‘We couldn’t have done what we did anywhere else’: Northern Light co-founder Scott Swan looks back 50 years later

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Merrilyn Gann and Angela Gann in As You LIke It, Northern Light Theatre 1980. Photo supplied by Scott Swan.

Allan Lysell, Merrilyn Gann, Angela Gann, Ann Casson in A Winter’s Tale, Northern Light Theatre 1981. Photo supplied by Scott Swan

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“We couldn’t have done what we did anywhere else!” declares Scott Swan.

He’s talking about Edmonton, and the persistently adventurous and surprising little theatre company he and three of his best friends, West Coasters all, co-founded here half a century ago. He’s thinking about how they kept hearing ‘Yes, what a good idea!’ when they could have heard ‘maybe later’ or ‘what? are you crazy?’.

Northern Light Theatre turns 50 this season. That’s a lot of opening nights. And there’s one coming up next week when the anniversary season finale Request Programme opens, a Trevor Schmidt production that stars a different artist from NLT’s 50-season past every at every performance.

The exuberant Swan, actor turned director (and also coach, teacher, mentor, and raconteur par excellence) was in town last month for the 50th birthday gala. And he delights in the sheer eccentric unlikeness of the origin story he tells over coffee. It’s a tale of creative spontaneity, bravado, coincidences — and expanding connections and profile across the country.

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Northern Light Theatre co-founder Scott Swam 1975. Photo supplied.

It began with Swan in his 20s, back from Vancouver fresh from director training at Bristol Old Vic, with a letter of introduction to John Neville, the international theatre star who’d become the artistic director of the Citadel. “Come! There’s work here,” said Neville, an empowering personality like Swan’s own. “Rolley Hugal and I are doing Oedipus. Come tonight and see the show.” Says Swan, “I sat in the back row (of the old Citadel). And it was incredible!”

The next morning he called his actor friend Allan Lysell in Vancouver. “I told him there’s something going on here I hadn’t seen anywhere else,” says Swan. “Get your ass up here … and experience it!” And that’s exactly what Lysell did.

Northern Light Theatre co-founder Allan Lysell 1975. Photo supplied.

It was 1974, and shortly thereafter the Gann sisters Angela and Merrilyn, theatre artists both, said yes too to the rather open-ended proposition on offer from their partners: “we’re going to Edmonton, do you want to come?” Says Swan, “the four us packed up Merrilyn’s Austin and my dad’s ’69 Mercury station wagon with the fake wood panelling on the side. And we drove up.” That quartet of yeah-sayers, in the right place at the right time, would change the scene in Edmonton.

Northern Light started small in March 1975. Swan took a proposition to Terry Fenton, the director of the Edmonton Art Gallery. “Your grants are based on how many people come through the door…. So what would you think if we did some lunch-hour shows? And he said ‘Yes! What a good idea’.”

“That’s Edmonton to me. In a nutshell,” says Swan.

The little 15-minute show, in one of the small galleries (“we got there at 11:30 turned the lights away from the paintings”) was a stage “collage” Swan put together of renaissance madrigals, “witty sexy sonnets, racy poems like Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, from a volume called Love and Drollery. And people came, a dollar a head at the door.

A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre 1978. Archival poster.

Then it happened again. Another “Yes, what a good idea!” from Fenton to the proposal to turn the lecture hall in the art gallery basement into a little semi-thrust theatre. That summer Swan directed four Northern Light one-acts. “I wanted to stretch myself, see what I could do.” The fare wasn’t all comedies:  the company did Pinter, they did a production of 10 Lost Years, Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent.…”

“At the end of the four shows (the debut summer) that we had everything we needed to go forward as a theatre company.” Swan grins. “We had an audience. We had a home. We had a deficit…. Yup, we were legit.”

Swan remembers a woman who came to see Adam and Eve three times a week for the whole run at the Art Gallery, and each time brought a different half-dozen people with her. He and Lysell were curious. Later, when they went to Margaret Byrne’s place for tea, they left with a cheque for $3,000. He labels that kind of spontaneous generosity as ‘pure Edmonton’, too. When Equity wouldn’t wait three weeks for Northern Light’s Canada Council grant to arrive in the coffers, and the show of the day was not going on, Mrs. Byrne instantly loaned them five grand interest-free so they could open. The Edmonton attitude was “hey, I got a day and a dollar for that,” says Swan.

NLT’s relationship with the Citadel was a keynote of the early days. Neville, a bona fide collaborator, “believed in spreading the wealth,” Swan says appreciatively. “When they did Pygmalion, we did (Richard Huggett’s) The First Night of Pygmalion,” a backstage look at rehearsals for Pygmalion. When Neville launched Citadel Too, an alternative second stage a couple of doors north of the old Citadel, he invited Swan and Lysell to do Babel Rap, by the Canadian playwright John Lazarus.

By then the little lunchtime operation had moved into evenings in the reno-ed Edmonton Art Gallery Theatre (“screw it, the audience is with us, let’s do it!”). It was a tricky shallow venue, with limited wing space; ingenuity was required. Swan’s production of John Murrell’s“Waiting For The Parade, “a massive success,” was a case in point. “When the audience arrived, the actors were all on the stage. Waiting. They were onstage for the entire act. Waiting” — a NLT vision of his play that Murrell credited in the published script.

Northern Light was on a roll. In 1980, Edmonton acquired its first summer Shakespeare when NLT put a big red-and-white striped tent in the river valley down by the Muttart (you know it as Folk Fest hill). And they did big-cast al fresco Shakespeare and Shaw under that big top: first year A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It and A Winter’s Tale the second.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Scott Swan, 1980, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Scott Swan.

It was a turning point moment for a new company, its band of intrepid adventurers, and generations of mosquitoes. It was Swan’s first time directing Shakespeare. And for many of the young actors in the company, it was a springboard. Paul Gross made his professional debut in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as the forlorn lovestruck shepherd Silvius. Christopher Gaze, now the artistic director of Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach, was Touchstone. It was, as Swan describes, a starry mix of up-and-comers and veterans.

The wild thunderstorm that nearly blew away the tent, the actors, and the artistic director on the preview night of Dream is by now legendary. By Act II, as Swan recounts, the wind was 100 km, the rain was horizontal, the costumes were soaked, the tent was ready for lift-off. When the storm abated Swan asked the sodden actors if they wanted to continue. They did. So did the (equally sodden) audience. And the latter “went apeshit,” as Swan puts it, when Bottom (Lysell) began again with “O grim looked night … O night with hue so black.” The cast finished the show in jeans and NLT T-shirts.

