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Four Plays

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Abby Krushel and Shyanne Duquette as the two Hannah Morgans in Fetch. Photo provided.

It was odd to get several days into Fringe and realize that I hadn’t yet spent time viewing traditional multiple-actor plays, except for Matt & Ben. I missed them, while still enjoying performance art, improv, and solo shows. But now I’ve seen a few more dramas and comedies.

Fetch, by Cat Walsh, was originally a 2018 Fringe production with the playwright and Lora Brovold on stage. I didn’t see that one, The 2026 production, directed by Steven Sobolewski, stars Shyanne Duquette and Abby Krushel. The two actors burst onto the small stage of Acacia Hall in near-identical dresses, carrying identical suitcases, speaking over each other and with each other to each insist “I am Hannah Morgan.” And each begins to narrate the story of her life – one tragic, one less so – but with suspiciously similar details. Each recounts the events of a big family vacation to an amusement park – as the youngest of a big family, six-year-old Hannah resents the vacations she missed out on being born last, and the way that siblings moving out to university and on to extracurricular activities and jobs signify the end of the family-adventures era. Krushel’s Hannah recounts her grievances with the age appropriate self-centredness of a loved youngest child, while Duquette’s character drops hints of bitterness and bereavement. Were there two families in the same reality whose lives had intersected that week? Were these two Hannahs embodying different multiverses, different outcomes? The Hannahs allude to the Schrodinger’s cat paradox – a cat in a box might be either alive or dead, until the box is opened. The weirdness ratcheted up along with the excruciating tension, as horror approached. I was reminded of Walsh’s 2015 Sterling-Award-nominated script The Laws of Thermodynamics . One of my favourite bits was when Duquette’s character is reminding the audience of the required ritual of speaking to a grieving person, the I’m sorry and Thank you shifting into taking the exchange as a given. It’s very well done.

Seanchaí, by young local playwright Gavin Bradley, isn’t marked in the program as New Work – I guess because it had a successful entry at StageStruck! and the provincial one-acts festival last year. But this is its first longer run, and it’s being well received by Varscona Theatre audiences. Susan Sneath, an Edmonton Fringe artist since the festival’s first summer, plays a retired seanchaí (storyteller and oral historian in the Irish tradition), and Mark Guerrero a young person who’s been retelling the traditional stories for TikTok. The grudging respect and growing affection between the two unfold as they tell the stories to each other, correcting and challenging. Its poignant and relatable and also affectionately funny. Knowing bits of Irish language means getting to laugh at a few lines first, but definitely isn’t required to follow the story. Knowing the folklore (Cú Chulainn, Children of Lir, Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Salmon of Knowledge) is also not necessary, as both storytellers provide compelling versions. Amanda Goldberg (recent Sterling Award winner for directing Jessy Ardern’s Cyrano) directed, bringing an understated delicacy and allowing the characters to show their quirks without being stereotypes.

Another small story of a gentle interaction between two isolated characters is Being Norwegian, David Greig’s script directed by Amy De Felice at the Holy Trinity Anglican basement space. The 45-minute play is set in Sean’s (Cody Porter) barely-unpacked apartment, late at night, as he brings home new acquaintance Lisa (Clarice Eckford). Both characters have Scottish accents, but Lisa explains that her name is short for Liselotte and she’s Norwegian. And they’re both awkward. Likeably awkward. The audience is sighing in sympathy as Sean tries to find a bottle of wine and can’t find glasses. His visitor assures him that mugs are better anyway, takes a sip, and manages to communicate to the audience that the wine is terrible without letting Sean see that. Porter and Eckford are both very good at this kind of nuanced portrayal of ordinary people – I’m remembering Eckford as caregiver daughter in The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble and Porter in Angry Alan, Betrayal, and others.

Queens of Romance, by Trevor Schmidt, is sillier than any of the above, and an audience favourite. Three romance writers are on a panel at a convention – the usual moderator is unavailable due to some whispered family scandal, so fan Missy (Schmidt) gamely takes the podium and the clutch of cue cards and tries to carry on. The panelists embody the range of romance-writing styles. Jason Hardwick portrays the Barbara Cartland-type Dame Nausea with smugness and pathos and dignity (but not all at once!) wearing the most over-jewelled caftan I’ve ever seen. Michelle Todd’s Janet writes about contemporary celebrity infidelities with luxurious descriptions – there are probably throbbing members in her stories. And the youngest of the writers, Karen (pronounced Karin), (Jake Tkaczyk), writes erotic suspense, with unapologetic kink and brutal imagery. Each of the writers is critical of the others’ choices, naming some of the problematic issues with women’s agency, racism, classism, transactional sex, and women feeling shame about their desires – all while conducting snappy repartee with each other and the ill-equipped moderator (and possibly with audience members). While I was admiring the pre-set before the show started, I was amused to see Schmidt’s anxious moderator character peeking out from the side curtains looking worried.

