Nan Fewchuk, Karl Thordarson and Adam Charbonneau in Magpie; Photo by Janet Shum

“Magpie” is my third play to be produced at FemFest, following ”Cowboy Boots and a Corsage” in 2003 and “Abby’s Place” in 2006. These three plays share roots as original radio drama scripts for the CBC, which I later adapted for the stage. An audio clip from the 1995 CBC national broadcast of “Magpie” featuring Valerie Pearson is available on my website (katherinekoller.ca). “Magpie” is about a parolee surveillance officer, code named Magpie, who has her own agenda. She doesn’t like the guys she mentors in her halfway house, but Reggie, the new guy, gets under Magpie’s skin. She’s got to give in, give up or give back.

This play was written after a woman I knew was slain in an Edmonton subway station. She was a young mom, and had just had lunch with her husband downtown, and kissed him goodbye. I wrote this play in memory of her and also to try to understand why anyone would hurt her and what I could do with my own hurt knowing that some people kill other people without intending, without thinking, without cause. I also had to deal with my own feelings of revenge, and that’s when the character of Magpie came to me.

How does a woman work with rapist-murderers? In some research I did with the Edmonton Police Service on another project, I met one particular amazing woman who worked with men like Reggie, and she inspired the character of Magpie. “Magpie” first appeared on stage ten years ago at Jagged Edge Lunchbox Theatre in Edmonton, which makes its appearance at FemFest a tenth anniversary production! I’m travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg for opening night on Sunday, September 18. Hope to meet you there!

Katherine Koller’s play, Magpie, directed by Hope McIntyre, is running at FemFest from September 19 to 23 in Winnipeg.

-Katherine Koller

Theatre festival’s fare should appeal to fans of the fringe

By: Alison Mayes WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

Photo PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
Karl Thordarson gets between Adam Charbonneau (left) and Nan Fewchuk in FemFest’s Magpie.

IF you’re one of the thousands who line up every July to take in diverse, affordable plays and solo performances at the fringe festival, Hope McIntyre has a message for you. “Good theatre doesn’t end at the fringe,” says the artistic director of Sarasvàti Productions, which puts on the week-long FemFest celebration of theatre by female playwrights. “People who enjoy the fringe should come and check out FemFest.”

FestivalPreview

Magpie by Edmonton’s Katherine Koller is about a woman who takes in paroled ex-convicts and tries to teach them life skills so they can reintegrate. The local four-actor production stars Nan Fewchuk as Magpie and Adam Charbonneau as a convicted rapist and murderer under her roof.

“Throughout the play, you really start to change your sympathies,” says McIntyre. “You think she’s doing it to help these men along… but you soon learn that she has a different agenda.”

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Theatre-festivals-fare-should-appeal-to-fans-of-the-fringe-130018383.html

Staging inspiration

FemFest, Sarasvàti Productions’ annual theatre festival, offers eight days of transformative theatre

BY: J   – UPTOWN  Winnipeg’s source for arts, entertainment & news.

FemFest, Sarasvàti Productions’ annual celebration of women theatre artists, promotes social equality through socially conscious theatre.

“Sarasvàti’s mandate is transformative theatre,” says artistic director Hope McIntyre. “We always make sure our shows are somehow engaging the audience, whether it’s with dialogue or thought or just letting them look at the world from a new perspective.”

The festival’s showcase production, Magpie, certainly keeps with that theme. Written by Edmonton-based playwright Katherine Koller, the play is about a woman who takes in rapists and killers in an attempt to reintegrate them into society.

“She’s got a personal agenda with these guys,” Koller says. “Yes, she’s there to help them, but she really thinks the best way to help is to send them back to jail. She does things to mess up their progress, but this guy Reggie really challenges her. He’s really good looking, he comes on to her and he treats her in a way none of the others ever had, so she’s really challenged.”

The audience is also challenged. Directed by McIntyre and featuring Jane Burpee, Adam Charbonneau, Nan Fewchuk and Karl Thordarson, Magpie blurs the lines between good and bad.

“Audiences sometimes identify with Reggie,” Koller says. “He almost becomes the victim when, in essence, he’s the victimizer. It turns the tables a little bit and it’ll be interesting to see who people root for.”

A black comedy, the story is told in a surrealistic style, but was inspired by a real event. Koller wrote Magpie, which debuted as a CBC Radio drama in 1995, after a friend was murdered on Edmonton’s LRT system.

“I had horrible feelings about who would do this to her and why,” Koller says. “I didn’t try to make a docudrama, I just tried to follow in my own head. ‘Who would do this? Why and what do we do with them afterward?’ Her father, who was a high-profile clergyman and politician, had this huge outpouring of forgiveness, which was remarkable. With that kind of pressure from the father, I really had to work out my own feelings of, ‘What do we do with a guy like this?’”

FemFest 2011: Staging Inspiration runs Sept. 17 to 24 at the Canwest Centre for Theatre and Film. In addition to fully realized pieces, the festival also features play readings and workshops, skill-development seminars and cabarets. It’s that combination of events that keeps FemFest going after nine years.

