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Trevor Schmidt’s Monstress

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Preset for Monstress

I’ve seen so much good performance in the last couple of weeks – it’s like Fringe, without the green onion cakes. I’m behind on writing it all up, and next I’m going to Pirates of Penzance.

I didn’t post about Monstress right away because it’s harder to describe than some of the other productions on local stages this month. Monstress, the first show in Northern Light Theatre’s season, left me unsettled. And I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be unsettling. It’s a premiere written, directed, and with set and costume design by Trevor Schmidt. Lights are by Larissa Poho and sound by Dave Clarke.

Performers are Sydney Williams (The Doctor) and Julia van Dam (The Body). That gruesome and impersonal credit is consistent with what we see early on. The Doctor tells us that despite her expulsion from the school of dissection and medicine, she has been able to continue her work in understanding human life to the extent that she can bring it back after death. She is dressed and/or lit in a bottle-green colour, reminiscent of some earlier era (steampunk? Victorian? it’s not specific). At first, her monologue about whether she is actually a monster herself does not seem to apply literally – it feels atmospheric, like some type of poetic overstatement.

Then she explains that a Colonel sent her the body of his daughter Lydia Chartreuse, recently dead from a riding accident. Actor Van Dam lies immobile on a lab in the basement lab (like the eponymous Rocky of Rocky Horror, but really not). Lighting makes her skin and her bodysuit into some flat chill colour between alabaster and pale green. The Doctor then uses her knowledge and additional equipment funded by the Colonel in attempts to re-invigorate the body.

These attempts appear to be successful, in a way. The Body can move, but it/she seems to have lost adult understanding, so the Doctor must teach her, must, in a way, raise her like a child or train her like a pet. Van Dam’s slack-jawed clumsiness and naive questioning conveyed a childlike tabula rasa,

After the two of them move out of the city to rehab at the Colonel’s private country estate, Van Dam also plays the housekeeper, poised and veiled and apparently in possession of even more information than the Doctor. It seemed to me that the Body/Lydia had information about her death and her previous life, that the Doctor did not. As an audience member trying to piece together the backstory, I wanted the Doctor to ask the right questions – and she didn’t.

The situation reminded me a bit of the 2018 Northern Light production by Bryony Lavery, Origin of The Species, in which an anthropologist (Holly Turner) discovers a live prehistoric woman (Kristin Johnston) and tries to accustom her to modern life, and a bit of the NLT’s 2016 production of Wish (adapted from a Peter Goldsworthy novel by Humphrey Bower), in which a young man (Christopher Schultz) develops a relationship with a sign-language-communicating primate, Ainsley Hillyard. Many NLT productions make me ask questions about what it actually means to be human, and to be humane, by considering edge cases. Provocative and unsettling edge cases.

I began to think that the Doctor didn’t want to know more about Lydia’s past, or about what was likely to lie ahead for her. Since I could make some horrifying guesses about both, I flashed back to the Doctor’s top-of-show musings about whether she was the real monster. Because … maybe she was. Like the scientists of Jurassic Park, she was so preoccupied with whether she could, she didn’t stop to think if she should. Because she didn’t care. And by the time the play ended, my worries about Lydia were modern-day realistic horrors. My feelings about the Doctor were mixed up with far too many true stories about people who don’t have the best interests of vulnerable people at heart – are they actively evil or oblivious and negligent, and does intent even matter?

Monstress is playing at the Arts Barns Studio until November 23rd. Tickets are available here. The theme of their season is Making a Monster – and I am starting to see why.

Tiny Beautiful Stories

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Michelle Todd, foreground, and Michael Peng, Sydney Williams, and Brett Dahl, in Tiny Beautiful Things. Photo Marc Chalifoux.

If you haven’t already seen Tiny Beautiful Things, the Shadow Theatre production of the Nia Vardalos play currently running at the Varscona, do try to fit it in before it closes on Sunday afternoon.

Tiny Beautiful Things is a set of vignettes portraying the interactions of an advice-columnist, inspired by Cheryl Strayed’s essays based on her time writing as Dear Sugar. Michelle Todd is wonderful as the writer who lands the columnist gig, giving advice from her heart and from her own messy experiences. The character seemed so warm and human and honest, folding laundry in her house wearing mismatched loungewear/pajamas (Leona Brausen costumes), that I wanted to take her home.

