Deserters: the alternate reality of Kenneth T. Williams’ new play, at U of A Studio Theatre. A preview

Posted on April 1, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Deserters by Kenneth T. Williams, U of A Studio Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective. Set and props Chelsea Payne Evason; lighting and projections T. Erin Gruber; costumes Kim-Michelle Brown

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“They get to do the fun stuff!” says Kenneth T. Williams of the sparky characters, all female, in his new play, getting its world premiere Thursday at the U of A’s Studio Theatre.

In Deserters, says the exuberant Cree playwright, “they get to fight, they get they get to be raunchy, they get to be sexual, they get to be rowdy…. I’m not re-writing the female identity, but I wanted to give the girls the chance to do all the rough stuff the guys always get to do!”

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When does that ever happen in theatre? As Williams points out, Hedda Gabler and Nora get to step out of line, but they’re just one, “and they’re surrounded by men…. “Imagine a room full of Hedda’s and Nora’s!” He laughs. In Deserters he’s made a point of expanding the rowdiness circle: “it’s the whole group who gets in on it, and has their elbows up, so to speak.”

And there’s this: Williams wrote Deserters specially for the U of A’s graduating BFA acting class, 12 actors strong, a cast “evenly split by gender identity….” In the production directed by Carmen Aguirre, “we’re not trying to feminize the boys; we’re getting them to bring themselves to the roles … the way we’ve asked women to do when we do retro-fitted Shakespeare.”

“And we get to have this without it being a Big Subject Matter,” as he puts it. “You know the way a woman playing Hamlet always turns into a headline, right?” The gender-fluid casting of Deserters isn’t like that, much to Williams’s delight.

Playwright Kenneth T. Williams. Photo supplied.

Originally from Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan, Williams is an associate professor in the U of A drama department where, in 1992, he became the first Indigenous grad of the Master’s playwriting program). And being at the university, he says, “has allowed me to experiment, not constrained by the usual restraints of Canadian playwriting” where four actors counts as a Size Large cast. It’s a challenge, yes, and a luxury to have a dozen actors. “And since they’ve been together for four years, they know each other well enough to have short-cuts,” and be a bona fide ensemble.

Williams’ route into a premium playwright’s career was circuitous, via the scenic life-experience back road: freelance journalist, rock band drummer, bartender, soldier, door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, First Nations land claims researcher came first. Thunderstick was his breakthrough play, the story of two fractious cousins, the one a hell-raiser and the other a frontline wartime photographer, and both living with a toxic residential school inheritance. In the 2010 Theatre Network production, Claude Lauzon of Royal Canadian Air Farce and Lorne Cardinal of Corner Gas switches roles every night. Cafe Daughter, Bannock Republic, Three Little Birds have been produced on stages across the country. The Herd, an Indigenous version of the purism vs commercial pressures raised in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, was at the Citadel in 2022.

Deserters comes with its own history — a veritable play in itself as the wry Williams (who’s got to be one of the most engaging conversationalists in Canadian theatre) describes. Its origins are the inaugural 2006 edition of ’10 Days of Madness’, a 24-hour playwriting competition launched at the U of A Bookstore. “Back then, it was for four actors,” he says. The idea of civil war was a way into expressing the residential school experience, “in a way that didn’t actual say ‘residential school’, with that experiential baggage.”

“I wanted to create it as an alternate reality, and I came up with the idea of people forced to fight a holy war they didn’t want to fight, conscripted on various sides of belief, and thrown together in a civil war.” The idea, he says, “to give people an understanding of my family’s experience of residential school history — in a sci-fi kind of way.”

“That’s how the whole thing started. And a little bit of that still exists in the play,” he says of the “tiny little world, set in the cell of a military prisoner camp…. Then people kept asking me more about the world. Who are these people? What does the alternative reality look like?  What does the country look like? Where are the police?”

“I kept building it up. But after many years and one almost-production at (Toronto’s) Native Earth Performing Arts, I stopped working it…. OK, so it’s not going to work as a (four-actor) play. A TV series maybe?”

Enter the U of A, and “the chance to expand and make it as big as I wanted.” He spent his professor’s sabbatical year re-working the script for 12 actors. And the more “lore-heavy it got,” he says, “the more confusing it got.”

Director Carmen Aguirre, whose background as a Chilean activist during the Pinochet regime has been invaluable, asked the hard question: “‘Ken, are you OK with the audience being confused?’ And I was ‘not really, Carmen’ (laughter)…. I’m so thankful for her as director/ dramaturge. She made me find a way to explain a lot of the lore that’s happening.”      

Deserters by Kenneth T. Williams, U of A Studio theatre. set and props Chelsea Payne Evason; lighting and projections T. Erin Gruber; costumes Kim-Michelle Brown. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Deserters owes its theatrical concept, and the aesthetic to ‘80s text-based computer games, ‘Wumpus’ among them…. Video games in the old days you have to visualize in your imagination,” unlike the current crop. “In the alternative reality of the play, the vast majority of the population is female.”

Theatre, he thinks, has not been generous with “scenes where two young women talk to each other onstage. It’s harder (to find) than you’d think; I’m stunned how few there are.”

Talking to Williams is like going to an idea carnival, with fast loping rides where you get to hang upside down and see what the world looks like that way. Next up, for an Indigenous writer and a BIPOC director (“a real-life resistance fighter” as Williams says), came the thorny question of culturally specific casting. The views of Aguirre and Williams aren’t identical (“we debate”). “I believe, philosophically, that actors (should be able to) play anyone,” as per the definition and purpose of acting. “But in practice, the cultural reality now, is that you’re not going to see Indigenous actors getting to play roles,” he argues. “ I believe we need to encourage culturally specific acting as much as possible….” It’s not a level playing field, after all.

“There’s still a cultural barrier that we haven’t been able to articulate, clarify, and get rid of, in order for true colour-free casting to happen. It’s not a criticism, it’s an observation: the majority of theatres in this country are largely white-led institutions serving a large white audience.” And “as much as theatres are trying their best,. it’s not improving the conditions for non-white actors…. Institutions are gun-shy about approaching Indigenous work of any kind. Very few plays that are this big are created by Indigenous playwrights.”

Deserters by Kenneth T. Williams, U of A Studio Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective. Set and props Chelsea Payne Evason, lighting and projections T. Erin Gruber, costumes Kim-Michelle Brown

Which brings Williams back to his own play. “All through the workshops and dramaturging, I worked exclusively with Indigenous artists,” he says. But as for the production we’ll see, with its 12-member cast exclusively of BFA graduating actors, “in an alternative reality the characters are not racially identified. Anyone can play the roles….”

In this unusually large-scale venture, Williams, who teaches Indigenous theatre, playwriting, screen writing among his academic assignments,  is “very very appreciative” of the contribution of the U of A creative team — the lighting and projections of T. Erin Gruber, for one, and the sound score and original compositions by Matthew Skopyk.

