Home Again: a journey to the desert in podcast form at Nextfest

Posted on June 12, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Playwright Calla Wright. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It was when the cast was rehearsing the kissing scene in Home Again that playwright/director Calla Wright knew, irrevocably, that Nextfest 2020 had created its own kooky creative wonderland.

For one thing Home Again, which runs Saturday night as part of the online 25th anniversary edition of the festival (at nextfest.org), is a podcast: it creates space entirely aurally. And as a particular challenge its narrative actually hinges on physical re-location: it conjures a journey between cities and into the desert. Besides, “how do you record a play when none of the actors can be in the same room?” as Wright says.

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Which brings us to the kissing; there’s nothing about arranging that in the Zoom manual for times of isolation. “We had a lot of fun with it…. What does this sound like? There they are, the actors, slobbering over their hands. I remember asking them ‘is this more or less awkward than it would be in in real life?’” Wright recalls, amused, there was a certain divergence of opinion between the tentative “maybe eventually this will feel normal” and the declarative “this is going to be weird forever!”

At the centre of Home Again is an intersection of life crises. The protagonist, as Wright describes, has lost a baby; her wife has had a stillbirth. “She immediately drives off to see her best friend from years before — that’s all she can think to do — and arrives at his house to find he’s just tried to kill himself…. She saves his life and drives him into the desert with the thought ‘let’s get drunk and do a lot of drugs together,” as their younger selves used to do.

“It’s mostly about growing up and dealing with the intense losses that are not like anything you’ve experienced before — and wishing you could go back to the person you were as a teenager,” Wright explains. “It’s trying to figure out what teenage friendships mean when you’re an adult, how to continue them. Without quite so much substance abuse….”

The 2020 edition of Nextfest, all online of necessity, has been “a really fun challenge, to try and learn to use all the new technology on the fly. Without visuals. More in the realm of a radio play,” as she puts it. Her childhood friend, composer/playwright/Daniel Belland, wrote music and improvised cues that assist materially in creating space.

If times hadn’t propelled Nextfest online, the ebullient playwright, who has an experimental zest about her, could imagine her play (the June instalment of The Alberta Queer Calendar Project) as a site-specific piece, with the audience on the move. “Really cool! Find a way to have an audience drive somewhere we could light a fire, and have that intimacy with the actors…. I’d love to do more site-specific theatre!” declares Wright, a home-schooled kid by upbringing, who started writing at five and acting in Shakespeare scenes at nine.

“When I was 12, my mom and I rewrote a version of the Narnia books (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe et al).” It took the audience into the ravine, through the wardrobe they’d built, and into the woods. It wasn’t till Wright was 14 or 15, that someone suggested she try writing plays. “I wasn’t a big fan of of prose and description; I always wanted to jump straight to the dialogue….”

Wright, now 27, was in high school when a musical she wrote with Belland, Semi-Colon the Musical, was workshopped at Nextfast. “I was so impressed by the quality of the audience and their feedback. That can be very hit-and-miss….” Wright, Belland, and their pal actor  Josh Travnik made their Fringe debuts with Semi-Colon. “I made just enough mistakes to learn from it. But I did just enough right that it was super-cool. A great introduction to Fringe world!” 

She spent two years as part of the Citadel’s Young Acting Company, in plays like Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and a stage adaptation of The Mill on the Floss. Those plays were, she says, “my big introduction to a lot of different styles…. Before that, it was lots and lots of Shakespeare; I really love adapting Shakespeare, reading it, performing it.”

Witness her play The Wind and the Rain, which she and Travnik toured to Fringes, puts together two of Shakespeare’s star Fools, Feste from Twelfth Night and the Fool from King Lear. In the playwriting program at Concordia University in Montreal, she adapted King Lear. The Blood Harmonic, she says, “has a similar premise to Queen Lear Is Dead (Jessy Ardern’s play which premiered last summer at the Fringe), but very different execution.”

Calla Wright and Maya Wright in The Wright Sisters Present: The Wright Brothers. Photo supplied.

Wright is less interested in “acting acting” and more focussed on playwriting these days, she says. But last summer, she and her younger sister did a Wright original, The Wright Sisters Present The Wright Brothers, an homage to the sibling aviation pioneers, “half biographical and half scenes made up of what they might have said to each other.” Wright played Wilbur and her sister Maya was Orville…. I shaved my head, one of those stadium cuts, and we looked remarkably like them, I’d say.”

Wright’s theatrical tastes “swing,” as she puts it, “between the super-old and the very very modern and experimental.” A university theatre exchange to Germany with a broad sampling of German theatre and its grand finale, a collective Canadian/German creation, were “a big influence.”

After Nextfest, the Wright project-in-progress is “what to do with my Fringe play?” Should it be on hold till Fringe 2021? Should it have an online incarnation of some kind before that? “Weirdly it’s a perfect play to transition to an online platform,” she laughs. The Truth, a title with an ominous reverb these days “is about a woman trapped in her apartment for six months…. I started writing it long before any of this happened.”

PREVIEW

Home Again

Theatre: Nextfest Arts Company

Written and directed by: Calla Wright

Starring: Josh Travnik, Chiara Tate-Penna, Daniel Belland

Where: nextfest.org

Running: Saturday night (full schedule at nextfest.org)

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Looking to the future: the Citadel moves its season to 2021

Posted on June 11, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

The Garneau Block, postponed by The Citadel Theatre. Photo by Arthur Mah.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight

“I used to be the good news guy,” sighs Daryl Cloran. “I got to call people to tell them ‘hey we’re gonna do your show’ and ‘hey, you’re in the cast’….”

Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran. Photo: Ryan Parker.

COVID has changed all that. A “hard couple of months” just got harder and sadder this week with the news that the Citadel will delay a return to programming on its mainstages till 2021. The announcement came jointly with similar news about their fall seasons from the Citadel’s fellow large-scale arts companies: Alberta Ballet, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and Winspear Centre, and Edmonton Opera.

The entire 2020-2021 Citadel season, or as much of it as possible, moves a year, starting with ELVIS the Musical in the summer of 2021. Before that the Citadel relaunches with “a Spring 2021 mini-season” consisting of Belinda Cornish’s The Garneau Block in March, Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears (a Punctuate!/Dreamspeakers partnership) in April, Erin Shields’ Jane Eyre in May, and Peter Pan Goes Wrong (a co-production with Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre) in June.

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“Our large-scale productions are best served live in front of a full audience,” the theatre announced. Alberta’s Phase 2 plans, unveiled this week, with a 50-person socially-distanced gathering maximum (and no singing), aren’t workable for a theatrical operation on the scale of the Citadel —  artistically, financially, or practically. On or behind the stage, or in the house, “pretty much everything we do is Stage 3, or beyond,” as Cloran says.

“We’re treating everything possible as a postponement (as opposed to a cancellation)…. We committed to these shows and these artists. We wanted to do them. And we still want to do them.” Says Cloran sadly, “planning a season takes a long time; it’s just as long to un-program one.” Not least because it involves co-productions and partnerships with theatre companies across the country. 

Jane Eyre, now slated for Citadel production Spring 2021. Photo supplied.