The biggest Edmonton success story of the ‘80s was Swan’s ingenious Northern Light production of Arthur Kopit’s Wings, starring the great English actor Ann Casson (a theatre blueblood, the daughter of Dame Sybil Thorndike). It toured the country, played to full houses, gathering awards wherever it touched down. The first reading of the script, originally written as a radio play, left both director and designer stymied. “I have no idea how to direct this; (so) we have to do this!”.  Swan thinks of this as Northern Light artistic logic at its most compelling.

When he went back to his home town in 1982 to run the Vancouver Playhouse School, and open his own studio, he took with him a vastly expanded artistic skill set, he says, and an appreciation of this theatre town of ours that has never dimmed. “You could feel the support of an audience to try something new; to support an adventure,” he says of his time here. “There was this ‘yes, and…?’ here that was absolutely phenomenal.”

“Northern Light and Edmonton let me find out what I was capable of.”

[And the story has continued at a theatre that has had more distinct eras, identities, logos, radical reinventions than any other in Edmonton. Stay tuned for 12thnight posts on Northern Light’s 50th season finale.]

 

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Kicking off your Sunday shoes: Footloose at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on April 19, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Ryan Maschke and Alyssa Crockett in Footloose, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Strange how it happens…. You’re all set to kick off your Sunday shoes for some rockin’ showbiz nostalgia, a young rebel with a quaint 40-year-old cause, and a truly contagious theme song.

And then, suddenly, you’re at the Mayfield. And in an early scene in Footloose, the 1998 musical adapted from the 1984 Kevin Bacon movie, a classic book, the Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five, is getting banned at a small-town high school. Wow. Musical theatre meets the news.

And more. A kid from the big city has ended up in a reverse Schmigadoon time warp in a town ruled by a conservative pastor, where there’s not only a curfew but dancing is against the law. In an era when time seems to be spinning backward, and the 1950s are starting to seem current on both sides of the border, Footloose has a startling new, energizing topical charge about it.

I’m here to tell you that Footloose is getting a kickass production at the Mayfield, directed by Kate Ryan and choreographed by assistant director Julio Fuentes. An exuberant cast of 19 take charge of a story set in motion when Ren, played by the terrific Ryan Maschke, is forced by straitened family circumstances to leave Chicago for a small-town when his father abandons him and his mom.

Welcome to Bomont (the name got a big laugh from the packed opening night crowd), where Rev. Shaw (Jay Davis) rules, and as the song has it, “you’ve got no disguise from somebody’s eyes….” The only legal after-school activity is the bowl-o-rama on the highway.

Ren is incredulous. “How do you live like this?” he asks his classmates. In Maschke’s captivating performance as the urban outsider in exile, incredulity nudges him into the role of rebel leader (by Act II at the barricades, so to speak, with the red jacket instead of that big red flag).

A great dancer and a singer with a lower range unusual for pop, Maschke makes the role their own with a layered, dramatically alert reserve and watchfulness — the sense of wounds concealed. For once, in Footloose,  Ren’s confession that he thinks about the pastor’s fretful, rebellious daughter Ariel (Alyssa Crockett) all the time actually makes sense. Since you don’t get a dance release party finale without it, a lot rides on Ren’s final confrontation with the preacher. Maschke and Davis give it some weight.

Ryan Maschke and Bryce Johnson in Footloose, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Ren’s moments with the hapless rustic Willard (the delightful Bryce Johnson) — the one bemused, the other an earnest learner — are among the comic highlights of the production. And so are Mama Says, (Willard’s spirited ode to the homespun wisdom of his mom) and his very amusing dance lessons.

Ryan’s production has considerable bench strength in a big cast of triple threats. And since the storyline is all about restoring dance to its rightful place in the universe, Fuentes not only puts them through their  paces in explosive, and often aerobic choreography — the youth population of Bomont are stunningly light on their feet — but individualizes the movement score (go, Willard!). And this gives the world of Footloose — the simmering containment of a younger generation under pressure — a dramatic and artful shape.

It’s a cast of strong singers. And under Jennifer McMillan’s musical direction leading an expert five-piece band, the musical’s unusual assortment of original Tom Snow/ Dean Pitchford) songs, Jim Steinman’s Holding Out For A Hero, and the outrageously hummable title number by Kenny Loggins, come at you with brio.

In a fine ensemble, may I single out Daniela Bauer as Rusty, a comic character with big pipes? Andrea House and Patricia Zentilli, both wonderful singer/actors, give some dramatic heft to (respectively) the preacher’s much put-upon wife and Ren’s mom. Their trio with Ariel, Learning To Be Silent, a true musical theatre number (“I’m becoming a mime”), is poignant and lovely. The musical values and sound (designed by Harley Symington) are, as usual at the Mayfield, first-rate.

Lieke den Bakker’s double-decker set, framed in neon (and lighted by Kirsten Watt), is a cross between a radio dial and a bandstand, with an arched screen across which Mat Schuurman’s projections and video,  have a dance of their own. They view the town and the church from the outside, the way Ren sees them. A riotous selection of Leona Brausen’s costumes, both church-y and dance-y, adds to the experience. And Ryan sets her large forces expertly in motion through this world.

Footloose isn’t a heavyweight musical; it touches down lightly in fleet scenes. But it validates dance and the joy of movement in a catchy way. And, newly meaningful in Alberta, it speaks (and sings) to a particularly repressive, prescriptive moment in our history. With this new revival you may well want to throw your Sunday shoes in the air by way of solidarity with a musical that’s all about euphoria, throwing off the shackles, and hoping for something better.

That’s the spirit. A fun evening all round.

REVIEW

Footloose The Musical

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Stage adaptation by: Dean Pitchford and Walter Bobbie, based on original screenplay by Dean Pitchford

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Choreographed and assistant directed by: Julio Fuentes

Starring: Kendall Ackland, Devin Alexander, Daniela Bauer, Cameron Chapman, Alyssa Crockett, Jay Davis, Evan Dowling, Sarah Dowling, Kory Fulton, Andrea House, Bryce Johnson, Ryan Maschke, Jameela McNeil, Andrés Moreno, Mark Sinongco, Garrett Waschuk, Michelle Yu, Patriocia Zentilli, Tim Zvifel

Running: through June 14

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca

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Two self-portraits onstage: Beth Graham & Brian Webb at Theatre Network

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Beth Graham and Brian Webb, Brian Webb Dance Company. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One of the season’s most unusual collaborations happens Thursday (through Saturday) at Theatre Network when two of the country’s most accomplished and adventurous artists take to the stage. Together. But apart.

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Beth Graham and Brian Webb isn’t a play. It isn’t a dance. Dance-theatre? Nope. Veteran dancer/ choreographer (and the founding artistic director of the Brian Webb Dance Company) meets award-winning actor/playwright Graham onstage as they each perform — as themselves — a personally revealing monologue.

