Fringe 2013 - Day 2

The Shape of a Girl (Chrysalis Theatre, SK)

The title is evocative. Part cute, part suggestive, possibly something you’d see in an advertising campaign. It takes a while to swing back to the intended meaning of the phrase: that peculiar and endlessly troubling circumstance when someone can lose her humanity at so young an age, to commit such terrible acts, all while maintaining the shape of a girl.

     The new Chrysalis Theatre production for this summer’s Fringe tackles Joan MacLeod’s acclaimed script about the grim realities of bullying. It is inspired by the 1997 case of a 14-year-old Victoria girl who was beaten and killed by two classmates while many others stood by and watched. Those present made a pact of silence, but still rumours got out. The Shape of a Girl was born out of that incident but has only gained relevance since then, with the Amanda Todd and Rehtaeah Parsons cases keeping discussion in the air about the cruelty of young people.

     This play takes a fictional story of a small Vancouver Island community where a seemingly ordinary group of girls find themselves twisted by a long-running game of malice, denigration, and passive witness. The one-woman show focuses on the story of Braidie, handmaiden to the Devil, in a sense. She recounts how her innocent childhood was transformed by social hierarchy and needless ostracism, how her best friend Adrianne became queen and arbitrator of her circle of classmates, pronouncing judgement as she saw fit and delighting in cruelty towards those she decreed were deserving of it. She recounts how one girl named Sophie, who never did anything wrong, became scorned and hated by everyone who knew her, simply because it was decided that she should be. And finally she recounts how she herself stood by and let it all happen, time and time again.

     U of S alumna Danielle Spilchen, in her first solo show, takes us on a profound and shocking emotional journey. Her ageless eyes shift seamlessly between hyperactive girlish enthusiasm and shell-shocked horror. She has a face which can shine halogen-bright or darken to a sullen smouldering, and throughout the course of the play she explores the whole range of expressions. The performance is a bit frenetic, unstuck in time, bouncing from one point to another, swirling around points of violence, then, as if approaching a black hole, it slows to a moment, a pause between heartbeats. Like the arresting bell sound effect that rang periodically, never failing to jolt me in my seat, Spilchen has the ability to snatch the audience out of one state and put them in another. She moulds the emotional experience, offering brief moments of levity then barrelling back into anguish.

     Onstage she is accompanied only by two stepladders. They stand grey and monolithic, one of them towering over her, the other much smaller. Before a single word is uttered, there is a power imbalance onstage, one ladder looking down on the other and Braidie wavering between them. At times she tries to climb, but there is always a painful sight when she does. The play is framed as a letter to her estranged brother, which lends a sense of longing and displacement to Braidie’s words. The sense of loneliness in her social circle becomes more pronounced as the play reaches to a close and Braidie becomes more vulnerable. Danielle Spilchen maintains such a degree of emotional availability that in her final tearful breakdown, it really is difficult to tell if she’s still acting.

     The one complaint I would lodge against the production is that it finishes with the director Louise Seidel offering a ten minute “talk-back” with the audience. I could tell that she planned this in anticipation of there being a lot of young people in the audience, and I grant that it may be a good way to temper their reaction to the dark resonance of the play. But in my predominantly adult audience, it came across as shallow, and all too reminiscent of those tired, pointless seminars I had to sit through in elementary school. The schoolyard saccharine approach Seidel took in contrast with the blunt reality of the play made me imagine ending Letter’s from the Apocalypse by addressing the audience and telling them to by energy efficient lightbulbs.

     The Shape of a Girl is an emotionally trying but very rewarding play, with an electrifying performance by Danielle Spilchen. It is not my custom to assign numerical ratings to plays, so I will just use words. Must see.

Money Don’t Grow on Trees (Neverending Highway Productions, SK)

Choose Your Own Adventure. I remember those books. I usually ended up getting eaten by a monster a couple times. I still used to marvel at their complexity, though. But I, along with six billion other people in the world, never imagined that the genre could be transplanted into live theatre. Fortunately, I am privileged above most of those six billion in that I know Graham Kent and have access to his machinations.

     Our homegrown Neverending Highway Productions, which last year tried out a radio drama, is venturing further into the fringes (get it?) of theatrical culture to try out something totally new. And so we have Money Don’t Grow on Trees, a ludicrous crime and caper story about lost love, lost money, and the bank robbery that brings it all together. The play is framed by a teenage girl, Penny, working on a creative writing assignment, but she sometimes needs help from the audience to decide which direction to take the story. The story she crafts is about down-on-his-luck low-life Frankie who conscripts his reformed friend Cid into pulling off one last heist, but it doesn’t take long for things to go off the rails.

     Even removed from the CYOA aspect, the play works well as a raucous comedy. Penny continually intrudes upon the narrative to puzzle over problems and assign characters catchphrases. The dynamic between Penny and her creations is a lovely tongue-and-cheek bit of meta-fiction. Grahame Kent is outstanding in his frantic, off-the-wall Frankie, combining slapstick humour with some Guy Ritchie-esque dark comedy; there is great chemistry between him and his straight man in Morgan Murray. Danielle Roy is a scene-stealer, their industry professional with a suitcase full of sexual tension. She is fun but steely. She has a commanding presence which allows her to bat around her co-stars. Jalisa Gonie as Penny is fun and always keeps the energy up. Then Lauren Younghusband as the ambiguously gendered Terry brings a wicked deadpan delivery to the latter half of the play.

