Request Programme, Northern Light Theatre. Graphic supplied.
By Liz Nicholls,
Northern Light, the adventurous Edmonton theatre company that’s had more eras, mandates, identities, logos, radical reinventions than any other in this theatre town, is turning 50 in the 2025-26 season.
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Its origins were modest half a century ago: lunchtimes in the basement of the Art Gallery (a buck a ticket). Since then, NLT has been a niche-jumper, shape-shifter, skin-shedder par excellence. They’ve done Shakespeare and Shaw in a big striped tent in the river valley (Paul Gross made his professional debut in A Midsummer Night’s Dream there). They’ve had seasons of dark and weird, via the modern Euro repertoire in translation.
They were into multi-media dance-theatre creations before dance-theatre was cool, and they toured the country with original hits. Sometimes Northern Light has been a theatre that does contemporary adaptations of a Jacobean goriest or a Kafka novel. Or original artist-collective “performance art” installations in found spaces — grotty warehouses or urban pedways. Sometimes it’s been a theatre that does mainstream musical revues of Piaf or Judy Garland, alongside new prairie plays.
When Trevor Schmidt became NLT artistic director in 2002, after nearly a decade of contributing to the company as an actor, playwright, director, and designer, he was looking for a niche, he says. He found it in a challenging assortment of obscure small-cast female-centric contemporary pieces by international playwrights most of us had never heard of — re-imagined and Canadian-ized by a stylized design aesthetic that defies Canadian realism. He’s regularly transformed a 70-seat black box theatre (the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns) to be a space that suits.
More of this fascinating, and continuing, history closer to opening night in September; stay tuned. Suffice it say that when COVID took its toll on programming at larger theatres, NLT bounced back better than many companies, says Schmidt. “We were big enough to stay noticed and small enough to dodge and weave through the closures.”
And now, in honour of this unique 50-year history, Schmidt has announced a three-production upcoming anniversary season that includes a revival of a Northern Light hit of recent vintage, the premiere of a new Schmidt comedy, and as the finale a wordless performance piece of European provenance.
In Request Programme (May 1 to 16, 2026), by the German avant-gardiste Franz Xaver Kroetz, which premiered in Stuttgart in 1973, a solitary woman arrives home at her solitary apartment, goes through her usual evening routine, makes dinner, cleans up, tunes in to a call-in radio show. And something happens that lifts this “ordinary” hour in the life of an “ordinary” woman into a gut-wrencher, for a reason you’ll discover. And that reason, as Schmidt explains, gives a ‘70s piece a visceral contemporary relevance.
Schmidt calls Request Programme “performance art, as opposed to a play … something we haven’t seen a lot of lately.” In this it refers back to the large-scale experiments undertaken in the 90s by his artistic director predecessors D.D. Kugler and the late Sandhano Schultz. As a celebration of the theatre’s history, each performance will feature a different actor who’s worked at Northern Light in the last 50 years — women of different racial backgrounds and ages, 20something to 80, one per night.
“Such a strange and interesting project to do in this way,” says Schmidt. “And scary: I can’t control it, how long it will be before (the woman) turns on the radio show. The actor has no lines, and will not have heard it before.” Every night will be different, and a different length, needless to say.
The cast list Schmidt is assembling for the run is a veritable who’s who of Edmonton actresses, all of whom have Northern Light credits in their resumés. So far they include Linda Grass, Davina Stewart, Kristin Johnston, Melissa Thingelstad, Nadien Chu, Michelle Todd, Holly Turner, Patricia Darbasie, Sylvia Wong, Cheryl Jameson. And there will be more.
“It’s a big project,” says Schmidt, and one that is tuned to the NLT frequency of “speaking to social issues without judgment…. We could have done this play with one actor. But I’m all about sharing the wealth.”
Ten years ago Schmidt introduced Edmonton audiences to the American playwright Eise Forier Edie via a solo play The Pink Unicorn. His production, starring Louise Lambert, was a popular and critical hit. The protagonist is a very conservative church-going Texas widow whose daughter has just announced she’s gender-neutral. It throws her world into chaos; she faces big moral choices. “What was relevant 10 years is even more so now,” as Schmidt points out.
The production that runs Sept. 26 to Oct. 11, Schmidt’s third (it ran at Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre in 2019, with Elinor Holt), stars Patricia Zentilli who, like Lambert, has qualities crucial to the play, Schmidt says. “She’s intensely charismatic and likeable.… The audience needs to fall in love with the character — she’s so recognizable and relatable and flawed.”
The new Schmidt comedy that premieres Nov. 28 to Dec. 13 has the longest title of the season by far. How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold At The Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition is all about an unlikely friendship between two women, mismatched in every way, as they prepare for an amateur dance contest.
“I thought I was writing a fluffy little satire,” says Schmidt. But it’s turned out to be more heartwarming than that, he’s found. “I always want to go for the gut punch.” Jenny McKillop makes her Northern Light debut as one of the characters; the other has yet to be cast.
If there’s an emotional through-line to the trio of shows, Schmidt finds that the women in them all explore “loneliness, isolation, feeling separate from the group.” It’s a recurring theme of his, he says, the tension between “characters who choose to make themselves happy and people who choose to hurt other people, and deny themselves happiness because they’re afraid.”
“In this anniversary season, I’m trying to be brave and push out…. Everyone wants to do safer work. But I think I want to do the hard stuff.”
Season subscriptions are now on sale (780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com), with single tickets available Aug. 6.
