By Liz Nicholls,
In the chiller of a play that opens October 25 in an eerie downtown basement, you’ll watch two sisters act out a dangerous, nerve-wracking, possibly lethal, role-playing game with each other — in a theatre of their own making.
In a way Claire and Solange, the title characters of Jean Genet’s tense and suspenseful 1947 play The Maids, are performance artists. The sisters, maids in a love/loathe relationship with their mistress, take on, and exchange, roles across the class and power divide. Their ritual is to take turns playing imperious, casually disdainful Madame, and each other. They drink a cocktail of contempt and admiration, and fantasize murderously about what it would take to change their world.
Theatre, roles, performance, fantasy that drifts into reality, inequities of power … it all sheds light on the imaginative hold the play has had for three years on Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam, two young up-and-coming actors who emerged from the U of A’s BFA acting program in 2021 with a theatrical mission.
The pair, theatre school classmates, have turned producers; they’ve written dozens of grant applications, raised money, sought out an award-winning director, found a venue in the newly restored Pendennis Building on Jasper Avenue. And they’ve named their new indie troupe Putrid Brat (from a line in The Maids translation by Brit playwright Martin Crimp). All in pursuit of the upcoming production directed by U of A drama professor David Kennedy, in which they play the maids, with Alexandra Dawkins as Madame.
As they explain over a pre-rehearsal coffee, Wigglesworth and van Dam were moved to collaboration after a scene study with Kennedy from The Maids during the pandemic. “We were really drawn to it, so much to dig into,” says Wigglesworth. And in Kennedy they both appreciated “a really great director, so passionate about the work…. “
The pair dreamed of a full production. “We just thought ‘when theatre comes back …IF theatre comes back….”
As they think about it now, it is perhaps no coincidence that Wigglesworth and van Dam were so attracted to a play about a power imbalance, and the longing to reclaim some control over their lives. They felt it. For one thing, they were part of a U of A graduating class that spent most of their arduous and intense four-year BFA program online, thanks to COVID — a particularly unsatisfying scenario in an art form that’s all about connecting with an audience.
As a theatre student in an all-consuming total-immersion program, a psycho-drama of its own, “your time is really not your own; it’s hard to have a second to think for yourself, and look beyond,” Wigglesworth says…” And at the best of times an actor’s life, after that, involves “a lot of waiting by the phone,” or the inbox. But in times of huge uncertainty, and at the start of theatre careers, they felt especially at the whim of others, of circumstances, of the world. “We were wanting to take some power back,” she thinks as van Dam nods. “To have some control of our own destiny, taking control of anything we could because we felt so out of control.…”
As van Dam puts it, producing The Maids was a kind of statement for them: “I’m not going to let this place (the university) define me. There’s a life beyond this! Anger was really a strong motivation for me.”
A farm kid from the Netherlands who moved to Canada at age six, van Dam drifted away from theatre into film and TV after graduation. The Brandon Rhiness indie film Grotesque, a lot of commercials, and one big American production, Under The Banner of Heaven with Andrew Garfield, shot in Calgary are on her resumé.
She credits Trevor Schmidt’s Northern Light Theatre production of A Phoenix Too Frequent last fall — she played a widow who gives up grief in favour of falling in love — with bringing her back to the stage. And next month Edmonton audiences will see her in the new Schmidt play Monstress at NLT, with more stage work to come this season.
Wigglesworth, originally from Winnipeg, went to Stratford for two seasons, as part of the Birmingham Conservatory, and ended up onstage with the Stratford heavy-hitters, like Colm Feore, in Richard III, as well as The Miser, the Brad Fraser adaptation of Richard II, and a modern take on Love’s Labour’s Lost. She’s now re-located to Toronto, for film and TV opportunities.
All the while, van Dam and Wigglesworth were brainstorming, long distance, about The Maids. The production history of Genet’s play includes every kind of venue, and staging it in a formal theatre was never in their plans. “From the start we thought warehouse,” says van Dam. But they considered every kind of “theatre,” an Airbnb, Rutherford House…. They considered casting a child, or a puppet, as Madame. “Crazy! When we found the space (in the Pendennis Building), it solidified a lot of things for us.”
Three years later, they’re still passionate about the theatre project they’ve built from the ground up. The 1947 play has invited every sort of interpretation: in some productions Claire and Solange are played by men, adding another level of artifice to the role playing, and taking their cue from Genet’s own introduction. Some productions are driven by the class struggle and economic inequities; others lean into the homo-erotic potential available in The Maids. It seems to speak to every age.
So how does a 1947 play sit in 2024? “Lately I’ve been feeling it focus on the patriarchy,” says Wigglesworth. “The three women onstage are, in different ways, jostling for their spot in this hierarchy created by men…. You think Madame has all the power, but she’s struggling too with the same things (the maids) are, at a very different level.”
Though the men are never seen onstage, the characters “are very aware of how they’re seen by men.” As van Dam puts it, “who has more value in the eyes of men?”
“When you feel powerless, what are you willing to do, what lengths will you go to to get some agency back in your life?” says Wigglesworth. It’s a question that resonates powerfully in The Maids, and for two young actors at the start of theatre careers. “I feel like Hannah actually is my sister,” grins van Dam.
PREVIEW
The Maids
Theatre: Putrid Brat
Written by: Jean Genet, translated by Martin Crimp
Directed by: David Kennedy
Starring: Julia van Dam, Hannah Wigglesworth, Alexandra Dawkins
Designed by: Even Gilchrist (set), Beyata Hackborn (costumes), Nick Kourtides (sound)
Where: Pendennis Building, 9660 Jasper Ave.
Running: Oct. 25 through Nov. 3
Tickets: showpass.com