Tag Archives: even gilchrist

Peter Quilter’s Autumn – delightfully specific

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Even Gilchrist’s set for Autumn, at Shadow Theatre, with lighting by Rory Turner.

Lana Michelle Hughes’ first directing gig as the new Artistic Director of Shadow Theatre is the poignant and relatable portrait of two bickering sisters, Autumn. Not “middle-aged sisters”, because as Rose (Karen Johnson Diamond) points out, sixty is only middle-aged if you’re going to live til a hundred and twenty. Oof.

Slightly younger sister Kathryn (Cathy Derkach) arrives for a planned visit, filling up the space with suitcases and drama. Rose tidies her away “You’re in the big bedroom” and settles her down and responds with gentle snark to Catherine’s criticisms of everything, from the snacks to the wine to the plans for the garden. Catherine mostly doesn’t even listen, busy with attention-grabbing stories about her current divorce and advice Rose hasn’t asked for.

We learn that this isn’t Rose’s home – they’re meeting at their late parents’ second home or retirement cottage. Many of the specific details in the set (Even Gilchrist) now make more sense – the main room is a cozy and appealing space with exposed beams and brick, but it feels like it was decorated in the 1980s or 1990s, with two comfortable non-matching recliners, shelving units holding everything from a cassette player and tapes to a worn Trivial Pursuit game, prints on the walls and a white-board calendar on the fridge.

And they’re meeting to plan and prepare for Catherine’s daughter Imogen’s short-notice (shotgun) wedding, which they’re going to host at the house. The action takes place in the 10-day period between Catherine’s arrival and the wedding. Long enough for the sisters to poke at each other’s sore spots, and get to know more about each other’s current lives, reveal some assumptions and address some conflicts.

When you hear the basics of this story – two bickering sisters, one daughter/ niece’s arrival anticipated, a handsome young neighbour to ogle while doing yardwork – you might recall one of the plays in last year’s Shadow season, Kristen da Silva’s Where You Are, a four-hander with similar characters. But I thought the concept was rich enough and the characterizations compelling enough in Autumn that I was completely engaged, and eventually satisfied. Both performers portrayed their characters with prickly affection and amusing consistency. The costume choices (Ami Farrow) helped me get to know who they were, Kathryn in blouses and blazer, skirt or dress pants and heels, tasteful solids, but Rose in colourful drapey things and Birkenstocks, undyed hair in braids.

But unlike Where You Are, in which the audience gets to see the sisters interacting with the daughter / niece (Nikki Hulowski) and the young neighbour (Brennan Campbell), in Autumn there are only two performers on stage. Kathryn’s daughter Imogen and her fiance Daniel, and the gardener Barry, are all part of the narrative, but we don’t exactly see any of them, and that’s not a distraction. Apart from a few stage-crew hands delivering props through doors, these three characters are evoked entirely by the very specific actions and gazes of Derkach and Johnson-Diamond, with support from the lighting (Rory Turner) and sound (Lindsey Walker) atmospheres. The set includes sliding doors to the yard, with lattice-top fence behind and barely-visible greenery behind that. The lighting and the music and sound selections make it easy to believe that a wedding’s taking place in the garden, and then that the newlyweds are passing through the cottage, collecting their motorbike helmets, and heading down the driveway, as we watch the relieved mother and aunt hover on the edge of the party and send them off. The director and performers have convincingly created the non-visible elements of the story and followed them through with consistency.

There are happy endings in Autumn, the kind of resolutions that are satisfying because the imperfect characters stay who they are, just with a little more understanding of each other and self-awareness. And maybe it landed more strongly with me because I’m thinking of my own faraway siblings and niblings in my birthday week – but I enjoyed it.

Autumn is playing at the Varscona Theatre until May 24th, with tickets here.

The Maids: Chilling, ambiguous, memorable

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Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia Van Dam as Solange and Claire, in The Maids. Photo by Kyle Tobiasson and PoppyRose Media.

A setting of sparse hygienic extravagance is created in the basement auditorium, with a shiny-white floor, forty pairs of stiletto-heels in every imaginable colour and finish lined up against the wall, chairs that state membership in some school of architecture, and huge bunches of long-stemmed flowers surrounding the structurally-necessary concrete pillars of the room. A young woman (Hannah Wigglesworth) in modern house-cleaning garb (spotless white sneakers, baggy black jeans, yellow latex gloves, a uniform smock with pockets) rushes in with a caddy of cleaning supplies, and begins scrubbing surfaces urgently.

This is the beginning of Jean Genet’s The Maids, translated by prolific English playwright Martin Crimp, as currently performed by independent production company Putrid Brat, in the basement-level space in the Pendennis Building on Jasper just east of 97 Street. It is the kind of play where lyrical text and menacing elliptical delivery leave some matters unexplained. Some become clear later, and some … do not.

A key point is the two maids (Wigglesworth and Julia Van Dam) playing a game or enacting a “ceremony” in which one of them plays the mistress, abusing and abasing the other. The other embraces the dynamic with enthusiastic consent and a certain eroticism which becomes more uncomfortable as one recalls that the two maids are sisters.

After some of this roleplay, in which we also learn more about the mistress’s life circumstances, a timer goes off and the maids rush to restore the room and their own costumes, to be perfectly prepared for the mistress’s return. They didn’t have time to reach the climax of their “game”, which would involve killing the mistress. And it’s not clear whether that’s an actual plan, or not.

Our expectations of the mistress have been formed from the way the young women have embodied her in the game – and when Alex Dawkins stalks in wearing a drapey fur coat and a figure-hugging dress, she confirms my impression. Her character is powerful and mercurial, dangerous and compelling. She is completely caught up in her own problems and her own drama, depending on her maids as mirrors but not recognizing them as individuals. Musing on how her lover’s incarceration will affect her life, she tries on a tired-of-the-world pose, “I’m giving up clothes! I’m an old woman!” but allows her maids to coax her out of it.

The harsh lighting and occasional ambient sound in the low-ceilinged room, the stalking and pacing, the mistress shouting and the maids rolling their eyes behind her back while hinting at strangulation or poisoning, create and build a menacing atmosphere. The ambiguity between reality and shared imaginings contributes some uncertainty but doesn’t lessen the menace. The ending is not entirely clear and not entirely satisfying, but left me musing on power dynamics in a stratified society, as I checked my phone for messages from work.

The play is directed by U of A professor David Kennedy. Design elements are credited to Beyata Hackborn (costume), Even Gilchrist (scenic design), and Nick Kourtides (sound), with artistic contributions from other people familiar on the local scene. Performances continue tonight (Sunday evening) and Tuesday through Sunday evenings next week, with tickets available through Showpass.