The theatre did look at alternatives, like “ripping out most of the seats,” says Cloran. “But for big shows we need a big audience — for the size of audience we serve, the scale of stories we tell, and … they cost a lot!” The $1 million budget for a full-bodied mainstage show isn’t unusual; for musicals, the tab is even higher. In short “we can’t do a mainstage show in a 700-seat house for 50 people. Or 100.” In a complex $13 million operation like the Citadel, at least half the revenue comes from ticket sales. So continued, and enhanced, support from government funders, sponsors, and the audience for the theatre and its artists is crucial. 

“The information changes daily. But we had to make a decision about a course of action,” says Cloran. “We needed to respect artists and audiences….” 

“Theatres across the country, across the world, are all staring into the crystal ball and trying to figure it out. Everyone is making a different call. In Toronto Mirvish Productions has cancelled all productions till the new year. In Vancouver the Arts Club, a regular Citadel co-producer, has cancelled all programming till the fall of 2021. On the other hand Milwaukee Rep, where Cloran’s production of As You Like It was slated to play after its Chicago Shakespeare Theatre run, has announced a 12-show season starting this October.

“Very different approaches and levels of optimism,” as Cloran puts it. “We’ve tried to pick one that’s probably optimistic, somewhat optimistic. And we may still find as we get to spring we won’t be able to roll out as we planned. And we’ll have two adjust as we get more news…. It’s pretty clear to us, in any case, that nothing of any size can happen on Canadian stages this fall. Not till the new year.”

“Each theatre is addressing it individually. But we felt it was time that we had to say some something…. How great it would be if things changed, and we could bring Edmonton A Christmas Carol (live)! But it’s just so unlikely … and we want to be honest!”

Bears by Matthew MacKenzie (part of Spring 2021 mini-season at the Citadel). Photo by Alexis Keown

Three of those four shows of the Citadel’s Spring mini-season had originally been planned for this season. The Garneau Block had just finished its final dress rehearsal March 13, the night before the first preview, when closure came. The set for Peter Pan Goes Wrong was built, and the production was already into rehearsals. This week’s decision was the third successive time Cloran has emailed that latter cast and creative team with news of another delay: first the summer, then the fall, and now next spring.

The return of audience confidence is a great mystery, as Cloran acknowledges. “The way we engage audiences is going to change so much,” he thinks. “How do we ensure the safety of 600 or 700 people at a time?” It’s not just a matter of having hand sanitizer on hand; “it’s how to get people in and out of the theatre, for example.”

This fall the Citadel will experiment with “digital creations” and live “micro-performances,” as a way of encouraging people to come back to the theatre. Meanwhile, they’ve launched [esc], an electronic story creation series. “We’re not locking the doors and turning out the lights,” says Cloran.

The liveness of live theatre is something precious and unique. In his conversations with artistic directors across the country, Cloran says, everyone talked about “the feeling of being close, sharing, feeling you’re experiencing something with other people….” It’s something the online world can’t give you. But in the interim, one thing the success of Citadel’s Stuck in the House digital series has proved to him — the 80 videos by local artists got over 200,000 views — is “how many people want a bit of art in their lives; they want to connect with artists they know and love…. Art is such an important part of the fabric of Edmonton.”

He quotes Mo Willem, a children’s literature author his kids love: “Science is going to get us out of this. Art is going to get us through it.”

Further information about ticketing options and subscriptions is available at citadeltheatre.com. 

  

  

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“We’re back to who we are!” Murray Utas launches Fringe Revue

Posted on June 9, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Murray Utas (centre) and Edmonton Fringe Theatre’s “Fringe Revue” production team. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you were in any doubt before that, the moment in mid-April the mighty Edmonton Fringe pulled the plug on its 39th annual edition in August, was a capital-M Moment of confirmation that the world had changed. Dramatically.

A summer without the Fringe? What would that even look like?

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Meanwhile Edmonton Fringe Theatre, the company that produces our biggest and most profoundly influential summer festival, has been making plans for “a world that’s different the next day. And the next. And the next….” as artistic director Murray Utas puts it. 

With Fringe Revue, the original live variety show that runs Saturday night (8 p.m.) online, “we’re back to who we are!” says Utas, with his usual exuberance. “OK, we don’t have this big fancy international festival …” he says. But this debut venture is designed to capture something of the impromptu energy and spirit of a festival with a winsome way of brokering “a true live ensemble” of artists and their audiences.    

Part pre-filmed and part live from the “Westbury as sound studio” at  Fringe headquarters (the ATB Financial Arts Barn), Fringe Revue is hosted by the elite improvisers of Rapid Fire Theatre, festival regulars themselves. Live music is courtesy of Jason Kodie.

Tymisha Harris in Josephine. Photo supplied.

And the 12-member cast of Saturday night’s show, directed by Utas, is made up largely of artists we would have seen at the Fringe this August had the world been (very) different. The engaging Chris Dodd, artistic director of the Sound Off deaf arts festival, is one. Tymisha Harris, the Florida-based triple-threat whose solo show Josephine has been a hit at successive Fringes, is another.

The multi-faceted theatre artists Amber Borotsik and Jesse Gervais, are in charge of the show’s dance break, in which “they’ll teach you a little choreography.” And we’ll see Utas in conversation with the Indigenous artist Josh Languedoc (Rocko and Nakota) about “how to give an offering to an Elder in a time of pandemic” and how to make a meaningful land acknowledgment.

Gordie Lucius in Fringe Revue. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

Spoken word artist/ activist Shima Robinson is assembling The Currently Current, a segment spun by artists of various perspectives from the week’s headlines: “spitfire artists, who run with it, film it, and Boom!” as Utas puts it in the language known in Fringe circles as Murrayspeak.

Saturday’s show is the first of three summer editions — June, July, August — of Fringe Revue. Ultimately Utas plans to unleash editions of the show four times a year, including a holiday special, a Chinook Series offering in February, and a season launch. “Every episode will have segments that are repeatable,” The Currently Current among them, he says.   

“We want to show all of our personalities,” says Utas, a playwright/ director himself, of the arts company he runs. Designers, production assistants, crew members … the six-member Fringe Revue production team of multi-taskers, led by designer Tessa Stamp, are all part of the show. “We want to be a maker of theatre.”

He’s thinking ahead, to a festival future that is, as yet undefined, not least because so much depends on the willingness of a mass audience to gather. “We’re thinking ‘creative pods’ not ‘performance venues’,” he says. “Artists tell me they just want to connect with other artists and with an audience. And I’ve got to create spaces where that can happen….”

“I’m going to roll out salons, with guests from around the world,” declares Utas, extrapolating at high speed. He habitually thinks big, maybe because he’s in charge of a festival with so many moving parts. He’s imagining “multi-camera set-ups and cranes; I’m stressing the video guy out — and I think that’s a good place to be….” He’s thinking of workshops and healing circles, with “opportunities for artists who are marginalized to connect with audiences….”

“I want to create a magic box of resources.”

“Welcome to the visual Fringe the pandemic just handed us!” says Utas. “We’re just getting started. It’s gonna be fun. And the trajectory is unstoppable!”

