Tag Archives: jonathan christensen

Vigilante: inexorable tragedy with Catalyst style

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A new Catalyst Theatre production.  Their first show in the Maclab Theatre intimate thrust stage at the Citadel.  Part of the Citadel subscription series.  It didn’t matter what it was going to be about; I was going to see it for sure.

The fact that it was about the Black Donnellys of 19th century southwestern Ontario, their feuds with neighbours and their brutal mass murder, was a bonus.  I grew up in southern Ontario, and this was one of the true-crime stories that my classmates did fascinated book reports on (that and the story of Evelyn Dick and the murder of her husband even closer to home in the 1940s).  Although I hadn’t actually read The Black Donnellys, The Donnellys Must Die or James Reaney’s play cycle, I felt familiar with and connected to the story.   And with that superficial knowledge acquired as a young person, I think I probably reconciled the story in my brain as “fair” on some level – a family of outlaws commits various crimes on their law-abiding neighbours and gets murdered because of it.

But partway through last night’s first preview performance of Jonathan Christenson’s new rock musical about the family, I changed my mind.  Christenson’s version provided some sympathetic portraits of the young immigrants James and Johanna Donnelly (David Leyshon and Jan Alexandra Smith) fleeing their feuding families in Co. Tipperary, Ireland for a fresh start in Canada, discouraged and cheated in acquiring Ontario farmland, and discovering their immigrant neighbours tenacious in the grudges of the Old Country.   As in the best of Shakespeare’s tragedies, the family’s strengths (fierce loyalty to each other and determination to succeed) are also the qualities leading inevitably to their downfall.  The performance made me care about them and mourn them.

So that’s the story.  But it was a Catalyst Theatre production, with Jonathan Christenson credited as writer, director, composer, and librettist, and the Catalyst design aesthetic expressed in ragged near-colourless layers of costume by Narda McCarroll, in cold stark lighting by Beth Kates, and in the spare barn-skeleton set by Christenson and James Robert Boudreau, so it was told with style.   I’ve seen two other Catalyst productions, The Soul Collector and Nevermore: the Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allen Poe (which is playing off-Broadway until the end of March).  I found Vigilante more passionate and more accessible than either of them, but still stylized and atmospheric.  Like the other two plays, much of the story is told in narration to the audience, in this case mostly by eldest son William Donnelly (Carson Nattrass).  Most of the text seems to be prose, unlike Nevermore which is full of rhyming couplets.   And there was music.  The music played by Matthew Skopyk, Morgan Gies, Emily Siobhan McCourt, Nathan Setterlund, and Kurtis Schultz had elements of screeching hard-rock guitar, frenetic Irish-dance fiddle, lyrical love-duet poetry, and persistent compelling drumming, and there was singing and movement.  I don’t have a very good memory for tunes, so I can’t recall anything well enough to sing it today, but I wish I could.   Oh, except for the repeated motif “tick…tock… goes the clock … light the lamp and lock the lock …” I loved the music, despite some occasional difficulty hearing the singers over the band in the first act.  There were also a few moments where the music, the powerful movement in boots, and the industrial shadow-lit set reminded me of the U of A’s recent Studio Theatre production of Threepenny Opera.

Neighbours and adversaries of the Donnellys were played by the same actors who also played the six sons, Nattrass (William), Scott Walters (Tommy), Kris Joseph (Daniel), Eric Moran (Robert), Lucas Meeuse (Johnny), and Benjamin Wardle as the youngest Michael.  All of the characters in the story had accents with enough Irish features to be credible yet comprehensible, consistent with growing up in an immigrant community.  The Donnelly sons also swore a lot when they were angered or when being wound up to fight by their mother.  Sometimes the modern-sounding vulgarities made audience members giggle nervously, and pulled me out of the story a bit.

The action started slowly in the first act, with William and his brothers giving an introductory narrative then Johanna and James falling in love in Ireland despite family opposition.  Things speeded up after intermission, with the family members’ doom coming closer and more unavoidable.

