“I have become God”: Trevor Schmidt’s thriller Monstress premieres at Northern Light, a review

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

You enter the Studio Theatre through fog, and discover you’re in a mysterious chamber, glowing with jewelled colours and overhung with dozens of scissors, blades pointing down at us.

To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

The centrepiece, a slab that might be a kind of altar, seems to float on rosy light from below, possibly from hellish sources. And you can just make out, if you squint, a back wall dominated by a Vitruvian Woman, splayed in the famous Leonardo square and circle.

There’s eerie magic in this improbable transformation of a small black box space, something of a specialty of Northern Light’s playwright/director/ designer Trevor Schmidt — a necromancy here assisted materially by the gorgeously atmospheric and dramatic lighting devised by Larissa Poho. And as you’ll quickly find out in Schmidt’s new Goth thriller Monstress, opening the NLT season, this reinvention speaks theatrically to the Frankenstein-ian experiment that’s at the centre of the play. Ah, the story is a tangible demo of the operating theatre as … theatre.

We’re in a doctor’s subterranean lab. “Am I the monstress?” wonders the “good doctor” (Sydney Williams) at the outset, speaking to us from the vaguely Victorian, even more vaguely English, past. “What have I become?”

Sydney Williams in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

This ambitious scientist, the first female doctor accepted to the Upper Harrington Academy of Anatomical Dissection and School of Medicine and Surgery, has been expelled. But she’s carried on. And now, she’s speaking to us from the precipice of a breakthrough “on the boundaries of life,” as she puts it. “Hubris has brought me here…. I have become God.”

Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Her experiments in “necromancy and re-animation” have come to the attention of a rich Colonel. He’s hired her to bring back from beyond the grave his dead daughter Lydia Chartreuse (Julia van Dam), her neck fatally broken when she was thrown from a horse. For the doctor it’s an invitation to pull back the curtain on the Great Secret of life and death, to cross the mysterious frontier between the two. Like Mary Shelley’s Viktor Frankenstein before her, the challenge to defy human limitations, operate outside boundaries of conventional morality, and exercise god-like power, is irresistible. In the male-dominated world of science the script and its witty title give this doctor’s single-minded quest a particularly feminist motivation, too.

Which is when you realize that the doctor is revisiting, and reassessing, her “triumph,” in a play that’s bookended by that opening question, “am I the monstress?” It’s really a question for the us, the audience.

As her experiment begins, relocated to the Colonel’s spooky country house, Dave Clarke’s clever sound design doesn’t just conjure the past in an unnerving, echo-y way — the fateful sound of horses’ hooves, for example, and voices that sound unlocked from a misty vault. The punctuation, so to speak, of Schmidt’s production is the recurring, and always horrifying sound of a neck cracking, in reverb. It will make you flinch, along with the doctor, every time.

There is much I shouldn’t tell you, for your own good, about what happens in Monstress. This you should know: both actors in Schmidt’s cast are excellent. The doctor’s re-creation of a person, and the education she instigates in how to be human, are strange, and queasy. In van Dam’s performance, which dispenses with any hint of English accent in favour of sounding neutral, Lydia Chartreuse has a chilling fixity, an outsized doll-like blankness (“a strangely clean slate”). The doctor as teacher introduces words, and words trigger memories that begin to add up.

And Williams is terrific as the instigator, increasingly flummoxed by the chain of direct life-and-death questions put to her by her “creation” — and by her own mounting doubts about her responsibility for the creature she’s returned to the land of the living.

Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

“Are you my mother?” asks Lydia, who attaches herself more and more to her ‘benefactor’. “I brought you back to life,” answers the doctor cautiously. “How do you know I wanted that?” Lydia wonders.  “Am I good? Are you good?” And here’s one: “how does a father love a daughter?” The questions are wide-ranging, and kind of float through the play, attaching themselves here and there, on the thorns of the past.

The script, and the story, belong to the doctor’s first-hand account, and, in Williams’ thoughtful performance to her dawning realization about Lydia’s life and the ruthlessness of her own thwarted ambition. The doctor, the self-created god who rallies under the science flag, describes events as they happen. Times being what they are, in an age permeated by political skepticism about science, Monstress is unafraid to wonder about the ego of the scientist, and that’s unsettling in itself.

But what gives this highly theatrical piece its particular tension and suspense is the visual and aural imagery attached to a story about female drive and unrelenting ambition. The sight of Lydia like a beautiful, dangerous, outsized fairy, learning humanness from scratch from a self-appointed god, is something you’ll take with you. The big questions are the unanswerable ones.

REVIEW

Monstress

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Trevor Schmidt

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Julia van Dam and Sydney Williams

Where: Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Nov.23

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com