“Very early on in my career I learned that you need to find people who are really smart artists and you let them be the smart people they are. They bring their magic with them. And it lifts stuff up!”

PREVIEW

Deserters

Theatre: U of A Studio Theatre

Written by: Kenneth T. Williams

Directed by: Carmen Aguirre

Starring: Katie O’Keefe, Sable B. Boltz, Liam Sievwright, Abby Krushel, Andrew Domanski, Colby Stockdale, Gabi Stachniak, Travis Edwards, Joshua Hope, Caileigh Muilenburg, Lauren Johnsen, Tori Kibblewhite

Where: Timms Centre for the Arts, 112 St. and 87 Ave.

Running: through April 11

Tickets: showpass.com or 780-492-2495

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Violent kids, bad parents? These Words Like Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude, at Springboards

Posted on March 29, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Lauren Boyd, who wrote the book and lyrics for These Words Like Daggers, Springboards Festival 2026. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“These words like daggers enter in mine ears….” Hamlet, III, iv, the Closet Scene

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What happens when you look at the world, and the violence perpetrated by kids, through the lens of their (shocked, or appalled, or ignorant, or in-denial) parents? Actually the team of Lauren Boyd and Michael Clark were responding to Hamlet, and particularly Hamlet’s mom, when they were creating These Words Like Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude, getting a staged reading directed by David Horak at Workshop West’s Springboards New Play Festival tonight in partnership with the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

composer Michael Clark, These Words Are Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude, Springboards Festival 2026. Photo supplied.

Gertrude has gotten bad press for more than four centuries — for getting re-married way too soon, and to a murderous usurper to boot, and quite often getting blamed for her son’s revenge quest on behalf of husband #1. But Boyd and Clark, as they explain, weren’t looking to make a musical Hamlet. And David Horak, the Freewill artistic director, who directs the staged reading, didn’t want that either. Boyd, who created the libretto, is an experienced playwright, actor, musical theatre director and producer (her Uniform Theatre production of Cry-Baby, a musical comedy created from the John Waters film, ran at Theatre Network in March). Clark, a composer, musician, and musical director, is the artistic director of the Edmonton Pops Orchestra, which will partner with Freewill on the “Shakespeare-adjacent” Broadway musical comedy Something Rotten!, alternating with Much Ado About Nothing on the Heritage Amphitheatre stage when Freewill returns to Hawrelak Park this summer.

Boyd says she was struck by the book (A Mother’s Reckoning, Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy) by Susan Klebold, the mother of one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre of 1991. “To what extent is someone aware?” says Boyd of the intriguing question that threads into These Words Like Daggers. “The parents of violent kids: it’s still their child, and she chose to believe her son’s innocence.” Klebold alludes to the mystery she failed to recognize under her watch in her own household.

“It’s easy to say, it’s because of this, or this,” as Boyd says of that kind of violence. “To what extent can a parent’s choices” lead to fatal outcomes. “Is it violent video games? Family tension at home? It’s very tempting to find a silver bullet … and say ‘problem solved’!…. We worked very hard not to identify a single factor.”

They cast temptations aside, and steered away from the specific narrative complications of Hamlet, including the Gertrude’s socio-cultural responsibilities and the culpability of Claudius, the usurper. “We pivoted away from ‘step-father as villain’,” says Boyd. “It’s interesting how often we talk about blame? Why did that happen? Who’s responsible? Who’s to blame? It’s so easy to say ‘it’s because of this. Or this’….” And especially this one, sometimes a question and invariably an accusation: “you didn’t know your own child?”

After all, not everyone who has a crappy step-father is screwed up, or takes up serial killing. “The mental health of young white men” might be one of the great mysteries of our time. “As we started exploring, we found ourselves veering farther and farther away from Hamlet and the (specifics) of Gertrude,” says Boyd.

Don’t be daunted by the idea of opera, albeit ‘chamber opera’, advises Clark. “I do a lot of orchestration, conducting, arranging, and composing. I love musical theatre. I just love telling stories through music!” And he and Boyd chose the opera identifier to distinguish the new piece from the usual “more happy-go-lucky” expectations of musicals. Boyd, who’s directed musicals for the last 13 years, points out that These Words Are Daggers doesn’t quite fit the musical theatre mold, with its ‘I want’ song and its ’11 o’clock number’, etc. It’s more experimental in form, more heightened in emotional stakes, than typical musicals.

So, what kind of music fits the storytelling? Not a question with a simple answer. There are even songs that devolve into “quasi-recitative,” as Clark puts it. The songs “go in an out,” he says. The score is not fully ‘classical,’ it’s “more pop, more rock (but not really “angsty teenagers doing punk rock”)….” He settles on “a mix, very listenable, with moments that are crunchier.”

Similarly, Boyd, the lyricist, who went back to the First Folio Shakespeare text,” says the songs veer away from the verse/ chorus/ bridge formula for pop, “the way most musical theatre is.”  Her lyrics are sometimes iambic pentameter, sometimes free verse, as she describes.

Boyd and Clark aired an early iteration of These Words Like Daggers at the Script Salon staged reading series in December. In this latest development, with a new cast of professionals (seven or eight, including Michael Watt and Larissa Poho) and new collaborators, they’re grateful for “the fantastic opportunity to get this off the ground,” says Clark, who’s been musical director for a number of Straight Edge Theatre productions, including Krampus the Christmas musical.

And now, at Springboards, Edmonton audiences get a sneak peek at a new and contemporary chamber opera, with the composer at the piano and Nicholas Yee on cello, and Shakespeare standing by.

These Words Like Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude gets a staged reading at Workshop West’s Springboards Festival tonight at The Gateway Theatre.  Tickets (pay-what-you-will): workshopwest.org.

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‘O god, I need this job’. A Chorus Line at MacEwan, a review

Posted on March 28, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

The cast of A Chorus Line, directed by Jim Guedo, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Choreography by Courtney Arsenault, costumes by Robyn Ayles, set and lighting by Travis Hatt. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is something so moving about seeing what 17 talented young theatre up-and-comers under an expert director bring to a classic. And the 50-year-old musical that’s the season finale and showcase for MacEwan University theatre arts’ graduating actors in Jim Guedo’s exciting production, is a musical theatre icon.

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There’s the dance, of course. Not only is A Chorus Line a full-on dance musical, replete with complex dance numbers, and numbers about auditioning to do dance numbers, and numbers that are all about how to somehow glean — and meet! — the insanely complicated and mysterious demands of a director, creator Michael Bennett’s stand-in. But it’s a musical that’s actually, dramatically, about that life.

It takes us backstage in 1975, where dancers are auditioning for a new Broadway musical. So in A Chorus Line there’s the multi-sided and delicate acting challenge of capturing the assortment of dreams, hopes, anxieties, and disappointments of 17 dancers of variable talents, experience, ambitions, specialties. Some of the characters are direct from theatre school, some are rebounding from showbiz rebuffs, or on the lam from assorted family dysfunctions…. What they share is the need, the desperation, to do what they love, to dance.

