2024: the year in Edmonton theatre, part 1, Theater News

By Liz Nicholls,

In a chaotic, incoherent year in the world, live theatre, which has itself been under every kind of duress in 2024, stepped up to offer us other perspectives, other visions, characters on personal quests for meaning, accountability, forward motion and change — ah, and happiness. Here are 10 highlight productions (in no particular order) in Edmonton theatre that made me appreciate theatre’s great gift of offering the world through other lenses. I hope they’ll jump-start your own memory of highlight experiences in the theatre this year. This is Part 1. Stay tuned for Part 2, a selection of memorable performances, moments, experiences in theatre here this nearly-past year.

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Wonderful Joe. This latest from the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, which premiered at Burkett’s home-away-from-home Theatre Network, was a wonder-filled up-close capture of urban life in this country — in all its diversity and cruelty, its absurdity, humour and heartbreak. It takes us to a ‘hood that the homeless, the outliers, the marginalized, the old and the young, mingle, populated by Burkett’s diminutive, magically expressive cast of actors. And the play is a vision of the multi-cultural Canadian city through the eyes of the old fellow Joe out for a last adventure with his aged dog Mister. He can see the human gold in a tarnished world; he has the gift of belief. A beautiful play: a miniaturized world, yes, but just as large as life. Read the full review here, and an interview with the playwright/ actor/ designer/ director/ marionettiste here.

Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Robot Girls. Fresh and funny, glinting with insights into the tumultuous lives of junior high girls, Trevor Schmidt’s sharp-eyed comedy, which premiered at Shadow Theatre, unfolded in weekly meeting of girls whose little act of initial defiance is joining a science club to build a robot for a competition. Friendships get built and strain at the seams, under the pressures of the world. Jointly directed by John Hudson and Lana Michelle Hughes, the Shadow production boasted some of the best ensemble chemistry of the season, from Larissa Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie. Have a peek at a interview with McKenzie here. The full review is here.

Brick Shithouse, fenceless theatre, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

Brick Shithouse. Ashleigh Hicks’s gut punch of a play, which premiered at the 2024 Found Festival, gave us seven stalled 20-something characters, simmering with the escalating frustration of unusable college degrees, who are working crap jobs and still living with their parents to save rent. They can’t afford the ‘real’ world, so they look to the online universe, live-streaming their fight club for an infinitely expandable, invisible (and, they think, anonymous) audience. Everything in Sarah J. Culkin’s Fenceless Theatre production, at the Tessarae, took a bone-rattling pummelling, including the characters’ moral boundaries, as the ante inevitably got raised. Just writing this makes my ribs hurt. Read the review here. And there’s a interview with the playwright here.

Dayna Lea Hoffman (aloft) in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Design by Narda McCarroll (set), Whittyn Jason (lighting) and Rebecca Cypher (costumes). Photo by Brianne Jang.

Mermaid Legs. The year’s best title belongs to Beth Graham’s new “surreal theatre dance fantasia,” which premiered at the 2024 SkirtsAfire Festival. It conjures theatrically the strange, unpredictable existential instability — the terrain between the fathomless sea and the risky dry land — that the great mystery of mental illness engenders within a trio of sisters. When Billy (the excellent Dayna Lea Hoffman) disappears, the lives of her sisters (Mel Bahniuk and Noori Gill) are thrown into chaos. Annette Loiselle’s production for three actors and four dancers, her last at the helm of SkirtsAfire, counted as meaningfully multi-disciplinary, a theatrical marriage of words, images, and sounds. To be precise, a collaboration between Graham’s text, Ainsley Hillyard’s choreography, Narda McCarroll’s dramatically expressive set, Whittyn Jason’s lighting, Binaifer Kapadia’s original music score, Aaron Macri’s sound, and Rebecca Cypher’s costumes. Read the full review here. And a behind-the-scenes interview with director Loiselle here.

John Turner (Smoot) and Michael Kennard (Mump) are back, in Mump and Smoot in Exit, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Mump and Smoot in Exit. The return of Canada’s celebrated “clowns of horror,” existentialists from the planet Ummo (Michael Kennard and John Turner), after a 10-year absence was a cause for celebration. In their new comedy, which premiered at Theatre Network in a Karen Hines production, Mump and Smoot, resuming their familiar fraught relationship as the imperious one and the resentfully compliant and impulsive one, arrived through the audience into a stage landscape dominated by bones, skulls, skeletons. And it dawned on them, and us, where they were. The big questions — memory and time, good and evil, life and death, religion — are part of this dark/ darker/ darkest comedy. Don’t ask what they’re chowing down on in the dinner scene. O grave, where is thy sting? Check out the review, and a preview interview with Mump and Smoot’s non-Ummonion alter-egos and director Karen Hines here.