PREVIEW

Fringe Revue

Theatre: Edmonton Fringe Theatre 

Director: Murray Utas

Art director: Tessa Stamp

Where: fringetheatre.ca

Running: Saturday, 8 p.m. (and 30 days after that)

  

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Letters of the Pandemic: be-wigged, bothered, and bewildered by the times

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Stephanie Wolfe in Letters of the Pandemic. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You knew this already. But it bears repetition, in an era that has deprived us of the hug:  and the handshake: never under-estimate the ingenuity of our artists.

What happens when an actor and a writer play improv tag with each other online? For the last two months of pandemic lockdown, at random intervals, actor/Die-Nasty star/aerialist Stephanie Wolfe has been the recipient of a letter. Each of the nine so far is from someone with a pandemic grievance or lament or boiling point reached. And each is addressed to a teacher, a relative, an employer, the Alberta premier perhaps — someone different every time.

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The letters come from the agile brain of a writer, award-winning novelist/playwright/storyteller Marty Chan, who wanted to do something “topical and local, and edgier, about the pandemic,” as Wolfe puts it. What happens after that is that she dives into “a giant tickle trunk” of wigs, costume bits, make-up, accents. She creates a distinctive character, who’s writing a letter of outrage or desperation or general crackpot lunacy to someone real or fictional. And she sends back a video to Chan. “I never know what I’ll get, or when, and I don’t tell Marty what character I’m going to do.… Cat and mouse!” 

“I film my take on it somewhere in my house; he gets it back and puts in sound and all that. We surprise each other with what we add to the mix. It’s never too planned. He has no idea what my character will be and I have no idea what the letter will entail.” 

And so another episode of Letters of the Pandemic, their satirical YouTube series, is born. Among the characters we’ve met so far is a conspiracy theorist fresh from igniting a 5G tower so that the government can’t transmit the virus via your cellphone. She’s writing to her son, reminding him that a roasted garlic up each nostril is much more efficacious than a mask in protecting you from germs. 

Stephanie Wolfe in Letters of the Pandemic. Photo supplied.

We’ve met a mom imprisoned with her impossible kids all day, listening to the word “awesome” and unravelling under the strain of home-schooling. She’s writing to one kid’s teacher, by way of apology for ever dissing the profession and its two-month vacation: “The days are bleeding into nights. And my sleepless nights are turning into a waking nightmare.” An intensely helpful Dr. Hinshaw groupie, a frazzled Costco employee, a woman trying to badger her hairdresser into remedying a tonsorial emergency…. they’re a gallery designed to tickle your sense of the absurd (in case it was atrophying). 

Wolfe says her biggest challenge, and “most fun in creating” was the series’ only man (so far), who’s fed up that golf courses aren’t designated essential services to the public. He possibly occasioned Edmonton’s only “curbside moustache and beard pick-up,” courtesy of notable makeup artist Prudence Olenik.

Wolfe had to adjust his other accoutrements. “OMG, I looked like the Tiger King, and that was NOT the goal….”

Stephanie Wolfe in Letters from the Pandemic. Photo supplied.

“We’ve used every corner of my house, including bathroom and closet,” she says of Letters of the Pandemic. Why would the re-opening of Alberta, bit by bit, be the end of it? “Re-emergence is a whole other shit show. We’ll just keep going!”

In fact, the upcoming episode will be a tour de force: no fewer than five characters at once. Says Wolfe, “wigs are flying!” 

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Looking for a sign: Hayley Moorhouse’s Bird Signs at Nextfest

Posted on June 5, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Hayley Moorhouse in Bird Signs, Nextfest. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

See that bunch of sparrows hanging out on the cable that goes to your house? 

Obviously it’s a signal from the cosmos vis-à-vis your career plans. Yes, you should definitely apply for med school, or become a Presbyterian, or learn Finnish. Unless, of course, it’s a sign you absolutely shouldn’t.

Photo supplied.

The solo play that joins Nextfest’s online 2020 edition Saturday night is a funny exploration of that human urge to ferret out order and meaning from chaos and randomness. Bird Signs, says playwright/ actor Hayley Moorhouse, “came out of thinking about signs from the universe and how seriously people take that sort of thing.”

Some people read the signs as a way of “progressing, breaking stagnation, making a change,” she says. “The flip side is the people who can’t do anything without a sign telling them it’s OK. It makes people afraid to take the next step without one.” 

“I hesitate to say autobiographical, because that sounds really serious,” laughs Moorhouse, who’s droll and quick-witted in conversation. But she does concede that “it’s pulled from stories and moments in my own life….” The character we’ll meet in Bird Signs is “a heightened version of myself.”

Moorhouse is remembering a moment of seeing a lot of birds that  “appeared in weird ways that seemed significant….” The train of thought took her along a route that  arrived eventually at a play about “how powerful that is, the impulse to find meaning in something that’s a total coincidence….” 

“The idea that ‘it’s gotta be a sign!'” comes, she muses, from the human desire to find meaning in the minutiae of your life. “People want moments to be meaningful…. They want to be meaningful themselves, to find meaning in everything they do. And I wanted to explore that.”

“I have a very deep fear of being boring,” says Moorhouse, a smile in her voice. “A day when nothing interesting or cool happens is a downer.… It’s too much pressure on the world to cater to you.”

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One of Nextfest’s inspirational features is the way it follows its emerging artists forward. At last year’s Nextfest Bird Songs debuted as a workshop production. This year, when the entire massive festival has of necessity gone online, Moorhouse (and director Izzy Bergquist) have had to wrap their wits around a screen transformation for the show. The result, she thinks, is “a weird little art film!”

playwright Hayley Moorhouse in Bird Signs, Nextfest. Photo supplied

“We’ve taken the opportunity to trim the 45-minute piece to 10 minutes, and tried to keep the tone, the same comedic levity,” says Moorhouse of their collaboration with emerging filmmaker Bob L’Heureux. “Since Bob knows a lot about film, and Izzy and I knew nothing, we thought maybe shorter would be better.” And there’s this: “consuming theatrical content online is really difficult,” she sighs, on the subject of shortened attention spans.

For Moorhouse, like Bergquist a 2018 U of A theatre school grad (in acting and stage management respectively), it’s been a year of propelling stage pieces into different forms for different platforms. She was one of the nine artists who created personal scenes and performed them from their homes for Vena Amoris Projects’ live interactive online production Tracks. It was, she says, a fascinating experiment in live-streaming. And virtuoso on-the-spot problem-solving was de rigueur on a nightly basis. “In a regular (stage) show there are only so many things that could go wrong. With Tracks there were SO many things that go wrong — wi-fi signals, computer crashes, things beyond your control…. “

And the podcast world opened itself to her, as well. Moorhouse’s play Suspension, which premiered at the Fringe last summer, is part of Cardiac Theatre’s ongoing Alberta Queer Calendar Project of monthly podcasts.  “I like it as a podcast,” she says of “a cool opportunity to focus on audio elements, and the text.” 

And now, a film version of Bird Signs: Moorhouse is delighted. “Bob (cinematographer L’Heureux) knows how to find cool shots, and spaces,” she says. “Izzy and Bob are both visual people, amazing at finding great images.” Most of the footage was filmed in Bergquist’s apartment, with “fun outdoor shots” added after that.

“It’s really new for both of us,” says Moorhouse of this debut venture into pre-recorded film with Bergquist (who’s making her directorial debut with Bird Signs). “To make something and see what happens!”