The rest of the ensemble (Michael Peng, Sydney Williams, and Brett Dahl) portray people who write to her, and other people in her stories such as her mother. Each of them gets a chance to play people of various ages and genders, adding to the impression that there are a lot of different correspondents. I didn’t ever feel like any of the portrayals were caricatures.

During the performance, I was reminded of several other plays I’ve seen. The first comparison was with Veda Hille, Bill Richardson, and Amiel Gladstone’s Craigslist Cantata, the series of songs and sketches about transactional connections on an internet classified-ads site, but I quickly decided that Tiny Beautiful Things was less frivolous and more thoughtful, as the interactions through an advice-column were about seeking understanding, rather than finding second-hand property, missed-connections on a commute, or a metalhead roommate for a metal house (although that one was so catchy that now it’s an earworm again).

When I realized that the conversations between Sugar and the letter-writers, often physically located at Sugar’s kitchen table or in her living room, were being done without the actors touching, and usually facing towards the audience, I remembered Duncan MacMillan’s Lungs, also directed by John Hudson for Shadow Theatre, with Elena Porter and Jake Tkaczyk as an unnamed couple recollecting the milestones in their relationship, while speaking to an unseen listener and never touching, not even in the sometimes-hot sometimes-hilarious sex scenes. And then in one of Sugar’s conversations, they do touch, and it matters.

Sugar’s advice and support, completely grounded in love, and the heartbreaking range of the ordinary people’s problems, also reminded me of a newer script which none of you have seen yet, unless you’ve been in a rehearsal hall at Walterdale Theatre during preparations for next week’s new works festival From Cradle to Stage. The festival, running May 14-19, presents three staged readings each night, for a total of nine new scripts by local playwrights. I helped select them, so I think they’re all worth seeing – but the one that came to mind yesterday when I was watching Tiny Beautiful Things was Kristen M. Finlay’s Modern Day Saints. In Finlay’s script, ordinary contemporary women struggle to do the right thing in a range of difficult and painful and familiar situations, starting from a student without enough money to pay her tuition fees dealing with unsympathetic bureaucracy. As in Tiny Beautiful Things, the glimpses of compassion and hope in the ensemble vignettes are life-affirming.

Tiny Beautiful Things starts with an electronic tone, and then another – I thought, is that a message notification? is that a piece of original music? and then I thought, Oh, there’s a Darrin Hagen sound credit, I bet it is both. And it was.

It goes without saying that it made me cry. In a good way. It also made me feel grateful for having friends to tell life stories with, and for seeing how crafting an experience into a story helps make sense of it.

Tickets for Tiny Beautiful Things are here. Tickets for Walterdale’s From Cradle to Stage festival May 14-19 are here. Modern Day Saints plays on May 17 and May 18 – but descriptions of all the new plays in the festival, by Bridgette Boyko, Donna Call, Kristen M. Finlay, Grace Li, Shawn Marshall, Madi May, Blaine Newton, Logan Sundquist, and Michael Tay are here.

Fringe 2022: Just a few more!

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I left my final weekend mostly open because I didn’t know if I’d have much energy and enthusiasm left, but I ended up wanting to fit in more shows I’d heard or read about. And I don’t regret it. All of these are now closed, of course, but some may have future runs at other festivals or elsewhere.

The Bender – Corine Demas’ three-hander about a grieving middle-aged woman (Demas) and her short-lived relationship with a much younger trans man (Kai Hall) she meets through a poetry-reading group (“Open hearts, open minds”). The third cast member, Steven Darnell, plays another poet, and amusingly also plays all the hookups the couple find on dating sites. I liked that the playwright didn’t aim for a conventional ending with any of the characters together. Acacia Hall.

The Truth – Adam Bailey is a Fringe-circuit regular, from Ontario. His fast-paced solo examined the concept of truth through anecdotes from his own life, from LGBTQ2S+ history, and from addiction-recovery research vs addiction-recovery ritual, among others, and it was entertaining to listen to.