“Just who am I today?”: that’s the intimate self-portraiture Webb and Graham asked of themselves at the outset. And the result, presented  in movement and words, is Graham’s Turn Left Gather Speed and Webb’s An Old White Fag Sits At His Desk … Naked. The titles alone, the one intriguingly mysterious and other pure Webb-ian sass (disclaimer: he doesn’t take off his clothes), speak volumes.

As Webb explains, in a joint phone conversation with Graham this week, “we met 10 years ago, on an arts jury. We hit it off, and we’ve been pals ever since.” The agent provocateur for the production was Webb who has a history of match-making dance with theatre, the visual arts, spoken word. “Did you know,” says Webb (who refers to dance as “body dramaturgy”), “that I got the Canada Council’s very first interdisciplinary grant?”

The Graham playwright archive, which reveals an artist who tries something different every time out in subject matter and form, includes a notable experiment in fusing theatre and dance. Her 2024 award-winning Mermaid Legs is a story of sisters told by a cast of actors accompanied by a chorus of dancers. And, she says, that 2024 play, with its “movement text,” has led to a new kind of artistic exploration for her: “how does dance inform storytelling?”

playwright Beth Graham

“I wouldn’t call myself a dancer,” Graham laughs. “I resist that. Dancers train for years. But (as an actor) I can move…. I’m playing with thinking more abstractly.” And that has theatrical implications. “The way actors and dancers use space is not the same,” says Webb, like Graham as a bachelor of fine arts in acting (his mentor was Tom Peacocke).

The double-monologue production is a risky new venture, in different ways, for both artists. In An Old White Fag … “I’m reading a poem I’ve written that’s just been published,” Webb says. “There’s spoken word in all my (dance) pieces, and there’s much more of that today…. But with Beth I’m leaning how to improvise, add a bit, take a bit away ….” For his part, as a dancer/choreographer he helped Graham with the ‘movement text’ in her monologue. “And she’s beautiful doing it!” he says.

In the course of his piece Webb at 77 steps up, unflinchingly, to include the death by suicide of his long-time partner. In fact he arrives onstage at the outset carrying a cardboard box, which he tells the audience contains Bill’s ashes. “The most beautiful , intimate piece of writing ever” he thinks, is Hamlet’s “to be or not to be …” soliloquy.

Brian Webb, founding artistic director of Brian Webb Dance Company

“I may not take my clothes off (as per his title), but I reveal myself — as an old white man I’m a person of privilege and as a homosexual …” He breaks off to remember vividly that when he moved to New York as a young dancer, “I was against the law. In my lifetime! What does that mean?”

For Graham, the starting point for Left Turn Gather Speed was that in her 50s she’s arrived at a mid-life turning-point moment. “I’m going to make a change in my life. A very big change. 180 degrees. And how do I manage that?”

“I’m wrestling with how life takes left turns. My life has changed. And I’m trying to find meaning in that.” In reflecting on her theatre career as both a playwright and an actor Graham thinks “most artistic growth has happened for me, in experiments…. And one experiment leads to the next.” Maybe the biggest challenge with Left Turn Gather Speed, she thinks, is that she hasn’t created a character to be played by an actor, the way playwrights do. For the first time ever “I’m onstage as … myself.”

The Fringe is full of confessional solo shows. This isn’t one of them. “We’re working through the questions we have for ourselves,” as Graham puts it. “We’re looking to find meaning.” And sometimes, as she points out, “the meaning is asking the question.”

PREVIEW

Beth Graham and Brian Webb

Theatre: Brian Webb Dance Company

Created by and starring: Beth Graham and Brian Webb

Where: Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre, 10709 124 St.

Running: Thursday through Saturday

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

   

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‘Tell me more about myself.’ It’s the future already, and AI is editing the past for us: Marjorie Prime at the Varscona, a review

Posted on April 13, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Maureen Rooney in Marjorie Prime, Trunk Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’ll be right here, Marjorie. Whenever you need me. I have all the time in the world,” says a man named Walter sympathetically to the 85-year old woman (Maureen Rooney) in the comfy chair.

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That’s the way Marjorie Prime, the latest from Trunk Theatre, starts. And it takes you a moment or two to process (a telling verb in itself) that Walter (the excellent Ben Kuchera) is Marjorie’s long-dead husband — the 30-year-old AI version of him, that is, that she’s selected from the possible Walters at Senior Serenity. Their corporate slogan? “Companionship is better than television.”

Marjorie’s memories are fading with age, which locates a witty woman on the irritation-panic slippery slope as Rooney’s performance captures. Increasingly she’s struggling to hold onto who she is. And the imperturbable Walter Prime, programmed with whatever “facts” has been uploaded to him, stands ready to reflect colour detail back at her. He converses fluently about Marjorie’s favourite dog, long gone. Or the movie they saw the night he proposed. Or Marjorie’s kids. Or nothing at all. “Tell me more about myself….”

One of the most disturbing things about this unnerving and fascinating play, by Pulitzer Prize-nominated Jordan Harrison, is that as Marjorie, in losing her memories, arguably becomes less fully herself, the Prime is gaining human-ness. He tells Marjorie’s kindly, conciliatory son-in-law Jon (Troy O’Donnell) that’s his goal — “I like to know more” — as his programmed memory bank accumulates. He wants to get better … at being human.

What happens at the axis point of the two trajectories of Marjorie and her Prime, one descending one ascending, is something you’re bound to think about when you see Amy DeFelice’s production. Is Marjorie talking to herself, her more-complete self in effect, when she’s chatting to Walter Prime? Having subsumed (or co-opted) more and more of Marjorie’s memories to feed back to her, with possible revisions, will the Prime (there’s more than one in the play) in the end be more “human” than the human whose memories are disappearing?

How you’ll react to a play that’s eerily topical, and catches you off-balance in a series of scenes, depends, too, on your own feelings about aging and mortality. The fear of both is at the core of Tess, Marjorie’s acerbic, prickly, snappish daughter (Sue Huff, who knows how to bite off a retort). And the defeat of time and loss — Walter Prime is Walter’s afterlife, in a sense — is what Primes are for. O death, where is thy sting?

In any case, it’s pretty scary how easily, even pleasantly, the take-over of man by machine is accomplished. What must have seemed like an unsettling speculation in 2014 (when Marjorie Prime premiered in L.A. en route to New York) feels different, and maybe even more chilling, in 2026. After all, AI already lives among us, figuring out stuff for us, arranging our schedules, writing our essays, telling us the news of the day, reminding us to take our cholesterol pills, keeping us company, sensing our moods, storing memories about our ex’s alive or dead….

