Tag Archives: leona brausen

More to see on local stages this weekend and beyond

A gay community and an era and two lives, through ten funerals

Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik, as Younger Jack and Young Maurice, in 10 Funerals. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Occasionally I am watching some fictional characters on stage (or on screen, or in a novel), wondering what’s going to happen to them next. And suddenly I’m astonished to realize that these characters do not even exist outside of the scenes that I am seeing. That happened to me tonight, partway through the performance of 10 Funerals, Darrin Hagen’s new play directed by John Hudson for Shadow Theatre. I wondered about some things between the scenes, and about what was going to happen after the final scenes had played out, and I had totally forgotten that these characters were not real outside of this script – because they felt so real, so believable, so irritating and stubborn, so consistently themselves throughout the 35+ years spanned by the storyline. Which is particularly impressive, because each character is played by two actors alternating. Young Maurice is played by Josh Travnik and Older Maurice is Doug Mertz, and Jake Tkaczyk and Nathan Cuckow play younger and older Jack, respectively.

One fascinating thing about watching this production is working out which young character grows into being which older one, and learning about why. Some mannerisms continue, and some of the couple’s habits and rituals and petty arguments recur. I won’t point them out, because it’s more fun to notice them.

And at the same time we are watching this particular couple through the years of their life together and the various funerals they attend together, we’re seeing the personal effects of various aspects of gay men’s lives through the last 40 years. Not just the community funerals of the early years of the AIDS crisis, but the experiences of leaving small judgemental towns for cities with their own dangers, the various relationships with families-of-origin, the issue of not having a good word to describe what they are to each other, or the legal recognition of their relationship – and also the bars, hookups, drugs, drag queens, music, and style. Oh, the style! – costume designer Leona Brausen has done an amazing job of capturing the changing fashions in clothing, hair, and facial hair over the periods, and illustrating the differences between the characters, even in the understated situations of dressing for funerals.

Parts of this play are sad. Parts of it are horrifyingly illustrative of how the injustices of our lifetime have not all gone away, but we’ve become accustomed to them. But some of the dialogue and physicality is absolutely hilarious. 10 Funerals is playing at the Varscona Theatre until May 14th – including Pay what you can, Two for one, and Safe Sunday performances. Tickets here or at the door.

Evelyn Strange at Teatro

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Oscar Derkx and Gianna Vacirca, in Evelyn Strange. Photo credit Marc J Chalifoux Photography and Video

It doesn’t take me long to say yes when a friend offers me a ticket to opening of a Stewart Lemoine play at Teatro la Quindicina. I didn’t read anything about it ahead of time, though a glance at the program told me that Evelyn Strange was first performed in 1995, and that Shannon Blanchet, this production’s director, had played the title role in a 2006 production at Teatro.

The curtains open on a box at the opera. The Metropolitan Opera in NYC, in 1955. So it’s ornate and private and expensive — and somehow set designer Chantel Fortin and lighting designer Narda McCarroll make it feel like that, with just a few pieces that get slid away to become something else in the next scene.

The occupants of the luxury box are Nina Farrar, whose sophistication and snark are a perfect fit for Belinda Cornish, and her husband’s earnest young employee Perry Spangler (Oscar Derkx), tidy and respectful in Clark-Kent-esque glasses. Perry explains that Nina’s husband Henry gave him the ticket because he was tied up, charging him to keep Nina company and see her safely to her commuter train. And which opera is it that neither of them really wanted to see? Siegfried, a five-hour segment of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. (By the way, Sing Faster: the Stagehands’ Ring Cycle is a fascinating 1-hour documentary video, if you can find it.)

Evelyn Strange is a great example of Stuart Lemoine’s work and why Teatro does it well. The opening situation has unexplained threads, but the details and characters that appear next don’t resolve those questions but create others. The dialogue and action is amusing but never predictable. Jesse Gervais is Perry’s pushy colleague, poking into Perry’s secrets and holding his own. The eponymous confused woman who slips into the opera box after the lights go down, and slips away again before intermission, is Gianna Vacirca.

