Tag Archives: varscona theatre

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

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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.

Three characters drink mimosas at brunch.

Teatro Returns with Caribbean Muskrat

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Cast of Caribbean Muskrat: Rochelle Laplante, Rachel Bowron, Jackson Card @alwaysepicphotos

Teatro de Quindicina, the summer-season professional theatre at the Varscona specializing in the work of Stewart Lemoine, hasn’t had a season since 2019. I remember their last production “before”, the complicated and wacky Vidalia, involving three identical briefcases and a very big onion.

In 2022, they’re starting the season a bit earlier than usual, with Stewart Lemoine and Josh Dean’s Caribbean Muskrat, originally performed here in 2004. I love that Lemoine has such a lengthy back catalogue, because they often produce works that other people remember favourably but I haven’t seen before. Stewart Lemoine directed, Madeline Blondal designed the set conveying multiple locations with a few clever pieces, Alison Yanota designed the lighting, and Leona Brausen did the costume design.

Caribbean Muskrat has many of the common features of a Stewart Lemoine play. So a subscriber or occasional attendee could have a rough idea of what to expect, but could still be completely surprised by the plot and characters on stage.

The unique characters in this play include Dr Hadrien Burch (Jackson Card), an oddly-smug sleep clinician, his girlfriend (previously his patient) Cynthia Lodgepole, an ambitious restaurant owner/manager (yes, restaurateur and restaurateuse are the correct spelling) (Rachel Bowron), and Bess Wesley a Canada Customs official in charge of animal imports (Rochelle Laplante, most recently seen in Citadel’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong).

The unexpected plot starts with a rare rodent, the Caribbean muskrat, which Cynthia acquired when attending a resort time-share pitch in Bimini, and which is now being held at the local Customs office. While we don’t actually see most of the animals in the office (a dolly stacked high with travel crates and ventilated boxes emitting mysterious noises), the one we do see is handled so well that I had to look away and then look again to reassure myself it wasn’t real. The three characters’ lives intersect because of the muskrat. Various complications develop and the story takes several turns I didn’t predict.

Similar to many other Stewart Lemoine plays, Caribbean Muskrat includes specific details about a location which are funny to people who know the place while contributing to worldbuilding for those who don’t know it well. In this case, the play is set in Kelowna BC, so there was wine-tasting, side comments about the nearby community of Peachland, and an Ogopogo joke.

As I started to watch this play, I recalled another characteristic of the Teatro oeuvre that I’d forgotten, and I still don’t quite know what to call it. It’s not quite magical realism, but it’s just a few steps away from probability into a context where unlikely coincidences happen and are accepted. The odd things that happen in this story aren’t unlikely enough to pull me out of the story, but they are delightfully unexpected enough to pull me in. And I’ve missed that.

Caribbean Muskrat runs at the Varscona Theatre until April 17th. Tickets are available through the Varscona Theatre website as well as at the box office on show nights.

Shadow Theatre’s Lungs

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Photo of Elena Porter and Jake Tkaczyk by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

The play I saw last weekend, Small Mouth Sounds, was like an exercise in telling a story on stage after removing almost all of the spoken words.  All the other parts of how a story is supported on stage, the costumes, the props, the actions and stage business, the set, the lighting and sound effects … they were enough.  I watched various characters arrive at a retreat centre, and I could tell what they were like and how the retreat was going to work for them.  One arrived late and on her phone, one slipped his flipflops gracefully into the shoe rack at the side and sank into a meditation pose that was in everyone else’s way, one wore a Tilley hat with chinstrap and an MEC catalogue full of outdoor clothing … I was anticipating all the ways these people might get on each other’s nerves over the weekend, and I was kind of right.

