Tag Archives: trevor schmidt

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).

Fringe 2023 Day 8

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It’s Friday morning – there are two and a half more days of Fringe shows to come. It’s foggy and smoky right now, but it’s supposed to clear up later this afternoon and be sunny with a high of 26 or 27 degrees on the weekend.

Thursday’s schedule was assorted in style, but all very good.

Lesbihonest – Laura Piccinin from Toronto delivered a one-hour standup monologue about her various comings-out and partners, her personal experience of queerness and the background of changing vocabulary and identity labelling. I loved it – and not just the parts I identified with. One particular bit of it, about meeting a schoolchild who talked matter-of-factly about being a lesbian, brought me to tears. I was reminded a bit of Kimberly Dark’s Dykeopolis in, wow, that was 2013. Stage 5, Acacia Hall.

Lia and Dor – I am so glad I fitted this into my schedule. It was lovely. Cristina Tudor, playwright and perfomer, and director Keltie Brown Forsyth shaped this original work in the small Nordic Studio blackbox with a few props and costume elements, giving the flavour of a Romanian folktale. Tudor and the other performer Alex Forsyth played several characters – a contemporary young woman Lia and her Dor, a Romanian word which “means something like longing, or wanderlust or a soul-calling. It encompasses both melancholy and joy and hope. A feeling that drives you to take a new journey, fall in love, come back home. You know this feeling, we all do. ” but also her grandparents and great-aunt, a wolf, a serpent, etc. A bit of puppetry, a bandanna becoming a kerchief, some shifts of voice and physicality, and the transitions of time and character were easy to follow. I like stories where the mythology and the current reality intersect, with characters speaking in contemporary voice along with archetypes and fantasy. I have appreciated the work of Forsyth and Brown Forsyth since first seeing 7 Ways to Die: A Love Story in 2012, and Tudor’s work was a great fit for their company K.I.A. Productions, now Vancouver-based. I’m also looking forward to seeing David Johnston’s Let’s Talk About Your Death, directed by Alex Forsyth, later this weekend.

Lady Porn – This Whizgiggling Productions threehander was written by Trevor Schmidt, and stars the same three fascinating actors as the Destination Wedding and Destination: Vegas shows of previous Fringes: Cheryl Jameson, Kristin Johnston, and Michelle Todd. The context was a woman-centric porn-film company like the ones that appeared in the 1980s. But the story was just a fascinating look at three characters who start the project with apparently-compatible ideals and goals, but each of them has different constraints and needs, leading to a series of compromises and eventually the question of have they really achieved anything different? Johnston is the producer Jill – after starting as a performer in that industry, she inherited money from a much older husband and is now the one seeking out backers and locations, moving into directing as her goal, announcing each scene with a clapper-board. Jameson’s Bonnie has been born-again as a youth pastor’s wife, returning to the industry because her husband assures him God said it was fine to get money that way for household expenses. Todd’s Denyse is a financial and commercial success as a porn actress. She’s well aware of where Jill is shading the truth or changing her plans, and doesn’t hesitate to call her out. The lights go up on Denyse reclining on a couch poolside at her mansion, regal in a bright yellow pleated dress with snapping fan. As in all Trevor Schmidt designs, the costuming conveys the period, distinguishes clearly among the characters, and blends well with other costumes and the set dressing. There was no nudity – it didn’t need it – and the casual discussion of the on-film blocking made it clear that to the characters Denyse, Bonnie, and Jill, the film is just work, nothing about themselves. More thought-provoking than the Destination plays, but equally entertaining . Stage 2, Backstage Theatre

Agent Thunder: You Only Laugh Twice, is the entertaining improvised spy story which explains why two well-groomed young men have been roaming the Fringe grounds in dinner jackets all week. Matt Ness and Michael Vetsch first brought Agent Thunder to the Fringe in 2019 I think, but I didn’t see it then. It’s a clever setup – the premise is that the shows are a series of agent-training seminars, designed to demonstrate the business to new spies (the audience) by retelling some of Agent Thunder’s past cases. In the one I saw, the audience suggestions led to “The Case of the Fast Alpaca”, but the plotline involving an alpaca of golden fleece resolved quickly and then shifted to a trip to Chile to discover why the Andean mountains were growing more quickly than classical plate tectonics would predict. As in a James Bond adventure, characters included the Director of the Service and the Lab Doctor who endowed Agent Thunder with some new gadgets, then a local guide, a mountaineer, the head of a company with evil aims, and others. Unlike in a James Bond adventure, there was no gratuitous romantic subplot, and I didn’t miss it.

