Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Monk Northey in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy. Photo by Ian Jackson
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The last time a Colleen Murphy play was onstage in this town, a Theatre Network production five years ago, the gore flew so enthusiastically that the front rows of the audience were equipped with splatter shields and bibs.
To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.
That was the riotously funny (very) dark comedy The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, Murphy’s first adaptation (that signed over to bouffon clowns a particularly grisly Shakespeare tragedy she described at the time as “really boring”).
The fearless Canadian playwriting star arrived at Theatre Network in 2020 with two Governor General’s Awards for plays exploring the repercussions of horrific acts of public violence (The December Man and Pig Girl). And an archive of theatrically adventurous, risk-embracing pieces, including films, and opera librettos. Consider, for example, a 23-actor play with a time span of 500 years and a polar bear protagonist (The Breathing Hole). Or a six-hour two-part 33-character epic designed to challenge assumptions about the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham (Geography of Fire/ La furie et sa géographie). Or an opera (with composer Aaron Gervais) about a young Ukrainian woman lured into the sex trafficking world by a Russian recruiter (Oksana G.).
playwright Colleen Murphy
Back to the present. After a three-day cross-country train trip (she doesn’t fly) from her Toronto home base, the intrepid Murphy, now an Order of Canada recipient, is back at Theatre Network, her favourite Edmonton destination. And her favourite director, Bradley Moss, is in charge of the world premiere of her latest, Jupiter, the fourth of her plays to be produced at Theatre Network (after Pig Girl, Armstrong’s War and Titus Bouffonius). It opens Thursday at the Roxy, the grand finale to the company’s 50th anniversary season.
On St. Patrick’s Day, we’re sitting in the light-filled rehearsal hall at Theatre Network. And after a conversational dissection of the depressing political news from south of the border, Murphy is describing her new play with a certain wry understatement, as “not just a family in a living room with a dog.”
True, there is a family (multigenerational, working-class, five in number). And there is a dog (an appealing golden retriever played by Monk Northey, who was the first of Moss’s ensemble to be cast). Hold on, has Murphy gone domestic on us? “It’s an experiment in time,” she says of Jupiter, a commission from the Morris Foundation which seeks out “plays that touch on mental health and addiction.”
Brian Dooley, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Ellie Heath in Jupiter, by Colleen Murphy. Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson
“I thought I’d show the consequences of a life,” Murphy says, “so you could see the future coming out of the present…. Jupiter happens during four days in 2015, the present, and how that plays out in the near future in 2030, and in the far future, 2050 — in the same living room. And the same actors play the characters at different ages. “I’ve always loved cause and effect in human behaviour…. I’m not saying that everything that happens to us when we’re young affects us later. But a lot of things do.”
That was a choice, says Murphy of her decision not to have different actors playing the same character. “I didn’t want that…. This is a bit harder and perhaps a bit more limiting. But I also felt that audiences have a relationship, however unconsciously, with the actor who’s playing the character.” Actors love that kind of challenge. And, on a pragmatic note, for a small theatre “five actors instead of eight is more practical.”
There has to be a dog; he’s crucial for the story as it unfolds. So Moss and his cast have put aside the famous old W.C. Fields showbiz saw about never working with children or dogs. “In 2015 a young girl in the family (Ellie Heath) is doing a science experiment with dog saliva and bacteria and stuff.” Murphy has already bonded with Monk, who belongs to Moss’s partner. “I’ve always had golden retrievers, and Monk is the dearest thing…. He’s not on for very long, but he has to hang around rehearsals so he feels at home; he has relationships with the actors and the director.”
Monk is the latest animal to get a plum role in a Murphy play. In the Murphy canon, animals figure prominently: “it’s so interesting, the audience’s instant emotional response.” In The Breathing Hole, which premiered in 2022 at the National Arts Centre, “the audience was extremely compelled by, emotionally connected to, the bear, a puppet with a man inside.” Of the 45 characters in Geography of Fire, 12 are animals and birds. For the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver, Murphy is working on a commissioned adaptation of Ibsen’s whistle-blower drama An Enemy of the People, “and I want an orangutang…. It’s set in the 21st century, with an emphasis on climate change.” And she’s changed Ibsen’s locale —spa baths, a town’s prime tourist draw, are found to be polluted — to the zoo.
Ellie Heath, Cathy Derkach, Brian Dooley in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.
The family we meet in Jupiter, infiltrated by addiction and alcohol, is not some fictional version of Murphy’s own family. “I never try to do that,” she says. But the Hutchinsons are from the same kind of working class mining community environment in which Murphy, the daughter of a miner originally from Rouyn-Noranda in Quebec, grew up in northern Ontario.
The explosively contained milieu of a family in a room is a first for her, she says. “There’s no drama without conflict,” is the Murphy mantra. And, ah yes, family has turned out to be a fertile ground for her sensibility. “There’s no family on this earth without some kind of conflict. Just by the nature of family. We love and we hate, and sometimes when we’re older we forgive. Or we regret….”
As Murphy, an artist who’s not apt to hedge, told .ca in 2017 before the premiere of Bright Burning (she’s renamed it I Hope My Heart Burns First) at the U of A, “our big fat myth is that we are a classless society.” In the play, commissioned from Murphy by the Lee Playwright in Residence program, the characters were meth addicts, prospect-less kids who loot an upscale suburban mansion to settle a drug debt.
She takes up that theme now. “You do not see the working class onstage nowadays. That is my observation,” Murphy declares decisively. In the world of Canadian theatre at the moment, “they’re contaminated…. We do not exist!” And now, onstage at Theatre Network, they are here. And I’m happy about that.”
“I love the working class. I am from the working class.”
It’s a language she knows. “I never want my audience to work hard to figure out what’s going on. My plays are not intellectual; they’re not abstract…. “My dialogue and plays are (a pause and a smile) pedestrian. Which sounds like not a good thing. I mean just straight-up. Ordinary people talking the way ordinary people talk. Nothing high fallutin’. I like to make an offer to an audience … to come on a journey.”
As usual Murphy is working on multiple projects at the same time. She’s co-directing a film version of Armstrong’s War (“in English Canada, an endless process!”). As well as the Arts Club commission, she’s in progress with a new play for Brian Dooley, who’s a member of the Jupiter cast, an actor with whom she’s regularly worked, in projects across the country. “He’s been after me for ages to write a play for him. And I’ve always told him ‘I don’t write for actors. I can’t think that way’…. But then one morning I woke up with an idea.” And the result is a two-hander, a comedy about (laughter) death. One of my favourite subjects. Funny and charming.” It’s heading towards a production in Quebec.
Meanwhile there’s a working-class family (Dooley plays the dad), three generations, and what happens to them and their dog in the three-decade aftermath of the Jupiter‘s present moment unspooling into the future.
“There’s Greek in this play,” Murphy thinks. “I love Greek tragedy…. There’s a reasons those stories continue to be interesting in the modern world. They’re psychological; they’re deeply emotional; they’re always about human behaviour, why we do what we do. That’s the most fascinating thing about drama. I never tire of that.”
PREVIEW
Jupiter
Theatre: Theatre Network
Written by: Colleen Murphy
Directed by: Bradley Moss
Starring: Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Cathy Derkach, Gabriel Richardson, Dayna Lee Hoffmann, Monk Northey
Where: Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre, 10709 124 St.
Running: Thursday through April 20
Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca
