Northern Light delves into gender
Gender is the hot topic that burns its way through the upcoming season at Northern Light Theatre.
All three plays challenge our assumptions about “gender, gender roles, and transgressing them,” says artistic director Trevor Schmidt. “It’s such an important part of where the culture is going. It’s not always comfortable: gender is one of the first things we know about people. And when that changes, it’s unnerving. ... We can open the conversation about it.”
“Subversive” is the operative word for the season opener, says Schmidt. He describes Space // Space by the American playwright Jason Craig, first produced by the experimental Brooklyn company Banana Bag & Bodice in 2012, as a “strange, cyclical, elliptical” piece, scary and funny, with a sci-fi setting: two brothers have been shot into space, and for three years one of them has been perfecting his standup routine while the other sleeps. When Lumus wakes up, he has a beard but he’s becoming a woman.
Schmidt’s production, which runs Nov. 21 to 29 at the PCL Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns, site of many of Northern Light’s most innovative shows, stars two of Edmonton’s bravest, most spirited actors, Sheldon Elter and Nadien Chu. They will be tucked into a design by Adam Tsuyoshi Turnbull.
In The Pink Unicorn, a solo show by California’s Elise Forier Edie, a woman in a highly conservative Texas town faces major social tumult when her 14-year-old daughter announces her plan to attend high school as a gender-neutral person.
“She needs to make a choice,” says Schmidt of the mother in a play, which he describes as moving and funny. “She’s forced to examine a lot of things. ... How far can she bend? One of the (many) things I love about this show about a mother’s relationship with her child is the way religious convictions are treated respectfully.”
The star of Schmidt’s production, running Feb. 20 to 28, 2015 at the PCL theatre, is Louise Lambert, who received a Sterling Award nomination for her striking performance as the Nurse in the Citadel’s Romeo and Juliet this past season.
Christina/Philippe, by the Canadian Per Brask, pits the Swedish queen who dressed and lived as a man in a battle of wits with Louis XIV’s brother, who dressed as a woman. Like many of Schmidt’s choices, the play exists in the most spare form on paper, and invites creative expansion onstage. “It’s maybe 12 or 14 pages,” says Schmidt of a script he plans to amplify with “live karaoke tunes, recorded interviews with transgender people, possibly video.”
Schmidt himself co-stars in the Northern Light/ Fringe Theatre Adventures co-production, which will run May 1-10, 2015 in the Westbury Theatre. His castmate has yet to be announced in a show he describes as “the one that terrifies me the most.”