Ness and Vetch practice the type of improv where the two of them switch characters frequently with a tapout, as other duos of long experience often do (Kevin Gillese and Arlen Konopaki of Scratch, Jim Libby and Jacob Banigan of Rocket Sugar Improv, etc). It’s fun to watch them maintain the character traits that they other one started, and it also keeps the story moving along since they often tap out when one has an idea for something the other character can do. Andrew Creswick provided musical accompaniment, and director Corina Dransutavicius was in the booth with near-instantaneous response of a wide range of suitable sound and lighting cues.

Going into the final weekend of The Answer is Fringe, there’s time to fit in a few more shows. Hope you see something great!

Amor de Cosmos, and Puck Bunnies

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It’s a little harder to find a connecting theme for these two – Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical is a fantastical recounting of the biography of a not-very-famous figure from Canadian history. Puck Bunnies is a play about contemporary young women who are hangers-on of a local minorleague hockey team. One’s a new work written by Richard Kemick with music and lyrics by local singer-songwriter-actor Lindsay Walker, and the other is a remount from local playwrighting team Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt.

Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical is not in the printed Fringe programs because it was a late addition off the waitlist. And it’s a little hard to describe, but it’s quirky and charming. Cody Porter, who directed the show for its Toronto-Fringe run, stepped into the performing role for Edmonton, which is a treat for his fans here. I loved the way he changed characters as Walker (accompanying on keyboard and narrating some parts from newspaper headlines) flipped him different hats, with physicality, dialect, and eye-twinkles to match. The elliptical/heightened text recitation reminded me a bit of Jonathan Christenson’s work, and was delivered with such clarity that I didn’t realize until afterwards that a lot of it was iambic pentameter. The main character was born into a mining family in New Brunswick, made his way to California as a photographer, and ended up in BC as a newspaper publisher and then politician. I was fascinated by the way the writers included acknowledgements of where this character stood or would have stood on various issues of the day that now we see as injustices (e.g. Indian Act, Immigration Act) and was cracked up by a throwaway anachronism about the right of homosexuals to give blood. Stage 8: Kick Point OSPAC, in the schedule slots showing as Ruby Rocket in the printed program.

The Guys in Disguise play Puck Bunnies debuted at the Fringe in 2017, and the playwrights won Outstanding New Work Fringe at the Sterling awards that season. In this remount, Jake Tkaczyk is playing Tammy, the new mother bringing her baby to the game as a visible reminder of her claim to the team captain Cliff. Tanya, played by Trevor Schmidt, seems to be the one making the rules for the group calling themselves the Puck Bunnies – providing hair/fashion consultation, relationship advice, and decreeing who can sit where. Newcomer Tina, played with adorable well-intentioned bewilderment by Jason Hardwick, used to sit with the “loser girls” but has been invited into the clique as a replacement for someone they’re shunning. As they watch the intersquad game from the stands (the bleachers are facing the audience) we learn more about their lives and their relationships and a lot of it is troubling. As I probably wrote when I saw the original production in 2017, I knew people like this when I was growing up in hockey rinks in the 1970s, so it’s troubling to see the same “put the boys first” mentality in a setting contemporary enough to have Google and selfies and pussy hats. Like other recent scripts by this writing team or by Schmidt, there’s a layer of poking gentle fun at the characters, but underneath there are some pointed messages about society and glimpses of hope. Even for these young women with their limited outlook and unsupportive environment, by the end we see hints of how things can change for them and for the people around them. Stage 11, Varscona Theatre.

Today I’m excited about catching Lesbihonest, Lady Porn, and Agent Thunder. How about you?

Forest of Truth and Bathsheba …

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Putting all the show titles in the post title makes weird mashups. Especially these two, which some from very different shared mythology cultural referents.