The sticking point is what to do about trauma and grief. There’s a human drama in Marjorie Prime, a family tragedy that seeps through the generations. Jon argues that a Prime should be uploaded with a full roster of memories that includes loss, emotional wounds, traumatic experiences. In thinking about a terrible 50-year-old loss in her mom’s life (and her own), Tess wonders why the past can’t stay past. What’s wrong with having “a little peace”?  Later in the play she’s the character who proposes that “living is a distraction from death.”

I found the opening scenes in this Trunk production a little washed out; the characters, except for Kuchera’s Walter, seem to talking sotto voce to themselves. And the married couple dynamic between Jon and Tess doesn’t quite take hold. Maybe this will grow to feel more lived-in during the course of the run at the Varscona.

In any case, there’s an interplay of the realistic and the abstract in the play. Karlie Christie’s striking set, which aptly references this dual optic, has a recognizable domestic centre — Marjorie’s armchair, the suggestion of a kitchen — surrounded by abstract columns of vertical slatted screens, hinting of expansion, and a route to something else. And Ami Farrow’s lighting, which has an ethereal blue glow between scenes, points to an existential dimension too, and captures the feeling that Marjorie Prime is a kind of ghost story (well, it is about the rise of the un-dead). So does Dave Clarke’s subtle score.

Our ghosts live among us, and technology ensures the past and the people we love aren’t gone; we can keep them with us. Here’s a knotty play you’ll have to think (and if you’re like me, worry) about. Aren’t you nervous?

REVIEW

Marjorie Prime

Theatre: Trunk Theatre

Written by: Jordan Harrison

Directed by: Amy DeFelice

Starring: Maureen Rooney, Ben Kuchera, Sue Huff, Troy O’Donnell

Where: Varscona Theatre

Running: through April 19

Tickets: varsconatheatre.com

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In the touch of a hand, a window on the world opens: Casey and Diana at the Citadel, a review

Posted on April 11, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Emily Howard and Nsthan Cuckow in Casey and Diana, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the big, expansive heart of Nick Green’s Casey and Diana is a haunting mystery. Where does hope come from, really? What form can it possibly take, in the final countdown of life?

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Green’s exquisitely crafted play, heart-wrenching and surprisingly funny, is inspired by the real-life story of Princess Diana’s 1991 visit to Casey House, the pioneering AIDS hospice in Toronto. And in an era when AIDS patients were routinely shunned, abandoned by their fearful families, exiled from human contact, “little things, the tiny, simple things,” like presence and the touch of an ungloved hand by a compassionate, attentive princess, became momentous. Shy Di’s act of public defiance against the stigma of the disease made headlines around the world.

Casey and Diana takes us to Casey House during the week leading up to her visit. And the impending occasion is a complicated, often comical, challenge for the residents, the head nurse, an excitable volunteer — and a treasure trove for connoisseurs of gallows humour. For one thing (to cut to the chase), can the residents manage to defy the odds, and stay alive for a week? For another, “my god, what to wear!” as resident Thomas (Nathan Cuckow) declares, looking at his hospice pjs in mock horror.

The performances in Lana Michelle Hughes’ Citadel/ Alberta Theatre Project co-production, are rich and detailed. And in the case of Emily Howard’s Diana, who has mastered the classic Diana listener’s head tilt, and the little Diana smile/grimace combo, an icon of compassion who glides in and out of the play on her kitten heels (costumes by Rebecca Roon).

Nathan Cuckow and Emily Howard in Casey and Diana,m Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

“People don’t die in situations like these; they take a breath and proceed,” declares the gay wiseass Thomas (Nathan Cuckow), a Diana devoté and a veritable gold mine of tossed-off showbiz references, who has somehow outlived four or five roommates. His pep talk to his fellow residents pre-Diana includes the battle cry “We are going to make it!” as he hauls his butt painfully out of bed and assumes the vertical by way of example.

The bold, vivid, tragically funny performance by Cuckow is a career high for an actor we alas rarely see onstage these days. He creates a fascinating multi-layered character, all jaded snarly gay wit on the surface — cracking jokes, flourishing irony like a flotation device with pom-poms over deep currents of sadness, anger, and terror.

Josh Travnik and April Banigan in Casey and Diana, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Thomas is a veritable Rough Guide to gay Toronto, its cruising locales and greasy spoon diners. And his new roommate André, young, hostile, and scared, who’s arrived at Casey House without anyone knowing, or caring, where he is, resists Thomas’s conversational largesse, but he can’t hold out forever. In a fine performance Josh Travnik plays him with a sardonic streak that just barely covers his lonely fear, and a practised lack of sentimentality about rejection that is in itself heartbreaking.

And there on death’s door, the pair — one a battle-scarred veteran with a gift of the gab and the other an amusingly sullen, taciturn young newcomer, develop a subtle rapport that’s one of the engaging achievements of Hughes’s production.

In a performance with a lovable bounce, April Banigan plays a well-meaning, unfailingly chipper volunteer with boundary issues who’s the butt of their jokes. She’s arrived to help at Casey House, as a kind of self-therapy following the death of her best friend from AIDS.

Nathan Cuckow and Norma Lewis, Casey and Diana, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Norma Lewis is compelling as Vera the head nurse, who’s grounded and matter-of-fact in her compassion, a woman with a steel backbone who knows how and when to hug. The most problematic character is Thomas’s aggressive, histrionic sister Pauline (Helen Knight), at Casey House to atone for shutting her brother out of her life. Her scenes are the only ones in Casey and Diana you might feel are a bit over-extended and hammered home.

Thomas and André’s Casey House room, in Hanne Loosen’s design, seems rather distant and lost on the Maclab stage. The characters have to walk considerable distances to enter and exit, and rarely occupy the downstage among us in the big thrust theatre. Opening the window on the world, which is in a sense what the story of Casey and Diana is all about, is a telling capture, though, in Hughes’s staging: the little stained glass window is small, but dead centre. And far above it float heraldic banners. Whittyn Jason’s subtle lighting plays along the shifting frontier between hospice reality and the dreams and hopes that Diana’s impending visit ignites.

Ah yes, hope. To return to the question of hope, in the borderland between life and death where playwright Green finds a poetic mystery. “A faint, warm ringing in your ears,” proposes Thomas in the opening scene where his hilarious conversation with Diana, a detailed analysis of her fairytale wedding, turns out to be an extended monologue.

At the end of life, the road map of mortality is measured in minutes. And a week, measured out incrementally as seven days, is a huge challenge. Diana and the play tell us that it’s to be found in the “little things,” the tiny units of human connection, the warmth of touch, a hand held. And that “faint, warm ringing in your ears,” perfectly re-created in Allison Lynch’s excellent score, is the sound of someone listening.

Casey and Diana will grab your heart and open your mind. Take a breath, grab your Kleenex, and get yourself a ticket.

12thnight talks to playwright Nick Green in this preview here.