The current production in the Shadow Theatre season, Lungs by Duncan Macmillan, could be the opposite exercise.  It’s as if the playwright, and the director John Hudson, and the designer Elise Jason, all sat down and said, what if we gave them great words, but almost nothing else –  a big bare stage, no props, one simple costume each, no sound cues, near-imperceptible lighting shifts – and launched them into the narrative of two people in the middle of a conversation they’ve never had before.  “A baby?” , Elena Porter’s character responds incredulously to a question Jake Tkaczyk’s character must have asked just before the lights came up.  He’d been thinking about it for a while, and although she’d assumed it would happen sometime in her future, she hadn’t thought of the future being now.   So they talk.  And they avoid talking.  And they talk some more.

Is it the right time for us?  Is it okay for us to want a child when the planet is already overpopulated?  The couple jumps between their personal anxieties “I want to still read books and do things” “I don’t want to be one of those fathers who never notices his kids unless they’re winning.” “What if I don’t bond with it?” and their bigger-picture worries about the state of the environment.   They reassure each other they are good people who bicycle, recycle, and buy coffee from local independent shops “even when it tastes like dirt” – but here they are, trying to create another person anyway.  In some ways, the script is specific to the 2019 flavour of those big-picture anxieties – partly about climate change and partly about doing the culturally-agreed right things – but the motivations and worries would be familiar to people of previous generations as well.  “This isn’t the best time, I take it, to be giving hostages to fortune?” as fictional character Lady Peter Wimsey (nee Harriet Vane) announces her pregnancy to Lord Peter in Thrones, Dominations in 1936.

Mostly, Porter’s character is the one whose worries are full of words, spilling over each other and contradicting each other, but Tkaczyk’s character (they don’t have names) also gets an anxiety monologue when he can’t sleep.

The script cuts brilliantly from the middle of one conversation to the important bit of the next one.  We don’t see the characters having sex – we see them looking at each other realizing they both want to, and then we see them collapsed in bed afterwards appreciating it.  Or, in one marvelous scene, we see them after the concept of conception has actually ruined the mood.  Not in the more-commonly-portrayed way of people feeling required to perform on schedule, but she wants the act to be romantic and symbolic, and she is put off by what she calls his “porno face”.

And, true to my own perception of life, things seem to speed up as life goes on, until the important bits flash by with one poignant line each (and usually a “where’s the camera?”)   It matters that the action starts in a near-contemporary time, because by skipping ahead to later in the characters’ lives, we also get disturbing hints of what the playwright is imagining for what the environment and the world might be like in the future by the time the characters get old.  I don’t think I’ve seen this done before, much.

Lungs is playing at the Varscona Theatre until Sunday March 31st.  Because the performers both joined the production on short notice, in the early performance I saw they were both carrying scripts – but it didn’t matter much.  I didn’t find it distracting, and it didn’t seem to prevent them from connecting with the audience and with each other.  I cried.

 

 

Sequence – convoluted and thinky

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Shadow Theatre’s current production Sequence is their last in the Varscona Theatre before it closes for major renovations.  Calgary playwright Arun Lakra entwines two stories to explore the topics of luck, probability, providence, genetics, free will, religion, dramatic coincidence, Fibonacci series, and disability.    John Hudson was director.

In one story, Coralie Cairns plays a cranky tenacious genetics professor and researcher who is going blind, and Chris W. Cook plays an unusual student.  In the other story, Frank Zotter plays a  very lucky man, on a book tour to promote his book about luck, and Caley Suliak plays an audience member who wants to benefit from or to disprove his streak of luck.  The action switches from one side of the stage to the other, at first with no apparent connections between the themes or narratives but various similarities gradually arising.  The show program includes two pages of glossary for the scientific terms and science-fiction-culture terms used by Cairns’ character.  I’d like to say that I didn’t need any of it, but reading them ahead of time did add to my understanding.  The cleverly-plotted piece seems to follow the Chekov’s gun rule strictly, but near the end I was not completely sure that I knew what the playwright had intended the connections and resolutions to be.

The set (designed by Lisa Hancharek) was also filled with fascinating details such as wall shelves reminiscent of representations of DNA spirals.

Sequence continues at the Varscona until this Sunday afternoon, November 16th, with advance tickets at Tix on the Square and cash tickets at the door.

