Rebecca Merkley song Come Clean. “I’m drowning … I’m letting go … I’m breaking free.”

That song, which takes aim at the heart of the experience in all its contradictions, is part of the new “audio song cycle” Songs To No One, opening May 31 online. Billed as “an audio commentary on the human condition,” it’s the work of Dammitammy Productions, an indie collective of remarkable versatility — witness the array of stage musicals (Rivercity The Musical), plays (The Unsyncables, Bountiful, 5 South) , radio plays (CAMP!), a Christmas show (They Wanted To Do Chekhov), an evolving circus cabaret (Merk du Soleil) in its unclassifiable archive.

Dammitammy artistic director Merkley, musician/composer/arranger/playwright/ director/ producer, explains that Songs To No One is a sequel of sorts to Letters To No One. The prevailing idea of that filmed Dammitammy production, which played in March, was the stash, in everyone’s bottom drawer, of letters written but never sent. The cast provided their own letters, and they performed each other’s (unattributed) contributions.

“I had such a good time collaborating with artists … a magical experience, all created by the cast!” says Merkley “who knew northing about photography” when that project began.

Songs To No One is similarly collaborative. And this time Merkley, a great self-educator, learned audio-editing to make it happen. The cast all wrote poems, lyrics, or spoken word pieces, revealing something about their experience during the pandemic. And Merkley, a musician by trade before her theatre life began, “transformed them into songs,” something that comes naturally to her. “I’m always writing songs, and I just love doing it!”

She didn’t specify subject or theme. “I just said ‘write your truth, write something you want to say, something you don’t get to talk about’.” And lo and behold, a theme emerged: identity and the loss of that precious commodity — particularly acute for artists — in this mapless shut-down world of ours. “It happened magically,” and that warmed Merkley’s heart. “There’s no outlet for artists to be … themselves. It’s cool to know, it’s empowering, that we’re all part of this, that we’re in this together!”

There are seven songs in the piece, with poetry and spoken word between them. But Merkley, who played piano and keyboards and wrote all but two of the songs — Darrin Hagen wrote Finally I’ll Be OK and the bonus song Sing Me — doesn’t consider it “a full-on album.” She calls it instead “a theatre experience,” one in which imperfections of balance and acoustics (different microphone qualities, some cast members recorded at home) contribute to a sense of liveness, of real people performing. “Acting and storytelling come first.”

As recording engineer Shayne Ewasiuk puts it, “you just don’t get to hear the human voice much in professional recordings,” so meticulous re-buffed and polished as they are. COVID restrictions meant that each artist had a scant hour to record (“45 minutes plus sanitizing time,” as Merkley puts it). “It took the pressure off, and there’s something really special about it. Something that makes live live!”

PREVIEW

Songs To No One

Theatre: Dammitammy Productions

Created by: composer/ editor/ creator Rebecca Merkley and the cast

Starring: Andrew Brostrom (guitar), Bret Jacobs, Carol Chu, Chariz Faulmino, Cameron Chapman, Jameela McNeil, Jasmine Khokhar, Maya Baker, Kristina Hunsziner, Sue Goberdhan, Sam O’Connor, Sammy Lowe, Vanessa Wilson, Will Smith (bass), Rebecca Merkley (piano, keyboards)

Where: dammitammy.com/tixevents

Running: from May 31, 7 p.m.

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Through the looking glass: The Ugly Duchess, streaming at Northern Light Theatre. A review

Posted on May 22, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Lora Brovold in The Ugly Duchess, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the start of The Ugly Duchess, a woman seen from the back walks away from us to approach an elaborate golden altar constructed of mirrors. When you look in the mirror, who looks back?

Trevor Schmidt’s beautifully filmed Northern Light Theatre season-ender, starring Lora Brovold, has everything to do with the intricate questions of the mirror image: the self-portrait and the image created by the public gaze and in time, history. The production plays with the multi-angles at which a story emerges, from the ways images resist each other, intersect, merge, diverge.

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The 1993 hit solo play by Vancouver playwright Janet Munsil, finally getting its professional premiere in Schmidt’s production, re-imagines from the inside out the strange story of 14th century Margaret, the last countess of the strategically located Tyrol, a rich and desirable catch as a bride, and by reputation the ugliest woman in history.

Her cruel nickname Maultasch, “bag-mouth” or “pocket-mouth,” has stuck (witness a startlingly grotesque Flemish portrait c. 1513 hanging in the National Gallery in London thought to be her likeness). And the historical libel trails political and moral ambiguities about ugliness, medieval gender politics, and the precarious place of a clever wealthy woman in authority playing in the world of men. Ring a bell perhaps?

In Brovold’s captivating performance, fierce and moving, the duchess sits at a vanity table loaded with make-up pots, powders, paints, perfumes. Like Alice, the quester in Wonderland, she has gone through the looking glass. And she speaks to us, conversationally, musingly, eye to eye, from the other side of time: the mirror as window.

Lora Brovold in The Ugly Duchess, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

Close-ups transform the world, as Schmidt’s direction, Ian Jackson’s inventive cinematography, and Roy Jackson’s lighting propose. Suddenly you realize that the decor of the vanity table, up close, is skulls, gruesomely masked in gold, their cavities threaded with golden chains. The duchess is transformed from a warm golden light of a hopeful younger, more naturally beautiful self, who can say “I know they don’t mean to be cruel; they need time to get to know me,” and decide to run with that thought. In the continuous weave of scenes, she becomes a more sardonic, wry, knowing commentator, seen at oblique angles, given to casual witty asides and narrative updates about her relatives, and bathed in greenish light. Or a pale-lipped white-faced fury, an assessor in lurid red lighting.