Both play and film are “very self-aware,” she says. “Onstage it’s me saying ‘I know this is a play; I know I’m talking to an audience’. On film that becomes ‘I know this is a video I made for Nextfest … we’re trying to make it immediate, and I don’t know how’. I say that right to the camera’.”

“It’s a cool thing to not sneak around that…. the first step is to be really honest about what we can do right now.” 

Bird Signs

Theatre: Nextfest Arts Company

Written and performed by: Hayley Moorhouse

Directed by: Izzy Bergquist

Where: nextfest.org

Running: Saturday night (see full schedule at nextfest.org). 

  

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‘How do I find my place in the world?’ Meet Nextfest actor/playwright Dylan Thomas-Bouchier

Posted on June 4, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Dylan Thomas-Bouchier. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“My brain is spinning with this show,” says actor/playwright Dylan Thomas-Bouchier “It’s very much my conversation with myself.… How do I, as a new artist, find my my place in the world?”

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That show is Finding Spirit — a title that in itself might be a mantra for the festival of emerging artists that launches its 25th anniversary edition online tonight. On night #2, Friday, Nextfest audiences get a peek inside the spirit of its 21-year-old creator/star. “I don’t want to be the poster child or anything,” he says. “But everyone’s voice carries a certain weight. And I want to share what I can, as an Indigenous artist…”

What we’ll see, and hear, in his Nextfest live script reading — Thomas-Bouchier calls it a “scene-sharing” — isn’t Finding Spirit in its ultimate form. For one thing, it’s “very new and still developing in my brain,” says the Fort McMurray native who’s back in the West (with his family in Okotoks to be precise) on a pandemic hiatus from Montreal and the acting program at the National Theatre School. For another, “the dream would be to take it in front of a live audience and share it that way,” he says of his multi-character solo show, coming to you Friday on video from his bedroom. “I started it with the thought of doing it in a black box … with ideas for a set and projections.”

Friday’s performance (at www.nextfest.org) is a launch, of a show and a new theatre company. Night Owl Theatre is the mutual creation of Thomas-Bouchier and fellow Indigenous actor/playwright Zach Running Coyote. “We met at NTS call-backs, we really hit it off, and knew we’d try to work together…. We have lofty goals, eventually a full season (of their original work). And a show at Nextfest is a great opportunity to get the name out there. This is the start!” muses Thomas-Bouchier, a thoughtful and intensely articulate sort.

The online 2020 incarnation of the festivities is his third Nextfest. Last year, Thomas-Bouchier was in the cast of Josh Languedoc’s Indigenous adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. His Nextfest debut, the year before that, was as a creator: Room 801. “I look back now, it’s good and I enjoyed it, but I was young” says the playwright from the vantage point of 21 remembering his 18-year-old self. “At the core I was sad. And I just wanted to write something to get feelings out.”

Room 801, says its author, “was about a man who thinks he has the perfect life; he finds a girl; they have an apartment together. And eventually his world stars to crumble.…Later  you find out he’s been in the hospital for months, in a coma, and now he’s waking up.” The play was spun from Thomas-Bouchier’s own boyhood experience “being in hospital for many months recovering from leg surgery. That was my life, being there. And it was hard…”

He says appraisingly “I don’t judge that project now…. The goal was to write about that experience, and repressed memories about my early life came up and through art became clear.”

Theatre had a big presence in his early life, growing up in Fort McMurray. He’d watched his father, who taught at Keyano College and was a veteran community theatre actor, in shows. His first participation was in a local musical, the story of  Fort McMurray, “the biggest cast ever, over 100.” But Thomas-Bouchier wasn’t one of them. “I was too scared to go out for the auditions,” he says. “And I ended up on the tech side — follow spot was my introduction to theatre! And it was a great door. I got my head set on, I could hear everything, the stage manager run the show, the crew … I could hear the machine run.”

His acting debut came a year later, in a community production of Les Miz. “From the beginning I wanted to appreciate as much as I could….”

Who are the Finding Spirit people? Thomas-Bouchier pauses to reflect. “At the core, this play is a bunch of characters who are overwhelmed right now. Each of the characters needs to find something about themselves that’s missing…. The world around them doesn’t make sense, the toxicity in modern culture.”

Among the characters we’ll meet is “a ringmaster trying to run a circus … ‘I’m the MC. And before everything went crazy and things became overwhelming you didn’t need me guiding you through the world because you’d just listen; your spirit would be with you’.”

Some characters recur, among them a young boy watching TV, with its overwhelming assault of news. “He’s the audience for me; he’s my young self,” Thomas-Bouchier says. There’s an old man too, whom the playwright conceives as a sort of town crier. When the old man insists “‘listen to me; I have the answers for you’, the young boy stops him, and questions his rhetoric.”

The fabric of the play is woven from “monologues, moments, little scenes,” says Thomas-Bouchier. “As the show develops more people are going to talk to each other.”

As it is for so many of Nextfest’s 500-plus artists, the frontiers between artistic disciplines aren’t particularly meaningful to Thomas-Bouchier. He’s been trained as an actor, yes, ready for a career in professional theatre. But “the typical ‘audition and get an agent’ grind, it’s not for me…. From the start I knew I wanted to create my own work.”

“Who knows what my journey will be? Technically I’m still in school,”  he says. “I came into theatre for people…. I need a community of people to be around, to support and be supported by.” And hey, there’s a festival for that.

PREVIEW

Finding Spirit

20th anniversary edition of Nextfest

Written and performed by: Dylan Thomas-Bouchier

Where: www.nextfest.org

Running: Friday night (see full schedule at www.nextfest.org).

 

 

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The “what’s next?” comes to you: the 2020 Nextfest goes online

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“O my gosh!” declares Nextfest director Ellen Chorley, who has a great and natural talent for celebration. “I’m absolutely blown away by how special and magical it is! I’m so thrilled!”

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The playwright/ actor/ director/ mentor/ dramaturg/ curator/ artistic director is talking, in her inimitably energetic fashion, about the influential annual festival that has, for a quarter of a century, given us an insight into the creative minds and souls of the next generation of emerging artists.

True, every edition of the festival dreamed up at Theatre Network lo these many years ago has its own personality, as it plays across the pliable spectrum of theatre, dance, music, poetry, film, design, comedy, drag, multi-media. Still, safe to say that the 2020 edition, the 25th anniversary of the 11-day festivities that starts Thursday, is like no other.

For the first time you don’t go to Nextfest; Nextfest comes to you. It  happens at your place, available entirely for free at the click of a button. Some 450-plus emerging artists — “more like 600 by opening night” says Chorley — have raised the bar (and possibly the barre, depending on the show) dramatically on creative risk-taking. 

They’ve taken the entire festival online, every live performance, production, workshop, coaching session, niteclub, lobby gabfest. And they’ve done it whilst  maintaining social distance. Which takes some figuring, in a world of rehearsals

Playwright Ellen Chorley. Photo supplied.

“It’s a daily march of new problems and problem-solving,” says Chorley, who’s been part of Nextfest, in one way or another, since she was 16 — and who has often given the festival credit for launching her artist career.  “It’s been an incredible learning journey about how to transform art for a digital platform, how to support digital art…. So enlightening!”