A Grave Mistake – The physical-comedy duo A Little Bit Off, with Amica Hunter and David Cantor, first hit Edmonton with Beau & Aero a few years ago, which was great, so I knew it would be worth going to the Gateway Theatre in the heat to see them. Their closing performance started with David explaining that Amica was ill and unable to perform, but that with some adaptations, Carly Pokoradi from Juliet: A Revenge Comedy would be filling in on book to give us a segment of the play, and then any remaining time would be filled with some “variety show” by other Fringe artists. So although I didn’t get to see A Grave Mistake in its entirety, I got to see a couple of brilliant artists do a suprisingly-good pick-up performance, with its highlight being the physical business of the swindlers’ seance. I also got to see some other amusing excerpts, similar to Late Night Cabaret bits, from Keith Brown, Paul Strickland, Ingrid Hansen with Nayana Fielkov, and – I’m sorry, I can’t remember who else. I would definitely go to see A Grave Mistake again. Yet this experience was a classic illustration of the ephemeral pleasure of being one of the people in the “room where it happens” for live theatre. Gateway Theatre. (And a note that sweltering-heat notwithstanding, I love that this venue is still being used, and is back to being a lottery venue.)

Pressure – Amanda Samuelson’s three-hander had a progress showing or staged read or something at Nextfest in the spring, but I didn’t get to see it then. I didn’t make it up to the new Roxy Theatre to see it this week until the last day of the festival, but I’m very glad I did. It’s the best new drama I’ve seen this Fringe. Sydney Williams plays the central character Grace, struggling with depression, anxiety, feelings of being an imposter as a playwright and as an adult, and residual hurt from being abandoned by her father. Grace’s sometime-partner Ricky (Meegan Sweet) and Grace’s mother (Sue Huff) don’t always know how to support her, and have their own conflicting needs, but mean well and worry about her. It was refreshing to see the mother-daughter interactions being so nuanced, without the mother being a caricature of misunderstanding or a villain – her support was more than tuna noodle casseroles, and it was satisfying to see Grace managing to reach out to her mother for help. I liked the scene-framing of negative snarky horoscope projections, and I noticed the different underscoring and lighting for therapist conversations and for negative self-talk vs the real-time conversations on stage, but I was occasionally a little confused about the time lapses and flashbacks between scenes. Lorne Cardinal Theatre at the Roxy.

Absolute Magic – Keith Brown’s stage-magic show, sold out at the Backstage Theatre, was a great way to wrap up the festival. He makes very good use of multiple closeup cameras to make close-up magic with cards and other small props come alive for a full room. I was pretty close, and I still have no idea how any of it was done, and I loved it. The performer had smooth, natural, consensual interactions with many audience members, not just the ones close to the table but some from further back in the risers. I appreciated that his methods of identifying audience members to invite participation didn’t assume gender. I liked his stories, which came out of shows he’d done and people he’d met, things he’d learned during the pandemic, and so on. They didn’t feel glib and a couple of them truly inspired me. Backstage Theatre.

I also went to the year’s last edition of Late Night Cabaret, a festive and joyful celebration of the Fringe and the artists and community. The more times I attend LNC the more I like it. I feel welcomed and included, and I love getting to sit and experience good music – including the preshow – and a fast-moving sampler of Fringe entertainment with shared jokes and short encounters with different performers. I also like having the salient details about each artist’s show posted on the video screen.

So, that wrapped up my Fringe 2022. I might see some holdovers later this week, but the last show laundry is done and it’s time to get caught up on the rest of life and start getting ready for Walterdale’s 2022-2023 season.

Highlights and improvements of the 2022 Fringe:

  • The expanded liquor-licensed area and the paperless-option ticketing systems introduced for last year’s small-scale festival worked great for this bigger event.
  • Same with the no-tickets single-transaction drinks ordering in the beer tents.
  • No paper handbills – I saw good and bad parts of this, but on balance I liked it.
  • Water dispensers around site
  • Community Care Team watching out for unhoused and vulnerable people who might be impacted by the festival
  • Ticket pricing displayed inclusive of the Fringe operations surcharge, so there are no surprises.

See you next year!