REVIEW

Casey and Diana

Theatre: Citadel Theatre and Alberta Theatre Projects

Written by: Nick Green

Directed by: Lana Michelle Hughes

Starring: April Banigan, Nathan Cuckow, Emily Howard, Helen Knight, Norma Lewis, Josh Travnik

Where: Citadel Maclab Theatre

Running: through April 26

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

 

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‘Come for the AI, stay for the human drama’: Trunk Theatre brings Marjorie Prime to the Varscona

Posted on April 10, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Maureen Rooney, Sue Huff, Troy O’Donnell in Marjorie Prime, Trunk Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Amy DeFelice didn’t know this. When you phone her cell, as I did this week, a glossy automated voice intervenes, to ask you to state your name and the reason for your call. “And I’ll see if this person is available.”

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She was. And we were both astonished to learn that an AI secretary, of sorts, had somehow infiltrated her life. What makes it downright eerie is the coincidence that DeFelice is directing a play, opening Friday on the Varscona stage in a Trunk Theatre production, that’s all about AI and humans and their changing relationship.

In Marjorie Prime, by the Pulitzer-nominated American playwright Jordan Harrison, the 85-year-old woman of the title is chatting to her long-dead husband — the AI version of him at age 30, that is — in 2065. And as Marjorie’s memory bank gradually dwindles with age, Walter Prime, a product of Senior Serenity Corp, is there to shore up, and possibly enhance, the remains, sympathetically, with cues and reminders from her life. “Companionship,” says her son-in-law, “is better than television.”

In that our memory fades, and we’re less ‘ourselves’, is our relationship with AI really a depletion of what’s human about us? You could argue the reverse. Is it progress to replace the bad bits of memory with better bits, curated in the course of aging in order to provide comfort amid the losses of life? Marjorie Prime wonders about disturbing things like that. DeFelice’s working catchphrase is “come for the AI, stay for the human drama.”

Maureen Rooney in Marjorie Prime, Trunk Theatre. Photo supplied

As she points out, in the decade since Marjorie Prime premiered Off-Broadway (it was remounted for Broadway last fall), it’s become a rare example of a prescient play that has not only not lost ground but actually become more topical in the course of time. What might have struck audiences as out-there sci-fi fantasy in 2015 is happening all around us, unnervingly, every day. AI programs designed to sense your mood, keep you company, and relieve your particular stresses already exist.

“The technology has caught up,” says DeFelice . Audiences will see Marjorie Prime differently in 2026, she argues. “They’re more suspicious— of surveillance culture, of data harvesting, chatbot therapy, identity theft, voice impersonation, etc. — all happening in the real world now. “The technology is has moved faster than time..”

As an example of the technological advances that blur the frontier that separates humans from the creations they load with human-ness, DeFelice, who’s an indefatigable researcher, points to the Loebner Prize (it ended in 2019), which was designed to award the most human-like computer programs. And in an AI/ human face-off, the judges couldn’t make the distinction. A validation of sophisticated technology that is disturbing at least.

In an age of AI “What is it to be human?” that’s the question, says DeFelice. And it’s one that threads through the play. “Marjorie over-writes memories with her own versions,” better, more positive ones. What, then, of past trauma? Should that be loaded into AI companions, too?. As DeFelice describes, Marjorie’s daughter (Sue Huff) and son-in-law (Troy O’Donnell) disagree. “One says ‘just go with it’. And one argues ‘let’s remind her of who she is’,” trauma and all. “How do we process the harder things in life?” DeFelice asks, on behalf of the play. “And there isn’t one right answer.”

“I think it was timing,” says DeFelice of the coup of acquiring rights to the play that’s been “on my list” — a DeFelice signature phrase she’s inherited from her actor/director/mentor father, the late great Jim DeFelice. She applied just before the Broadway remount of last October.

Trunk Theatre has a history of bringing Edmonton audiences challenging properties from across the border or the pond we might not see at other theatres. Playwrights like Sarah Ruhl, David Harrower, Mark O’Rowe, Nick Payne are in the Trunk trunk. DeFelice’s own attraction to Marjorie Prime included her feeling that “it’s a different (theatre) experience than I’ve seen,” and the “meaty roles, complicated characters” it provides for four actors. “As I age I think about aging.”

It’s a really packed 85 (intermission-less) minutes,” DeFelice says of a play to which everyone will bring their own experiences of grief and memory, of being a caretaker, of weighing fantasy vs. reality. If you could have a version of someone you’ve loved and lost,  someone loaded with the memories of your lives together, would you buy in?

PREVIEW

Marjorie Prime

Theatre: Trunk Theatre

Written by: Jordan Harrison

Directed by: Amy DeFelice

Starring: Maureen Rooney, Ben Kuchera, Sue Huff, Troy O’Donnell

Where: Varscona Theatre

Running: through April 19

Tickets: varsconatheatre.com

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Rat-free? No way. Fingers and Shrimp are back in a Rat Academy double-feature: a big week of openings in E-town

Posted on April 8, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Rat Academy, Batrabbit Collective. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a self-proclaimed rat-free province they’re scrappy outliers, up against it in a hostile world. But the rat underground persists (call it a rodent infestation but only if you’re classist).

In an unusual cross-town double-feature Batrabbit Collective’s pair of hit clown shows, comic gems both, bring back their rodent insurrectionists to two different theatres, separated by a river. Rat Academy returns Thursday through Sunday to Theatre Network’s Roxy. And this reappearance is followed by a longer run (April 19 to May 16) of the sequel Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order at Rapid Fire Theatre’s Exchange Theatre in Strathcona.

If you missed either or both in their sold-out Fringe incarnations,  this, my friends, is your reprieve. And if you have seen them, know that Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner (directed by Joseph McManus) are very apt to explore further with their richly imagined shows every time out. Both performers, quick on their paws, are expert at interacting with audiences; every performance is, in that sense, custom-made.

Katie Yoner and Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Rat Academy. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

When we first met Fingers (Dayna Lea Hoffmann) and Shrimp (Katie Yoner) in 2023, it was in a Whyte Avenue alley. In Rat Academy the street-wise, wary Fingers, glaring suspiciously at us, is getting more and more exasperated trying to impart survival skills to Shrimp, a naive, distractible lab escapee — starting with ‘How 2 Steal’.  We are directly involved, because Shrimp gravitates impulsively our way,  looking for our approval. Which makes Fingers ready to blow a gasket.

In the sequel, which debuted at Nextfest and then the Fringe last summer, these outcasts want more, something more permanent, a home of their own, a barricade against eviction notices. This is Alberta, right? Land of real estate opportunity, right? Hilarity, satirical barbs, and, yes, poignance, ensue. McManus’s productions feature the inventive work of set and props designer Claire Sonmor, with lighting by Whittyn Jason, and costumes by Meegan Sweet. Ah, and fun photography by Marc J. Chalifoux, as you’ll see. Catch both shows. When you buy a ticket at one theatre, you get $5 off your ticket at the other. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca and rapidfiretheatre.com.