Things get odder. Some things seem to fall into place but other things are hinted. Settings like a publishing sub-editor’s office, an automat vending-machine restaurant, a hotel suite, Grand Central Station, and a bachelor’s apartment provide glimpses of mid-century modern chic, with a few well-selected details. Vacirca’s character, Miss Strange, claims to have no memory of her past – which would explain her, um, strange behaviour, assuming she’s now telling the truth.

There is a missing husband, a double-booked hotel room, evidence of trenchcoats and opera tickets and a $20 bill – in some plays, the details might never all fall into place and from other playwrights the hints would all be so obvious that we could figure out the outcomes at intermission. But not with Stewart Lemoine. At intermission my friend and I chatted about some of the possible explanations – we were right about some and wrong about others. And when the play ended, a patron behind us read out the list of predictions he’d jotted down at intermission to note how many of them he’d gotten right. It was that kind of play, like an elegant jigsaw puzzle.

And speaking of elegant, the 1950s-era costumes were designed by Leona Brausen. And speaking of jigsaw puzzle, one of the questions I had afterwards was “what did she have under that? and why didn’t it fall off?”

There are so many Stewart Lemoine plays that I haven’t yet seen, that I don’t want to use superlatives like “best”. But this production is most entertaining, with the directing and acting adding to a very clever script.

Evelyn Strange is running at the Varscona Theatre until June 12th. Tickets are available here and at the door. Masks are required when not eating or drinking – the usual list of refreshments including red licorice and Bloom cookies is available from the cheerful artistic associates staffing the lobby booth.

Teatro Returns with Caribbean Muskrat

Betrayal, by Harold Pinter

Theatre out of the theatre

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I attended three performances last week, none of them in conventional theatre spaces. And I attended a rehearsal in a living room, for an indie production that may culminate in workshop/performance in equally unconventional space.

There is something truly inspiring and welcoming about using found space to create and share performance, about taking advantages of the quirks of the location to develop site-specific performance, and about bringing live entertainment to places the audience is already comfortable with, rather than trying to draw new audiences in to a conventional theatre with all its inherent cultural expectations (do I dress up? do I fit comfortably in their seats? what if I get restless? can I afford it? can I bring refreshments? etc).

Two of the performances I attended this week were staged readings rather than fully staged productions. That means that the actors had the scripts in front of them, on music stands. There were no sets or props, no fancy lighting or sound effects, just the narrative and the actors delivering it.

Alberta Playwrights’ Network hosts a “Script Salon” once a month, a public reading of a new script by one of their members. This month it was Blaine Newton’s Bodice Ripper. (Blaine Newton’s play Bravo! about nuclear testing in the south Pacific was performed by Shadow Theatre a few years ago). Tracy Carroll directed the reading, and the readers were Perry Gratton, Jenny McKillop, Sam Jeffrey, Patricia Cerra, Jacob Holloway, and Jake Tkaczyk. The actors took turns reading the setting description notes and stage directions, and from these we learned that the action all took place in the main room of a small holiday cabin in the mountains, in the 1960s. The premise is that a group of friends borrows the cabin retreat with a plan to write a novel collaboratively – maybe a romance, a bodice-ripper, maybe a murder mystery or thriller, they can’t agree. Without a visible set, I pictured something like the cabin in Teatro’s Sleuth a few years ago, or maybe the Mayfield’s stylish Long Weekend, or the one in Ruth Ware’s thriller novel In a Dark, Dark Wood. As was pointed out in the lively talkback discussion afterwards, setting it in the 1960s “raised the stakes” for female characters who had been resenting the men who underestimated them – and it also provided for a fully-staged production to benefit from the audible and visual business of feeding paper into a typewriter, typing (quickly, slowly, or clumsily with mitts on), and pulling paper out to crumple it or file it. Script Salon is open to the public, admission by donation. The April session will mark five years of the project, and promises to also have cake and live music.

