Waiting for the bunny? See a show: the startling variety of Edmonton theatre this weekend

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

While you’re waiting for the Easter bunny to show up, there’s live theatre, and lots of it, in town this weekend.

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This weekend is your last chance to catch The Revolutionists at Shadow Theatre. Lauren Gunderson’s intricate black comedy about the artist and artistic creation, especially playwriting, in the shadow of Mme La Guillotine during the Reign of Terror in Paris 1793, gathers together an assortment of historical characters, all women. And it adds a Black resistance fighter from the colonies imagined from Marianne, the French symbol of Republicanism. Have a peek at the preview with the cast here, and the review here. John Hudson’s production runs through Sunday at the Varscona. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

Deserters by Kenneth T. Williams, U of A Studio theatre. set and props Chelsea Payne Evason; lighting and projections T. Erin Gruber; costumes Kim-Michelle Brown. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Another kind of resistance to colonialism is happening at the U of A’s Studio Theatre. Deserters, a new, experimental play by Kenneth T. Williams, is staged on a grand scale in the lavishly theatrical premiere production directed by Carmen Aguirre.

It’s not so much a story (at least one I could follow) as a lengthy video game-type barrage of allusions to assorted back stories, all of them involving violent subjugation and the urge to win. But in the end Deserters,  challenging and formless as it is, seems not much interested in narrative, or individual characters, as much as it sets about evoking a confusing world. It’s brutally dystopian and militaristic, with its own jumbled history of meaningless skirmishes, wins, and losses — and lots of physical fighting (fight director Morgan Yamada). The Army, Navy, and Air Force compete for supremacy and status, perpetually at war with each other, for some reason or no reason. That this is a war without known cause, full of power plays and defeats that the characters don’t explain but allude to endlessly, is part of the point, I guess. No one asks video games to explain themselves.

In the world of Deserters. Recruits, “piglets” in a boot camp, are the grunts of the military class system, set against each other for promotion, and survival, in a ruthless hierarchy. And all missteps or revolutionary impulses are brutally punished (there’s quite a lot of shouting and threats).

There are references throughout to a “Great Desertion” of long ago, and the oppression of a group of people with ties to the land. Deserters doesn’t elucidate, but colonialism, the brutality of childhood displacement with “house mothers,” references to inter-generational trauma, thread their way through the play as a toxic running subtext to the nightmare residential school experience. The population is all-female, and the enforced separation of children and mothers seems to be a given. And it becomes more explicit when a bomb disposal unit discovers a small, undamaged corpse at a bomb site that’s a mass children’s grave.

The play invites you, not to become emotionally entangled in the fortunes of individual characters, but to immerse yourself in a world with its own elaborate rules, “suicide rooms” for the unruly, surveillance, and its own signature sport, Murderball. And the staging deliberately reverses (I’m not sure why) the more usual interplay of close-ups and long shots. Individual encounters are often seen close up on screen in live video, while live witnesses onstage, in sinister sunglasses, observe at a distance.

The world is impressively presented in Aguirre’s production. In stunning visuals and sound, it comes at you on a grand scale (and at a grand two and a half hour-plus length), with video game accoutrements: digital choices between assorted back stories, or themes, get typed on a giant screen. Chelsea Payne Evason’s strikingly monumental multi-layered set, leans in, at an ominous angle, on the prisoners in the fortress of this world.

The stunning projections, on screens large and small, and the lighting that bursts and dapples and flickers across the set are by T. Erin Gruber. Matthew Skopyk’s sound design references the thundering drums and industrial percussion of war, married to the driving rock of video games. And his clever score captures, as well, with classical riffs, the absurd anachronism of military ambitions. Kim-Michelle Brown’s costumes are a wild swirl of military and athletic garb of every vintage, including archaic uniforms. It all looks amazing, and it wears you out.

The cast of 12, half male half female and all playing female characters, are all talented graduating acting students in the BFA program. They hurl themselves valiantly, and I’d have to say selflessly, into multiple roles, in a play designed to demonstrate the ultimate suppression of individuals. The cast: Katie O’Keefe, Sable B. Boltz, Liam Sievwright, Abby Krushel, Andrew Domanski, Colby Stockdale, Gabi Stachniak, Travis Edwards, Joshua Hope, Caileigh Muilenburg, Lauren Johnsen, Tori Kibblewhite

Deserters runs through April 11 at the Timms Centre for the Arts. Tickets: showpass.com or 780-492-2495. Check out the interview with playwright Williams here.

Luc Tellier, Alexander Ariate, Chariz Faulmino, Hal Wesley Rogers in The Wizard of Oz, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

•At the Citadel, there’s a high-contrast pair of shows. On the Shoctor stage, Thom Allison’s production of The Wizard of Oz, the musical adapted from the classic film version of the great L. Frank Baum fantasy, possibly the most famous road trip in entertainment history. The review is here. It runs through April 12. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820, and the review is here.

On the Maclab stage, Casey and Diana by actor-turned-playwright Nick Green, a U of A theatre grad, starts previews Saturday, directed by Lana Michelle Hughes (she’s the new artistic director of Shadow Theatre). The play, which premiered at the Stratford Festival in 2023 and has played to critical raves and full houses since then, is set during the AIDS crisis of the 1990s. It takes us to an AIDS hospice, Toronto’s Casey House, the week before the arrival there of Princess Diana, whose very public compassion and warmth helped change the optics on the disease in an era of cruel exclusion and stigma. The Citadel-Alberta Theatre Projects co-production runs through April 26. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com. Look for a interview with Green soon.

•And it’s your last weekend to hear Only The Lonely, live onstage and accompanied by a great band, in One Night With Roy Orbison starring Matt Cage, at the Mayfield through Sunday. Check out the review here. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.