Yes, it’s a big week of theatre openings in this theatre town.

Emily Howard and Nathan Cuckow, Casey and Diana by Nick Green, Citadel Theatre, photo by Nanc Price.

•Nick Green’s hit Casey and Diana, inspired by Princess Diana’s ground-shifting visit to the Toronto AIDS hospice Casey House in 1991, finally has its Edmonton premiere Thursday at the Citadel, in a production directed by Lana Michelle Hughes. Check out the 12thnight interview with the actor-turned playwright here. It runs through April 26, and tickets are at citadeltheatre.com.

Maureen Rooney in Marjorie Prime, Trunk Theatre. Photo supplied

•Trunk Theatre, an indie with a track record in bringing Edmonton hot offerings from across the border, and the pond, is back in action with Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, opening Friday on the Varscona stage. An intriguing and mysterious 2015 Off-Broadway hit by a Pulitzer Prize nominee, it’s recently opened on Broadway, and still seems provocatively, scarily topical in 2026. It’s set in a future that has, in many ways, already arrived, since it’s about the blurring of the frontier between AI and the human. In her 80s and beginning to lose her memory, Marjorie has acquired a companion, an AI version of her husband at 30. That’s the starting point. The Trunk production, starring Maureen Rooney, Sue Huff, Ben Kuchera, Troy O’Donnell, runs through April 19. Tickets: varsconatheatre.com. Stay tuned for 12thnight’s interview with Trunk director Amy DeFelice.

•And to celebrate unpredictability, a festival ,and wild one at that. Returning Thursday is Rapid Fire Theatre’s annual Bonfire Festival to showcase a creative assortment of original, experimental long-form improv ideas of every description, from the improbable to the impossible, the edgy to the crazily risky to the completely bonkers. And the audience provides the cues. Here’s an example: in one of Friday’s offerings, Movie! The Musical, the company undertakes to transform your favourite movie into a Broadway musical. Really. Or how about Pearly Gates, when, as billed, “characters at the end of their lives face divine judgment from God (herself) in a comedic exploration of heaven, hell, and audience influence.” And how intriguing is P.S.A., public service announcements with life advice? Bonfire runs Thursday through Saturday at the Exchange Theatre. Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

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A princess takes off the gloves: the Diana Effect. Nick Green’s Casey and Diana at the Citadel. Meet the playwright.

Posted on April 7, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Emily Howard and Nathan Cuckow in Casey and Diana by Nick Green, Alberta Theatre Projects. Photo by Benjamin Laird for Alberta Theatre Projects.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In 1991, as the AIDS crisis gained momentum, Princess Diana visited the residents of Casey House, Toronto’s groundbreaking AIDS hospice. And everything about that visit, including Diana’s very public display of compassion and warmth, helped move the dial on the stigma of the period, and the disease’s reign of terror.

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Playwright Nick Green, Toronto-based, was researching the archives of Canadian queer history for his Dora Award-winning queer media play Body Politic when a story caught his eye. A eureka moment: he earmarked it as an inspiration for the play that would be Casey and Diana, opening Thursday on the Citadel’s Maclab stage. “It had Casey House, an organization which set a lot of precedents for palliative care across the country” — a subject dear to his heart since Green the playwright is also Green the (full-time) social worker and palliative care volunteer. “And it had Princess Diana.”

“As a result of her coming to Casey House people there lived a bit longer, literally,” Green says of the so-called ‘Diana Effect’. “The true story is that the people who worked at Casey House didn’t tell anyone she was coming till seven days before the visit…. They didn’t want to instill false hope in family, or residents who, two weeks or a month out, might not make it.” And amazingly, “against all odds, no one died in that week.”

Josh Travnik and April Banigan, Casey and Diana by Nick Green. Photo by Benjamin Laird for Alberta Theatre Projects.

And there was a special Casey re-focusing for the occasion, as Green explains. “Casey House was very much about helping people have a good death, about offering comfort and compassion in the process of dying. But for one week they all just embraced the mission of trying to keep people alive. A big switch. And they succeeded!” And the Diana Effect meant that “everyone at Casey House — the residents, the nurses, the administrators, the volunteers, who’d all experienced stigma — all of them felt valued, an extra wind at their backs….”

Fast-forward a couple of years from his eureka discovery in the Canadian queer history archives …. Since the 2023 premiere at the Stratford Festival which commissioned it, Green’s Casey and Diana has done something new Canadian plays so rarely do: it’s gathered multiple remounts, no fewer than 12 productions across the country, coast to coast, with more to come. And it’s garnered raves and gathering full houses all along the way.  “I’m unapologetically drinking it all in, and enjoying the hell out of it…. It may never happen again!” says the Vancouver-born playwright, a resonant and cheerful voice on the phone from his Toronto home. “And it’s so exciting to see some of the best actors in the country tackling these parts….”

This week, the Citadel co-production with Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects, directed by Shadow Theatre’s new artistic director Lana Michelle Hughes, returns Green’s hit to the theatre town where he went to theatre school at the U of A, where audiences know him as an actor and a playwright (Happy Birthday Baby J; Coffee Dad, Chicken Mom and the Fabulous Buddha Boi).

The origin story of Green the actor-turned-star playwright has a certain esprit de corps that’s pure Edmonton … and quite possibly unique in Canadian theatre. He was in the original cast of such Guys in Disguise productions as Two Queens And A Joker (which he co-wrote with that drag theatre collective’s presiding muses Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt). “Trevor and Darrin were such a huge part of my birth as a writer!” Green declares.

Emily Howard, Nathan Cuckow, Norma Lewis in Casey and Diana by Nick Green. Photo by Banjamin Laird for Alberta Theatre Projects

The other source spring of his writing career was Fort Edmonton Park. Green, who started there as a waiter at Johnson’s restaurant on 1920 Street, wrote four shows a year for three years, including such effervescent offerings as Poof! the Musical (with Hagen), in which a fraught mother-teenage daughter relationship is complicated by the maternal expectation to be evil.

“Between Trevor and Darrin and Fort Edmonton” a playwright (and an appreciative one) was born. And having a play onstage at the Citadel is a big deal for Green, as he’s happy to point out. “The Citadel gave free tickets to theatre students,” he says of his BFA years at the U of A. “It was my formative theatre experience as a young adult; it’s where I formed my identity….