Is she talking to us? To herself? To history? In extreme close-ups, Brovold negotiates the multiple possibilities of the narrative with virtuoso precision, in adjustments of voice and eye contact.   

The performance has a kind of confidential, in-your-ear quality. And it engages smartly with one of the tricky challenges of Munsil’s play — writing a historical figure with contemporary resonance. Without anachronisms per se, the language is mostly successful at being both of its time, and of now. “No one is ever loved by everyone,” says the duchess, who has an uncanny ability to shore up her own resolve with a plucky shrug. “Life is too short to spend much of it in childhood.”

Lora Brovold in The Ugly Duchess, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

What will touch your heart about the character, in Brovold’s performance, is the fortitude with which Margaret faces up to the horrifying cruelties of her life — the skin-flaying insults, the public burning of effigies, the scapegoating for fire, flood, locusts and the plague, the marital abuse and humiliations. “I am the goddess of ugliness…. The ugliest living thing is not as ugly as the dead,” is a thought from a medieval existentialist of sorts.

Schmidt’s artful production is bookended by the duchess’s exit from the swirling mists of the vanity table she’d approached at the beginning. Darrin Hagen’s score, with its vaporous hints of the medieval, is particularly evocative; voices nearly emerge from the air, like a wisp of smoke. It’s a metaphor of sorts for whole production.

And the duchess leaves us, and her rightful homeland, with a resolve that will warm you: “I long to surround myself with art, with beauty, with new ideas.” Can there be a better way to leave a familiar world for a new one? To be discussed.

REVIEW

The Ugly Duchess

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Janet Munsil

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Lora Brovold

Where: online, from northernlighttheatre.com

Running: through Sunday, and May 27 to 30, various times

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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The journey of the outsider: The Ugly Duchess, streaming finale of the Northern Light Theatre season

Posted on May 19, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Lora Brovold in The Ugly Duchess, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“That night I dreamt of the faraway land where the ugly women are loved by the blind men, the men that were the pincushions of cupid’s arrows….” The Ugly Duchess by Janet Munsil

Direct to you from the 14th century, the character we meet in The Ugly Duchess, the solo play by Vancouver-based Janet Munsil that opens Friday streaming digitally as the Northern Light Theatre season finale, is a celebrity of a very particular sort. Margaret, the last Countess of Tyrol, has the peculiar distinction of being memorialized as the ugliest woman in history.

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Her nickname Maultasch means “bag mouth,” or “pocket mouth.” During outbreaks of the plague, her subjects had someone, a monster, to blame. The famously grotesque portrait of an extravagantly dressed old woman by Flemish artist Quentin Matsys (c. 1513) hanging in the National Gallery in London is thought to be a depiction of her. And that portrait was the model for the Duchess in the classic Tenniel illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.

The Look, produced by Northern Light earlier this season, explored beauty: the worship of it, the profession of it, the personal (and corporate) implications of it. In The Ugly Duchess, a 1993 multi-Fringe hit, the theatrical gaze turns about-face, on ugliness. We meet a woman who was, in view of her wealth and the Tyrol’s strategic location, one of Europe’s most eligible catches as a bride — except in appearance, that is, if the mythology attached to her has historical legs.   

Written originally for the playwright’s husband (actor Paul Terry), and widely produced, travelled, and awarded on both sides of the Atlantic, The Ugly Duchess gets its professional premiere in Trevor Schmidt’s NLT production. It marks the return to the company, after nearly a decade, of Lora Brovold, back to star as the beleaguered, vilified outsider Margaret. In a long and varied resumé of star performances  at Edmonton theatres of every size, the Citadel, Shadow, and Theatre Yes included, her history with Northern Light history is a trio of high-intensity plays that are nothing if not visceral.

Brovold’s last appearance with the company 10 years ago was Karen Bassett’s Heroine (sword in hand, as one of two formidable 18th century female pirates). Before that, the Toronto native who’d moved West to go to theatre school at the U of A, was in Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig (as confrontational as you’d imagine) and Gary Henderson’s downright shocking Mo and Jess Kill Susie.

Now, a play about a famous misfit, recipient of a barrage of public loathing, including the charge she was a witch. The historical research, Brovold she says, has been full of fascinating questions. “So much is conjecture…. Was she demonized for her looks? Or for her (marital) behaviour? Or both?  Was morality the issue? Or her face?”

“At a certain point, I surrendered!,” Brovold laughs. She gave up the actor’s quest for historical certainties. “You know what? She was demonized, and that was the point!”

Lora Brovold in The Ugly Duchess, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

Visually re-creating the ugliest woman in history with a beautiful actor is a job would require contortionist ministrations from a make-up and prosthetic artist. “In the playing, Trevor chose not to go after visual replication,” says Brovold. What’s crucial to the story is that “people think of her this way, and she thinks of herself this way. She feels (the ugliness) herself, how she sees herself is based on how people see her.”

It’s “the psychology of being ostracized,” that drives the theatrical portraiture. “The slings and arrows that have become part of our psychology, and what we really believe about ourselves…. Hurt gives way to anger and anger gives way to rage. Does that make her a monster? Or does that make her human?”