The other staged read I attended was Social Studies, a play by Winnipeg playwright Trish Cooper. The reading was in a suburban community league hall, hosted by a regular seniors’ social group there – there were folding chairs, a small stage, and a cheerfully-staffed snack bar, but no other theatre amenities – no dimmed lights, no sound amplification or hearing-assist loop, no reserved seats, no programs. And of course no set pieces, props, or actor movement. But I loved it regardless. Kristin Johnston plays Jackie, a young woman who arrives with suitcases (and metaphorical baggage) at her childhood home after a breakup, only to find that her mother (Leona Brausen) has given away her room to a Sudanese refugee (Deng Leng). Rebecca Merkley plays teenage sister Sarah. The play’s narrative intersperses snippets of a class presentation Sarah gives to her class about the Lost Boys of Sudan and Sudanese refugees in Canada, with scenes of how this works out in real life in the household. I thought the dialogue was well-written, credible, funny, and affectionate. It reminded me of a mix of Kim’s Convenience and Schitt’s Creek, in the way it portrayed 21st-century mismatches between parents and children, and between well-meaning people of different cultural and religious backgrounds. Specificity made it more powerful (audience members at the reading shared afterwards that they were familiar with the meat-packing plant in Brooks hiring Sudanese workers, as mentioned in the text). The readers were all good, bringing life to the script with comic timing and pathos, with Leona Brausen particularly powerful as the slightly-hippie single-mother/activist. The reading was directed by Jake Tkaczyk, who also read the stage directions.

In a change of pace from the staged readings, Tuesday night I attended opening night of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, with Gregory Caswell in the title role, Marisa West playing her husband Yitzhak, and musicians Matt Graham, Sean Besse, Connor Pylypa, & Sam Malowany as the backup band. Brennan Doucet directed. It was fully staged, with all the rock/punk music and over-the-top costumes. And it was performed in Evolution Wonderlounge, the small subterranean LGBT+ nightclub down the street from Rogers Place. This worked perfectly with the musical’s storyline that Hedwig and her band are performing in a low-prestige venue near where her estranged former lover/protege Tommy Gnosis is playing an arena show – and every now and then Hedwig throws open a door and we “overhear” Tommy Gnosis’s over-amplified between-songs musings.

Hedwig is a cult phenomenon, an off-Broadway show that opened in 1998, a film version in 2001, and a first Broadway version in 2014-2015 (I saw that one, with Neil Patrick Harris and Lena Hall in their Tony-award-winning performances). It’s a rather odd story, using the late-20th-century divided Berlin as a metaphor for love and gender and a seeking for wholeness and re-unification. Caswell owns the role and the stage, from eyeshadow to stilettos, a fierce, tragic, brave genderqueer performer telling us her story and singing her songs. Marisa West plays Hedwig’s Croatian husband Yitzhak, surly and resentful at the start but reborn in beautiful drag for the finale. Hedwig and the Angry Inch has one more performance tomorrow night (Saturday Mar 16th). It’s not quite sold out, but it probably will be.

Two theatre adventures in Old Strathcona

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The big ticket for my week was opening night of Martin Crimp’s adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope, at the Walterdale Playhouse, directed by Janine Waddell Hodder.

It was going to be my first encounter with Molière, so I picked up a copy of an English translation of the text in a used book store to prepare, and I used Wikipedia to learn that Molière was a 17^th century writer of comedy, so working about a century later than Shakespeare and Cervantes. I looked at the cast of characters, started reading, and was dismayed to realise a few pages in that it was not only written in poetry lines like Shakespeare but it rhymed. Application to internet resources confirmed that it rhymed in the original too. I don’t know why this annoyed me, since I am fond of rhyme in a stage-musical context. But it did. Anyway, I read the first couple of acts before going to see the play.

This was my first time attending anything at the Walterdale other than Fringe shows. It has comfortable seats on risers on two sides of a biggish thrust stage, and good acoustics.

