Tag Archives: elise forier edie

Northern Light’s The Pink Unicorn: hopeful and loving

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Patricia Zentilli as Trisha Lee in The Pink Unicorn. Images Brianne Jang BB Photographic. Set and costume Trevor Schmidt, lighting Larissa Poho.

The first production in Northern Light Theatre’s 50th-anniversary season is The Pink Unicorn, by Elise Forier Edie, directed and designed by Trevor Schmidt. I meant to tell you about it last week, but for some reason my blog host wasn’t letting me post pictures. So I waited, since I love the promo photos of Trisha telling her story.

And it’s so good! Patricia Zentilli plays small-town Texas mom Trisha Lee. Trisha’s been raising her only child Jolene alone since her husband Earl died when Jolene was six. Various details show that she’s always been proud of her daughter and supported her in being her unique creative self. So when Jolene tells her mom that she’s going to start high school as an agender and pansexual person, named Jo, Trisha responds as well as she can manage – helping to shop for a leather jacket, and looking up the unfamiliar terms on the internet at work. She worries a bit about whether the other kids will mistreat Jo, but reassures herself and the audience that Jo looks “real cute” in her buzzed hair and black boots. By this point I realize that it’s not just me – that the whole audience is clearly on Trisha’s side here. We might feel superior from our 2025 perspective, already knowing the vocabulary – but Trisha Lee is so easy to relate to, a loving parent trying to support and protect her kid, who’s living a life Trisha doesn’t understand.

You might remember that Northern Light produced this solo play in 2015, with Louise Lambert performing, and with Trevor Schmidt directing and designing. I think the current production brings us a more nuanced portrayal of Trisha. I was struck by her bravery, in the way she did uncomfortable things because she needed to – from her history of getting a job and carrying on as a single parent after her husband died, to her steps into activism on Jo’s behalf.

Trisha also tells the audience parts of the story that don’t reflect well on her, acknowledging that some of the thoughts are things you aren’t supposed to say. But the comments she makes without apologizing help to remind the audience that she’s still part of that particular culture, where “Latino, Hispanic, and Chicano” are all still used, and in the inner monologue we’re privy to, she always refers to Jo as “she”, not as Jo’s requested pronoun of “they”. That particular point reminded me that maybe I’m making judgements based on superficialities too. Trisha is doing so much to support her daughter and the rest of the unofficial GSA, why do I even notice the pronouns detail?

Patricia Zentilli as Trisha Lee in The Pink Unicorn. Images Brianne Jang BB Photographic. Set and costume Trevor Schmidt, lighting Larissa Poho.

The set design (Schmidt) creates the sense of a feminine living-room – even a jug of pink lemonade on the coffee table – in front of a fascinating background with dainty pink wallpaper torn open to reveal a sculptured rural landscape. Lighting (Larissa Poho) and sound (Darrin Hagen) enhance the shifts in storytelling tone and location, through a church service, a downmarket bar, and a protest in the rain. Trisha’s outfit includes boots and a silver-medallions belt over a pink patterned dress and large hair, but it feels contextual rather than caricaturistic (I’m doing a rewatch of the small-town-Texas TV show Friday Night Lights, and she’d fit in there if she wanted to).

Also – parts of it are hilarious! Zentilli is great at delivering funny lines that the character doesn’t see as funny, or doesn’t stop to enjoy. This is no surprise to anyone who’s seen her in various big-stage musicals at the Citadel or the Mayfield,

The Pink Unicorn is both provocative and hopeful. In the author interview in the show program, Forier Edie says that if she were writing it today, she might write a “scarier” version. But I loved the reminder that people’s minds can be changed, one at a time, by really listening to the people they care about. And I appreciated the call-to-action at the end, where Trisha points out to us that doing the hard thing isn’t just for people who are already good at it. I know there are lots of Jos around here, and lots of Elijah Breakenridges. And I know that not all of them have a Trisha in their corner. But Trisha’s story shows that you don’t have to be an experienced advocate to start doing the right thing for someone you care about – just do it.

The Pink Unicorn is playing at the ATB Arts Barns Studio Theatre until October 11th. Tickets are here.

The 50th season of Northern Light!

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Northern Light Theatre announces their 50th-anniversary season!

Next year will be the 50th season of Northern Light Theatre, an independent company whose mandate includes bringing challenging, thought-provoking, unfamiliar, and entertaining work to Edmonton audiences, with particular attention to stories of women. Artistic Director Trevor Schmidt has a particular gift for play selection, so that a Northern Light season typically includes at least one playwright I’d never heard of, but whose work captivates me and might be relatable or disturbing or both. Schmidt is also a playwright himself, with ventures into the poignant, the macabre, and the screamingly funny.

Last year’s NLT season was themed “Making a Monster”. Schmidt’s own Monstress started the season with a disturbing gothic Frankenstein-esque tale that left me thinking I wasn’t sure who the monster was. Angry Alan, by Penelope Skinner, starred Cody Porter as an ordinary guy who gets sucked in by “men’s-rights” rhetoric, with horrible consequences. And Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin showed a different kind of monstrousness, but was hilarious at the same time. It was one of the most thematically-effective seasons I’ve ever seen.