The pandemic devastation has been a year to erode the resolve and confidence of any performing artist. As Brovold puts it, “when life throws you curveballs it upsets your centre of gravity. When I read the script I felt an affinity and compassion for the character…. Going through a period where your self-worth has taken a hit, how do you keep going? How do you push forward? I related to that!”

“There was something to this person that I wanted to understand; her strength really resonated with me,” says Brovold of Margaret, who survived broken marriages, betrayals public abuse, ugly intrigues in the gendered politics of the time, and finally exile from her homeland. “I was feeling a little bereft: personal things, then COVID…. You’re on the journey of life, but you feel like you’re ricocheting off events.” Then came Schmidt’s enthusiastic invitation to do The Ugly Duchess. “I thought ‘OK, I’m going to have a creative renaissance with myself, make something creative at a very creatively tamped-down time!”

“What makes human beings keep going? The questing spirit in me was intrigued by the question. What else can you do but keep trying? And that’s what this play is about!”

Thoughtful, funny and self-deprecating in conversation, Brovold says she was “coming from a place of ‘I don’t know if I know how to be an actor any more because it’s been so long’, living life in such an overwhelming time’.” And then came The Ugly Duchess.

COVID restrictions on theatre meant that filming happened at the photography studio of cinematographer Ian Jackson. And Margaret’s story arc  — stylized since Schmidt’s production is a filmed play and not a movie — happens in front of (and through) a vanity table mirror, from a variety of angles. “Trevor is really good at taking risks, trying new things in very imaginative, specific ways.”

Brovold laughs. If she was looking for a sign that, hiatus notwithstanding, she was still heart and soul an actor, “here’s the age-old actor question, arghh, that never goes away: where do I put my hands?”

Making a solo play into “a filmic piece” had its own particular challenges, Brovold found. The segments might not be shot chronologically, but “you still have to learn the whole arc of the play in order to have emotion continuity,” she says. “You really have to know who you are, what the moments are about.” And since there’s no moving about a stage physically, or projecting to the back row of a theatre, that knowledge has to be very particular, revealed in close-ups. “It’s a more intimate relationship, in a way. A breath, a flicker of a thought, and the camera is with you.…”

“We can’t know what we’re making yet! We creatively make choices, individually and as a team. But only the audience knows what we’ve made,” says Brovold, who’s looking forward to seeing how the contributions of director Schmidt, cinematographer/editor Ian Jackson, lighting designer Roy Jackson, sound designer Darrin Hagen, fit together, when the production starts streaming Friday.    

And there’s the story of a character who “goes out fighting.” Says Brovold, “it’s so great to work on a play that reminds us that we all suffer; the degree and the reasons are unique, but we all do. And we all deserve and need kindness. I’m so thankful to re-learn that.”

Stories, muses Brovold, are what the theatre is for. “I’m so hopeful that when we return to theatres (in person), communities will flood the halls, and give it a big welcome. People need stories to feel they’re not aliens! They need to sit together in the dark, and agree to hear a story together, witness something together, breathe together.”

PREVIEW

The Ugly Duchess

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Janet Munsil

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Lora Brovold

Where: online, from northernlighttheatre.com

Running: Friday through Sunday, and May 27 to 30, various times.

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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Concrete Theatre’s Sprouts Festival grows new plays, online

Posted on May 16, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Edmonton’s Concrete Theatre, a company with a national profile in theatre-for-young-audiences, is into its mid-30s with a new pair of co-artistic directors — and in this strange pandemic time, the need to re-invent one of its prime raisons d’être.

Live theatre? Plus school touring? In a plague year? Now there’s a mind-expanding multiple suspension to wrap your imagination around.

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They have different ages (by a couple of decades), different theatrical specialties, connections, and cultural perspectives, as you might expect. But, as they take over the artistic directorship of a company named for its street-level savvy, what Tracy Carroll and Corben Kushneryk share is a zest for young audiences and the creation and showcasing of new plays to reflect kids’  experiences growing up in a complex, diverse Canada.

Both partners have roots in Concrete, so to speak. “I directed Lig and Bittle (by Elyne Quan and Jared Matsunaga-Turnbull) 20 years ago!” says Carroll. Kushneryk’s Concrete debut was as an actor in The Bully Project five years ago (Carroll directed, and stage managed). 

As Carroll points out, a complementary co-artistic directorship is nothing new for a company that was born as a five-way collective in 1987. For much of its life since, it’s been run by partnerships of artists, and more recently, a pair of artistic directors, Mieko Ouchi and Caroline Howarth.

And now, by a pair of theatre artists with a skill set of striking breadth. Carroll is a veteran dramaturge and director, with a formidable record in new play development. Kushneryk, a bona fide triple-threat, is an actor/ director/ designer and an up-and-coming producer with indie cred: he’s a co-founder of the indie company Impossible Mongoose (The Fall of the House of Atreus, Prophecy).

Corben Kushneryk

“It’s such an interesting time to join a (theatre) that’s primarily a touring company!” says Carroll, with a wry laugh. “It’s fun to come up against these barriers!” declares Kushneryk cheerfully. “I love controlled chaos; it can be a beautiful thing!”

On the eve of the annual Sprouts Festival, a Concrete spring-planting tradition of some two decades standing that happens (all online for the first time) next weekend. The Concrete partners were on Zoom together this week — a platform where they spend a lot of Concrete brainstorming time — to share their thinking.

“I love having a partner!” says Carroll. “We share a brain.” Says Kushneryk, “it’s such a helpful thing in a partnership to have different generations and perspectives…. I love having Tracy’s experience as a writer, a dramaturge, a director — and as a mother!”