     It is to Money’s credit that the script seems to have had a solid outline before the participatory elements were layered in, rather than relying on the gimmick to prop up everything else. It has a lot of strength as a comedy, and the CYOA element gives it a boost of uniqueness. But since the play committed to that form and made it the focus of its campaign, I have to admit it felt a little anemic. There is only one choice offered to the audience in the entire first half, and that only ends up affecting a single line of dialogue. While I can’t speak confidently based on my single viewing, I am left with the impression that most choices presented to the audience have very little bearing on the development of the plot; and on top of that, there is a tendency to have one option be so outrageous it is impossible for the audience not to pick it. But the play does have four guaranteed possible endings, and I’m confident the three I didn’t see are just as manic and action-packed as the one I did.

     Money Don’t Grow on Trees is a wicked and wacky crime comedy. While its choose-your-own-adventure format could have definitely been more ambitious, the play still stands strong on its own.

Stalled (Watermelon Heart Theatre, SK)

Poetry and bathrooms. Two things that bring unlikely people together. Stalled drops us into a unisex bathroom (*gasp*) at an unnamed seedy bar. Regulars at a weekly poetry night, dropping into the lavatory for a few moments, get tangled up in the intimate bits of each other’s lives, pushing together and pulling apart.

     To glance at this play on paper, one curious thing that stands out is the scope of its cast. Due to the brevity of commode interactions, Stalled relies on a parade of characters moving in and out to keep the action going. With a cast of four, each person onstage does duty as three or four characters. Costumes are minimal, but each character has some sort of detail or accessory to identify them; beyond that it’s down to good old fashioned acting and faith in the audience to keep everything straight. (For the most part it’s easy, though I admit I got turned around a couple times.) The rogues gallery includes a cynical bartender and her easy-going manager, a fracturing husband and wife, a grieving father and son, lesbian best friends, a few insecure romantics, a wounded nymphomaniac, and a predatory academic. As they bump and grind against each other’s lives they take the time to scrawl graffiti on the bathroom mirror, which becomes a poem itself.

     At its heart, Stalled appears to be a love letter to poetry – not surprising given playwright Shanda Stefanson’s regular presence at Lydia’s “Tonight It’s Poetry” (making the timing of this play all the more poignant). But that is hardly sufficient as a summation of the nature of this play. It traces the preposterous origins of poetry, weaving its way through our lives and relationships, bursting out at moments of high emotional intensity. The line scrawled at the end of each brief scene creates an icon, defining the character who wrote it at that particular moment, but shrouded in mystery as soon as the moment passes.

     The production is fairly complex for a fringe show. Two graffiti’d bathroom stalls stand prominently centre stage. It’s an impressive feat both to create those and to move them on and off stage with ease. The sleazy, dilapidated look about them, along with their incongruous sense of sturdiness, set the atmosphere right away. The set doesn’t lack for personality, but it is also strangely impassive, shielding the audience from the sight of sex, death, and everything in between. The interactive graffiti is captured by a projector off stage left, which starts out blank and gradually fills up with poetic scribbles, changing the colour of marker depending on the act of the play. It was a lovely technique (thankfully free of technical glitches) that bounces back the whole theme: we start out with a blank slate, seeing nothing but strangers; over time we get to see their dirty secrets and vulnerable moments, inundated with information, but never quite able to make complete sense of it.

     The cast of four has quite a lot to juggle, doing lightning fast character transitions. It’s tough, but they do well, falling into the erratic pace of the production gracefully. Some of the cast has less acting experience behind them, so there were a few rocky moments where the actor had trouble getting grounded in their character. But they still hit the notes they need to. Alyssa Bennett is enigmatic as ever, playing a more subtle game than the other actors, but that makes her outbursts all the more compelling, in her brief lesbian makeout scene and her bizarre “Preserve your sexy” rant. Isaac Bond is at his best as the suave and slightly cocky manager. He brings a lot of emotion to the part of a depressed teenager, but in the spare few minutes he has to develop the character, there is a lot of sound and fury that doesn’t quite land. Mike de Jong (who, to the best of my knowledge, is not Jared Beattie) has a bit of trouble getting his characters to resonate and ends up overshadowed by his stage partners much of the time; but he does have a good standout performance in his meatiest character, a cardigan-wearing lothario who, by the end, could make the audience burst out laughing without saying a word. Kelly McTaggart was a surprise for me. I have not seen her before but she does a knockout performance as the play’s most mysterious character, an emotionally damaged woman who tries and fails to seek solace in casual sexual encounters. Her final scene is gut-wrenching.

     Stalled manages to keep a lot of balls in the air at once. Its biggest drawback is being constrained to Fringe length; with another 15 or 20 minutes it could do a lot of wonderful things and avoid spiralling its storylines toward their tragic endings too quickly. But as it is, it packs a lot into its 55 minute runtime. The actors turn out at least one great performance each, but more importantly they can all work well together. The threads of people, poetry, and that likeliest of all unlikely meeting places wind together to create a powerful thematic statement that you don’t even realise is there, like graffiti on the wall.