Trevor Schmidt, as Missy the moderator, peers out at audience before the show starts.

More to see on local stages this weekend and beyond

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First, you have three more chances to see Flop! before it closes Sunday evening May 28th. If you haven’t yet been to a show at Rapid Fire Theatre’s permanent home, Rapid Fire Exchange on 83rd Avenue, this is a great reason to check out the venue. Ron Pederson and Ashley Botting bring an inspired variation on the musical-theatre-improv genre which uses the framing of two performers unexpectedly being stuck without script, lyrics, set, or costumes, just a musician (Erik Mortimer), so they call for audience suggestions and build a musical on the fly. Like skilled stage magicians, they increase the entertainment value of what they’re doing by making it look hard, sometimes stepping out of character between scenes to work out what to do next. I’m accustomed to improv troupes who appear to do impossible things easily – Rapid Fire’s own Off Book: The Musical, Gordon’s Big Bald Head – and I loved the extra layer of entertainment in seeing Pederson and Botting acting being terrible at something they are actually brilliant at. I hadn’t seen Ashley Botting on stage before – except in her recent guest appearance in Die-Nasty’s current improv drama Doctors – and she is delightful. Tickets for Flop! and future Rapid Fire shows are available here.

Boy Trouble, the new two-performer version of Mac Brock’s script, has two more performances in the Studio space at the Fringe Arts Barns, this afternoon at 2 pm, and this evening (which is showing as sold out on line.) I haven’t been able to see this one yet but I loved the solo version of it which inspired this retelling, at NextFest 2019 and then again at Fringe 2019.

Prison Dancer at the Citadel closes tomorrow afternoon. The performance this afternoon (Saturday May 27 at 1:30 pm) is the last audience-masks-required performance of the Citadel season. Tickets are available here.

Several years ago I attended a staged reading at the APN Script Salon of a new play called Anahita’s Republic, about women’s lives in contemporary Iran. Even in a music-stands reading in a plain meeting room, the script grabbed my attention and shook up some of my assumptions, so I was excited to see it fully staged. The company AuTash Productions, and playwriting team Hengameh E. Rice, have had two full productions – a recent one at Toronto’s Factory Theatre directed by Brenley Charkow, and this one directed by Brian Dooley, with a completely different cast and creative team. Roya Yazdanmehr is compelling as the eponymous Anahita, a woman who runs the family business and weathy household according to her own rules. From the first scene, when she strides in after a swim, applying lotion to bare legs, and then responds to her brother/business-partner (Yassine El Fassi El Fihri as Cyrus) who is pleading for money for his children’s activities, she did not fit my assumptions about how women live in that particular regime. But their history, and its effect on them, unfolds more slowly, making it more shocking to imagine this woman as a militant 16yo beside her late mother in a crowd of protesters. The next character who enters is a woman in a chador, Omid (Jennie George), but once again, my first assumptions about her life were wrong. Michael Peng plays Omid’s father, business associate of Cyrus and Anahita. Late in the play, when they are all in a situation with no good solutions, Anahita talks about different kinds of freedom and about how nobody is really free. Their situation has a resolution, but it’s not ideal. The play made me want to see more complex stories like this, coming out of a context I don’t know well but not limited by it. Program notes and vocabulary are provided through a QR code, and a large display timeline about event’s relevant to women in Iran on the lobby wall – including both mandatory “unveiling”, with enforcement, and mandatory “veiling”, also with brutal enforcement.

Tickets to Anahita’s Republic, playing until June 4th at the Fringe Backstage, are available here.

In a complete change of mood, last night I attended the opening performance of Elyne Quan’s Listen, Listen! as part of the Teatro Live! season. I giggled so much that another audience member commented to me and my companion about it at intermission.

Farron Timoteo plays a mall bookstore worker passionate about selecting background music, Nadien Chu plays a customer who objects to the music, and Nikki Hulowski and Alex Ariate play a hilarious collection of ensemble characters in the bookstore workplace. The play is set in 1986, which means that the sound designers (director Belinda Cornish and stage manager Frances Bundy) got to use all the catchy tunes of that era, costume designer Leona Brausen, fresh from designing for 10 Funerals, with half its scenes in that era, got to evoke memories of women’s soft-tie business blouses, asymmetrical hairstyles for young people, and leather ties, and the playwright got to stick in lots of dramatic-irony jokes about how people in 1986 expected the future to go.

Like many of Stuart Lemoine’s works performed by Teatro, this play was an affectionate portrayal of quirky characters, plot-driven but with lots of scope for entertaining character business. It was a lot of fun. Tickets are here.

Other theatre events coming up – I may not make it to all of them, but I’m noting them here for you –

Helen, the Euripedes comedy about Helen of Troy directed by Amy de Felice outdoors at the Queen Elizabeth Planetarium, runs to June 4th.

CHUMP, by Sue Goberdhan, is “about growing, grieving, and being Guyanese”. It is being workshopped and will have one public performance at the Fringe Studio June 11.