As the name will hint, Sprouts plants theatrical seedlings: new and original playlets, 10-minutes or so in length, collected from unusual artistic, cultural, ethnic, and professional sources — designers, actors, novelists, journalists, improvisers, playwrights who’ve never before written for kids.… Some of the sprouts they create grow up, get fully produced (and re-produced), tour, “and join the canon,” as Carroll puts it. “Some live in that (10-minute) time.”

The trio of short plays we’ll see at this year’s edition (acted by a cast of three, directed by Kushneryk, dramaturged by Carroll) were inherited from Ouchi’s tenure as artistic director. They all started pre-pandemic, and have had an extra year of seasoning, thanks to the COVID hiatus of 2020.

With The Colour Keeper, Patricia Cerra, best known to Edmonton audiences as an actor (and currently in an artistic director internship at the Nepture Theatre in Halifax), tries her hand at playwriting. As Carroll describes, it’s a story about girl on a quest to bring the joy of colour back into a world where it’s missing.

The title character of Mika Laulainen’s Wag is a Dalmatian who had an epic adventure in company of a friend. The Enchantment is by the multi-tasking team of Dave Clarke (also in charge of Sprouts sound) and Marissa Kochanski, whose designs have been part of Sprouts for many years.   

“We rehearsed over Zoom,” says Kushneryk. “It’s been all about how to connect, and make (the experience) as live as we can.” And the cast of three — Chariz Faulmino, Andrés Moreno and Christine Nguyen — “jumped right into the characters; they’re so infused with joy.” Technical director Bobby Smale “drove bags of mics, and lights, and props (design by Heather Cornick) and costumes (by Betty Kolodziej) to the actors at their homes.

A pandemic year gives all three plays different layers, as Carroll and Kushneryk report. A play about a world without colour, for example, and a quest to restore it, has gained a heightened social reverb in a new alertness to diversity. A play about friendship and anxiety is bound to have a different force field, too, in these isolating times.

For live theatre, the times are a test of creativity. When the pandemic closed the theatres suddenly 14 months ago, Concrete’s Pia and Maria by Josh Dalledonne and Bianca Miranda, fully rehearsed and ready to go, got cancelled on the eve of opening. The intergenerational play about two elderly Italian sisters bonding with a young Filipina girl is back in June, adapted as a radio play (directed by Mieko Ouchi).

Acting Our Colours, a Concrete in-school residency designed to celebrate the richness of cultural diversity, is currently being adapted in a digital version. The plus side to the pandemic has been accessibility to new communities, new audiences, beyond the city and across the country.

“At heart Concrete is issue-based theatre,” says Carroll. We can expect to see new plays, yes, but it’s not as if the issues that kids confront vanish from the scene, as the perpetually timely repertoire of Concrete shows — The Bully Project, Consent (sexual coercion),  Routes (family violence), or Under Cover (cultural prejudice) — confirms. “Kids grow up; there’s a new audience every year.”

Last word to Kushneryk. “It’s such a gift to be working in theatre for young audiences…. From my experience there’s no audience like a TYA audience. They’re so with you, so alive!”

PREVIEW

Sprouts New Play Festival For Kids

Theatre: Concrete

Written by: Patricia Cerra, Mika Laulainen, Dave Clarke and Marissa Kochanski

Directed by: Corben Kushneryk

Dramaturged by: Tracy Carroll

Where: online, concretetheatre.ca

Running: May 22 and 23, 2 p.m.

Tickets: concretetheatre.ca

  

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To be or not to be: Hamlet served six ways, from Thou Art Here Theatre

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The time is out of joint (I think we can all agree with Prince of Denmark on that).

Isolating, infuriating, anxiety-making, rippling with hints of mortality and “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” … does that ring a bell at this moment of history where we’ve found ourselves.

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Hamlet was on it, four centuries ago. And an experimental mini-series created by the adventurous Edmonton indie theatre Thou Art Here — a “site-sympathetic” company that takes Shakespeare on location to the people — will deliver six different Hamlets, one a week, direct to your place.

With Hamlet in Isolation, every Friday for six weeks starting May 21, we’ll get to see a different Albertan actor (one who’s never played Hamlet before) have at the most celebrated role in English theatre. And as befits the COVIDian regulations of the moment, the complex and compelling character that every actor dreams of making their own, won’t have to share “the stage” with anyone else.

In partnership with three directors and an original (eight-page) script fashioned from Hamlet’s seven signature soliloquies, the six actors, one a week, perform from their homes, solo and live-streamed on a variety of digital platforms, including YouTube and Twitch. Thou Art Here co-founder (and now artistic associate) Andrew Ritchie says the instruction to director-actor partnerships was alluringly open-ended. “Here you go! Run with this and see where you take it.”

Shrouded in mystery Hamlet may be, as four hundred years of wildly divergent interpretations attest, but the guy is voluble, no question. He has more lines to speak, by a ratio of nearly two to one, than any other character in the Shakespeare canon. And he talks to himself. In his pinnacle soliloquies — “to be or not to be,” “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,” “how all occasions do inform against me” and the other heavy-hitter monologues — Hamlet thinks aloud; he shares his thoughts with the audience; he meditates; he assesses and reassesses what it means to be human.