Even when audiences can show up again in person, “I know for a fact we’ll keep some of the things we’ve learned,” she says happily. For one thing, “it opens up our audience! Widens our circle! They can be all over Canada, and the world, and that’s exciting, eye-opening!” — especially since a prime Nextfest goals has always been enhancing artist profiles and expanding career possibilities. One of the Nextfest playwrights, Lebogang Disele, went home to Botswana when the pandemic started, and she’s been creating and interacting from there ever since. “Yes! I guess we’re an international festival now!” says Chorley.

The ease of captioning has redefined accessibility, and opened up the audience in other ways, too, to housebound or deaf audiences for example. And every Nextfest theatre artist has ended up with a useful digital version or excerpt of their work to present to theatre companies as an archival calling card.

Here’s the challenge offered to Nextfest theatre artists by Chorley on April 1 — to wit, “we’re going online … are you in?” Amazingly, they all said yes, and came up with a variety of ways to transform their work (you’ll meet three of them in future 12thnight posts). “They’ve all had to go ‘OK, I imagined this piece as a live performance; how does it change in video format?’ It’s been fascinating to see,” Chorley says. Some shows are live-streamed; some have been captured. Each gets a single performance, plus Chorley’s offer of a live Nextfest slot next year — “if you’re still working on the piece.”

“And we’ve paid everyone to do it,” Chorley says. “I’m so pleased about that… As I well know,  it’s very rare to get paid to write a play. And emerging artists are the first to lose their gig.”

How has that been possible without ticket sales? “We have a great presentation model,” says Chorley, who points out that Nextfest was “set up to not be about ticket sales.. Artists don’t have to reach a bottom line or spend any of their energy getting people in the door. Nextfest is ‘presented’ by Theatre Network; they provide us with resources, a venue, some of the tech (technical expertise and equipment), the marketing. And they take the ticket sales….” The Nextfest budget, $160,000 or so, is underwritten by sponsors, like Syncrude, the CBC, the dating app Bumble, the Old Strathcona Business Association, and government funders. When the festival went online, they all stayed in. 

Of all the art forms that go into the Nextfest mosaic, theatre arguably poses the biggest challenge for digital transformations, as Chorley points out. “It’s the live element that is so special in theatre, the interplay (of the storytelling) with the audience. How do you do that?”

Amongst the many streaming services available, Chorley et al picked Twitch, mainly because “it comes with a chat box to go along with live content … a way for audiences to engage with what they’re seeing, while it’s happening, and for artists to engage with the audience. We lose our lobby, but we have a chat room. And even if the content isn’t live, the artist can jump in and say ‘I wrote this, or choreographed it, and it you have any questions I’m here’.” This pleases Chorley mightily.

“I do miss the sound of an audience, though, the laughing, the breathing,” says Chorley, permitting herself a rare sigh. “But there’s an interesting intimacy…. I’m sitting in front of my computer right now and I feel like it’s being performed just for me!”

Nextfest’s “performance niteclubs” have required a makeover for the online world, too. The always popular Smut Niteclub has been reinvented by curator Sarah Culkin: All Gender Speed Dating For The End Of The World. Chorley describes it as “half workshop half performance…. Basically, you just get to meet people. Not romantically per se.” Thirty-six people max register, and meet this or that person” in one of Zoom’s break-out rooms. “It’s a cool, funky online meet-and-greet.” 

“Connection between people is such an important part of what we do. And that is still happening,” says Chorley of a festival that’s an invaluable networking forum for young artists in addition to its benefits as a showcase. 

The other two niteclubs have become online experiences too. The artists invited by curator Mackenzie Brown to The  Extreme Supreme Quarantine PJ Party on Friday will in their pyjamas, at home natch. Emergent Emancipations on June 13, designed to coordinated with Pride weekend, is an interdisciplinary assortment of artists invited by Simone A. Medina Polo. Chorley predicts the focus will be music, “lots of it, and DJs!”      

There are workshops (the most requested topic is on the business of art and the sustainability of arts careers, subjects not invariably covered in theatre and film school). New this year are free mentorship sessions for participants, one-on-ones with an arts pro of their choice. The most-requested list is topped by actor/ playwright/ artistic director Kristi Hansen (of Azimuth and The Maggie Tree). Chorley calls her “the mentorship queen of Edmonton.”  

“I feel like this festival is a time capsule of what emerging artists wanted to make during this pandemic. What was it like creating art while social distancing? Or creating art when you feel disconnected from people? We’ve asked these artists to be so vulnerable, so brave. They’ve had to think so quickly!”

“I just don’t think we could done this, even close, even two years ago…. The technology has developed so much.”

That’s what you’ll discover when you press the Watch Nextfest button at www.nextfest.org every evening at 6 or 7 p.m. and meet a live host. What you get after that is three or four hours of every possible permutation and fusion of the “next,” as imagined by young artists whose urge to create is pretty much unstoppable. Just pray for a good wi-fi connection.

PREVIEW

Nextfest, 25th aniversary edition 

Theatre: Nextfest Arts Company

Directed by: Ellen Chorley

Running: Thursday through June 14

Where: online at nextfest.org.

  

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The strangest of seasons: a truncated year on Edmonton stages in Sterling Award nominations

Posted on June 1, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Robert Benz in The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Helen Belay, Nicole St. Martin, Isaac Andrew in The Blue Hour, SkirtsAfire Festival.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Two high-contrast shows, one a subterranean prairie slow-burn tragedy and the other a riotous blood-spattered revenge comedy of the Shakespearean persuasion, proved the top choices of jurors as the 33rd annual Sterling Award nominations were announced Monday — from theatrical exile online.

Michele Vance Hehir’s The Blue Hour, which premiered at the 2020 SkirtsAfire Festival, and Colleen Murphy’s The Society For The Destitute Present Titus Bouffonius, produced at Theatre Network, each received nominations in nine of the 24 categories, in Monday’s COVID edition of the annual preface to the Sterling Awards.

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The Sterlings, which get presented June 29 — also online — exist to celebrate the season just past on Edmonton stages. And it was, in the end, the strangest of theatre seasons, in an arts industry that has suffered devastating blows in the pandemic lockdown. A season truncated like no other, in which the curtain abruptly, unseasonably, came crashing down in mid-March two and a half months early — sometimes mid-rehearsal, with a dozen shows at least left to open. It invited (and got)  endless repetitions of the word “unprecedented.”

The Society For The Destitute Present Titus Bouffonius, a go-for-the-gusto bouffon version of Shakespeare’s gruesome Titus Andronicus, picked up nominations for director Bradley Moss and four of his five-member ensemble of actors playing amateur thesps playing characters in the lurid story: Helen Belay’s leading performance and Hunter Cardinal, Marguerite Lawler and Bobbi Goddard in the supporting-role (drama) category. Moss’s gleefully macabre production got nods as well for Tessa Stamp’s dumpster salvage set and her costumes (barraged by the season’s biggest hits in ketchup), and Scott Peters’ lighting.

Annette Loiselle’s production of The Blue Hour, one of five contenders in both the new play and independent production categories, has acting nominations for Ian Leung’s star performance as a morally conflicted preacher, and for two of his supporting-role cast-mates, Nicole St. Martin as a beleaguered single mother and Robert Benz as a conciliatory small-town mayor.