Forest of Truth involves the same people who brought the inspired weirdness of i’m lovin it to Fringe a few years ago, Theatre Gumbo of Japan. It’s set in a fairytale milieu with some familiar tropes, and references to characters like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White. There’s a problem to solve – the Queen of the forest needs some True Love Extract to preserve/extend her beauty – and an adorable sidekick. But the unfolding action includes some parts that are very much not for children! I loved it that the plot did not stick with the Man being the romantic pursuer and the Woman wanting marriage for other reasons – the Woman was also checking out (climbing on?) several audience members as potential partners, with clearly physical intent. As in i’m lovin it, there were some visually-delightful bits with props, and a diarrhea joke. Forest of Truth would also have been funny if it were slightly less heteronormative. Venue 28, Roxy Theatre on 124 Street.

Bathsheba and the Books is a straightforwardly ridiculous comedy. I was familiar enough with the source material to find extra humour in the details, but even without, I think Aimée Beaudoin’s sex symbol of the ancient world, as costumed by Trevor Schmidt with exactly the right kind of gown to seem credibly period and suitable enhancement for the character’s … endowments … was just so fun to watch and listen to. She’s obviously in control of her world, a scholar who manages the men of the household after the death of her husband King David. Chris Fassbender and Jeff Halaby are her collaborators and servants, and Jake Tkaczyk is equally larger-than-life as her son, a young King Solomon. Directed by Davina Stewart, the pacing is good, the laughs are frequent, and the canon-consistency is left at “it coulda been”. Lots of dramatic-irony asides which are funny if you have some ideas how the Bible is treated in 21st century cultures and religions. I have to admit that I was a tiny bit distracted by the costume practicalities of how they got sparkly gold Birkenstock-type footwear. Venue 1, Westbury.

A Hundred Words for Snow is lovely

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Dayna Lea Hoffman in A Hundred Words for Snow. Photo by Epic Photography

I’m not sure what adjectives to use to describe the current Northern Light Theatre production. Because I don’t want to diminish its significance and power if I call it charming, satisfying, thoughtful, or delightful. But it is all of those things, too.

Tatty Hennessy’s script is a more realistic narrative than many of the works Northern Light brings us. Its 15yo narrator (Dayna Lea Hoffman) is Rory, a recently-bereaved 15yo Londoner, relating her experiences and observations in a tone both unique and familiar. After her father’s funeral, she notes the problem of her father’s ashes being in an urn on the kitchen table and her mother being disinclined to do anything about this immediately – so she gets the idea of taking the urn on an adventure that the father, a geography teacher and armchair explorer, had daydreamed about with her and fantasy-planned in a notebook. Of course! She will borrow her mother’s credit card and go scatter the ashes at the North Pole – this makes complete sense to her.

As you should expect from a Northern Light show, brilliantly-executed design elements enhance the narrative. Alison Yanota is credited as production designer, taking care of set, costume, and lighting. Matt Schuurman designed projections on the floor, and Daniela Fernandez was sound designer. Trevor Schmidt directed. The performance is done in the round – I picked a side randomly and did not feel like there was any advantage to being on any side.

The script said some things about grief and about growing up that I am still thinking about. In particular, the concept of trying on grief responses to find what felt appropriate. I also really appreciated that the writer didn’t punish the teenage girl for not thinking things through and for trusting the people she met. As I think I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I’m tired of stories where teenage girls (and, by extension, the audience) are “taught a lesson” by having their risk-taking and initiative result in disasters, whether physical, social, sexual, or legal. Rory’s quest didn’t work the way she’d thought it should – but it still worked out.

Northern Light Theatre requires its patrons to wear masks in the Fringe Studio Theatre – and in the performances I’ve attended this season I’ve seen 100% compliance with this. The play runs until Saturday May 6th, and tickets are available here. I recommend it highly.

Starting the Fringe 2022

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Crack in the Mirror – This Guys in Disguise show is set at a late-1970’s Women’s Group meeting in a suburban home. Strident divorcée Ruth (Jason Hardwick) shows up at Melanie’s (Trevor Schmidt) finger-foods and wine event with earnest brochures and speeches about Gloria Steinem, but both of them are disappointed when nobody else comes except for the older, naive, Ginger (Jake Tkaczyk). I once heard Trevor Schmidt speak at a script reading and he said in his writing, he favours choosing kindness when possible – that there’s still lots of scope for conflict and interesting stories with characters who don’t set out to be mean to each other. And I didn’t realize it at the time – I was laughing too hard – but Crack in the Mirror is a good example of that. Varscona Theatre.