This coming year is called “The F Word”, as a play on the age of fifty being unspeakable. And the three plays each have some call-back to aspects of Northern Light’s history. The first one is a remount of the award winning The Pink Unicorn, by Elise Forier Edie, which was an award-winner in the 2014-2015 season. Trevor Schmidt told me that this production will use an updated version of the script, which is shorter and more cohesive. Patricia Zentilli will play Trisha, and Schmidt promises an all-new design, with a twinkle in his eye. If you’re not familiar with The Pink Unicorn, it’s the solo narrative of Trisha, a small-town Texas woman whose daughter begins to identify as agender, genderqueer and pansexual. Trisha loves her daughter, but struggles with her community’s intolerance, in a fight she didn’t choose. In 2015, I thought it was topical and ahead of its time — in 2025, I imagine I will find it even more topical, and definitely not dated!

Before Christmas is another Trevor Schmidt original, How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold At The Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition. The excerpts read at the season-launch included Jenny McKillop as a frazzled mum looking for an activity of her own, and Leona Brausen reading as another middle-aged-tap-dancer character. It seems like it will be very funny, but also an effective reminder of community and of loneliness.

The exploration of loneliness will come to the fore in the last play of the season, Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Request Programme. Instead of presenting an excerpt from this play, the teaser given at the season-launch was a performance by singer-songwriter-guitarist Cayley Thomas (a U of A BFA Acting grad), a wistful and moving song about missing her late brother. Schmidt explained that for each performance of this play, one actor from NLT’s long roster of talented female-presenting performers will perform a character’s solitary life routine without dialogue, while a soundtrack of a radio “request programme” plays in the background. The music on the request programmme will all be from local female artists, including Cayley Thomas. Some of the actors have already been identified – Linda Grass, Holly Turner, Nadien Chu, Michelle Todd, Pat Darbasie, Sylvia Wong, Davina Stewart, Kristin Johnston, Cheryl Jameson, Melissa Thingelstad – and with a few more still to be confirmed.

Early in 2026, the NLT Board will also be hosting some kind of gala 50th-anniversary celebration, details to follow. But the F-Word season seems commemorative and celebratory enough in itself. VIP season subscriptions are currently available here at an early-bird price until July 2nd.

Pink Unicorn, and other samples of diversity

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I loved The Pink Unicorn.  I loved its narrator Trisha (Louise Lambert), a widowed mother in a small Texas town.  And I loved seeing how I misjudged Trisha, first seeing her tailored floral outfit, big hair,  and fussy mannerisms and hearing her Texas accent, and assuming that she would be overly concerned with appearances, tradition, and approval of authority.

I was wrong!  The more I got to know about Trisha, the more I respected her and enjoyed listening to her.  Because not only did she start out with a more complex background, she grew and changed over the course of the events she recounts, starting when her daughter Jolene tells her that she wants to start high school as Jo, a person without gender, genderqueer and pansexual.  The playwright Elise Forier Edie has been very clever in creating a protagonist who is uninformed to start with but eager to learn about concepts of gender in order to understand her child.  So Trisha reports that she began to research on Wikipedia, and at first you can hear the air quotes around every phrase that comes out of her mouth, “androgyne” “LGBTQ” and “gender continuum”.   At first she doesn’t see the point of it, just gamely goes on with supporting Jo because she’s always wanted her to be able to be herself.  The audience can feel a little superior because Trisha is bewildered, but the script gives the audience lots of information along the way and brings everyone up to speed on vocabulary and concepts.  And sometimes this is very funny.  Her description of the gender continuum first has Charles Bronson at one end and Marilyn Monroe at the other, herself close to the Marilyn end and Jo somewhere in the middle, but when she explains it to someone else later in the story, she starts at the hypermasculine end with Charles Bronson, then she adds Clint Eastwood, then Hilary Clinton, then a big gap before Brad Pitt.

The performance has Trisha aware of an audience, telling the story to outsiders like us and addressing us directly.   Her occasional bad language and vulgarity is startling and delightful, because we know that she doesn’t usually use it to other people.  And when she expresses some unkind thoughts and reveals prejudices, it matters.  She knows she shouldn’t be saying mean things about fat people, lesbians, or disabled people, and she isn’t doing it to get a laugh – she just needs to admit those thoughts because her mis-judgements matter to the story.

As Jo and her friends encounter resistance to forming a Gay-Straight Alliance at school, Trisha finds herself drawn into their fight and discovers unexpected allies of her own.  I especially loved the matter-of-fact part about her alcoholic brother – the script had no glib attempt to explain his alcoholism and bad choices with past-trauma tropes, and Trisha discovers that he can still offer her meaningful support despite his sickness.   Trisha’s Biblical interpretations and Jo’s speeches about freedom and diversity are useful background for anyone who needs to argue in support of Gay-Straight Alliances or other support for diverse genders and sexualities.

Trevor Schmidt directed the play and is also credited with designing the playful pink and peach set and costume.   In the show I attended, the performer had the best line-prompt call I’ve ever seen, staying completely in character and improvising a reaction to the prompt that had the audience laughing and on her side.

The Pink Unicorn is playing until February 28th at the PCL Studio at the Arts Barns.  It is an impressive solo performance of a good script, it is a story of contemporary queer lives that has a happy ending, it is a celebration of family love and personal growth that are not in contradiction, it is enjoyable for people who are familiar with LGBTQ issues and those who are not, and it is a valuable discussion-starter that has had me thinking ever since.   Tickets are through Fringe Theatre Adventures.  If you live far enough from Edmonton that you can’t see this show and you wish you could, you can buy an electronic copy of the script here.  You can arrange performance rights through the author, whose contact information is on the same publisher’s page.