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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.

Pageant, down home style, second try.

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Last year I didn’t manage to see Best Little Newfoundland Christmas Pageant Ever at the Varscona, because I left the ticket-buying too late and the only performance I could get to was sold out and I didn’t make it up to the top of the waitlist.

This year I got closer.  I actually saw the first half of the show before looking at the clock at intermission and realizing I’d mis-calculated the time of my later-evening commitment, so I wouldn’t be able to stay til the end.  So I’ve seen half of this show, and next year it is definitely going on my booking list earlier.

Like the Christmas Carol, I got the impression that many of the patrons at this show had seen the production in previous years and were anticipating the jokes, whereas my only familiarity was with the source material.  And I suddenly realised partway through the show that the fussy little girl Alice (Lindsey Walker), the one who gets ousted from her perennial pageant role as Mary by Imogene Herdman’s (Cheryl Jameson) and her brothers’ (Graham Mothersill, Corbin Kushneryk) threats, was missing the point complaining constantly about the way their story wasn’t sticking to the traditional telling of the Nativity, so I had better throw out the little list in my head of all the ways in which this adaptation deviated from the original Barbara Robinson novel since I was missing the point in the exact same way.

Fortunately, I had this realization, or generally got caught up in the show, early enough to be enjoying it.  There was a cast of only seven, including a piano player (Jeff Black), and a little bit of amusing double-casting.  That meant that not all the canonical Herdmans were on stage, just Ralf (“with an F”), Leroy, and Imogene. But it worked out fine.

In written fiction, I am always a little slow to recognize unreliable narrators or other quirks of a first-person point-of-view character.  In the stage version, then, I was surprised to find the narrator character Beth (Kayla Gorman) a bit of a caricature, with distinctive child-like can’t-stand-still and seeming to side with Alice’s disapproval of the Herdmans.  It wasn’t at all inconsistent with the source material; I was just caught by surprise.

Compared to the novel, then, Beth’s mother the pageant director has a bigger role.  Mrs. O’Brien is played with appealing earnestness, bewildered but coping, by Natalie Czar-Gummer.  She incorporates the audience in the story as kids showing up for auditions, and then has each section sing one of the carols as shepherds, wise men, or angels.

The adaptation was originally done by  a company in Newfoundland, with a few changes to the original story like the usual director having collided with a moose, and the church being Catholic.  The performers’ accents are credible and not overdone.  It felt like an affectionate tribute to a culture where lots of Edmonton residents have roots.

Note to self:  if this plays next Christmas, buy a ticket early and block off the whole evening.