Meatball Séance – John Michael of Chicago’s solo show is infused with so much manic awkward energy that the themes of loss at its heart didn’t bring it down. Lots of audience participation bits, always with an option to decline. Sue Paterson stage at Campus St-Jean.

Mules – Directed by Kevin Sutley and with a good cast of actors from U of A Augustana (that’s the campus in Camrose), I bought a ticket for this because of the playwrights, Beth Graham and Daniela Vlaskalic. It was dark, it was twistedly funny in parts, and it managed to evoke some really disturbing things without actually showing any of them directly. It is a longer play (90 minutes), but I was really engaged with what was going to happen with these characters, played by Miracle Mopera, Kyra Gusdal, and Frank Dion. Walterdale Theatre.

Late Night Cabaret – I don’t make it to this Fringe midnight event very often, because I usually need some sleep more than I need a variety show with an amazing house band (Zee Punterz), amusing hosts from Rapid Fire Theatre, and glimpses of many of the Fringe artists and phenomena that I hadn’t yet had time to catch up with. But in the scaled-down masked-up Fringe of 2021, I managed to score one ticket to the limited run of Late Night Cabaret and when I walked in to the Backstage Theatre that night, its perfect blend of nightclub energy and community acceptance was something I hadn’t known I’d been missing. Last night’s hosts were Joleen Ballendine and Joey Lucius of Rapid Fire and the guest performers included Ingrid Hansen (Epidermis Circus), Tymisha Harris (Josephine, Josie & Grace) and Rachel Comeau (Josie & Grace), and Johnnie Walker (The Heterosexuals). Backstage Theatre.

White Guy on Stage Talking – I am stage-managing this, an innocent operations production with Jake Tkaczyk and Meegan Sweet. Like Tkaczyk’s previous innocent operations work, it includes a series of images and explorations devised on a theme, many of them topically pointed, excessively silly, or just absurd, and never takes itself too seriously. It’s fun to show audiences the things the performers and other creative contributors have been building. Walterdale Theatre.

This year’s Fringe has kept some of the innovations we first saw last year. The option to do paperless ticketing, and the move to one-step sales in the beer tents instead of the old get tickets here, give tickets there ritual. The bigger liquor-licensed area covering the old South Beer Tent and the whole of McIntyre Park (Gazebo Park) which eliminates a lot of the crowding/bottlenecks. The “no handbills” rule was easy last year as reducing the interactions between artists and patrons on site felt appropriate, and it eliminated a lot of paper. This year I think it’s more of a challenge – performers do need to engage to sell their shows, and it’s probably harder when there’s no tidy way of taking a card to wrap up the conversation. I’ve seen performers wandering in costume and wearing billboards and T-shirts with their QR codes.

The gravel parking lot (formerly Farmers’ Market parking, rebranded a few years ago to Theatre District parking) has increased in price to almost $20 for a full day, which will change my strategies a bit. Lots of my favourite food vendors (the wood fired pizza, the grilled cheese people, Fat Frank’s, the spaghetti in a cone, and the green onion cakes) are back, along with Native Delights (bannock burgers!) and something I need to try based on recommendations, BF Korean Chicken. Some people are wearing masks – more indoors than out, more performers than guests. There has obviously been some festival planning to eliminate pinch-points and bottlenecks and other non-intentional crowding, which is helpful in many ways other than reducing covid transmission.

Happy Fringe!

Live in Calgary!

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Photo shows Chris Enright, Trevor Schmidt, and Jake Tkaczyk, in Flora and Fawna Have Beaver Fever (And So Does Fleurette!). Picture from Lunchbox Theatre Facebook, credit TBD.

J Kelly Nestruck, the theatre reviewer for The Globe and Mail, said in a recent column, “Is any theatre scene in Canada as hopping right now as the one in Calgary?“

I can’t judge that, but last week I viewed performances of two of the three productions he mentions. The creators of both shows have Edmonton connections.