The play he stars in is Shakespeare’s longest — so long it’s almost never performed un-cut. Hamlet in Isolation takes that trimming further (into bite-sized pieces of half an hour or so), directly into Hamlet’s consciousness. Ritchie cites a scene in the very funny Canadian series Slings and Arrows, set at a Stratford-like Shakespeare festival, in which an actor freaking out as he prepares to be Hamlet gets sage advice: “just nail those monologues, and everyone will go home happy.”

Via the soliloquies we venture into the minds and sensibilities of six different Hamlets, chosen, says Ritchie, “from a public audition call that got a big response. So many artists looking for work….” And there’s a striking variety in their backgrounds, in experience, in aesthetic, in gender. “We’ve never collaborated with any of them before,” says Ritchie, one of the three Hamlet in Isolation directors, of the artists assembled for the project. “And that’s very exciting.”

Director Sydney Campbell, for example, is an improv and sketch comedy star, half of the queer sketch duo Gender? I Hardly Know Them. Desirée Leverenz, who also directs, is the artistic director of the experimental performance ensemble The Orange Girls. Marguerite Lawler (Lavinia in Theatre Network’s The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius), one of the Hamlets, is an actor with starry improv cred.

The original Thou Art Here idea, he says, was to “take Hamlet to five different sites.” Act III, in which the court gathers to watch a play, was to be in a theatre; Act V, when the bodies really pile up, in a graveyard.…

The current pandemic restrictions in Alberta made that unworkable. Instead, you get a one-on-one with Hamlet. Scenographer Elise Jason has extrapolated for their design from the soliloquies and the enforced intimacy, in the six at-home settings where we find the performers.

“When you watch several (episodes), the pieces will be in conversation with each other,” Ritchie hopes, “an interesting exploration of the text” affected by who the actors are since they’re filmed in their own personal habitat.

PREVIEW

Hamlet in Isolation

Theatre: Thou Art Here

Directed by: Sydney Campbell, Desirée Leverenz, Andrew Ritchie

Starring as Hamlet: Philip (Lin Hackborn), Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Deedra Salange LaDouceur, Marguerite Lawler, Andrés Moreno, Kiana Woo

Where: performed and streamed live online

Running: May 21 through June 25, Fridays at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: fringe theatre.ca, pay-what-you-will

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‘Questions that make the house shake with silence’: Something Unspoken streamed at Northern Light. A review

Posted on May 8, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Davina Stewart and Patricia Darbasie in Something Unspoken, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Northern Light Theatre’s exquisite little streamed version of Something Unspoken, a rarely produced Tennessee Williams’ one-act from the ‘50s, is a bit like a whisper in a bubble. Breathe too hard and it will vanish.

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In Trevor Schmidt’s production, beautifully filmed by Ian Peter Jackson and running a swift 45 minutes, we arrive by air, floating down from above onto a stage (the Varscona) that seems to be a theatrical capture of a fleeting moment in the mind’s eye. An artful dream, perhaps? A clock is ticking.

We touch down in a rosy perfumed world of pale pinks and mauves, right down to the juice on the table and the jam on the toast (the design is by director Schmidt). There’s a romantic glow to the lighting (by Adam Tsuyoshi Turnbull); a chandelier seems to have broken through a paper ceiling. The windows and walls give on cascades of suspended pink-hued fantasy blossoms. In short … a rarefied world, cocooned in a sense of unreality.

Davina Stewart in Something Unspoken, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

That’s our introduction to Cornelia (Davina Stewart), a wealthy grande dame of the Southern belle stripe, and Grace (Patricia Darbasie), her secretary — or is it companion? — of 15 years. And their relationship in the South of the ‘50s is the play’s mystery, approached with delicate ambiguity in the script, the performances, and the assortment of closeups — eyes, mouths, hands — in Schmidt’s production.

It’s election day for the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, a stronghold of white privilege and authority in an antebellum world that is gradually disappearing. And Cornelia, who has an intense relationship with the telephone, her golden hot line to the world beyond her garden, is anxiously awaiting the affirmation that things have gone her way. “I will accept no office except the highest,” she declares, with bravado, to her social spy on location at election HQ. And it has to be by acclamation; voting is for the riff-raff.  Stewart captures a rarefied combination of imperial entitlement, neediness, and the fear, unspoken like so many things in the play, that she is somehow losing ground.

Patricia Darbasie in Something Unspoken, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography

Grace’s attempts to mollify her employer are airily dismissed; Cornelia even rejects that ‘m’ word. “I have never been mollified by conciliatory replies.” In her alert, watchful performance Darbasie conveys the kind of wary calm that has hidden reserves, including a soupçon of skepticism and occasional flickers of cautious amusement that rise to one eyebrow and quickly subside.

The relationship is nuanced. And it’s fuelled by the chemistry between the actors, Edmonton stars both. What adds to the mystery, in Schmidt’s production, is race. Cornelia, who aspires to head an organization devoted to white supremacy, isn’t just run-of-the-mill white. Stewart, in a white Victorian peignoir, long white-blond hair, is ultra-white, bleached out to ghostly whiteness by the lighting. She looks chalky; even her lips are pale.

The woman Cornelia is exhorting to speak the unspoken is not just her employee, with the social and class tensions that implies. She’s black. And, as Darbasie’s complex performance conveys between the lines of a text that never mentions it, that fact ups the ante on Grace’s caution and evasiveness, her resistance to the “outspokenness” Cornelia demands.