It may be a period piece. But Guedo’s cast knows something first-hand about being on the brink of something they really really want.

They are the individual faces (or the headshots on resumés, as a brilliant early scene sets forth) of rising to an ill-defined occasion (what does director Zach want?) with, as the cliché goes, 110 per cent effort and pizzaz. Dance harder, smile more, in the service of the compelling contradiction of A Chorus Line, beautifully captured in Guedo’s production: how to be outstanding enough to join an ensemble and not stand out. To fit exactly into the chorus line of Zach’s new musical — in order to do what they love. To dance.

It gives the climactic numbers What I Did For Love and the finale reprise of One their heartbreaking power. Definitely not a singular sensation. And with the graduating actors of Guedo’s cast, on the threshhold of theatre careers, you get to see what passion, hope, fear (and regret, seen in advance ) look like, 50 years after A Chorus Line opened on Broadway. When one of their number falls with potentially career-ending knee damage, the fierce competitors, and even tyrannical Zach (Zakary Matsuba in a terrific performance), show real sympathy and emotional solidarity.

Audiences might see the ensemble, the chorus line, as razzle-dazzle human stage scenery. But they’re individual artists. Their working lives are fragile. Their gigs are high-stakes. But these are people who wouldn’t have it any other way. All for love.

For me it triggered a memory of being in New York one spring and interviewing a couple of Rockettes from here for the Journal, members of that celebrated move-as-one chorus line. They instantly persuaded a genial NYC cop in Times Square to be their prop for photos, and started in on a series of high kicks of the prescribed Rockette angle. They said, matter-of-factly, that they could do this all day long, without breaking a sweat. When it was time for coffee the photographer actually had to tell them to stop.

They were fulfilling an ambition. One had landed a job as the ensemble member whose claim to individuality was wearing a bratwurst on her head in the chorus line number in The Producers. They were both thrilled with their lives, even though they weren’t unaware their careers wouldn’t last.

A Chorus Line, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo supplied

A Chorus Line is brilliantly constructed to take us backstage to see the individuals behind the precisely calibrated anonymity of the line. To comply with Zach’s demands to hear them talking —“O god, I need this job” they sing in the opener I Hope I Get It — they reveal bits and pieces of their backstories, as little kids, as pubescent pre-teens either being stand-ins for their parents or defying them, as struggling wannabes. In I Can Do That, James Allen’s long-legged Mike recalls imitating, and trying to best, his big sister’s dance moves. The worldly street-hardened Sheila (the compellingly big-voiced Layne Labbe) gives up her tough-cookie gambits to reveal she danced to escape girlhood wounds in an awful family. And she admits to the dream of being a prima ballerina (At The Ballet), joined by other audition-ees in a cleverly staged highlight scene.

Under pressure from Zach, Greg (Kohen Foley) tells of his discovery of being gay. Puerto Rican Diana (Gigi Giles) recounts the gruesomely comic story of her terrible experience in high school drama (“they all felt something, But I felt nothing, except the feeling that this bullshit was absurd”). And in an emotional monologue, delivered with heart-tugging reserve by Don Raphael Figueroa, Paul recounts his troubled history as an exploited effeminate kid in Spanish Harlem. Jenn Houle is fun and sassy as impressively pulchritudinous Val, who sings with gusto about the benefits of “tits and ass” enhancement in Dance: Ten, Looks: Three.

In the most overtly comic number, from Avery Neufeld and Jayden Leung pull off the tricky timing, amusingly. And at the heart of A Chorus Line, Cassie, who has a failed romantic history with Zach, has abandoned her solo aspirations and returns, sadder and wiser, to the chorus line because she needs a job. She’s played by Josie Hoffarth, a stunning dancer whose solo is a tangible demo of what Cassie gives up in taming her wild talents to the ensemble.

Under Guedo’s direction, the performances through the whole ensemble, led by Matsuba’s Zach, are vivid and bold, . The singing talents are variable, in truth. The dancing, choreographed by Courtney Arsenault, is a knock-out. Arsenault’s challenge is to capture the struggle of dancer characters of differing expertise, en route to thrilling precision. This is the double-sided drama of the piece, and Arsenault’s contributions are indispensable.

The solos sometimes sometimes have an ensemble context. And it’s captured by Guedo’s stagecraft, and the smart use of dance rehearsal hall mirrors and lighting (designer: Travis Hatt). The rehearsal costumes (designer: Robyn Ayles), which veer from snazzy work-out leotards to shleppy jeans, are an insight into character, social background, individual ambition. And the sound (designer: Brian Raine) in the Triffo is impeccable.

It’s all accompanied by a crack seven-member band led by Shannon Heibert. They know exactly how to negotiate Marvin Hamlisch’s great, showbiz-forward musical theatre score (just try to leave the theatre without humming).

It’s Jim Guedo’s farewell production at MacEwan after 15 years. A landmark show for a landmark era in Edmonton theatre.

REVIEW

A Chorus Line

Theatre: MacEwan University Theatre Arts

Created by: Michael Bennett, Marvin Hamlisch (music), Edward Kleban (lyrics), James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante (book)

Directed by: Jim Guedo

Musical direction: Shannon Hiebert

Choreographer: Courtney Arsenault

Set and lighting: Travis Hatt

Costumes: Robyn Ayles

Where: Triffo Theatre, Allard Hall, 11110 104 Ave.

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: macewan.ca 

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We are haunted by our losses: Phantom Limbs at Expanse

Posted on March 27, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

I want to tell you about a haunting and mysterious play I saw last weekend at the Expanse Fest. Phantom Limbs is one of those experiences that move into your mind and lodge there. It’s a dance-theatre piece that gives a bravura role to body-sensing tech, since Moment Discovery’s impressively sparkly high-tech Dot Box, full of thousands of LED lights, plays along with playwright/performer Kristi Hansen onstage as she moves through the story she’s telling — a story of pain, resilience, obstacles overcome, joy.

On the one hand the tech is a kind of sympathetic stage companion. When Hansen moves, or jumps, or spins, the Dot Box responds in sync, with light and colour patterns. On the other hand, that technology eerily persists in mapping a right leg and foot that Hansen, an amputee artist of pretty much unlimited versatility (she’s a great dancer), no longer has on her body: a phantom limb that continues to ache and make its presence felt even though it doesn’t physically exist.

And in her play Hansen weaves a collage of phantom memories and selves, thoughts, images, dreams that stay with her, haunt her, refuse to vanish into the past. There’s her bright six-year-old self unfazed by people staring at her unusual leg and backward foot. There’s her 12-year-old self, counting backwards, the way anesthetists  command, en route to complex (and innovative) surgeries in hospitals. Counting backwards gives new meaning to the concept of phantom pain, a march into the past and an experience that time cannot remove (a powerful metaphor for our losses that resonate in the present).

And threading through the play is a free-association of thoughts about horrifying war-time amputations, land mines, limb-severing accidents in parts of the world where amputees don’t have access to prosthetics, or even anesthetic.