Day seven: Rocket Sugar Improv and Dogfight

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Sometimes a busy Fringe day doesn’t mean seeing lots of shows, and sometimes trying to do too many things in one day means messing up and missing the start of a show at a distant venue because of not remembering the right time or getting involved in a conversation.  I’m sorry I won’t be seeing The Real Inspector Hound after all, and I hope to catch Ask Aggie later.

Yesterday I started the day with Rocket Sugar Factory at the Telus Stage.  Improv partners Jacob Banigan and Jim Libby, based in Austria, come to Edmonton Fringe each year, and musician Jan Randall joins them and enhances their shows with playful piano and additional repartee.  The audience for the early show seemed to be full of people who had seen them before.   This year, apparently, they’re using a different improv structure in each show.  In the one I saw, they played a couple of stories, then after each they asked the audience to identify a point at which a character might have made a different decision, and then they showed an alternative ending.  One scene started with an audience member’s story about encountering a crabby lady in the grocery store.  The other started with suggestions that led to a group of teachers winning a lottery but misplacing the ticket.  One of the strengths of these two artists is the way that they will each create several characters with distinguishing body language and voice, and then the two of them will switch frequently among all those characters to keep the story moving along.   I particularly enjoyed Jim Libby’s portrayal of the perky home-ec teacher Caroline.  I also enjoyed watching the moments when one of them set up the other to do something difficult or awkward and the other did it – performing rap music, lifting the other person up, etc.

In the evening, I queued up outside Strathcona High School so that I could sit in a front-row chair for Dogfight rather than climb up the bleachers.  This was my second viewing of the Strathcona Alumni Theatre’s production of the 2012 musical by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, directed as usual by Linette Smith.  Most of the show is set one evening in 1963, in San Francisco, where a small group of  young US Marines has their last night of leave for departing for Okinawa and eventually Vietnam.  At the start, end, and intermission, there are also framing scenes showing the main character (Chris Scott as Eddie Birdlace) returning from Vietnam some years later and seeking out the girl he met that night (Emmy Kate Whitehead as Rose Fenny).

That one-line description could easily fit most conventional wartime-romance stories, but this one is different in some disturbing and refreshing ways.  Disturbing, because boy meets girl happens because of a dogfight, a competition among Marines to bring the ugliest girl to a party.  And refreshing, because the shy awkward nominally-unattractive girl Rose takes some control in the situation, calling the Marines out on their appalling behaviour in a way that makes the audience cheer, expressing anti-Vietnam-war concerns in a way appropriate to 1963, and telling him afterwards that she hadn’t been waiting for him.  I was also pleased that it avoided the period-piece tropes of having the young woman be coerced into sex and getting pregnant by a more experienced male partner.  It was clear to this modern feminist viewer that except for having been tricked into attending the dogfight, she wasn’t doing anything that she didn’t choose to do.  His contraceptive precautions were explicit, and his acknowledgement that it was new to him too won the audience over with a round of awws, while we watched Rose’s face receiving this unexpected but touching gift.

Emmy Kate Whitehead and Chris Scott both impressed me with the way they met the singing and acting demands of the lead roles.  Sydney Williams was heartbreaking as the streetwise prostitute Marcia and had a beautiful solo later as another character.  Kyle Thulien played several small roles (sergeant, drag nun, snooty waiter) and was spot-on as a sketchy lounge singer.  Gabe Richardson’s character Ralphie Boland was a nasty piece of work and Gabe added a swagger and a smirk that made me shudder.

The musical ensemble, under the direction of Matt Graham, was good, and the sound was well-balanced so that I could hear all the words.   The choreography was fun to watch and suitable to the story, especially the chair choreography (in unison, in army boots, by Scott, Richardson, Aidan Burke, Alex Aoki, Jordan Mah, Evans Kwak, and Michael Vetsch) and the impressions-of-war scene.   Jocelyn Feltham played Rose’s mother with gentle concern and no overplayed fuss.

There were two things I didn’t like about this show.  It ran overtime in both performances I saw, finishing at about 10:20pm rather than the published time of 10:00, and that is frustrating on a busy Fringe evening.  I don’t know whether a correction had been posted at the info tents, but it’s not on the Fringe website and wasn’t posted at the venue or in the program.  I will keep buying tickets ahead of time and driving down to Strathcona High School to see whatever challenging modern musical this company produces in future years, because they are good and they are local.  I would keep going even if the shows were three hours long.  But I want to know ahead of time.   I also didn’t feel comfortable with the stereotypical aboriginal character Ruth Two Bears (Olivia Aubin), shuffling and drinking stone-faced in buckskin and braids.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the portrayal in this production was toned down from earlier productions elsewhere, but it still made me wince.