“It was a training for me, being able to see those shows. I’m just so, well, proud that (Casey and Diana) is going up there, a total pinch-me moment…. There’s a young me that’s having a fangirl moment!” And it’s enhanced by Hughes’s cast. Nathan Cuckow, for example, who plays the central character Thomas, “is one of my idols. The work that he did was so much the stuff I wanted to do as an actor and writer. ” Green remembers specific moments in Cuckow’s performance in Kill Your Television’s production of Shakespeare’s R&J.

Since he moved to Toronto in 2010 Green’s career has leaned almost exclusively into writing (“I miss acting sometimes, but I can’t really say I miss the lifestyle of being an actor”). And his burgeoning body of work includes three plays that deal with the Canadian queer experience: Body Politic, Every Day She Rose (about the collision of Black Lives Matter and the Toronto Pride Parade), and Casey and Diana.

“They say ‘write what you know’, Green says. “And I know about being a Canadian queer…. So many plays about queerness and the queer experience are American, and many are my favourites. But our experience in Canada is not the same.” “Darrin (Darrin Hagen) really set my mind in motion about writing about Canadian queer history. And I’m my mother’s daughter: Darrin really mentored me as a playwright….”

“In the next chapter of my writing,” he says of the four commissions he’s currently juggling (across the country and one in New York), “I’m focussing on other things” than queer history. “I wish I didn’t need to use all my vacation time for writing, but….” The pairing of social work and the arts strikes him as a natural, though. Both “ask  people to imagine what someone else is feeling and experiencing…. We all need training in empathy.”

Green was a gay kid in the single-digit age bracket, growing up in Vancouver, during the 1990s AIDS crisis of the 1990s. But as a teenager, he remembers coming to know about the “scary epidemic,” and it was a profound experience, he says. “My generation is marked by discovering you are part of a community that is dying. …”

And dying under cruel circumstances. “The residents of Casey Houser weren’t the only ones who experienced stigma,” he points out. “Even in medical settings. In hospitals they were often quarantined, and offered a low level of care….This play is about much more than the residents. It’s about the (largely) women who surrounded these residents and gave so much to help them in their final days.”

What inspired Green’s feeling that the Casey House story should be theatre? “Thematically, it’s a story about love and hope and compassion. And stories about us coming together and showing kindness to one another are (something) we’re all in need of,” he says. And there’s this: “Technically it’s a group of very different people in a single location, with a single objective, and very high stakes. Which is often a good recipe for theatre…. What I discovered was a natural story structure.”

Let no one argue that the Green resumé is monochromatic. The Last Timbit (a musical with a Green book, a score by Annika Johnson and Britta Johnson, and an elite cast), a commission from Tim Horton’s, had full houses at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre “cheering and screaming” as Green puts it, in the summer of 2024. Timbits and Casey and Diana are perhaps the opposite ends of my writing portfolio,” Green concedes, laughing. “Maybe they won’t be published in the same anthology.”

In any case, a hallmark of Green’s writing is its humour, even in circumstances like the story of Casey House during a remarkable week in 1991. “Life is funny, even in the darkest, unimaginable moments,” he thinks. “In exploring a story, I’m interested in what makes it hard and what makes it funny…. If I want to truly emotionally impact an audience, laughing together is as profound as crying together.”

And, after all, “historically, humour has always been an essential coping mechanism” of the queer community,” he says, citing a line from Casey and Diana: “you have to laugh to keep from dying.” When there’s laughter, “we let our walls down a little bit, and we open our hearts a little bit more.”

PREVIEW

Casey and Diana

Theatre: Citadel Theatre and Alberta Theatre Projects

Written by: Nick Green

Directed by: Lana Michelle Hughes

Starring: April Banigan, Nathan Cuckow, Emily Howard, Helen Knight, Norma Lewis, Josh Travnik

Where: Citadel Maclab Theatre

Running: through April 26

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

 

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Waiting for the bunny? See a show: the startling variety of Edmonton theatre this weekend

Posted on April 4, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

While you’re waiting for the Easter bunny to show up, there’s live theatre, and lots of it, in town this weekend.

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This weekend is your last chance to catch The Revolutionists at Shadow Theatre. Lauren Gunderson’s intricate black comedy about the artist and artistic creation, especially playwriting, in the shadow of Mme La Guillotine during the Reign of Terror in Paris 1793, gathers together an assortment of historical characters, all women. And it adds a Black resistance fighter from the colonies imagined from Marianne, the French symbol of Republicanism. Have a peek at the 12thnight preview with the cast here, and the review here. John Hudson’s production runs through Sunday at the Varscona. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

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

Another kind of resistance to colonialism is happening at the U of A’s Studio Theatre. Deserters, a new, experimental play by Kenneth T. Williams, is staged on a grand scale in the lavishly theatrical premiere production directed by Carmen Aguirre.

It’s not so much a story (at least one I could follow) as a lengthy video game-type barrage of allusions to assorted back stories, all of them involving violent subjugation and the urge to win. But in the end Deserters,  challenging and formless as it is, seems not much interested in narrative, or individual characters, as much as it sets about evoking a confusing world. It’s brutally dystopian and militaristic, with its own jumbled history of meaningless skirmishes, wins, and losses — and lots of physical fighting (fight director Morgan Yamada). The Army, Navy, and Air Force compete for supremacy and status, perpetually at war with each other, for some reason or no reason. That this is a war without known cause, full of power plays and defeats that the characters don’t explain but allude to endlessly, is part of the point, I guess. No one asks video games to explain themselves.

In the world of Deserters. Recruits, “piglets” in a boot camp, are the grunts of the military class system, set against each other for promotion, and survival, in a ruthless hierarchy. And all missteps or revolutionary impulses are brutally punished (there’s quite a lot of shouting and threats).

There are references throughout to a “Great Desertion” of long ago, and the oppression of a group of people with ties to the land. Deserters doesn’t elucidate, but colonialism, the brutality of childhood displacement with “house mothers,” references to inter-generational trauma, thread their way through the play as a toxic running subtext to the nightmare residential school experience. The population is all-female, and the enforced separation of children and mothers seems to be a given. And it becomes more explicit when a bomb disposal unit discovers a small, undamaged corpse at a bomb site that’s a mass children’s grave.

The play invites you, not to become emotionally entangled in the fortunes of individual characters, but to immerse yourself in a world with its own elaborate rules, “suicide rooms” for the unruly, surveillance, and its own signature sport, Murderball. And the staging deliberately reverses (I’m not sure why) the more usual interplay of close-ups and long shots. Individual encounters are often seen close up on screen in live video, while live witnesses onstage, in sinister sunglasses, observe at a distance.

The world is impressively presented in Aguirre’s production. In stunning visuals and sound, it comes at you on a grand scale (and at a grand two and a half hour-plus length), with video game accoutrements: digital choices between assorted back stories, or themes, get typed on a giant screen. Chelsea Payne Evason’s strikingly monumental multi-layered set, leans in, at an ominous angle, on the prisoners in the fortress of this world.