The spoken text — which includes voice-overs at a variety of aural distances, from six artists including Hansen herself — is both graphic and poetic. And you’re bound to reflect on the phantom “limbs” — the absent people, selves, moments, images that haunt you, still part of your body memory. They’re with you, and of you, even though they’ve been “amputated” by the passage of time.

Phantom Limbs by and starring Kristi Hansen, Expanse Festival. Photo by Ian Jackson.

It’s eerie, and it’s also strangely reassuring, I found. We are not just an architecture (albeit a fragile one) of flesh and bone, Hansen tells and shows us. Those can be lost, amputated, rearranged; flesh and bone can be cut away, or replaced by plastic and metal. But somehow, remarkably, we remain fully ourselves. “And life goes on.”

It’s a haunting, richly imagined piece of work — to which Moment Discovery’s team led by director of research Pamela Anthony and a long list of theatre artists at the top of their game (Aaron Macri, Ainsley Hillyard, Sheldon Elter among them) have contributed. And your chance to see it isn’t lost to the world of might-have-beens: Phantom Limbs continues at Expanse Friday through Sunday (at Moment Discovery headquarters in Edmonton Centre). Tickets: azimuththeatre.com. 

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What I did for love: A Chorus Line, Jim Guedo’s farewell production at MacEwan

Posted on March 26, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

A Chorus Line, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo supplied

The cast of A Chorus Line directed by Jim Guedo, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The musical that opens tonight on MacEwan University’s Triffo stage takes us into the individual lives, the hopes, the desperate dreams, the sacrifices of Broadway dancers, that anonymous ensemble of high-kickers who do it — or so the song says — for love.

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Fifty years ago A Chorus Line, the Tony-studded Pulitzer-winning creation of the brilliant director/ choreographer/ innovator Michael Bennett, broke new ground in musical theatre. Its scene is behind-the-scenes; its set a stage where dancers are auditioning for a new Broadway show. The anxiety and tension, the fierce competition … it’s all there threading through the real stories gathered from interviews with career dancers, in the conception of the groundbreaking musical that director Jim Guedo chose for the theatre arts season finale at MacEwan.

And, as a special occasion capper, A Chorus Line is Guedo’s own farewell to that institution after 15 years as an educator, teaching, mentoring, and directing there, preparing the new generation of theatre artists for life in the industry. “I love the show,” says Guedo, who saw the original Broadway production on his first trip to New York . “It’s a great show to end a season.” And for his cast of graduating actors, “it’s the final show of their training after four years: they’ve spent four years acting, singing, dancing. And they actually get to do a show that beautifully integrates all of that.”

“Such a cohesive concept piece, experimental at the time … great acting scenes, fabulous stand-alone numbers, and dancing for days! I love the integration of it, workshopped originally to give each aspect equal weight: stream of consciousness, internal exploration, documentary realism…. It’s just a wild ride.”

For the students it’s an ultimate work-out, in a great way.” And the ultimate dance show, as he points out: “jazz, ballet, tap, soft-shoe….”

Saskatchewan-born Guedo, who taught theatre at the University of Saskatchewan for a decade before coming to MacEwan 15 years ago, has a director/designer resumé dotted with awards and Canadian premieres and productions in theatres across the country, including his artistic directorship at the late Phoenix Theatre here, summer Shakespeare with Freewill, Theatre Network, Workshop West, the Citadel. And departing MacEwan, “bittersweet” as he describes, means a liberation into freelance directing, including productions to come with his own indie company Wild Side Productions, known for his challenging choices like Small Mouth Sounds, A Doll’s House Part 2, The Children. Last summer he directed and designed Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things at the Fringe. At this summer’s festivities, it’s full throttle: he’s directing two shows, both musicals.

A Chorus Line, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo supplied

And A Chorus Line, Broadway’s longest running musical till Cats overtook that record, comes with its own challenges, and its own ironies for both cast and director, as Guedo describes. “People tend to think of it as a dance musical like 42nd Street or Fame, about kids getting their big break. But it’s a darker, deeper animal than the traditional backstage musical,” he argues. “Beautifully written, it charts, not in a linear way as fractured between (stories from) 17 people, the stages in the life of a dancer — at eight, at 15, what made you want to do it? how did you become a dancer? what was it like growing up? You get a sense of it.”

The realities of life in the theatre have changed in the 50 years since Zach, the musical’s tyrannical director character, demanded the audition-ers spill the  secrets of their private lives. The theatre is not an easy life, to be sure. But “I don’t believe this show as it’s written can be performed as if it’s happening in 2026,” Guedo points out. “I was an acting student in the late ‘70s, when the instructor could be smoking in class, and his mickey contained who knows what…. And Michael Bennett could do a cattle call audition that could last eight hours, and grill the dancers all day long. The director was god, and you could break all the rules.”

“None of it would fly now. The director would not get away with any of this.” The realities were brutal, as Guedo has been telling his student cast. In 1975, where “most Broadway musicals were lucky if they lasted 10 weeks,” a dancer might make $200 a week. So, $2500 in a year — yes, doing the job you love, but if you got injured and had surgery, that would be the $2500 gone.”

“The weird irony,” as he says, “is that we’re training the students to audition. And auditioning is nothing like the world of this play…. We’re used to a more compassionate, empathetic, nurturing environment.” The difference in tone between the 1975 cast recording of A Chorus Line, and the one made from the 2006 Broadway revival, is telling. The latter, Guedo points out, “has (already) been slightly softened, trapped by nostalgia….”

“When you sing What I Did For Love, you can’t turn it into a power ballad, a park-and-bark emotional pop anthem. It’s saying ‘what would you do if you can’t dance?’.”

A Chorus Line is a 1975 portrait — of Michael Bennett, via his show alter-ego Zach — of the director as brilliant, a genius, and a master-manipulator.” He demands insights into their lives, into “what makes them tick.” The dancers are “his playground, his putty, his tools, and they suck it up; they want to be part of it.” Guedo says wryly, “In my entire career, there are only three or four people I’ve hired on the basis of an audition.” He much prefers watching actors onstage in other shows (“you learn more be being in the audience”). Or “I go for coffee with them…. Is this someone I want to spend six weeks with?”

The production makes no concessions for students, says the director. “Courtney Arsenault’s choreography is not some junior version….” The great Marvin Hamlisch songs are in the hands of musical director Shannon Hiebert. “And the students are there. We have the people!”

And after 25 years “simultaneously straddling” the parallel, but different, worlds of theatre education and the professional theatre, Guedo is ready to step up to the bucket list of shows he’s always wanted to direct. “I’m open for business.” What he’ll miss is directing the students through their four-year evolution. “I want to see where they land!”