Named for formidable theatre pioneer Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, the Sterlings have continued the innovation of last year, gender-neutral leading and supporting actor  categories — the gender divide replaced by the designation of comedy or drama as determined by the jury. Last year, some 14 of 20 performance nominations went to women; this year 13.

The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Catalyst Theatre. Photo by dbphotographics

The other big nomination draws are two “musicals” that rattle the usual expectations about that form. Of seven Sterling nominations for Catalyst Theatre’s compelling original all-female espionage musical The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, inspired by real-life World War II history, two are for the score and musical direction by playwright/composer/lyricist/director Jonathan Christenson in collaboration with Matthew Skopyk. Laura Krewski’s choreography received a nod, too. And three nominations are for the stunningly theatrical, graphic novel-esque contributions, in costume, lighting, and multi-media invention, of designer Bretta Gerecke.

As You Like It. Photo by Dylan Hewlett.

The Invisible is in the running for outstanding musical, a category it shares with Daryl Cloran’s playful Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre version of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a musical collaboration between the Bard and the Fab Four, with a score of some 25 Beatles hits. It’s the recipient of six of the Citadel’s 26 Sterling nominations — including a best director nod for Cloran and a fight direction nomination for Jonathan Hawley Purvis, who provided the E-town season with its only body-slamming wrestling match

Six The Musical: Divorced. Beheaded. Live In Concert. Photo by Liz Lauren.

The five-show outstanding musical category is occupied, as well, by the clever, snazzy pop-rock musical that arrived onstage at the Citadel from the West End and Chicago Shakespeare Theater en route to Broadway. Six, which turned an Edinburgh Fringe success into something an awful lot bigger, conceives of the wives of Henry VIII as pop stars in concert. It received five nominations. And so did Kimberley Rampersad’s fiercely moving Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production of The Color Purple. The outstanding musical contender received Sterling nods for the director and for Tara Jackson’s deeply affecting star performance, in addition to contributions from musical director Floydd Ricketts.

Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play. Photo by BB Collective.s

A funny, frightening play that speaks, with maximum originality and force, to the mythologizing of pop culture and the prospect of connection in a post-apocalyptic world was produced jointly by two leading Edmonton indies: Blarney Productions and You Are Here. Andrew Ritchie’s inventively immersive production of the Anne Washburn hit Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play, which led the audience through three specially created “theatres” fashioned from the Westbury Theatre, received five nominations. 

So did the Citadel/Arts Club Theatre production of the challenging Pulitzer Prize-winner Cost of Living, which conflates economic privation with our conventional notions of disability. It’s one of two Citadel productions (along with Every Brilliant Thing) nominated for outstanding production, along with two from Theatre Network (…Titus Bouffonius and Bed and Breakfast), and Northern Light Theatre’s premiere production of Everybody Loves Robbie.

Richard Lee Hsi and Jayce McKenzie in Everybody Loves Robbie. Photo supplied.

The outstanding new play category is particularly competitive, with nominations spread among big and small stages. Fellow contenders alongside Nicole Moeller’s new thriller The Ballad of Peachtree Rose (which premiered at Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre), and Michele Vance Hehir’s The Blue Hour include the Citadel’s new 1940s adaptation of A Christmas Carol by David van Belle, Jason Chinn’s E Day produced by the indie Serial Collective (which takes us backstage at the actual Alberta election the NDP won in a landslide), and Everybody Loves Robbie, Ellen Chorley’s coming-of-age comedy. 

The nomination list even includes a production specially created in and for this isolating world we inhabit: Mac Brock’s Tracks, directed by Beth Dart, an immersive live event about storytelling from nine artists, in nine different home “theatres.” Techno whiz Bradley King had to figure that out, in order to get his Sterling nomination in multi-media design. 

The special Sterling awards, for outstanding lifetime contributions to Edmonton theatre,  and for career achievement in production and administration, are on hold till 2021 and the return of in-person celebration.  

And here they are, the Sterling Award nominees for 2019-2020

Outstanding Production of a Play: Cost of Living (Citadel Theatre/Arts Club Theatre); Bed and Breakfast (Theatre Network); Everybody Loves Robbie (Northern Light Theatre); The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (Theatre Network); Every Brilliant Thing (Citadel Theatre)

Timothy Ryan Award For Outstanding Production of a Musical: As You Like It (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre), The Color Purple (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs (Northern Light Theatre); Six (Citadel Theatre); The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Catalyst Theatre)

Outstanding New Play (award to playwright): The Ballad of Peachtree Rose by Nicole Moeller (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); A Christmas Carol by David van Belle (Citadel Theatre); Everybody Loves Robbie by Ellen Chorley (Northern Light Theatre); The Blue Hour by Michele Vance Hehir (SkirtsAfire Festival); E Day by Jason Chinn (Serial Collective)

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – drama: Tara Jackson, The Color Purple (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Alex Dawkins, The Ballad of Peachtree Rose (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Ashley Wright, Cost of Living (Citadel Theatre/Arts Club Theatre); Ian Leung, The Blue Hour (SkirtsAfire Festival); Christopher Imbrosciano, Cost of Living (Citadel Theatre/Arts Club Theatre)

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – comedy: Patricia Cerra, Happy Birthday Baby J (Shadow Theatre); Jayce Mckenzie, Everybody Loves Robbie (Northern Light Theatre); Mathew Hulshof, Bed and Breakfast (Theatre Network); Kristin Johnston, Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs (Northern Light Theatre); Helen Belay, The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (Theatre Network)

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – drama: Bahareh Yaraghi, Cost of Living (Citadel Theatre/Arts Club Theatre); Robert Benz, The Blue Hour (SkirtsAfire Festival); Nadien Chu, The Winter’s Tale (Freewill Shakespeare Festival); Janelle Cooper, The Color Purple (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Nicole St Martin, The Blue Hour (SkirtsAfire Festival)

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – comedy: Hunter Cardinal, The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (Theatre Network); Marguerite Lawler, The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (Theatre Network); Oscar Derkx, As You Like It (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Bobbi Goddard, The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (Theatre Network); Andrea House, The Bad Seed (Teatro La Quindicina)

Outstanding Director: Kimberley Rampersad, The Color Purple (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Bradley Moss, The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (Theatre Network); Daryl Cloran, As You Like It (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Trevor Schmidt, Everybody Loves Robbie (Northern Light Theatre); Ashlie Corcoran, Cost of Living (Citadel Theatre/Arts Club Theatre)

Outstanding Independent Production: The Blue Hour (SkirtsAfire Festival); Mr Burns, a Post Electric Play (Blarney Productions/You Are Here Theatre); Girl in the Machine (Bustle & Beast Theatre); Betrayal (Broken Toys Theatre); E Day (Serial Collective)

Outstanding Set Design: Tessa Stamp for The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (Theatre Network); Brianna Kolybaba for Mr. Burns, a Post Electric Play (Blarney Productions/You Are Here Theatre); John Dinning for Sleuth (Mayfield Dinner Theatre); Megan Koshka for The Blue Hour (SkirtsAfire Festival); Pam Johnson for As You Like It (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre)

