‘My love letter to queer and trans kids’: The Adventure of Young Turtle launches Expanse Festival 2024

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

One morning this week, I went on an undersea excursion backstage at the Westbury Theatre, and I met an apprehensive moray eel.

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Their body was once an air compressor hose, their eyes Gatorade bottle lids, and their pointy teeth, plastic forks. They were hanging out with fellow sea creatures, including an oyster who opened like a takeaway food container to reveal a nice fat pearl inside. And a giant jellyfish who’d started life as a garden umbrella then developed shimmering bubblewrap tentacles.

They were getting into character for the “queer puppet musical for kids” that premieres Thursday to open the 2024 edition of Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival. In the course of S.E. Grummett’s 60-minute The Adventure Of Young Turtle, our hero — the only character in the production from Saskatoon-based So.Glad Arts who isn’t a puppet but has a human body, with accoutrements like fins and a shell — will meet a butch shark, a gender-fluid clownfish, a cuttlefish with drag queen eyelashes to die for. “Different letters of the queer alphabet,” as Gummett (Grumms) puts it.

Logan Stefura, Émanuel Dubbeldam in rehearsal for The Adventure of Young Turtle. Photo supplied

“And they all teach Young Turtle lessons … about identity and being yourself, being able to embrace who you are and showing that to the world. Things about how to be brave outside rigid, masculine emotions. Things about the strength of community and found family.” They laugh. “A lot of creatures and an ocean of possibilities!”   

No bubble wrap is safe from the inventive zest (and hot glue gun) of Grummett (Grumms) and co. No rubber glove or scrubby, pool noodle, spare backpack, or old hula hoop. Empty juice bottles, beware: you could be on the brink of a transformational experience. And as for plastic cutlery … well, check out the disconcerting toothy grin on that big-mouth shark.

“Stylized trash,” declares the transgender non-binary artist cheerfully of the diverse cast of animal characters played by four performers (Ali Deregt, Émanuel Dubbeldam, Oli Gusell and Logan Stefura), one from Saskatoon, two from Edmonton, one from Calgary, in a rare example of “a cross-prairie queer collaboration.” Beyond virtuoso ingenuity with found objects, “we wanted to make everything so it looked re-purposed too. Part of the aesthetic!”

“I was the kid who who wrote a play for my class, then directed it, acted in it, designed a set cobbled together from everybody’s parents’ stuff,” says Grumms, who has a sunny sort of buoyancy about them in conversation. “I went to the University of Saskatchewan as an actor, then started making my own stuff, and doing the Fringe circuit….” For one thing “there wasn’t enough work to just be an actor. And there weren’t a lot of parts for trans folks like myself.” Besides, “I’m what my theatre mentor (playwright/director) Yvette Nolan calls ‘a theatre rat’. I like to get my hands in every little bit of the process, even the poster design.”

And that, they think, is the gravitational pull of Fringes: “you get to make every little piece of it!”  And those festivals have figured prominently in their work. Physical comedy and puppets, both Grumms signatures, were involved in Pack Animals, the show they and their So.Glad collaborator Holly Brinkman took on tour to nine Fringes (including Edmonton’s) in 2019. A woodpecker and a beaver get lost in the woods….

Grumms met their life partner on that tour, and the pair found themselves waiting out the pandemic in Australia. In Grumms’ absurdist physical comedy Something in the Water, inspired by their coming out as transgender, the audience watched the performer/creator turn into a giant squid, a monster outsider. It won the Best Theatre prize at the giant Adelaide Fringe in 2017, and has since sprouted a kids’ version, and played the Play The Fool Fest here.

Creepy Boys, the “little-c clown show” (“I don’t do noses”) comedy Grumms created with partner Sam Kruger, inspired by “growing older and how we feel about re-boots and re-makes of everything our childhood,” premiered at the Twin Cities Horror Festival. And it’s played Fringes in Australia and got raves at the very big one in Edinburgh.  

In 2016, “fresh out of theatre school,”  Grumms and Caitlin Zacharias had created SCUM: A Manifesto and taken it to the Saskatchewan Fringe. Playwright/dramaturg Vern Thiessen called it their “fuck-you play.” Grumms beams. “It was rage-filled and what I needed at he time.”    

“But as I developed my theatre voice I’ve come back to comedy, as a way of enlisting the audience, extending love to characters … as a way of making queer work very accessible to everyone. If we can laugh together, we build a community in theatre.”

“Comedy,” they muse, “can be a Trojan Horse for important themes and content.” They’ve found that a lot of the plays about trans people that aren’t written by trans artists “are rooted in trauma. And I’m less and less interested in telling those stories and more interested in telling stories that are full of joy and celebration, that are empowering to the trans community, not just putting our stories onstage to educate.”

Grumms and co-producer Mac Brock celebrate the fact that the cast and creative team of The Adventure of Young Turtle are entirely trans, queer, non-binary. And all the animals are queer too. There’s “a big win in this,” as Grumm says. Not least because it’s a moment in our history when anti-trans rhetoric and oppressive legislation threaten the human rights, health, safety, happiness of kids. After the Edmonton premiere run at Expanse,  a national tour in 2025 will launch at Saskatoon’s Persephone Theatre.

Logan Stefura, Ali DeRegt ih The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts. Photo supplied.

The Adventure of Young Turtle, which emerged from an original short story Grumms wrote before the pandemic, is So.Glad Arts’ first show specifically written with kids (the five-plus crowd) in mind. And it’s a musical (music by Rae Spoon and Ruaridh MacDonald): “I don’t write music, but the hero’s journey suited the musical form…. Every creature can have their song (the eel has two).”

Émanuel Dubbeldam, Ali DeRegt, Oli Guselle in rehearsal for The Adventure of Young Turtle. Photo supplied.

Puppets are big in GrummWorld. “I don’t fit into a lot of binary roles,” they say cheerfully. “I’m an odd duck onstage…. I‘d love to be cast as a leading man (laughter) but I don’t think that will happen any time soon…. I’m often cast as non-humans, robots, cyborgs, aliens, (more laughter) squid monsters.” For Grumms puppets were “a way of opening up what I was allowed to play onstage as a trans performer. I could play all kinds of genders, creatures, inanimate objects…. I got to use the whole of my creative practice.”

They’re tickled by the ‘trash into treasure’ aesthetic that’s an invitation to imagine — to “fall in love with a garbage bag or a little hunk of clay, or be captivated by a piece of wood.” Puppets are “so live … theatre magic that can’t be a movie or online. And you can see the fingerprints of the people that made it.”

Kid audiences buy in instantly; “with adults you have to tease it out a little more, do a little more warming up to get to that place.” Grumms loves performing for kids. “They tell you exactly how they about things … an audience who haven’t made up their minds about the world yet!”

The ocean is a meaningful setting for their new musical, Grumms figures. “We’ve only discovered 10 per cent of the ocean, and the ocean has been around forever. Like the ocean we’ve only discovered 10 per cent of gender expression and identities. And like the ocean queer and two-spirit people have been around forever. It’s not a new thing.”

“This is my love letter to queer and trans kids…. It feels much needed right now. I hope the kids who need to see it, find it.”

PREVIEW

The Adventure of Young Turtle

Theatre: So.Glad Arts at the Expanse Festival

Written by: S.E. Grummett, with music by Rae Spoon and Ruaridh McDonald

Directed by: Jay Northcott

Starring: Ali Deregt, Émanuel Dubbeldam, Oli Guselle, Logan Stefura

Where: Westbury Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: March 28, 30, 31, April 3 and 4

Tickets: pay-what-you-can (suggested $25), tickets.fringetheatre.ca or at the door