PREVIEW

A Chorus Line

Theatre: MacEwan University Theatre Arts

Created by: Michael Bennett, Marvin Hamlisch (music), Edward Kleban (lyrics), James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante (book)

Directed by: Jim Guedo

Where: Triffo Theatre, Allard Hall, 11110 104 Ave.m

Running: tonight through Sunday

Tickets: macewan.ca 

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Two years and 51 servings later … The Butter Chicken Odyssey at Springboards New Play Festival, a preview

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Ramneek Singh’s The Butter Chicken Odyssey, at Springboards New Play Festival. Graphic supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a vision quest. It’s a challenge. It’s a journey of discovery beyond the menu and into a South-Asian cultural inheritance. It’s an expedition into the woods (well, Mill Woods) to satisfy a hunger, to re-discover Punjabi cultural roots and reclaim identity.

It’s … butter chicken.

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Two years ago the intrepid food writer Ramneek Singh set bravely forth on a two-year odyssey to find the best butter chicken in Edmonton. Fifty-one restaurants, 51 servings of f butter chicken, and towering cholesterol later, The Butter Chicken Odyssey has become a solo play, created by Singh with the theatrical and dramaturgical collaboration of award-winning playwright Collin Doyle. And it gets its first live theatre audience Friday in a staged reading at Workshop West’s Springboards New Play Festival.

Singh’s lively food reviews, posted on Facebook and Instagram (“Ram’s Food Reviews,” @ramfoodguy), had already garnered him a huge social media following when his bright idea came to him. “I’m a huge fast-food junkie,” he says. “My dad raised me on McDonald’s quarter-pounders. Burgers, poutine, tacos….” He reviewed fast food of every kind (“if you’re telling the truth you’ve gotta be tough; you can’t hold back”). When he trashed Jollibees, the Filipino franchise, his review went viral, 70,000 people saw it, and he got death threats. Singh calls it his Mumbo No. 5 (Doyle is amused by this).

Eventually, Singh, at 40, got fast-food fatigue. “I was thinking of calling it quits,” he says. “I’m not bringing anything new to the table…. But about that time I had a daughter. And as she was developing speech and language I realized she couldn’t speak Punjabi, and it was my fault. I wasn’t speaking it with her. And it was my mother tongue,” says Singh who was born in Edmonton but didn’t know English till he was in kindergarten. His parents had arrived in Mill Woods in the ‘70s from India, and Punjabi was the language of the household.

Ramneek Singh, creator and star of The Butter Chicken Odyssey. Photo supplied

“I felt I needed to get back into my culture,” he says of his newly 40-year-old self, “and I figured one of the easiest ways was through the food…. I might be the only Indian food writer in Edmonton. But if not, I’m certainly the only Punjabi one. There’s a void here. So I did a deep-dive into Punjabi food — and had butter chicken 50 times.”

This, laughs Singh, who has a natural exuberance about him in conversation, “was instrumental in me being on cholesterol meds right now… I’m sure I’ll be fine in three months.”

Why butter chicken, of all the Punjabi culinary identifiers? “Its universally loved,” Singh says. “It’s also one of the most controversial and polarizing dishes because of the way it mutated over time for Western palates. It was really colonized by the West….” And, a birth-right stolen, the “bone-in authenticity” of a glorious, nuanced, and complicated dish, was leached out. “Chicken breasts floating in Campbell’s tomato soup: that’s not the real butter chicken.”

The Butter Chicken Odyssey “was my way of creating a conversation about how its authenticity was diluted over the years.” He thinks of it as a kind of cultural appropriation, so thoroughly claimed by the Western world that there’s a common misperception butter chicken was invented in England. Wrong. “It is an Indian food, invented in one of the most famous restaurants in Dehli (Moti Mahal).”

“We should be proud of it … and people treat it like it’s the neglected step-child on menus (the celebrated Indian restaurateur Vikram Vij in Vancouver refuses to even have it on his menu it’s been so bastardized). “But it’s a great dish if it’s made right.” Singh, who’s had dishes named after him in Indian restaurants, declares his own butter chicken “only passable, but I’ll get there…. I’d give it a 6.”

Still, “there’s only so many ways you can write about butter chicken,” says Singh. “How many times can you talk about fenugreek?” Gradually, his writer’s vision expanded, to embrace his childhood memories of Punjabi family life, of growing up amongst the families of multicultural Mill Woods.

And that’s when theatre happened in his life. Doyle, a playwright of blue-chip credentials (The Mighty Carlins, Slumberland Motel, Let The Light Of Day Through) and a fan of Singh’s reviews, reached out, on New Year’s Day. “This should be a play!”

“I wasn’t a theatre guy, not at all,” says Singh cheerfully. “I love movies but I’ve been to one Fringe play in my life.” Since many people have wanted to collaborate with him (“I’m a bit trepidatious”), he did some research. “I read some of his plays,” starting with Routes and moving on to The Mighty Carlins, both set in Mill Woods. “And I was ‘Wow, this guy wants to work with me!? This stuff is art. It’s brilliant!’”

“So we met at Zaika for butter chicken.”

Playwright Collin Doyle, dramaturg of The Butter Chicken Odyssey by Ramneek Singh, Springboards New Play Festival. Photo supplied.

“You could feel a shift in Ramneek’s writing as it got more personal,” says Doyle. What had started with reading Singh’s reviews on Facebook “just because I wanted to know where the best butter chicken was,” became a real appreciation of soulful writing. At the end of Singh’s odyssey, his “beautiful story about his bibi, the woman who babysat him in Mill Wood, cared for him, gave him language, made him embrace his culture,” sealed it for Doyle. “It was a gorgeous piece of writing.” And Doyle was struck by just how engaged he was by reading Singh on Facebook, a “disposable media” where stuff normally just slides off you as you scroll.

What the pair discovered was a whole set of unexpected, and instant,  connections. Says Singh, “we’re both film geeks, we both love the Beatles,” and this: they’re both from Mill Woods, and it’s a part of town that figures prominently in their work. “We both have a passionate love for Mill Woods…. To me, growing up in ‘90s it was a cultural utopia, a multicultural rainbow, every type of culture, all these working class parents, Vietnamese families, Korean families, all building something at the same time, moving from basements to apartments to houses…. And there was harmony there.”

Whether it’s referred to explicitly or not, “all my plays are set in Mill Woods,” says Doyle, whose family moved there in 1980, first the so-called “brown apartment” near Millbourne Mall, then public housing…. It’s one of the best places you can grow up poor.” Mainly because the neighbourhoods are built inclusively — “lower class, working class, middle and upper classes, all together. For a kid going to school, there was such a diversity of people, of income levels, of cultures.”

Both Singh and Doyle push back against “the myth,” as the latter puts it, “of Mill Wood being this violent dangerous place.” Remember the Kill Woods nickname? As Singh says, “I grew up with people talking trash about Mill Woods in the early 2000s, and ”media sensationalism, fuelled by racism, about “drive-by shootings and Molotov cocktails, brown-on-brown gang violence…. We were branded basically because of two murders six blocks apart….”

