Tag Archives: jayce mackenzie

Two actors portraying youth in goth clothing, one male one female.

Candy and the Beast

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Jake Tkaczyk, as Kenny, and Jayce Mackenzie, as Candy, in Candy and the Beast. Photo Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

One of my Facebook correspondents called Candy and the Beast “this weird little play”. And he’s not wrong.

Trevor Schmidt’s latest original script on stage at Northern Light Theatre is disturbing and kind of delightful, both. I was thinking that it’s not quite like any of his other work that I’ve seen, but it takes advantage of a lot of things the writer/director/designer is good at. He’s good at poignant; he’s good at macabre; he’s clever at creating designs that enhance the mood and message of a production. He’s very good at the humour and dramatic-irony of naive child narrators, as we saw in Shadow Theatre’s recent production of Schmidt’s Robot Girls, about junior high school students in a science club making sense of families and friendship and growing up.

Candy and the Beast demonstrates all these strengths, in a performance a little over an hour long. The audience enters the Arts Barns Studio space in the fog and gloom, to be seated on low risers along one of the long walls and wonder what the menacing lumps on poles are, upstage. One of my neighbours, opening night, said that the lights were gradually coming up as showtime approached – but they weren’t coming up very much.

The play starts with two characters staring out at the world together through Hallowe’en masks and layers of goth-teen armour: Candy Reese (Jayce Mackenzie) is the main narrator, observing her little town and protecting her younger brother Kenny (Jake Tkaczyk). Younger, but not smaller – she prods Kenny to explain that he has a condition known as central precocious puberty, meaning that his body’s grown up while he’s still a little kid. So they call him The Beast. He says he doesn’t mind. She says he does.

And the town has some issues – not just the classism against trailer-park residents like Candy and Kenny and their parents, and general mistreatment of outsiders and weirdos, but a pack of howling animals in the nearby woods, and a serial killer at large – a killer picking off young blonde women, especially ones the town doesn’t care about. The story and mood reminded me a bit of Twin Peaks.

The sibling relationship between Candy and Kenny was one of the most compelling things about this play. The little boy adopts his tough big sister’s fashions, beliefs, and interests – his big sister beats up his bullies, helps him get to sleep, and reassures him that he’s not too old to trick-or-treat. As an oldest sibling, I found her mix of impatience and kindness easy to connect with. Their parents sound benign, but aren’t significant in the story. The play also says some important things about outsiders in a community.

Other characters brought to life in various scenes include self-absorbed real-estate agent Donna Crass shopping at the ice cream stand where Candy works, Sheriff Sherry Lau (“the long arm of the Lau”) updating townspeople about the investigation and search, a grandmotherly librarian helping Kenny research werewolves, and others. Tkaczyk, a member of the Guys in Disguise theatre-drag troupe, embodies some of these characters with distinctive voices and mannerisms.

The production is enhanced by Schmidt’s set and costume choices, dim and harsh lighting from Alison Yanota, and sound design and original music by Dave Clarke. The menacing lumps seen pre-show turn out to be a row of creepy heads on pikes, with the wall behind showing some graffiti left on the wall of Candy and Kenny’s trailer.

The performance includes several songs by Kenny (Tkaczyk), representing his thoughts, fears, and imaginings. They vary from eerie foreshadowing to a melodic ballad with a few songs reminding me of David Bowie’s 1980s repertoire, with effective use of recorded guitar track and echoey microphone.

I won’t reveal the plot events or provide any explanations of the mysteries, but I found some satisfaction at the end in a shift in the relationship between Candy and Kenny, as they become more honest with each other and give each other more comfort. I don’t know what will happen to these characters next, but I think it’s going to be okay. (And if you don’t think so, don’t tell me, because I really like both of them!)

Candy and the Beast is continuing at the Arts Barns Studio Theatre until next Saturday night, April 20th. Run time is about 65 minutes. Tickets are available here and at the door. (Tuesday Apr 16 is 2-for-1).

Trevor Schmidt’s Robot Girls, and other stories

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My calendar was full for a while working on Cabaret for ELOPE Musical Theatre (timely and chilling and also entertaining), but now I have a little more time for watching theatre as well as helping to make it.

Two weeks ago I attended the monthly Script Salon organized by Alberta Playwrights Network and Playwrights Guild of Canada, because the new work to be read was Trevor Schmidt’s Robot Girls.  It was wonderful and it made me cry.  Kristin Johnson, Rebecca Sadowski, Jayce Mackenzie, and Karina Cox played students in a girls’ junior-high robot-building club.  Stage directions were read by assistant director Patricia Cerra.

The playwright said in the talkback session afterwards that he had tried to consistently have his characters in this play choose to be kind.  I also had the impression that the playwright was kind to the characters, making them quirky and interesting but not at all parodies or objects of amusement.  And there was still enough challenge and drama in their lives to make it interesting listening/viewing – even in a staged read.  The wide social gaps between Grade Nine soccer-star (Johnston) and naive less-popular-twin Grade Seven (Mackenzie), between the student council president (Sadowski) and the new kid (Cox) were accepted by all the characters.  Watching them awkwardly navigate the group norms and transition to productive teamwork and cautious friendship made me happy.  The premise of the story – a continually-absent teacher-advisor, a school rule against cell phone use – gives us a situation where the four girls have to interact with each other while they work on the project.  And the incidental conversations ring true – about embarrassing parents, about annoying siblings, about various understandings of menstruation, about teachers and classmates and dreams of the future.  I loved that the characters are not preoccupied with boys, romance, or sex – this script passes the Bechdel-Wallace test easily, with the few conversations about boys mostly limited to the problems of having brothers or the ways in which boys in a mixed-gender school would take over the building project.

I thought that it was a play for adults, but that young people of the characters’ ages or five years older would also enjoy it and feel like it was a fair portrayal.  In an epilogue, we hear not only how the team fares at the robot competition/festival, but how each of the characters goes on in science and in life.

It reminded me a little bit of the wonderful 1999 movie October Sky, about boys from a West Virginia coal-mining town in 1957 who pursue rocket-building.  And it also reminded me of the recent movies Eighth Grade and Booksmart, films about present-day bright feminist girls navigating social challenges at school that show their young characters in respectful ways.  In both those films, there are no villains, nobody being gratuitously mean.  The protagonists get embarrassed, and they get into awkward and potentially risky situations, but they get themselves out of them.  They aren’t stories where the writers punish the girls for aiming too high, for acting on the crush, for going to the party with more popular kids.  In both films, things don’t quite work out as hoped for the protagonists, but they aren’t disastrous.  And after I saw Eighth Grade, I realized that there are an awful lot of stories where the plot punishes the outsider girl with humiliation, with slut-shaming, with sexual assault. It’s awful that I’m impressed when that doesn’t happen in a story.  But it doesn’t always happen in life, and it shouldn’t always happen in stories.

Maybe we’re into a new kind of stories about teenage girls, and I like them.   Trevor Schmidt’s Robot Girls is a good one.  I hope to see it on stage soon.