“You mustn’t expect me to give bold answers to questions that make the house shake with silence,” she says of the hidden 15-year infrastructure of a relationship that has apparently always lived in the subtext. Moved at last to words, Grace has a lyrical moment in which she proposes that they’ve aged differently: Cornelia’s hair is the gray of iron, Grace says; her own is the gray of cobwebs. The balance of power lives in that thought.

Intriguingly, Schmidt’s production leads the subtextual path of Something Unspoken from sexual ambiguity and homoerotic repression into other more contemporary contradictions. And they’re based on race. Cornelia’s domestic desires, however enforceable by class (“a request from an employer is hard to tell from an order,” says Grace), seem to be at loggerheads with her aggressive campaign for upward mobility in a racist outfit devoted to maintaining white privilege. Is this tension between love and power the toxic residue of white privilege and colonialism as it plays out in the modern world?

“Some things are better left unspoken,” Grace concludes. The balance of power, weighted as it is in every way, is maintained by silence. And you’ll find yourself thinking about that when the roses have faded from view.

REVIEW

Something Unspoken

Theatre: Northern Light

Written by: Tennessee Williams

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Patricia Darbasie, Davina Stewart

Where: streamed on Vimeo, northernlighttheatre.com

Running: through Sunday, and May 13 to 16

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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New plays for big stages: Collider, the Citadel’s debut play development festival

Posted on May 6, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Line most often heard from Canadian theatre producers by playwrights labouring on new scripts. “Great, but could you make it smaller? How about three actors, better yet two, instead of five?”

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If ‘think small’ is the working mantra of new play development in this country, where do playwrights and theatre-makers get experience (and exposure) telling their stories in a bigger way, for Size L and XL performance spaces in Canada and beyond? Spaces like the Citadel, for example.

There’s a new festival for that. The Citadel’s Collider Festival, originally scheduled for a March 2020 debut edition, collided … with COVID. Now it’s launching, in entirely digital form, May 12 to 16.

Collider, a collision of artists and forms, is devoted to new play development. In its play readings, workshops, and keynote address, it’s  all about theatre creation on that larger scale. In the local theatre ecology, “there are already many new-play companies in Edmonton. I’ve kept looking at what the Citadel can provide,” says artistic director Daryl Cloran. “The great thing, and the challenge, at the Citadel,” as he puts it, “is that both its mainstage performance spaces are 700-seat houses.”

“What does that large-scale mean?” that’s the question for artists. “It doesn’t mean super-populist or a cast of 20 every time,” says Cloran. “But there has to be something about the work that resonates on a larger scale…. It could be thematically; it could be in production value; it could be an adaptation of something that captures people’s attention.” The question for him is “what do we need to provide (creators) in order to have them thrive, to dream, on that larger stage.”

Amongst the six new pieces, in various stages of development, getting full readings at Collider,  the assortment of forms is wide — among them a period literary adaptation, a black comedy thriller, a door-slamming farce, a musical. The casts are gathered from here and across the country (and in one case across the border),

Jane Eyre, which brings to life the Charlotte Brontë masterwork of 1847, is a Citadel commission. Originally slated for a 2020 premiere, audiences here will see it, says Cloran, as soon as the theatre can return to big, live onstage performances. The adaptor is acclaimed Canadian playwright Erin Shields.

“She, more than any playwright I know, has such a gift for adaptation,” Cloran says, citing such plays as Shields’ versions of Paradise Lost for Stratford and (Ibsen’s) The Lady From The Sea for the Shaw Festival. “Erin really gets it, how to take a classic story, look at it from her contemporary viewpoint, make it resonate for a contemporary audience.”

Cloran was responding to the demonstrable fan-dom of Citadel audiences for full-scale costumed period shows (the Jane Austen adaptations are perennial hits). The new Jane Eyre, he says, “is very much a period piece. But she’s given it a contemporary feminist viewpoint. And it’s real ensemble storytelling; everybody plays a whole bunch of different parts, a kind of low-tech theatricality I really love….”   

The most complicated to assemble for an online reading is Almost A Full Moon, a musical by the team of composer/lyricist Hawksley Workman and playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman (the latter a finalist for this year’s Governor-General’s Literary Award for Guarded Girls). It’s based on Workman’s original Christmas album of 20 years ago, a Cloran seasonal fave (“for me and my generation and peer group, it’s integral”). It’s not a song cycle per se. But the songs, are “thematically related.”

Last fall, directed by Cloran, the new musical got a six-week workshop with students at Sheridan College’s Canadian Musical Theatre Project (where Come From Away was originally developed).

As Cloran points out, Workman is a rock star with a distinctly theatrical bent; the new holiday musical is by no means his first foray into theatre (he composed music for The Silver Arrow at the Citadel, his one-man cabaret The God That Comes premiered at the High Performance Rodeo). Workman said he imagined the intertwined multi-generational stories evoked by the songs in a Love Actually sort of way.

Playwright Corbeil-Coleman, says Cloran, “wrote a beautiful script that takes place in three different timeliness, World War II, the ’80s, that intertwine and overlap.”

Ten actors and a six-piece band that includes violin and cello: a lot of editing intricacy is involved in putting it together on Zoom “for a true experience in what it sounds like,” says Cloran. We’ll see its full stage premiere at the Citadel, “as soon as we can do big musicals!”

He laughs. “We’re trying to fully corner the market on the holidays!”