Post-butter chicken odyssey, Singh has a new quest. His Mill Wood Dreamer columns (with the Herculean goal of reviewing every single Indian and Pakistani restaurant in Mill Woods) are inspired he says by the famous video leak in which Connor McDavid is exhorting his team during the Panthers series. “What means something to me?”

After 30 years Singh had left Mill Woods (Glastonbury will never be home, he says), “and I started dreaming about it, my first memories of my parents, my childhood dreams, my Dad’s dreams when he moved there from India,” his memories of watching rented horror movies. “That’s how we learned English,” he laughs. “I know it sounds messed up…. We rented Child’s Play from the 7-Eleven. I don’t care what language you speak, that movie is terrifying!”

And now there’s a play, getting “a test drive” as Doyle puts it, at Springboards before its next iteration at the Fringe. It occurred to Doyle to wonder whether Singh, an accomplished and engaging public speaker, could act. “We did a reading of the first act, and thank gawd, he could!” They both laugh.

“It’s not really acting for me,” says the genial Singh modestly.He’s more concerned with whether he can remember all his lines. Says Doyle, “it’s Ramneek’s voice … and the butter chicken odyssey gives it such a clear arc.” It begins with a question that someone asks Singh, “where are you from originally?” And “we go on this this journey. He answers that question by the end, and I think it’ll make people cry.”

PREVIEW

Workshop West Springboards New Play Festival

The Butter Chicken Odyssey

Written by and starring: Ramneek Singh, dramaturged by Collin Doyle

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd

Running: Friday

Tickets: (all pay-what-you-will) workshopwest.org.

 

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Celebrating playmakers: Springboards, Workshop West’s signature new play festival, is back

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Springboards springs back this week. And with it our chance to catch new Canadian plays-in-progress, a whole bunch of them at every stage of their evolution, as they meet an audience — us! — for the first time.

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Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s spring-loaded new play festival is, as artistic producer Heather Inglis has often put it, “our backstage pass” to the world of artistic creation. It’s our sneak peek, in staged reading form, at Canadian hits to come. And it’s a signature event for a 48-year-old company devoted to the development, the expansion, the profile of the Canadian repertoire — and its creators. Our engagement, our reactions, our feedback are crucial for the playwright, “to see how it lands with an audience,” as Inglis says.  “Sometimes they’re testing a concept, sometimes the script is rough and ready; sometimes it’s more polished….”

This year’s edition, the fifth since the festivities returned in 2022 after a 10-year-absence, features the work of some 30 playwrights — some experienced, some emerging, some newbies. And it connects Springboards for the first time to new partners, the U of A’s New Works Festival and the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

The Next Big Thing, Thursday night, is a double-bill from two of the New Works Festival’s hottest up-and-comers, Elyse Roszell and Josh Greyvenstein, “advised by” Brijesh Magarathinam, the festival’s artistic director. “Both interesting, both well constructed,” says Inglis of The Piano Lesson and I Inherited The Harvest. The former, a two-hander, finds two women mysteriously locked in a room with a piano. The latter, a drama of the gothic stripe with a Hunger Games vibe as Inglis describes, explores the dark inheritance of tradition.

A connection with the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, a first for Springboards and welcomed by Inglis, comes March 29 via These Words Like Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude. A co-creation of Lauren Boyd and Michael Clark, it stars Hamlet’s mom: you remember her, the king’s widow who got married, too soon too soon as her son points out, to her late husband’s brother, a usurper who now wears the crown. For Gertrude, the optics have always been pretty bad. This new piece explores a mother and a son in new ways, says Inglis.

Edmonton theatre audiences know the work of musician/composer/conductor/ musical director Clark by his extensive musical theatre credits, including his Edmonton Pops Orchestra contributions to such Straight Edge Theatre productions as Krampus, the Christmas horror musical. Boyd, the librettist, is an actor playwright improv comedy artist. The staged reading (which includes cellist Nicholas Yee onstage) is directed by Freewill artistic director Dave Horak, who has a particular interest in “Shakespeare-adjacent” work. A  12thnight interview with Clark and Boyd is coming soon.

The Butter Chicken Odyssey, Friday night at Springboards, is theatre’s first engagement with food writer and social media star Ramneek Singh (Ram’s Food Reviews, @ramfoodguy), and his remarkable two-year quest to find the best butter chicken in Edmonton. Fifty-one restaurants, rocketing cholesterol, and insights into South-Asian culture, Mill Woods and his own Punjabi roots later — with dramaturg Collin Doyle, the premium playwright who became intrigued by Singh’s writing — it’s a solo play.   Stay tuned for 12thnight’s interview with the pair, coming up soon.

The annual Springboards cabaret, a perennial fave, has a lively new form this year. Five-Alive: The Springboards Cabaret Goes Rogue, on Saturday night, is directed by Ron Jenkins, a former Workshop West artistic director and now the U of A’s Lee Playwright-in-Residence. Off Your butts, people. The five-minute plays in Act I, written by participants in the Edmonton Playwrights’ Circle happen in found spaces, the nooks and crannies of Workshop West’s Gateway Theatre home base. Jenkins is an expert at using found spaces; Inglis is delighted, too — found spaces were her specialty in the years she was artistic director of Theatre Yes. In Act II, you’ll be back in the theatre proper, in the seated position, for excerpts of more playlets.

EDMONten, a partnership with the Alberta Playwrights Network is a showcase of five 10-minute originals (selected blind by a jury), happening Wednesday night. The playwrights: Joëlle Préfontaine, Marshall Eglinski, Cat Walsh, Nathaniel Tesfaye, and Grace Fitzgerald. Charlie Peters directs a cast of four: Ben Kuchera, Glenn Nelson, Monica Gate, and Hayley Moorhouse.

And the festival kicks off Tuesday night with The Script Becomes Her, excerpts from new plays by The Women’s Script Writing Circle.

Springboard tickets (all pay-what-you-will) are at workshopwest.org. Or at the door, Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.   

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‘Gotta go make some hi-story’: The Revolutionists at Shadow, a review

Posted on March 20, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Aimée Beaudoin, Alexandra Dawkins, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Revolutionists, a comedy (well, “mostly a comedy” as billed) by the American playwright Lauren Gunderson, on stage in the Shadow Theatre season, is bookended with a killer sound effect: the storied metallic swoosh of the guillotine.

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Yup, high stakes, with a vertical drop. Inside that historic framework, a playwright with writer’s block is fretting away struggling in vain to write something meaningful and profound and, you know, rise to the occasion: it’s 1793 in Paris, mid-Reign of Terror, and there’s just been a big-deal Revolution which seems to be going wrong. “There’s drama everywhere you look these days. Why can’t I write any of it?” wails Olympe (Alexandra Dawkins). “Everyone is making history except me.”

Re-worked from the real-life playwright Olympe de Gouges who lost her head for feminist activism, she’s the character — playwright as flawed anti-hero — at the centre of this sassy, self-mocking, often funny comedy, in full period regalia (costumes by Rebecca Cypher,  sound design by Darrin Hagen, who takes his cue from a script that artfully mixes the 18th century and the contemporary).