Outstanding Costume Design: Cory Sincennes, A Christmas Carol (Citadel Theatre); Bretta Gerecke, The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Catalyst Theatre); Gabriella Slade, Six (Citadel Theatre); Tessa Stamp, The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (Theatre Network); Megan Koshka, The Blue Hour (SkirtsAfire Festival)

Outstanding Lighting Design: Tim Deiling, Six (Citadel Theatre);
Scott Peters, The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Buuffonius (Theatre Network); Elise Jason, Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs (Northern Light Theatre); Bretta Gerecke, The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Catalyst Theatre); Leigh Ann Vardy, A Christmas Carol (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Multi-Media Design: Bretta Gerecke, The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Catalyst Theatre); Bradley King, Tracks (Vena Amoris Projects); Sean Nieuwenhuis, Girl in the Machine (Bustle & Beast Theatre); Matt Schuurman, The Blank Who Stole Christmas (Rapid Fire Theatre)               

Outstanding Score of a Play or Musical: Aaron Macri, The Blue Hour (SkirtsAfire Festival); Darrin Hagen, Bed and Breakfast (Theatre Network); Jonathan Christenson & Matthew Skopyk, The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Catalyst Theatre); Mhairi Berg, Mr Burns, a Post Electric Play (Blarney Productions/You Are Here Theatre); Binaifer Kapadia, The Blue Hour (SkirtsAfire Festival)

Outstanding Musical Director: Roberta Duchak, Six (Citadel Theatre); Floydd Ricketts, The Color Purple (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Jonathan Christenson & Matthew Skopyk, The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Catalyst Theatre); Mishelle Cuttler, A Christmas Carol (Citadel Theatre); Ben Elliott, As You Like It (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre)

Outstanding Fight Direction or Choreography: Samantha Jeffery, Mr Burns, a Post Electric Play (Blarney Productions/You Are Here Theatre); Carrie-Anne Ingrouille, Six (Citadel Theatre); Ainsley Hillyard, Mr Burns, a Post Electric Play (Blarney Productions/You Are Here Theatre); Jonathan Hawley Purvis, As You Like It (Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Laura Krewski, The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Catalyst Theatre)

Outstanding Individual Achievement in Production: Brad Fischer, technician/operator; Tessa Stamp, production manager; Alana Rice, technician/operator; Nicole Diebert, scenic painter; Meghan Wearne, technician/operator

Outstanding Production for Young Audiences: Sleeping Beauty (Alberta Musical Theatre Company): Safe & Fair: Scene At Work (Alberta Workers’ Health Centre); Cinderella (Capitol Theatre)

Outstanding Artistic Achievement, Theatre For Young Audiences: Deanna Finnman, costume design, Sleeping Beauty (Alberta Musical Theatre Company); Gina Puntil, director, Safe & Fair: Scene at Work (Alberta Workers’ Health Centre); Kate Ryan, director, Cinderella (Capitol Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe Production: Queen Lear is Dead (Fox Den Collective); The Green Line (In Arms Theatre Collective); Boy Trouble (Vena Amoris Projects); Hack (Get off the Stage Productions; Reality Crack (Vibrate Productions)

Outstanding Fringe New Work (award to playwright): Hack by Dylan Rosychuk (Get off the Stage Productions); Reality Crack by Candace Berlinguette and Laura Raboud (Vibrate Productions); 5 South by Rebecca Merkley (Dammitammy Productions);The Green Line by Makram Ayache (In Arms Theatre Collective); Queen Lear is Dead by Jessy Ardern (Fox Den Collective)

Outstanding Fringe Director: Taylor Chadwick, The Flying Detective (Accidental Humour Co.); Dave Horak, The Bald Soprano (Bright Young Things); Valerie Planche, Queen Lear is Dead (Fox Den Collective); Kenneth Brown, Look at the Town (Poeima Productions); Leah Paterson, Swipe (Synaethesis Dance Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe Performance – drama: Amena Shehab, Hagar (Alma Theatre); Michael Peng, Red (Wishbone Theatre); Max Hanic, Boy Trouble (Vena Amoris Projects); Rebecca Merkley, 5 South (Dammitammy Productions); Candace Berlinguette, Reality Crack (Vibrate Productions)

Outstanding Fringe Performance – comedy: Mark Meer, Fear and Loathing and Lovecraft (Rapid Fire Theatre); Jenny McKillop, You Are Happy (Blarney Productions/ Dogheart Theatre); Elena Eli Belyea, Gender? I Hardly Know Them (Tiny Bear Jaws/Rapid Fire Theatre); Ruth Alexander, Two (Atlas Theatre); Cody Porter, The Flying Detective (Accidental Humour Co.)

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A world of uncertainty: a playground for improv. Dungeons, Dragons, and Die-Nasty

Posted on May 29, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Mark Meer as the Dungeon Master in Rapid Fire Theatre’s improvised Dungeons & Dragons. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a world of uncertainty, improv makes perfect sense. It’s no coincidence that in a crisis, award-winning artists in this improv-crazy theatre town have stepped up to the challenge, and improvised new ways to take performance online. Here are a couple of deluxe possibilities, one for Saturday, one for Monday.

A. We’re all looking for signs, a pattern, something to give shape to a formless, chaotic universe. Elite nerdery can help.

The “very last live show” Mark Meer he did before the Great Shutdown of 2020 was an improvised stage version of Dungeons & Dragons (an exportable Meer invention that’s been one of Rapid Fire Theatre’s biggest hits for a decade) at Dad’s Garage, RFT’s sibling comedy co. in Atlanta.

Colin Mochrie and Mark Meer in Rapid Fire Theatre’s improvised Dungeons & Dragons. Photo supplied.

On Saturday at 8 p.m., live, the Dungeon Master takes his improvised stage Dungeons & Dragons online, in a new socially distanced live streamed version. On Rapid Fire’s YouTube page, you’ll see Meer as the Dungeon Master, joined by a deluxe cast of improvisers led by Canadian star Colin Mochrie. “The patron saint of improv” as Meer calls him has appeared numbers times with Edmonton improvisers, who regularly attract a coterie of national and international players.

The cast includes Travis Sharp from Dad’s Garage, whose blue-chip nerdery credentials include creating a Star Wars musical called Wicket (in which the story is told from the Ewok perspective), Song of the Living Dead, and Change: Another Teenage Werewolf Musical. And the senior corps of RFT improvisers includes Joleen Ballendine, Gordie Lucius, Julia Grochowski, and Lee Boyes.

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“The return of regular characters, characters who have lived onstage and have a history with our audience, give continuity to the show,” says Meer. Cues from the online audience set them forth into the unknown.

Saturday’s live-streamed improvised adaptation on Rapid Fire’s YouTube channel comes at the invitation of Edmonton Nerd List’s Virtual Con. And it includes monster artwork by local artists Fish Griwkowsky, Stephen Notley, Nat Jones, Tim Mikula, and Trevor Sieben.

“Since we all existed in the old universe,” as Meer puts it, he’s spent a considerable time, at oddball hours of day and night, actually playing D&D online, using Zoom. His fellow players, far-flung across the globe and its time zones, include Adam Meggido (whose production of Peter Pan Goes Wrong is now on hold at both the Citadel and the Vancouver Arts Club Theatre) and Alan Cox (of School of Night fame) in Britain, and D&D devotés in New Zealand.