Vigilante is playing at the Citadel until March 29th.  Tickets are available here.  Tonight (Sunday March 8th) is the Pay What You Can performance, and I would imagine that the ticket line-up for that at the Citadel box office is forming as I write.  I liked it and I found it challenging, so I’m trying to figure out if I have time to see it again.  But on this week’s calendar I also have Fiddler on the Roof, The Falstaff Project, First Time/Last Time, and a U of A Drama production of A Winter’s Tale, and before the end of the month also Arcadia, dreamplay, and Book of Mormon.  So much theatre, so little time.

A dream within a dream: Nevermore

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The Westbury Theatre was sold out.  The Arts Barns lobby was filled with a queue folding back on itself like a pack of ramen noodles.  Lots of familiar faces from the Edmonton theatre scene and lots of twitter buzz reinforced what I’d heard: the opening night of the new Catalyst Theatre production of Jonathan Christenson’s Nevermore was a big deal.

Nevermore recounts the life story of Edgar Allan Poe, the American nineteenth-century writer of the creepy and suspenseful.  Compared to The Soul Collector,  a Christenson / Catalyst production I saw last spring, the narrative of Nevermore is direct and almost completely linear.  But it’s still a supremely weird show, set in a world where nothing is normal.  (Nothing is right-angled either!)  It was also interesting to view this show recalling Emily Winter’s portrayal of Poe in last summer’s Fringe hit Poe and Mathews.

Most of the story is told by one of the narrators speaking directly to the audience in rhyme, while the characters in that part of the story interact physically and sing together.  This works better than you might expect, conveying a literary and distanced mood but showing the affection and awkwardness among the flawed individual characters.

Scott Shpeley plays Edgar, from about age 8 to his death at 40.  He does the whole show in the same odd black and white costume and makeup, but his motions and postures show obvious changes from child to adolescent and young man to older man.   His appealing clear tenor voice works well for the character at all ages.   As a child, he frequently looked small, fearful, and pitiable, trembling all over.  In one of the glimpses of happiness, when he falls in love with his young cousin (Beth Graham), his face is illuminated by joy.  And in one of the moments of anguish he lifts a tear-streaked face to the audience.

The other six actors in the ensemble play several parts each, with various additions to hair or costume.  Garett Ross and Vanessa Sabourin are Edgar’s ill-fated parents (with the portrayal of his moody actress mother being especially poignant), and Gaelan Beatty and Beth Graham his siblings.  Ryan Parker’s characters include a Paul-Lynde-ish portrayal of the biographer Rufus Griswold.  Shannon Blanchet was Elvira Royster, a character seen as a teenager and again as a widow.  One of the best portrayals was Beth Graham as Fanny Allan, Edgar’s foster mother, trying to win over the orphaned boy despite her surly merchant husband (Garett Ross) and struggling with despair.

The visual designs for this production were fascinating and spare, consistent with what I understand of the Catalyst Theatre aesthetic.  Bretta Gerecke is credited as scenographer and resident designer for the company.  I was intrigued and then captivated.  All the costumes are black and white, twisted impressions of nineteenth century dress.  Black boots are made noticeable with white accents.  Rigid wires hint at hoop skirts and frock coats.  Harsh monochrome lights turn costume elements reddish or bluish.  Hats and hairdos are odd and extreme, from punkish spikes to one of the women’s updos looking very much like a stalk of Brussels sprouts.   Human and non-human characters with long mis-shapen claw-hands reminded me of similar imagery in The Soul Collector.   I loved the rhomboid oversized notebooks and asymmetric undersized trunks.   Many characters adopted odd hand and body positions like twisted sculptures.

Nevermore is playing at the Westbury Theatre until the afternoon of Sunday March 2nd.  If you like going to weird theatre, unconventional musicals, or shows that everyone in Edmonton will be referring to for years, then you should make time in your schedule for this.  You can get tickets at Tix on the Square.  There are also some $10 youth tickets available at the door for each performance.