Queen Lear – a play about a play

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Part of the handful of theatre ticket vouchers that I acquired in the Rapid Fire Theatre Date Night auction in January was a pair of tickets to see Eugene Strickland’s Queen Lear, a Shadow Theatre production at the Varscona Theatre.  John Hudson directed, and the cast included Alison Wells as Jane, Ellie Heath as Heather, and Diana Nuttall as The Cellist.  The Cellist did not have a speaking role, but she was an active contributor to the story, as the music seemed to represent Jane’s inner thoughts and emotions.  Jane could hear the music, and sometimes it was loud enough to distract her or irritate her, even to the point of yelling “shut up!”  The Cellist also had an expressive face, showing what she was thinking about the various conversations and actions on stage.  I really enjoyed what the music and the musician added to the performance.

Jane is an actor in her 70s, who has been cast as Lear in an all-female production and who is anxious about being able to memorize her lines.  Heather is a 15yo family friend whom Jane has hired to run lines with her.  The show in which I’d seen Ellie Heath most recently, KIA Productions’ Closer,  also takes advantage of the actor’s skill at using unguarded facial expressions and casual postures to emphasize her character being younger than the others. As Heather, she’s a likeable young person with good manners but she is blunt, impatient, and uninterested in the problems of her elders.  In each scene, Jane and Heather work through a bit of the script in order, and they gradually get to knowing and trusting each other.  Heather lives with her widowed father.  Jane lives alone and is lonely and sometimes worried about being able to perform adequately in the play.

Costumes and stage dressing make a beautiful warm autumn-colours palette.  In the final scene, we see a small excerpt from the performance of Lear, with Jane in a rich gown too heavy for her and with Heather playing Cordelia, and it is so effective that it made me and my playgoing companion wish to see a whole production of King Lear with the title role being a woman.   Parts of the performance made me think about the third season of Slings and Arrows, and how easy it is to entwine the story of an aging performer with the struggles of playing King Lear.  Having it be a woman made me get it more, I think, too.

The run continues at the Varscona Theatre until March 30th.  More details are here along with a link to Tix on the Square.  It’s worth seeing, and generates lots to talk about.

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.

The Three Sisters, a play about lacking agency

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It can’t count as a spoiler if it’s something that everybody knows, something that’s entered the cultural lexicon.  Godot never comes.  Rosebud is his sled.  And the three sisters don’t get to Moscow.

That’s actually all I knew about Anton Chekov’s famous play The Three Sisters, before attending the Broken Toys Theatre production last night.  They don’t get to Moscow.  Oh, and one of them would be called Masha.

The Broken Toys production was directed by Clinton Carew, and he also did a new translation of the play from the Russian.  Before the show started, Carew came to the front of the stage and told the audience that he would be filling in for an ill cast member until further notice, and he alluded to the broadsheet he was carrying, with Russian headlines, which he would be referring to throughout the show.  (Maybe it had lines or cues on it, but he didn’t actually spell that out.)  I eventually figured out that the ill cast member must be Ken Brown, cast as Chebutykin the old military doctor and friend/tenant of the family.  I also spent the whole evening trying to figure out whether I’d seen Clinton Carew on stage before or whether his voice and movement just reminded me of someone, and this morning a theatre friend has pointed out to me that Carew had played in the Catalyst Theatre production The Soul Collector.

There were many more familiar faces and names on the Varscona stage as well – almost as many as in the cast list for The Christmas Carol (no overlap of course).

Lora Brovold (A Few Good Men, Let the Light of Day Through) was the oldest sister, competent comforting Olga the unmarried teacher.  The middle sister Masha, the discontented married one, was Melissa Thingelstad (An Accident, Kill Me Now).   The bitter sarcastic edge that her paralyzed character showed in An Accident and the impatient strides of the caregiver aunt in Kill Me Now were perfect in Masha, and the scenes in which she is parted from her lover and welcomed back by the husband she doesn’t love are heartbreaking.  The youngest sister Irina, with her enthusiasm for family, her naive ideas about working for a living that are gradually disillusioned as she tries working as a telegraph operator and a township council clerk and then gets a teaching qualification,  and her longing for the Moscow of her childhood, was played by Elena Porter.  I don’t think I’d seen her on stage before but I will definitely watch her again.