Flora and Fawna have Beaver Fever (and so does Fleurette!) by Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt has three more shows as of this writing – two on Saturday afternoon and one Sunday Feb 5th at noon. In this Lunchbox Theatre production, Schmidt as 10-year-old Fawna is joined by Jake Tkaczyk and Chris Enright (Flora and Fleurette, respectively), in the roles played in the past by Hagen and by Brian Dooley.

This was my first time seeing a Lunchbox production. It had a full-enough-for-pandemic-comfort house for a show at noon on a weekday. The performers interact a bit with audience members in character before the show, reminiscent of a Fringe performance, and then the play starts with welcoming the audience as the new “junior probationary members” of the group started by these three awkward misfits and their mothers. There are rituals and activities and informational skits as earnest and clumsy as the girls themselves – the Naturelle Girls theme song is nearly as painful as an unfamiliar church congregation struggling through “He Who Would Valiant Be” – but interactions between the girls while they are running the meeting tell us more about the characters and their lives. I loved the running joke of saying that certain mean girls “shall not be named”, but watching Fawna take delight in actually telling on them. The version of history performed in their skits skewers both white capitalist colonialism and the ways it might be understood by 21st-century children. (“And then the Hudson’s Bay Company discovered Hudson’s Bay! What a coincidence!”)

One of the layers of entertainment in this show is that the actors deliver lots of doubles entendres, mostly about beaver(s), plus it’s just really funny to see adult men playing these 10yo girls in shapeless tunics and practical haircuts, Fawna playing with her dress, Flora slouching to be less of a target, and Fleurette eager to participate but usually cut off by her Anglophone friends.

There’s also a storyline with some suspense – what is Fawna trying to avoid talking about? – and some truly touching resolution and message, completely consistent with the character development.

Tickets for the remaining performances are available here. Lunchbox participates in the REP and takes the usual precautions.

Louise Casemore in Undressed. Photo by Erin Wallace.

Alberta Theatre Projects is also in downtown Calgary, in the Arts Commons building. It’s currently hosting a run of Louise Casemore’s Undressed, an original solo performance exploring the idea of auctioning off used wedding dresses. Casemore plays the auctioneer but also embodies several of the dress donors. The auctioneer talks about various kinds of single-use and extravagant artifacts used in weddings, and says that the event tries to find new homes for as many of them as possible. Finding another couple with the same names to use leftover personalized napkins amused me, and the callback gag about herding a flock of peacocks to its new owner was also droll. I was a little puzzled about how the proceeds of the auction were intended to benefit an organization called “Zero Waste Canada” (it seems to be a real thing), but in one part of the story a woman sells one wedding dress in order to buy another, more aspirational one, and I was distracted by wondering how that worked. I liked the shy lesbian who had never expected she’d get to have a wedding.

I have been to ATP before, for Waiting for the Parade and for Glory. This time, the main level of the Martha Cohen auditorium was arranged cabaret/coffeehouse style, with seating around tables, presumably with parties seated separately. Undressed runs until February 13th, with tickets available here.

The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921

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Northern Light Theatre’s season starts off with a conflagration, at the Varscona Theatre, with Linda Wood Edwards’ play The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921, directed by Trevor Schmidt. Sue Huff plays Mrs. Hastings and Twilla Macleod plays Mrs. Smith, both independent businesswomen in the small Central Alberta mining town of Big Valley. The social distance between them is large, as the blunt joyful pragmatic Hastings runs a whorehouse and Smith, a devotee of Queen Victoria and of propriety, runs a boardinghouse for unwed pregnant girls/women and helps to place their children for adoption. The costumes (production designer Alison Yanota) emphasize their differences, with Hastings in flamboyant reds and flapper style, and Smith in cool buttoned-up floorlength blues. Although both of them operate business/social enterprises dependent on men for their existence, the interactions between these two women and descriptions of offstage characters and action pass the Bechdel-Wallace test easily (“do two women have a conversation that is not about a man?”)