Alexandra Dawkins, Aimée Beaudoin, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Soon Olympe’s chamber (a classical multi-doored round in Cindi Zuby’s clever design) will be invaded by her old friend Marianne Angelle (Kijo Gatama), a Black Haitian revolutionary and freedom-fighter and spy, keen to get her pal to put fiction aside in favour of reality, and write a pamphlet or two. She’s the conscience of the play, and the only character who’s imagined (from the French iconography of the Republic) and not borrowed from history.

Jacquelin Walters and Kijo Gatama in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Then Charlotte Corday (Jacquelin Walters), the young assassin who’s about to get famous by stabbing the Jacobin big-shot mouthpiece Marat in his bathtub — “because he’s awful.” She’s looking for some snazzy last words from “the last lady playwright in Paris” she can deliver at her inevitable execution.

And then, who should show up but Marie Antoinette (Aimée Beaudoin), a perky bubble-head hoping for a re-write on her image, tarnished by bad publicity she figures. “The country used to like me…. I just need better press,” she says. She’s perplexed by the revolutionary chaos.“Was all this because of me? Am I too pretty?”

The fun of The Revolutionists, and also its darker side, is that these characters in search of an author all want something different from the beleaguered playwright. And for her part Olympe just desperately wants theatre to be important — to be a star, make a big splash by writing something important, create a dramatic hit that will slay at the box office, and get great reviews. “This is our time to make a better world for everyone,” she declares grandly, “everyone … who sees my plays.”

Gunderson, a deft comic writer, is hard on theatre and the self-importance of its practitioners, and that spirit of self-assessment (via some very funny theatre zingers) means that The Revolutionists touches down lightly in its dark world. And as it becomes a play within a play, there’s something heartwarming about its doubts. Is having a story enough?

So, a play about theatre vs real life, or theatre and real life: that is The Revolutionists’ question. In John Hudson’s production (his last Shadow show as artistic director after a 30-year run), Dawkins plays Olympe boldly as a sort of manic grotesque, a histrionic clown in perpetual motion on the stage in this heightened performance, flinging her arms like a manic marionette, shrieking and chattering, ready to levitate at a moment’s notice. Truly, you can’t take your eyes off her, but I wonder if it’s a performance that’s a bit overheated in adding another layer of comedy to the comedy.

Anyhow, the playwright here is something of a tiring high-maintenance upstager, needing to be tamed by her own characters. And, to be sure, this is a play that wonders about that.

Marianne, who has a certain calm skeptical intensity about her in Gatama’s fine performance, comes as something of a relief. As Charlotte Corday, who gets off on “the feel of righteous fury,” has a kind of breezy youthful charm in Walters’ performance. The scenes between Charlotte and Marianne as her acting coach have an odd kind of sweetness to them.

Aimée Beaudoiin and Alexandra Dawkins in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The funniest, and most surprising, character is the ex-Queen played by Beaudoin as an unexpectedly satirical critic of the theatre, with a certain sharp-eyed producer glint about her. If it’s not a romantic comedy, she tells Olympe, “nobody will come.” She’s serious about shallowness, as Beaudoin, a gifted comic actor, conveys so amusingly. And then it turns out she has an offhand but surprisingly sturdy feminist streak, and a steadfastness about female friendship, witness a scene of unexpected emotional heft between Marie and Marianne at a moment of crisis.

Sometimes, Marie says brightly, a revolution needs a woman’s touch. And so does writing for the theatre in stressful times, like our own. A validation of what theatre can be makes for a lively evening in the company of a clever comedy.

REVIEW

The Revolutionists

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Lauren Gunderson

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Aimée Beaudoin, Alexandra Dawkins, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through April 18

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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The mysterious presence of absence: Kristi Hansen’s Phantom Limbs at Expanse Fest 2026, a preview

Posted on March 20, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Phantom Limbs by and starring Kristi Hansen, Expanse Festival. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a great mystery at the heart of Kristi Hansen’s Phantom Limbs, opening Saturday at the Expanse Festival.

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It’s the uncanny way the past haunts the present. It has to do with the resonating presence in our lives of things, people, images, moments in time — and limbs — we’ve lost.

Amputees, Hansen included, have often reported physical sensations — “a sort of Charley Horse, an ache, a pulsing” as she describes — where limbs and appendages are missing. But when Moment Discovery’s ultra-sophisticated body-sensing technology actually mapped a right leg and foot that aren’t physically present — and haven’t been since Hansen was a pre-teen — she knew she had a poetic metaphor, rich and magical, to take onto the stage. Theatre artists know these things, and this year’s Expanse, dubbed “Intersections,” seems a perfect place to unveil it.

Hansen traces the synapse of theatre and technology back a couple of years to a partnership with Moment Discovery’s director of research Pamela Anthony. And X-Box sensors meant, as Hansen describes, “in the space I can trigger light, sound, projections with my body. I’m in control.” Phantom Limbs is “me cue-ing myself,” Hansen says of her “theatre/ dance/ technology/ art experiment…. my co-star onstage is a Dot Box, thousands of LED (lights) in a square.”

“Such poetic resonance!” Hansen says of the metaphor that underscores the show, an exploration of an interior garden of intertwined memories, selves, “inside the moment and reflecting on the world now….” Gaza, for example, the site of “the most child amputations in history,” and the privilege of access to prosthetics, these are thoughts that haunt Hansen’s dreams.

In fact she calls the show “a fever dream, — and it takes me down different paths and memories, an exploration of me, my leg, growing up in a different body, experiences in the hospital….” And there’s a universal resonance too to the experience of phantom loss: “texting friends even when they’re gone, miscarriages, when you lose a pet.” We are all haunted beings. And, in Phantom Limbs, Hansen (who, incidentally, is the director of Expanse’s most physical show Cycle) is “haunted by my own body,” as she puts it.

It started as a 10-minute trial excerpt. And now it’s about an hour — “the tech is my scene partner” — with live sound design and the addition of “some manual cue-ing” fired by stage manager Tessa Stamp.

The new iteration combines “the physicality of dance (performed without prosthetic), and voice-overs, other voices that I’ve imagined, calling to me,” says Hansen. “It’s taking me, but I’m in control…. A grand experiment!”

Phantom Limbs runs Saturday through March 29 as part of Expanse Festival 2026 at Moment Discovery, 122-10025 102 Ave. Tickets (all pay-what-you-can) and full schedule: azimuththeatre.com.

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Making plays in the shadow of Mme La Guillotine: The Revolutionists at Shadow, a preview

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Aimée Beaudoiin and Alexandra Dawkins in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Revolutionists, opening tonight at Shadow Theatre, has an intriguing subtitle: “A Comedy. A Quartet. A Revolutionary Dream Fugue. A True Story.”