Meegan Sweet and Gabby Bernard in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Stars on Her Shoulders. Stephen Massicotte’s beautiful, riveting new World War I play, which premiered at Workshop West in a Heather Inglis production, took us to a convalescent hospital in France. The five characters, all women, are nurses, and in 1918 they’re poised on the threshold between the 19th century view of women’s roles and a brave new world of equality between the sexes. Two of them, Canadians, are each in their way, “odd women,” out of step with the view of women as on a husband-finding quest. Both the script and the production, with its terrific ensemble cast — Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann — individualize the characters without forcing the issue, en route to thoughts about how to be happy in a completely shattered, and shattering, world. It hit hard, close to home, in a funny and heartbreaking way. The review is here, and a preview interview with Massicotte here.

Kristin Johnston, Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Jana O’Connor in Pith!, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Pith! Stewart Lemoine’s 1997 love letter to theatre, and the transforming power of the imagination, got a crack revival at Teatro Live!, directed by the playwright. Three actors, four chairs, a rug and a phonograph are the starting point for an exotic bare-stage adventure, brazenly instigated by a breezy and resourceful vagabond seaman (Andrew MacDonald-Smith) on behalf of a woman imprisoned by grief and faint hope (Kristin Johnston) and her peppy companion (Jana O’Connor). A signature Teatro piece, with a revival cast that knew exactly how to land the playwright’s graceful and intricate wit. See the review here, and a preview interview with O’Connor here.

Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Dead Letter. Conni Massing’s cunningly contrived mystery/comedy thriller for three actors (an achievement in itself), intriguingly MC’d by the “detective,” so to speak, is a woman looking for reassurance from the cosmos that the losses, however minor — from missing socks to dead letters — aren’t just random and disconnected. They’re clues in a larger, more meaningful life mystery. Heather Inglis’s perpetual motion staging in the round in a Workshop West premiere production is a challenge to the world’s obstinate lack of transparency. The way the central character weaves in and out of narration and simultaneous action, was another reminder that Massing is a witty comic writer, and that Lora Brovold is one of our most skilled and engaging actors. Read the full review, and a preview interview with playwright Massing here.

Brandon Mcpherson, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Ruth Alexander in The Pillowman, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

The Pillowman. In a venue we didn’t even know about (the eerie Pendennis Building basement downtown), Theatre Yes revived a queasy, disturbingly playful 2003 Martin McDonagh comedy, a queasy-making storytelling puzzle cum screwball, that turned out, in Max Rubin’s production, to be disconcertingly contemporary. In an interrogation chamber in a totalitarian state, a writer (Dayna Lea Hoffman) is being questioned by a pair of Keystone cops about a series of horrifying child murders that have an uncanny resemblance to the murders in her bedtime stories. The play is an intricate construction of layers of gruesome-ness, with questions that always seem a bit out of comfortable reach. Here’s one: are artists responsible for the effect their imaginative work on audiences? An unsettling experience in a plastic-lined room. Read the review, and a preview interview with director Rubin.

Stafford Perry, Heidi Damayo, Lindsey Angell in A Streetcar Named Desire, Citadel/Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price

A Streetcar Named Desire. Daryl Cloran’s atmospheric production, lavishly framed with live music and beautifully lighted (by Bonnie Beecher), brought one of the great American plays about illusion and delusion to Citadel audiences. At the centre, as Blanche DuBois, the memorable figure of the outsider, displaced in time and space to a new and jostling world, and on the lam from the harsh light of reality and her own history, was a substantial performance by Lindsey Angell. She made Blanche’s last stand, with its high price tag on fantasy, into something valiant.  And Sheldon Elter made something crucial of the small role of Mitch, the decent neighbour whose heart is available for the breaking in Blanche’s relentless campaign of charm. The production, staged at an unusual distance upstage, unfolded in a series of beautiful, but long-shot, tableaux. The review is here; a preview interview with Lindsey Angell is here.