Connect to Saturday night’s show on YouTube here. (Donations to RFT welcome, of course).

B. It didn’t take long for Die-Nasty, E-town’s award-winning live improvised soap opera, to devise an alternative to its weekly onstage performances at the Varscona. They are improvisers, after all. A scant week after the great pandemic lockdown of March, Die-Nasty was back in action (thanks to the expertise of Peter Brown), with an online radio-play version of their 29th season, set in the golden age of vaudeville in the New York of 1919.

A cast of 14 (with guests) in their own separate homes (and a fetching assortment of wigs and hats) continued, on Zoom, the story set in motion last October 21 on the Varscona stage. Monday night’s final episode is the last grand flourish of the arc, an extravaganza of sudsy intrigue, murderous ambition, treachery, betrayal, upstaging, “backstage backstabbing” for top billing at the Ferguson Theatre (named in honour of weekly soap improv founding parent Ian Ferguson). Monday’s special guest is actor/improviser John B. Lowe, an Die-Nasty alumnus based in Kelowna.   

Expect “big news and revelations,” says Die-Nasty regular Stephanie Wolfe. She plays Juniper Jones, “a sassy brassy broad, a hula hoop/ singer/ dancer flapper and part-owner of the Ferguson Theatre who may or may not have killed someone.” Questions abound. “How did it get so weird?” wondered “burlesque queen” Daisy Darling in last week’s episode, when all she wanted was adulation by hundreds of millions.

Amongst other characters improvised for season, you’ll see Mark Meer as a character named from real-life history: silent movie star Lou Tellegen. Belinda Cornish plays a spoiled movie star named Geraldine Farrar, Tellegen’s real-life wife, who just wants regular things, you know like fame and fortune and her lover. Jesse Gervais is the Ferguson’s “cold, calculating, increasingly menacing” accountant, who arrived in last week’s episode wielding a gun. Kristi Hansen is the Ferguson’s stage manager Bobbie Smarts, who seems to have a homicidal jealous streak. Matt Alden as the jaunty Jack Potts has just invested every cent of his family’s money in the stock market. It’s 1921, and what with a 10-year growth period for stocks, what could go wrong, right?

What will happen? Who did off that obnoxious kid, anyhow? The only way to find out is to show up on Die-Nasty’s YouTube channel on Monday.  Here’s the link.     

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Girl Brain goes the (social) distance in a new series of online comedy sketches

Posted on May 28, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Alyson Dicey, Caley Suliak, Ellie Heath of Girl Brain. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Proposition: there is a funny side to everything. If you approach from oblique angles. 

While Ellie Heath was spending a month in quarantine at her mom’s place, she overheard a rambunctious maternal Zoom cocktail get-together. “Mom and her friends were all laughing, making jokes about cleaning out closets, especially the liquor cupboard, and happy hour starting early.”

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A new Girl Brain sketch was born: a day-long Zoom meet-up over copious quarantinis. In this riotous first of the comedy trio’s new socially distanced series of YouTube videos (directed by Belinda Cornish) we see Heath and her Girl Brain compatriots Alyson Dicey and Caley Suliak in their separate abodes, hoisting glasses, celebrating, getting more and more corked. Which only goes to show that you’re never really alone till Bacardi leaves you in the lurch. 

There are many things about the absurdities of the world and real life in these parlous times, theatre not excepted, that tickle the three clever and resourceful actor/writer, best friends who make up Girl Brain. But they admit, they were awfully old-fashioned sad when gigs in Calgary and a big two-year anniversary show at Theatre Network got cancelled, .

Girl Brain. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

“This isn’t funny!” Dicey remembers lamenting to director Cornish on a Zoom call. “My whole world was ending — for a few weeks anyhow.” The lack of each other’s constant company in person was a huge blow. Says Heath “we spend so much time together, and all of sudden to not be joined at the hip was a really disorienting feeling…. We live in the same ‘hood; we’re used to seeing each other every day! And there was the uncertainty of not knowing when we can be onstage together again.”

Life for the three lobes of Girl Brain has had its own special pattern, till the current derailment: they were constantly running into each other accidentally on purpose, going for coffee, hanging out, then “the minute we walk away from each other we’re texting…. I wouldn’t call it stalking exactly, but …” laughs Suliak.

What happens to a sketch comedy-writing team when they can’t ever be in the same room together?    

When Fred Kroetsch and David Cullen of Edmonton’s Catapult Pictures approached Girl Brain with “a creative proposition,” to create socially distanced sketch comedy videos in a world reconfigured by something as frightening and dark as COVID, they jumped at the chance. “O thank goodness, I get to work with my best friends again!” says Heath. Suliak says “it was a cool challenge to take something and make it funny while still being sensitive to people’s worries and real feelings.”

Girl Brain. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

Brainstorming by email and Zoom took some getting used to, not least because the Girl Brain sense of humour is closely allied to physical comedy. “No body language,” sighs Dicey. “And we’re just so used to playing off each other.” Says Heath, “a lot of the humour is visual, or specific to the environment. Or based on the screen freezing, and the editing.” Says Cullen, wryly, “stage directions don’t necessarily translate to how not to break the flow of a video….”

In Cullen and Kroetsch, Girl Brain found sympathetic partners. “We’re so lucky!” says Dicey of the Catapult contribution to the new videos, shot at the requisite safe social distance. “Fred sets up our location. Then we record ourselves,” with cellphones and computers. Now would be an excellent time, they feel, for a sponsorship: listen up, Apple. 

Episode 2 is a musical number. I Couldn’t Say No (not to Trudeau) is Dicey’s spirited love letter in song to her crush, inspired by the P.M.’s COVID performances. “Daily standing on your porch, you’re here for the nation/, a Canadian dude with a big daddy attitude….”

Dicey laughs. “ Every morning as Justin talks from his porch, it was an important comfort zone for me. My dad and I would watch together.” The day her father had the temerity to vacuum during the sacred broadcast, well, let’s just say he got a look that would freeze olive oil at 100 paces.

Facetime Date, episode 3, is a very funny online encounter marred by a constant stream of technical hiccups that you’ll recognize instantly from your own attempts at online socializing.

Girl Brain has always found that real-life dating is a rich vein of comic material. Have they actually tried COVID dating? Well, Heath admits to “scrolling through Bumble a bit. Then last Friday I had to get my garburator repaired. And my plumber was really attractive…. We went on a socially distant date this Monday. Yes, even in COVID love can happen. Not that it was love.” 

“Sounds like a romantic comedy,” says Dicey. “Face it,” says Heath,  “we’re starved for young male content…. It’s amplified any time a beautiful young man walks by.” Suliak objects. “He doesn’t have to be beautiful. Only slightly attractive. At the park, a dude walks by, and we’re ‘wasn’t that A Man?’”

Three are up, and more episodes are ready for release on Girl Brain’s YouTube channel and their Instagram page. The the new sketches “have been through the gauntlet,” says Suliak happily. “Workshopped, paired down, tweaked. A lot of brains have worked, and tweaked — more than for our live shows. And many minds are greater than one (or three).”

Find Girl Brain, socially distanced, on YouTube and Instagram.

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