I did not quite recognise Jesse Gervais (Let the Light of Day Through) in the bearded off-topic character of Ferapont.  Ryan Parker of the Be-Arthurs was the brother Andrei, the petted only son who fails to live up to his sisters’ ambition for him and their hope to follow him to Moscow, finding himself stuck in marriage to banal social-climber Natasha (Laura Metcalfe), in a job with local government, and in debt due to a gambling problem.  And Michael Peng (The Kite Runner, An Accident) was very strong as Vershinin, the military commander with unhappy homelife, tendency to make philosophical speeches, and passion for Masha.

During the play, various characters sing or hum bits of song, unaccompanied and with about the same attention to rhythm and tune as ordinary people in real life.  This struck me as unusual for the stage, where people don’t usually sing without singing well.   Between acts, the cast members set up new furniture as needed for a bedroom and then the grounds of the house.  Instead of removing the furniture used for previous sets, they piled it all up at the back of the stage, building the impression of the family being less and less settled in the military town and in the family home that Natasha is gradually taking over.  I also really liked the modern language in Carew’s translation, “Weird!” “Well, that happened.” “She has … people skills.” and very occasional profanity.  I thought the play was a lot funnier than Chekov’s Cherry Orchard, which I remember studying in Grade 13, but I can’t tell how much of that was due to the strengths of this production, and how much was just that it went over my head in the  English classroom.

Playing til December 7th, tickets ahead of time at Tix on the Square, same-day tickets at the door.  I really wish that Tix on the Square and their partner companies could do same-day on-line sales the way the Fringe box office and Eventbrite can do.

Saturday excursions

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Last Saturday, the bookends of my day were two more Edmonton entertainment traditions, thanks to invitations from improv-class friends.

In the morning I went to Saturday Morning Cartoons at the Garneau/Metro Theatre.  For $12 (cheaper for kids, seniors, and students) you get to sit in the semi-dark theatre all morning and watch an odd assortment of cartoons and vintage Saturday-morning TV ads, while replenishing your bowl from the lobby buffet of cereal and milk.  Many of the patrons were in pajamas or reasonable comfortable facsimile.  The entertainment seemed to mostly be from the 1970s, and the familiar-seeming bits were as odd as the parts I’d never seen before.  An ITV ad showing the attractions of modern Edmonton, on a backdrop of brand-new concrete and artificially-green grass.  Scooby-Doo.  A classic McDonaldland ad.  American public service announcements reminding people not to litter, smoke cigarettes, or light forest fires.  Kid Power, which was probably considered (by white people) to be a charmingly progressive treatment of post-racial society in 1972, but which kept us muttering to each other, did they really say that??  There were lots of choices of cereal and milk options.  The lights in the theatre were dim but not extinguished, so that it wasn’t difficult to come and go during the screening.  I would definitely go again.

I’d also definitely go again to Oh! Susanna, a late night variety show at the Varscona Theatre hosted by the character Susanna Patchouli, who bears surprisingly little resemblance to Mark Meer, and her assistant the Duchess of Capilano, who sounds a little like Belinda Cornish.  The friend who was with me goes to the show regularly.  He was unsurprised that part of the show involved a bartender concocting a tasty mixed drink for the hosts and giving the recipe, and then handing out tastes of it to the whole audience, and that then something similar happened with grilled sandwich bites.  There were several other guests discussing other shows and entertainment options coming up soon in Edmonton, with the most memorable being James McClennan, a tenor who will be performing in the Edmonton Opera’s Eugene Onegin, and Lisa Norton, who will be playing Odysseus in the Citadel’s Penelopiad.  Both of them were interesting to listen to and seemed to be having fun with both the conversation about the arts and the more bizarre aspects of the Game they competed in.