A new farce, a classic six-actor door-slammer called The Fiancée, is the work of actor/playwright Holly Lewis. “Secretly, if Holly could be anyone she’d be Lucille Ball,” laughs Cloran who’s married to Lewis. “She loves to be funny; she loves the mechanics of farce….” And those mechanics are dauntingly intricate, as Lewis knows from starring in a Theatre Found production of Steve Martin’s farce The Underpants in Toronto.

“I’m wildly biased, but I think her idea here is really good,” Cloran says. The premise riffs on Boeing, Boeing, a farce in which a guy juggles a romantic schedule involving three flight attendant girlfriends who work for different airlines, and are unexpected grounded during a storm. Lewis’s thought, says Cloran, was “how to create a great farce with women at the heart of it.”

As Cloran describes The Fiancée, during World War II, a young woman accepts proposals from three men, expecting they won’t all make it back from the war.” But they do, “and all arrive back on the same day.” Which sets in motion an escalating chaos of “shoving people in closets, slamming doors, putting on wigs to be someone else.” And then the formidable landlord shows up; eviction looms.

Mieko Ouchi’s Burning Mom chronicles her newly-widowed mom’s journey, in a Winnebago, down to Burning Man in the Nevada desert. And it imagines large scale in a different way. It may be a solo show (starring Nicola Lipman) with an intimate story, “but Mieko’s vision for the show is huge,” says Cloran. He reports that the playwright/director has been collaborating with a Montreal projection designer with Cirque cred. Yes, the Winnebago opens up.

A Distinct Society by the Canadian-born New York- based Kareen Fahmy, had a reading in Chicago last fall. “We wanted to introduce it to Canadian audiences,” Cloran says of the strikingly topical cross-border play that, quite literally, straddles the Canada-U.S. border — in a library with a line down the middle. That’s where a Muslim family meets, to circumvent the “Muslim ban.”

In collaboration with Script Salon, Kenneth T. Williams’ new play Paris, SK, gets a reading directed by Keith Barker of Toronto’s Native Earth Theatre. “A crime thriller/ noir kind of feeling, very cool,” says Cloran. “And the playwright as “smart, political, and funny.”

Collider opens with an address by Sherry J Yoon, the artistic director of the experimental Vancouver indie Boca del Lupo, specialists in grand-scale theatre spectacle. She was the  National Arts Centre’s Jillian Keiley’s collaborator on the Grand Acts of Theatre series. The lineup includes an afternoon of 10-minute readings from new plays developing as part of the Punctuate! Theatre’s Playwrights Unit.

And there are two workshops for who’d rather go big than go home: one from Shields on the subject of adaptations, the other from Michael Rubinoff, the head of the Canadian Musical Theatre Project at Sheridan, on developing new Canadian musicals.

 Says Cloran, “we already have the largest Fringe on the continent…. My dream is putting Edmonton on the map as a place where great new work is being created. What Austin with SXSW is to music, we can be for theatre.”

Registration and attendance are free, but space is limited. Check out the full Collider schedule and register at citadel theatre.

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A theatre to-do list for the week, including a bread and circus combo, kid stuff, costume and video installations, shows to stream

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Bread and Circus, Firefly Theatre and Circus. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In week ten thousand of the pandemic, before you actually melt into Netflix and disappear, clicker in hand, put a couple of suggestions on your theatre to-do list. The word ‘fun’ does not go amiss, I assure you.

•Aerialists rise. They’re like bread that way.

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For sheer originality in “pivoting,” and a kind of witty inevitability given the times, it’s hard to top the ever-inventive Firefly Theatre & Circus. Bread and Circus, coming your way live-streamed Friday evening, is named for a Roman phrase, meaning public diversionary tactics used by savvy politicians during times of unrest, confinement, and general malaise. “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt” (Juvenal). Side notre: Marie Antoinette obviously had not read Juvenal, or she never would have mentioned cake and thereby caused the French Revolution.

The Firefly evening combines two anti-gravity sensations, bread-making and top-flight circus artists from around the world. While your fougasse-in-progress is levitating (under instruction from of chefs at Get Cooking) you’ll be watching the latter do the same.

They’re an international brigade of some 24 artists who sent Firefly eight videos from three continents, six countries, two provinces, and Calgary, including four circus artists from here: Lyne Gosselin, Maria Albiston, Normand Boulé, and Stephanie Gruson. All but the artist from Australia (Kristi Wade) — ironic since Australian theatres have re-opened, are performing for real audiences. And audiences are the yeast of live theatre.

Meanwhile, the online entertainment is further enhanced by live-streamed performances from the Edmonton band Le Fuzz and taiko drumming specialists Rabbits Three.

Firefly co-founders Annie Dugan and John Ullyatt host. Bread & Circus happens Friday, 6 to 8:30 p.m. Tickets are at Firefly Theatre.

•The Kids Fest turns 40 this year. In honour of this auspicious birthday of festivities devoted to unlocking the kid imagination, the International Children’s Festival of the Arts has launched 40 Days of Play this week. Every day, on the St. Albert website, you’ll find a new creative challenge, visual art activity, outdoor exploration (I suspect strongly that sourdough will not be involved). Photos posted on Instagram or Facebook with the hashtag #40DaysofPlay are eligible for prizes.

The grand finale, June 4 to 6, is an online version of the festivities headquartered up the road on the banks of the mighty Sturgeon: “three days of virtual, interactive and international entertainment programming.” The lineup is announced May 7.

•I know you’ll be yearning to emerge from your domestic stronghold and the mesmeric power grab of your screen and have a theatre visit. Here are two possibilities:

On the Citadel’s south-facing windows catch a video installation that will give you a thrill and leave you hungry for more.