I thought the play was very funny, and it probably would have been funnier for someone with a more intimate knowledge of the source text. For one thing, the dialogue (some of it possibly a different Molière translation than I’d read, and some of it completely modern) was in the same kind of rhyme and metre used in the source text. The actors – especially Brennan MacGregor who played Alceste – did a great job phrasing the long speeches for sense rather than emphasising the metre. In the first scene, Alceste and his sidekick John (Zachary Parsons-Lozinski) were talking very quickly, which was part of the humour but it took a bit more effort to follow. Some of the rhymes were gratuitous enough to be inherently funny: boring and Andy Warhol drawing, for example, which works as a rhyme in the sort of Estuary English that character was using. The characters had a variety of English and American accents consistent with their origins (with a little bit of French and a minor character something else – maybe Northern Irish?), and I thought the accents were well done, enhancing the story rather than detracting from it.

In the Molière story, the main character Alceste (the eponymous misanthrope) insists he prefers blunt direct speech, but he is in love with a woman named Célimène, who says cutting things to everyone but only behind their backs. One early scene illustrating Alceste’s character has him and his sidekick Philinte listening to a bad poem someone else has written about Célimène, and then Alceste telling the writer how crap it is.

In the version I saw, Alceste is a modern-day playwright in London, and the catty woman he’s in love with is Jennifer (Afton Rentz), an American movie star. The equivalent critique scene involves a drama critic (Bill Roberts) who begs Alceste to listen to a play he has written – well, more like a draft, a scene, notes for a scene. It’s awful, of course. Bill Roberts’ delivery is painfully good, and Alceste and John’s different ways of responding are very funny. Jennifer’s naïve repetition of good lines at her friends’ expense goes bad in the way a more media-savvy person would expect, and wacky hijinks ensue.

One of the funniest things about this play was the way that every now and then there would be some allusion to Molière or the 17^th century, culminating in everyone except Alceste showing up at the end in period costume for a party, while delivering the lines that worked equally well in the movie start’s hotel suite and in the French court.

It was also thought-provoking for me because I’m definitely not a person like Alceste who enjoys delivering blunt critique directly, and I don’t like receiving it either. I’m more like John, preferring a world where people are kind to each other first. This probably makes me not a very interesting reviewer, especially since I admire people who take creative risks in public so much that I just want to be a fangirl. Is it possible to be kind in person without being cutting in private? Sometimes sharing the good lines is hard to resist, so does that make me like Jennifer? Food for thought.

As you can see from my example, you don’t need to know very much about the original play to enjoy the adaptation and pick up on some of the inside jokes. The Misanthrope is playing at the Walterdale Playhouse until December 15^th, tickets at Tix on the Square. Also, the program says it’s 3 hours long – that’s a typo; it’s about 2 hours with intermission.

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My other new theatregoing experience this week was that I went to Die-Nasty for the first time. Die-Nasty is a very-long-form improv show at the Varscona Theatre: a season-long soap-opera with an installment every Monday night. This year it’s a Tennessee-Williams’-flavoured story of the lives of interconnected families in the Deep South, which leads itself easily to parody. Most of the audience seemed to be regulars, familiar with the characters and the routine of the show, and many of them had season passes with reserved seats. There was a brief summary of story-to-date in the program, and each character got a brief monologue to introduce himself or herself before the action got going. And there were lots of odd characters, similar to stock characters of that setting but with enough specifics to be original. There was one line with a possible interpretation in poor enough taste to disturb me (calibration – this rarely happens for me at improv performances), but in general it was just silly. I couldn’t work out how much of it was planned ahead of time – the narrator would introduce each scene or vignette like “meanwhile, back at the Beaumont plantation, the lawyer has some bad news”, and then the actors would do that scene.

A bonus for Edmonton theatregoers is the number of familiar faces on the stage, including Peter Brown of the CBC, Donovan Workun, Leona Brausen, Mark Meer, Matt Alden, and others. Die-Nasty tickets are also available at Tix on the Square, with performances every Monday (except Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve).

Ephemeral Pleasures

A few notes to save along with the theatre programs, restaurant bills, and concert handstamps

Tag Archives: leona brausen

More to see on local stages this weekend and beyond

A gay community and an era and two lives, through ten funerals

Evelyn Strange at Teatro

Teatro Returns with Caribbean Muskrat

Betrayal, by Harold Pinter

Theatre out of the theatre

Two theatre adventures in Old Strathcona