The stunning projections, on screens large and small, and the lighting that bursts and dapples and flickers across the set are by T. Erin Gruber. Matthew Skopyk’s sound design references the thundering drums and industrial percussion of war, married to the driving rock of video games. And his clever score captures, as well, with classical riffs, the absurd anachronism of military ambitions. Kim-Michelle Brown’s costumes are a wild swirl of military and athletic garb of every vintage, including archaic uniforms. It all looks amazing, and it wears you out.

The cast of 12, half male half female and all playing female characters, are all talented graduating acting students in the BFA program. They hurl themselves valiantly, and I’d have to say selflessly, into multiple roles, in a play designed to demonstrate the ultimate suppression of individuals. The cast: 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

Deserters runs through April 11 at the Timms Centre for the Arts. Tickets: showpass.com or 780-492-2495. Check out the 12thnight interview with playwright Williams here.

Luc Tellier, Alexander Ariate, Chariz Faulmino, Hal Wesley Rogers in The Wizard of Oz, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

•At the Citadel, there’s a high-contrast pair of shows. On the Shoctor stage, Thom Allison’s production of The Wizard of Oz, the musical adapted from the classic film version of the great L. Frank Baum fantasy, possibly the most famous road trip in entertainment history. The 12thnight review is here. It runs through April 12. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820, and the 12thnight review is here.

On the Maclab stage, Casey and Diana by actor-turned-playwright Nick Green, a U of A theatre grad, starts previews Saturday, directed by Lana Michelle Hughes (she’s the new artistic director of Shadow Theatre). The play, which premiered at the Stratford Festival in 2023 and has played to critical raves and full houses since then, is set during the AIDS crisis of the 1990s. It takes us to an AIDS hospice, Toronto’s Casey House, the week before the arrival there of Princess Diana, whose very public compassion and warmth helped change the optics on the disease in an era of cruel exclusion and stigma. The Citadel-Alberta Theatre Projects co-production runs through April 26. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com. Look for a 12thnight interview with Green soon.

•And it’s your last weekend to hear Only The Lonely, live onstage and accompanied by a great band, in One Night With Roy Orbison starring Matt Cage, at the Mayfield through Sunday. Check out the 12thnight review here. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.    

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Northern Light Theatre at 51: a new ‘Life Takes A Turn’ season

Posted on April 2, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Davina Stewart, Pamela Schmunk and Linda Grass in Iron Matron by Trevor Schmidt, Northern Light Theatre. Poster graphic supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At a crossroads: Northern Light Theatre turns 51 next season with a trio of plays about characters poised, or stuck, or shoved into the intersection where big life changes unexpectedly happen.

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The “Life Takes A Turn” lineup announced this week by artistic director Trevor Schmidt includes the premiere of a new Canadian play and two Brit two-handers, one a much-revived 1980 hit, and the other by a much-awarded English playwright who leans into characters in a rural setting.

The Northern Light season was tailored, as Schmidt puts it, to feature “artists I want to work with,” and showcase exceptional performers who have been overlooked, lack opportunities, or in some cases are making their professional debuts.

The series opens (October 22 to Nov. 7) with the world premiere of a new Schmidt play, the wittily named Iron Matron. A 60-ish woman, “almost divorced and faced with the aggravating humiliation of moving in adult son and his wife, reconnects with her estranged college roommate. And they form a heavy metal garage band, joined by a career musician in answer to their ad for a drummer.

The play, says Schmidt, “is not about menopause or anything like that…. It explores friendship,” making new friends or somehow re-igniting long dormant, fractured friendships. It stars veteran actor/director/teacher, and Northern Light newcomer Pamela Schmunk as Alice, “an abrasive character, myopic, thoughtless, and a bit callow. Not mean in spirit but insensitive,” as Alice’s creator describes. ”

Joining Schmunk onstage are Davina Stewart and Linda Grass. Both have extensive Northern Light credits in their resumés. Schmidt directed them together in the Donald Margulies play Dinner With Friends at Theatre Network in 2007. And both have had many Northern Light credits before and since, Grass with perhaps a longer NLT archive than any other single Edmonton actor.

Émanuel Dubbeldam and Michael Watt in Milked by Simon Longman, Northern Light Theatre. Photo supplied

In Milked, a 2015 play by the English writer Simon Longman, two young men, best friends in their early ‘20s, are struggling, each in his own way, to find a foothold in life, find a job — and, most immediately, to deal with a dying cow stuck in a field. “As most plays I choose, it’s very funny, and ends on a fairly tragic note — but hopeful!” Snowy, who’s rural and living on his dad’s farm, has persuaded his friend to help him with the the ailing bovine, either by curing or killing, and they’re stumped. Paul, a university grad “wants to move to the city and break into communication and marketing, but has no real clue how to get started.”

Schmidt is interested in “rural plays,” rare in the theatre repertoire, not least because of his own experience: he spent 10 years in Saskatoon and the family moved to Shaunavon for a year.” And he plans to re-locate the Hertfordshire country setting of Milked to “somewhere outside Red Deer, where going to the “big city” means Calgary or Edmonton. Two of this town’s hottest young actors  Émanuel Dubbeldam and Michael Watt — “so charming, warm, bright, gifted” as Schmidt describes — star in the North American premiere production that runs Jan. 21 to Feb. 6, 2027.

Duet For One, starring Lianna Shannon and Melanie Dreyer-Lude, Northern Light Theatre. Poster photo supplied.

The season finale, Duet For One by the late Brit playwright Tom Kempinski, chronicles a visceral experience of loss and resilience in its story of a concert violinist who consults a psychiatrist when her career is cut short by a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. The story of cellist Jacqueline du Près springs to mind.

Schmidt’s production re-introduces into the theatre scene an accomplished actor, Lianna Shannon, who has been using a wheelchair during rehabilitation from a spinal chord injury. Melanie Dreyer-Lude plays the psychiatrist, whose encounters with the artist are the fabric of the play.

Schmidt says tracking down the rights was a veritable obstacle course; the theatrical publisher Samuel French was no help; eventually rights were obtained direct from Kempinski’s widow. Duet For One runs April 8 too 24.

Meanwhile, in addition to Iron Matron Schmidt is working on multiple new plays, including two Fringe shows (one for Players de Novo and one for 100 % More Girls). And Northern Light’s 50th anniversary season continues with Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Request Programme, opening May 1, and starring a series of 16 actors, all women and of all ages — a different one every night — who have performed with the company in the last half century.

Tickets for Request Programme and subscriptions for the upcoming season in the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.): northernlighttheatre.com.

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