Productions of Northern Light Theatre often keep me guessing a bit about their genre or mood, which makes them more interesting to me than a more predictable play. As you might expect, the two characters start out hostile to each other and full of assumptions based on past hurts, but later find some similarities in their grief and in their ambitions. The funniest part is … something I’m not going to spoil, but the advice about avoiding unnecessary clothing repairs. It’s not a tidy ending, but it’s a satisfying one, leaving me thinking about middle-aged women making their own way and starting over, and about the harm done by mistrust and prejudice among groups of women.

The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921 runs to Sunday November 28, with tickets available for digital viewing as well as in-person performance under the Restrictions Exemption Program. The Varscona Theatre is a large auditorium and audience members are asked to leave space between each party. The concession and washrooms are open. Running time is a bit under 70 minutes.

The next play I’ll be watching is the one I’m directing now, Walterdale Theatre’s 5@50 – another look at women in middle age, how they can support each other and how they can wound each other. Tickets are available at the link.

Brilliant Women on Stage

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Two of the plays I saw early in Fringe 2021 featured familiar women on stage in sympathetic nuanced portrayals of women in their middle years. Both, unsurprisingly, were directed by Trevor Schmidt.

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Woman Caught Unaware, by Annie Fox, is a solo performance by Davina Stewart. The art history professor is in her office, planning to head home to her partner, when a student appears outside of office hours. I enjoyed the the confident academic’s wry observations on student behaviour and the changing expectations for faculty members as the student seems reluctant to confide about a problem, and the professor runs through the recent advice on what to do about cyberbullying and other issues. (I was reminded of Professor Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross’s mystery novels.)

But the student has come to tell – and show – her instructor that it’s actually Professor Conté’s nude image that’s being shared on-line, with harsh comments about her aging body. And while the narrator tries to ignore it, she discovers “allies” all around her, each responding in well-intentioned but self-centred ways to adopt a cause. A protest! A petition! A nude calendar!

We get to see why the professor anticipates the sanctuary of home, in brief affectionate images of her partner Gail (“I’m like a pin, she’s like a pincushion”), their cottage, their garden, the savoury aroma of Gail’s beef bourguignon on the stove (“we’re pescatarian in public, but …”). And she eventually addresses the issue directly (this is me resisting the full-frontal metaphors), in ways that left me satisfied about an articulate older woman taking back power. I loved watching and listening to Davina Stewart in this role.

Woman Caught Unaware has performances Monday through Sunday at the Varscona Theatre with some tickets available for each.

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Destination Wedding is a Whizgiggling Productions work, written and directed by Trevor Schmidt, and performed by Cheryl Jamieson, Kristin Johnston, and Michelle Todd.

Three women meet up after many years, having all been invited to be attendants at an old friend’s destination wedding in a tropical resort location that Honey (Jamieson) insists they not name. Johnston’s Marlene is an artist seated with powerful stillness in black. Todd’s Britt is a lesbian, a successful businesswoman, and the one who slips naturally into curbing the worst of Honey’s impulses (“No, you can’t go get your hair braided on the beach / wear a bride’s tribe t-shirt, that’s appropriative”) her affect suggesting that she does this all day long and she doesn’t expect Honey to learn.

With the three fascinating characters, this premise would be enough to make an entertaining Fringe show – as if the mother’s-friends-chorus in Mamma Mia were distinct interesting people. But it turns into a darker, more ambiguous, story. Various details were mentioned – the kinds of breadcrumbs that a less subtle narrative would explain as Clues. At one point I noticed that the painted backdrop of a resort veranda scene now seemed to have a dark sky and a stormy sea, which I guess was some magic of lighting design (also Schmidt).

While the three are waiting for their old friend the bride to show up, they meet some other significant characters, providing opportunity for these three talented actors to demonstrate their skill distinguishing multiple roles, and for the audience to be even more entertained and diverted from what was turning into a central mystery. I particularly liked Johnston’s Amy, the bride’s daughter, all eye-rolling and vocal fry.

The hints weren’t all tidily wrapped up into clues and exposition, but left in a delicious suspension. I wished I’d gone with a friend to have fun figuring those things out afterwards. Maybe I should go back. But if I do, I better buy a ticket soon, since some of the remaining seven performances are already sold out.

Both these shows are also available for online viewing.

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.