Nextfest, the annual festival of and for emerging artists, runs June 1-11.

The Sterling Awards nominations will be announced at 5 pm on June 5th at the Arts Barns, and winners will be celebrated at a more affordable event than the pre-pandemic Mayfield galas, also at the Arts Barns on Monday June 26th.

Walterdale Theatre’s 2023-2024 season launch event will also be held June 5th – doors at 7 pm, event at 8 pm.

And … in August it will be Fringe! Fringe 42: The Answer. (Do you know where your towel is?)

Busy stages at the end of November

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What a busy couple of weeks it is for Edmonton stages!  If your weekend isn’t already full, there’s lots of theatre to watch, with these four shows all closing this weekend.

Fen, by Caryl Churchill, is playing at the Varscona Theatre until Sunday.  Amy De Felice’s Trunk Theatre production is fascinatingly atmospheric.  The trapped and oppressed lives of farm-workers in the cold drizzly fen country of England were portrayed with compelling credibility.  I looked at the women picking potatoes in ill-fitting gloves, on their knees on a cold day, and I remembered what it was like to be tying grapes in March, saying to myself that the money would get me out of here, the money would take me to university, I would never need to do this again.   Most of the people in the play don’t have any realistic hopes for escaping their lives, and their unrealistic hopes are heartbreaking.  Even the children in the story are joyless, trapped and powerless and sometimes abused (I found those scenes the most upsetting of the whole play, but not by a lot).  It is unusual to see a farm story about women’s lives not be a story of land-owning families.  But in this story, most of the women (Ellen Chorley, Monica Maddaford, Miranda Allen, Julie Golosky, Jennifer Spencer) are employed as day labourers or crew foremen, and the men (all played by Cody Porter) include a labourer and a landowner who sells his land to a corporation and becomes a tenant.    The story reminded me a lot of the subgenre of Canadian literature about homestead isolation and despair.

Another hard important story to watch is on stage at the Backstage theatre behind the Arts Barns.  Guys in Disguise / Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre is premiering a rewrite of Darrin Hagen’s Witchhunt at the Strand.  Set in Edmonton in 1942 or so, the story is based on primary source material about criminal trials for homosexual behaviour.  Jesse Gervais, Mat Hulshof, Doug Mertz, and Davina Stewart each play lawyers and police officers as well as the men caught up in the witchhunt and their friends and partners.  The scene where one of Hulshof’s young characters is on the stand being questioned in horribly intrusive detail about a sexual encounter was one of the most uncomfortable things I have witnessed in ages.  The main characters in the story were all involved in the Edmonton theatre scene, including Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, in whose honour the Sterling Awards are named.  Mrs Haynes is shown as what would nowadays be called an ally to the LGBT community.  I cannot imagine how the 1940s attitudes of privacy and discretion would have discouraged her choice to be a character witness for her theatrical colleague in a morals case, and I found the character as written very sympathetic.

Witchhunt at the Strand made me very grateful that I grew up mostly after Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had said “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation” and decriminalized same-sex sexual behaviours.  It also made me think about how I had been influenced as a child by the grownups around me who remembered the era of the play, not all of whom were straight.  And it made me cry.

Anxiety is a Theatre Yes co-production with several small theatre companies, brand new and unexpected and … and they asked the viewers not to post about it.  If that intrigues you, check whether they have any tickets left this weekend.

Twelfth Night is much funnier and easier to watch.  It’s playing until Saturday night at the Timms Centre.  Ashley Wright, an MFA directing candidate, directs a version with simple staging and a framework of watching a company of travelling players arrive at the theatre, warm up in their underthings, and get into costume.  Julien Arnold, Dave Clarke, Jaimi Reese, and Jake Tkaczyk play the broad-comedy roles of the script, with Reese as Olivia’s mischief-making gentlewoman companion, Arnold and Tkaczyk as the partying uncle Sir Toby Belch and his awkward trying-too-hard sidekick Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Clarke in a variety of clownish roles.  Clarke also created and performed interesting songs and underscoring for the production.  Contrast with the fun-loving quartet comes from Malvolio (Alex Dawkins), Olivia’s dour steward, whose pride makes him vulnerable to one of the most memorable practical jokes in the history of the stage.  Did he get what he deserved?  Or was it unfair that he was bullied and apparently driven mad, with the pranksters getting away with it?  I can’t decide.  Watching Malvolio try to smile and gesture as he expects his mistress wants is kind of painful, but it’s also very very funny.

Look-alike twins Viola and Sebastian are played by Chayla Day and Jordan Buhat.  Day’s physicality readily conveys a woman who is inexperienced at passing as a man.  Marc Ludwig is lovesick Orsino, courting Olivia (Emily Howard) who wants nothing to do with him, using her dead father and brother as an excuse until she is captivated by Orsino’s new pageboy Cesario (actually Viola).  Olivia’s reactions to Cesario are delightful, and her discovery that her crush is actually a woman is particularly so.