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Windows To New Works, Citadel Theatre.

The video installation Window To New Works is a loop of projected scenes and songs from theatre projects in development at the downtown playhouse or elsewhere in town. Among them are Erin Shields’ Jane Eyre (starring Gianna Vacirca), Almost A Full Moon by Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman and Hawksley Workman, Tai Amy Grauman’s You Used To Call Me Marie, Mieko Ouchi’s new play Burning Mom (starring Maralyn Ryan). The other night I saw glimpses of The Garneau Block, Heaven, and Chris Dodd’s Deafy. 

Check them out till May 31, and give your theatre bio-clock a crank.

In the Varscona windows, designer Leona Brausen’s original costume installation Hero Material, continues with the Canadian artist Emily Carr. Amazingly, in one of the panels, Brausen has re-created Carr’s celebrated painting Red Cedar, using 1940s dressing gowns. No kidding. Who would do that? To get the full effect, with theatrical lighting, catch it after dark.

•Continuing: A Brimful of Asha and Mary’s Wedding are both available to stream from the Citadel. (Check out the 12thnight reviews for the former here and the latter here. The U of A’s Studio Theatre season continues with an online production of Mary Zimmerman’s strange and playful fairy tale mash-up The Secret in the Wings, directed by Fringe associate director Elizabeth Hobbs. Read the 12thnight interview with that multi-faceted artist here.  And get tickets here.

•And since it takes a creative people to change the world, check out the three inspiring short videos fashioned by artists commissioned by Catalyst Theatre for the National Transformation Project. Kristi Hansen, Rebecca Sadowski, and Chris Dodd, aka The Transformers, all thought about how the world could be made better. Find them at catalysttheatre.ca or on the National Arts Centre website.

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Follow the ‘once upon a time’ through the fairy tale world: The Secret in the Wings at Studio Theatre

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

The Secret in the Wings, Studio Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Don’t let the ‘happily-ever-after’s fool you. Fairy tales are not, contrary to popular belief, a Disney invention, the have-a-great-life tag to rom-coms on a roll.

The production that opens today online, in the Studio Theatre season,  follows ‘once upon a time’ into the obscure reaches of the Grimm catalogue and colour palette, and beyond. Into the dark tangled playground of the subconscious, childhood fears, adult taboos, strange transformations where fairy tales live.

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 The Secret in the Wings, by the star American playwright Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses), is “particularly bizarre,” declares director Elizabeth Hobbs with delight (adding “theatrical,” “weird” and “quirky” for good measure). “When I read it I laughed out loud. I didn’t understand it but I was so intrigued!” That’s why she chose the 30-year-old play for her thesis production (she emerges from the U of A with a master’s degree in directing).

“It offered a lot of freedom, creatively, for devising,” says Hobbs, an associate director of the Fringe (where she’s been in charge of the street performers and of the Kids’ Fringe). “I’m really interested in marrying script to devised (theatre).” And this is a play that invites the performers to participate, to improvise whole sections. She quotes the playwright: “text is only one instrument in the orchestra.”

Hobbs’ cast of nine “are great movers and singers,” Hobbs says. One of the actors, for example, is a ballet dancer, and offered to do a scene en pointe. It’s in the show. A lot of what we’ll see “comes from the cast coming up with cool stuff, shaped by me…. All theatre is that, I guess. But this one is wildly so!”

The Secret in the Wings, Studio Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

Hobbs and co have been let loose on an intricate mash-up of six existing but very obscure fairy tales, a couple from the Brothers Grimm and all very different stylistically. As she describes, “they’re told individually inside a larger frame-work of Beauty and the Beast” — cut off right at their half-way point of maximum suspense, and separated by interludes. In the second act, “the characters step outside their own individual stories and into the larger frame.”

She hasn’t seen the film version of The Secret in the Wings yet (available today through Friday) but her production has had six live performances for a very limited audience of nine (plus her) in there 300-seat Timms Theatre. Rehearsing in COVIDian times has been a creative challenge: nine actors, 115 props, 75 costumes. Consider: “the actors, all masked, two metres apart, no physical contact, entrances and exits” — in a show where a boy carries a dead body offstage, partners dance, and marriages are consummated with a kiss. “In some ways it’s been a blessing, not a curse,” says Hobbs of the restrictions. “We’ve had to devise creative solutions…. And it’s hyper-theatrical, nowhere near realism in the first place. So we’ve leaned into that.”

Meanwhile Hobbs has been in Calgary workshopping a new version of a play, Fish At The Bottom Of The Sea by Edmonton’s Nicole Schafenacker, that she first directed at the 2008 Nextfest. Slated to be part of Firefly Theatre’s circus arts festival in late June, it’s a one-person show (starring theatre/circus artist Leda Davies) with “a big aerial component, bungee loops…” It taps Hobbs’ own training (in Australia) as first a stilt walker and aerialist. “I’ve always  been inclined to the physical,” she says with a certain comical understatement.

“A celebration of the theatrical and the childish imagination,” The Secret in the Wings may be complicated but “ultimately the message is so simple,” says Hobbs. Simple, perhaps, but eerily à propos at our moment in history. “Ultimately, kindness and generosity will get us through this short time we have together on this earth.”

Not quite the full ‘happily ever after’, maybe, but a restorative nonetheless in an isolating year.

Tickets for the online production, streamed through Friday, are available at uastudio@ualberta.ca or 780-492-2495.

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