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And the play — by the continent’s most produced contemporary playwright Lauren Gunderson — set in Paris in 1793 at the apex of the Reign of Terror in the looming presence of Mme La Guillotine, brings together four women of that moment of violent extremism. Three are kidnapped from history: playwright Olympe de Gouges, Marat assassin Charlotte Corday, ex-queen of France Marie Antoinette. The fourth, Marianne Angelle, Black and from the Caribbean, is the imagined embodiment of the French post-Revolution icon of liberté and égalité. And all of them are annotated in the script at the outset as “badass.”

This is the play, written in the shadow of the guillotine that was Trump’s 2016 election victory, director John Hudson has chosen for his finale production as Shadow’s artistic director after 30 years. And for the occasion he’s brought together four exciting Edmonton theatre artists — bad-ass actors/ writers/ directors/ theatre-makers themselves, multi-disciplinary and of very different artistic stripe. 12thnight.ca had a chance to catch up with them this week to see what a play about writing a play, and creating bold art in risky and turbulent times (ring a bell?), means to them.

Alexandra Dawkins, Aimée Beaudoin, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Alexandra Dawkins plays Olympe, in real life an artist activist on behalf of equal status and rights for women, and in The Revolutionists a playwright suffering from writer’s block at a high-stakes moment, brainstorming for a title for her new play, as yet unwritten ( maybe “something tantalizing but really vague, like The Revolutionists….”). Dawkins, a U of A theatre school grad whose own directing career began with Shadow’s first “artistic director fellowship,” thinks of Olympe, the presiding mind of The Revolutionists, as Gunderson’s “vehicle to explore fragile white feminism….”

Dawkins thinks of the character as a manifestation of Gunderson’s “internal conversation…. Do my feelings, my viewpoints about abolition and oppression, as a white women making claims, have an impact?.” Olympe is “the playwright’s way of exploring the role of the privileged artist and how effective you can be as an artist in starting a conversation with the world … exploring her own relationship to the colonial world we live in and her impact as a white woman who has the privilege of telling stories. I think Gunderson is wrestling with a lot of those questions.” Questions like “whose story it is to tell….”

Jacquelin Walters, actor, playwright, director, composer and musician, plays Charlotte Corday, the young convent-raised countrywoman who assassinates the journalist Marat, anti-monarchist and witch-hunt inciter of deadly mass violence (in his bathtub, as per the famous Jacques-Louis David painting). Or rather, as Walters amends, she’s playing Olympe’s idea of Charlotte Corday. Walters describes the character, “a young woman with not many life experiences,” convinced “that she was put on earth to kill Marat,” since no one else has the guts to do it.

She muses on that tricky question of the ownership of narrative. She wonders about Olympe and her writer’s block, “her inner editor” paralyzed by the fear of not executing perfectly and “stopping herself from making any statement at all…. Sometimes, as half-decent imperfect people we’re so concerned about getting it a bit wrong” we leave the storytelling to the forces decisively on the wrong side of truth. Au courage: “at least there’s a record, not on the side of authority.” As Kijo Gatama says, citing the play, “if you don’t write it, who will? And if they do, they win….”

Kijo Gatam and Alexandra Dawkins in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Gatama plays Marianne, symbol-turned-Black woman. An actor, playwright and poet (her own plays always start as poems then expand), she has some doubts about this tactic. “I love playing her,” she says of Marianne, a freed slave from the Haitian Revolution who’s in Paris on an espionage mission. “But I think of her as a social experiment, to be honest….. She’s in the play to remind the characters (and the audience) that liberty isn’t a silo, that it’s something that has to be across the planet.”

She’s “useful to the writer … to have morality.”

Playwright Gunderson “puts a lot of weight on Marianne in the play…. She pushes (the other characters) to think outside their own selves, to see how privileged they are…. Knock knock, there’s a bigger world out there.”

Aimée Beaudoin, Alexandra Dawkins, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

As for Marie Antoinette, the doomed French queen much vilified for flaunting her royal privilege (“let them eat cake” is long attributed to her), is a comical presence in The Revolutionists. “It starts off with raucous comedy,” says Aimée Beaudoin, who plays her. And Marie turns out to be a surprising character, “obtuse and insensitive, not really listening to what anyone is saying, or caring … and ending up being there for Marianne in her darkest hour.” Beaudoin, playwright, cabaret artist, and co-founder/-producer/-creative muse (with Jeff Halaby) at Spotlight Cabaret — one of Edmonton theatre’s bona fide success stories — is a specialist in comedy. And she points to “a dichotomy” we all share, “a shallow silly side and a deeper, more heartfelt side.”   

For the cast, The Revolutionists — and they all pay tribute to Hudson in this his artistic director farewell piece — has inspired reflection on their own role as career artists working in risky, often hostile times, with consequences, albeit without the ultimate price tag of the guillotine.

Dawkins’s own favourite theatrical form is bouffon clowning since it “gives artists permission to ask really hard questions, to talk directly to the king” so to speak, “while the king is in the room … taking the mickey out of yourself in order to speak truth.” The appeal, for Dawkins, a new artistic associate at Thou Art Here Theatre, is that “I really really like direct address, talking directly to the audience.” She’s creating a new bouffon play Saboteur for her clown character. And she’s directing the latest iteration of Sophie May Healey’s clown show Hysteria’s House for the Found Festival.

Beaudoin, who appeared in Shadow’s Slumberland Motel with Julien Arnold seven years ago, launched Spotlight “when Jeff and I weren’t getting gigs,” as she says cheerfully, is well aware that comedy, her métier, comes with particular risks in these cautious times. Maybe danger is the appeal. “The world is scary,” she says. “And you kind of have to push through…. But putting yourself out there is always scary.”

She and Halaby, who never see a fourth wall they don’t want to knock down, are currently re-working a piece they created seven years ago (Lady Marmalade opens May 1). Looking at the original now, she says, “we realized we were scared to write the kind of comedy we actually enjoy.” The new version won’t be like that.

“After five years of drafting and workshopping,” Gatama, fresh from a starring role in Jameela McNeil’s Mrs. Pat’s Kitchen at SkirtsAfire, is now involved in final edits for the publication of her play Hyena’s Trail. It’s in an art exhibit (till March 28) at Co*Lab. And she’ll soon be performing at the Edmonton Poetry Festival. “Shadow was the first company I auditioned for professionally, when I was just 19 or 20 and I’d just been accepted for the BFA program at the U of A.” Being in Hudson’s final show as artistic director has a beautiful full-circle arc for her.

Walters is writing and will direct a new show, a two-hander operetta (or is it musical theatre? she laughs) with hints of her love of G&S, in which her theatre partners Michael Watt and Nicole Maloney will appear at Spotlight Cabaret during the Fringe.

And meanwhile there’s the actor’s challenge of being in a play about the creation of a play, being characters fashioned and edited in the mind of a character who’s a playwright. Ah, in a comedy that begins and ends with four beheadings. How badass is that?

PREVIEW

The Revolutionists

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Lauren Gunderson

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Aimée Beaudoin, Alexandra Dawkins, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: tonight through April 18

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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