By Liz Nicholls, .ca
There can be nothing quite like the vast isolating distances of the prairies for locating a play about disconnection — between rural and urban, farm and city, booking learning and blue-collar life experience.
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And the playwright AJ Hrooshkin brings a considerable store of first-hand knowledge about all of the above to Alphabet Line, premiering Friday as part of the Fringe Theatre season. “Almost everything I do is blue collar, rural, and a little bit queer,” says a good-humoured, droll voice on the phone from out in Sturgeon County north of the city.
Originally from Veregin, Sask., Hrooshkin (they/them), who signs onto social media as “gayhick,” has been leaving the countryside and driving to rehearsals for the Prairie Strange production of their play directed by Giulia Romano at the Westbury Theatre. But only as needed. “Gas ain’t cheap when you drive an old truck.”
Alphabet Line, titled after the alphabetical nomenclature of towns on the CNR line across the prairies, is set in Yonker, Sask. (that’s after Xena and before Zelma) in the late 1940s. Duncan (Zachary Parsons-Lozinski), a queer farm kid, reaches out of his isolation by radio. And one day Nicholas (Sam Free), a grad student from Saskatoon answers the call to connect. Will a love story emerge? “I’m a sappy sappy romantic,” says Hrooshkin cheerfully.
“There are bits of me in both,” they say of the two characters in a play inspired by their own experience of “the urban/rural dichotomy, practical education vs book education….” The winner of the 2024 Westbury Family Theatre Award, Hrooshkin was themself a farm kid (their dad lost the family farm when they were very young) who grew up “all over rural Saskatchewan and Alberta. Nine schools, everywhere from Saskatoon and Prince Albert, acreages, farms, Lamont, Lloydminster, high school in Fort Saskatchewan…. All over the map.” Why? “My mom’s a hippie.” (affectionate laughter).
“What I learned about the land and how to be on it, I learned from my dad,” they say. “Alphabet Line is partly a love letter to that. And partly it’s ‘what could I have been if I’d had the full experience of that life?’.
And then we have the university-educated Hrooshkin: they have an honours degree in gender studies from the University of Saskatchewan. And queerness can be at home in both environments, they’ve found.
Hrooshkin’s dad, as they describe appreciatively, is “a farmer who writes poetry, very supportive of the arts and curious about what I do … farmer, trucker, handyman, contract worker; you name it he’s done it. The fatal flaw of the Hrooshkins: they can’t say No to work.” They come from a long line of “farmers, plumbers, cement pourers; everyone’s done construction….”
It’s a blue-chip blue-collar lineage. And that “did cause a little tension with my peers in urban settings,” they concede, remembering their high school years. “I like to garden; I like to plant things. I come from a family that hunts; I’ve had a firearms licence since I was 16,” says Hrooshkin. “In my late teens I pushed back on my upbringing; ‘I’m gonna get out of this and go get an education’…. I don’t regret it; it got me here and I wouldn’t be myself without it. And education is a beautiful thing. But it’s not a replacement for practical knowledge.”
“My experience is unique, and I’ll own that,” Hrooshkin laughs. “I’ve been kicked around for my redneck sensibilities…. But I have to say I’ve taken more shit in the city for being a small-town rural hick than I have ever taken for being out and queer in a small town. Ever.”
Hrooshkin is emphatically not in sync with the common view, oft expressed in CanLit and theatre, of small towns as an isolating experience compared to cities, and especially fraught for queer folk. “In those smaller places even if I’m alone I know that I can go the local coffee shop, general store, bar or whatever. I can talk to people. And they talk to you back. And it’s not weird…. I never go in gay first; I go in AJ first. By the time me being queer, being trans, comes out, they already know I’m a person.”
As you’ll glean, Hrooshkin didn’t arrive in theatre via any of the conventional routes, like acting. Though, to be fair, they did turn in a starring performance in kindergarten as a sea anemone in the Clear Water Pageant in Saskatoon. “Then I took a 25-year hiatus.” They thought of themself as a novelist. It took an intervention by friend Samantha Fraughton (one of the creators and performers of the Fringe show Talk Treaty To Me) when they moved in with her during COVID. “You could write a novel,” Laughton told them. “But a play’s more fun. Just write a play!” So they did.
They laugh. “My saving grace was that I had no idea what I was doing. Theatre was an experiment; I was just going to try it. And not knowing the industry, the conventions, helped a lot.”
They were a late-comer to the Fringe and, for that matter, to theatre. Hrooshkin was inspired, in a powerful, life-changing experience, by watching Bruce Ryan Costella’s Fringe show Spooky & Gay (“a queer horror storytelling cabaret”). “I laughed. I cried. Such human-ness in that performance; it just sang. And it didn’t flinch away from the realities of what it is to be queer.”
As Hrooshkin remembers vividly, Costella said “Edmonton was the Fringe that made me brave.” And “him saying that allowed me to be brave too.”
Brave enough to take their play Train One To Coal Valley to the Fringe in 2023. As they describe, “it follows two gay men working on the railroad. A bit of a love story, a bit of a retrospective.” The themes are similar to Alphabet Line, they think: “connections, reckoning with yourself…. My goal is to show that there is queerness in these blue-collar spaces. It’s not the preserve of urbanites.”
Spring is “farm time; it’s labour season,” says Hrooshkin. After the run of their play they’ll be back to farm and garden work. “At the end of the day I get to stick my hands in the dirt; I get to be where food comes from. I get to spend time with the community; we‘re all out there together…. Being a redneck was the best theatre education I could ever have.”
PREVIEW
Alphabet Line
Theatre: Edmonton Fringe Theatre and Prairie Strange Productions
Written by: AJ Hrooshkin
Directed by: Giulia Romano
Starring: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Sam Free
Where: Westbury Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.
Running: Friday through May 3
Tickets: fringetheatre.ca