Dogfight is, of course, sold out for the balance of its run.  Last year an additional performance of Rent was announced for the final weekend, but I think it was announced midweek.

Our show Sonder was not sold out the last time I checked.  We perform this afternoon (Thursday) at 4:00 pm, and Saturday at 6:45 pm.  We’re at King Edward School, an easy walk across a playground from the main Fringe grounds and in a neighbourhood with some free parking, and running time is just under an hour.

Wonderful Town!

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Wonderful Town, a 1953 musical with music by Leonard Bernstein, is this year’s Citadel Theatre Young Musical Company performance, directed by Bridget Ryan with musical direction by Sally Hunt.

It’s a silly fluffy large-cast show with lots of mistaken identities and misunderstandings, goofy characters, delightful period costumes, and a happy ending.  The setting is New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1930s, with a mix of young people, artists and performers, prostitutes, and immigrants living in the inexpensive apartments of the area. The premise was actually quite similar to Avenue Q.

The story opens with a tour guide in straw boater (Adam Houston) showing some tourists the sights and inhabitants of Christopher Street, Washington Square, and nearby areas.  This device allows many of the cast to be briefly introduced while setting the scene in a song.  Then the main characters, sisters Ruth (Zia Mizera) and Eileen (Sydney Williams) from Columbus Ohio, arrive with their suitcases, looking for an apartment and hoping to make their names in writing and in show business, respectively.  Landlord and painter Mrs Appopolis (Michelle Diaz) rents them a tiny basement apartment, shown on stage with twin beds cunningly pulling out of a backdrop, and a window grate at street level opening on an outside staircase.  We learn quickly that older sister Ruth is the practical outspoken one, but both of them are quickly overwhelmed with the big city, the apartment shaking with detonations for subway construction, men looking for the prostitute previous tenant (Phoebe Davis), drunks peering in the grate or unzipping to urinate through it.  This sets up the lovely song “Ohio”, in which they express their homesickness while rhyming the name of the state with “Why,oh why oh,”  I was particularly charmed because I used to live in Columbus.

Ruth sends out her writing to editors (Roland Meseck, Eugene Kwon, Michelle Diaz) and tries to get work in journalism, while Eileen mostly seems to spend her time meeting “boys” (Bryce Stewart, Adam Houston, etc).  Ruth’s wry song “One Hundred Easy Ways To Lose a Man”, acknowledging that her competence, bluntness, and unwillingness to dissemble are disadvantages in dating, is possibly not quite as true today as it was sixty years ago when the song was written, but it’s still familiar and the song is a good exposition of Ruth’s character, putting the audience on her side.  Neighbours Wreck and Helen (Daniel Greenways and Bridget Lyne) are an unmarried couple whose plans to conceal their cohabitation when Helen’s mother (Phoebe Davis) visits are also slightly dated to a modern audience but still humorously familiar.

In classic musical theatre structure, the first act ended with plot complications and an uptempo song and dance number with lots of cast members in it.  Ruth is tricked into believing she has an assignment to interview some Brazilian naval cadets for a human interest story, but the sailors (Houston, Kwon, Davis, Taylor Paskar, Diaz, Lyne) just break into an enthusiastic and uncontrollable conga line which lands in Ruth and Eileen’s apartment and gets Eileen arrested for disturbing the peace.

As the second act opens, Eileen is in custody in a station full of police officers with Irish accents, all charmed and all convinced she is Irish.   After a few more twists and turns, everyone has happy endings – Ruth finds both requited love and journalistic employment, and Eileen is a hit singing in a nightclub.

Most of the performers are cast in several roles, showing their versatility.  The only characters that I had a little trouble distinguishing were Bryce Stewart’s Valenti (the nightclub promoter) and Chick Clark (the newspaperman).  Zia Mizera and Sydney Williams were very good together as the contrasting but loyal sisters.