“Year after year, the message we keep hearing is ‘You have to keep doing this,’” McIntyre says. “The women artists have learned to depend on it as a showcase opportunity, as a way to get work and as a way to develop their plays — and our audiences just love the diversity of it all.”

http://www.uptownmag.com/arts/theatre/Staging-inspiration-129834788.html

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Francois Chevennement admits he was stunned to find out that most lifelong Edmontonians have no idea where the famed Strand Theatre once stood.

“Everyone knows about it in the States, but no one in Edmonton here knows that we had the Strand,” he says, noting that some of the world’s greatest vaudeville artists once performed right there, on Jasper Avenue: “Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy—hello!” he quips.

Initially named the Pantages Theatre after its founder, the Strand sat on the corner of Jasper and 102 Street, beneath the Enbridge tower—a measly 12-inch plaque on the north wall is now the only mark distinguishing the historic theatre’s background.

As Citie Ballet’s artistic director, Chevennement came across the story of the Strand last year, when he was given an article about the mysterious death of the theatre’s manager, Lester Treffery.

“I wanted to present something that was really Alberta, especially Edmonton,” he explains, and the mythology surrounding the Strand intrigued him.

Though the manager’s death was never deemed a murder (Treffery was found dead at the bottom of the staircase with an apparent head injury), Chevennement notes that there was another, more symbolic death that occurred when the live vaudeville stage was changed into a film screen, and he decided to explore that shift in his next full-length ballet: Murder at the Strand.

Chevennement recruited a libretto-writer, Katherine Koller, to develop a script for the piece. Along with a bit of can-can and slapstick-style shenanigans in the ballet studio, Murder began to take shape.

“In the 1920s, because moving pictures were starting to come here, people weren’t going to vaudeville anymore. They wanted to see the new technology,” says Koller. “So my goal was to build the relationship between something that we already had and was killed. The murder in the title came from that: it was the murder of live theatre.”

Incorporating new technology himself, Chevennement employed videographer Travis Fairweather to help create a film that would augment the ballet through projections—they filmed a dancer for a day in Fort Edmonton Park’s Selkirk Hotel (incidentally, the original Selkirk was right across the street from the Strand).

The characters in the piece are partly historic, partly symbolic, Chevennement says. On the historic side there’s Treffery (danced by Luke Muscat), the manager who changed the theatre’s format. Then there’s Charlie Wilson, the true-to-life longtime doorman of the Strand, played by Jason Vaz. On the fictional side, there’s Marie (Lauren O’Kell), a young dancer trying to make a name for herself by getting into the movies. She’s foiled by Aster (Danica Smith), an older, experienced dancer. “Aster is a bit of a diva, the prima ballerina,” Chevennement chuckles. Six other female dancers round out the cast, along with pianist Evan Rokeby-Thomas, who will score the show just as a pianist would have during a silent film in the roaring ’20s.

“One of the things I want to do in the piece is to give people a hint that they should not forget the past. The past helps us to evolve: you always remember what you did earlier so you can move forward,” Chevennement explains. Whatever Murder at the Strand shows audiences, there may be a few more Edmontonians who take a closer peek at the plaque on the Enbridge wall as they’re strolling down Jasper.

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Inspired by an unsolved case in 1920s Edmonton, Murder at the Strand is an elegant, compelling story ballet set in the energetic era of vaudeville. Meet the suspects, study their motives and solve the crime!

Two performances only!  June 4 at 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. The June 4^th evening performance includes a reception complete with light fare and silent auction.

Choreography: Francois Chevennement and Laurence Menotti
Ballet Mistress: Laurence Menotti
Libretto: Katherine Koller

Music: Scott Joplin, Yann Tierson, Dick Hyman, Guy Lombardo, Jacques Offenbach, George Gershwin, Gustav Holst, Wociek Pillar

Dancers: Mackenzie Alcorn, Larissa Lynn, Luke Muscat, Emily Noton, Lauren O’Kell, Danica Smith, Samantha Underhill, Jason Vaz, Sophie Wensel, Tanya Yacyshyn

For Tickets
Advance tickets now available at Tix on the Square, (780) 420-1757.
Presented at Timms Centre for the Arts, University of Alberta
Saturday, June 4th, 2011, 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

2:30 Matinée | Tickets: Adults, $25 / Student, Senior, $20 / Under 12, $15
7:30 Evening Performance/ Reception Silent Auction/Light Fare| Tickets $55

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Now in its fifth year, King’s Shorts Festival brings eight new plays to the stage.  Food is Love is directed by Lynda Hanshaw.

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How are rural folk—coming out of traditions that go back generations—coping with the changes of the twenty-first century? What happened to the practice of putting away garden and grain seeds for next year’s planting? What does the future hold for our food and the people who grow it? The Seed Savers is a compelling story of one family’s—one community’s—struggle to understand and readjust to rapid changes outside their control.

Featuring Sharon Bakker as Mindy, Kent Allen as Joe,  Carmela Sison as Sky, Will Brooks as Solo and  Matt Josdal as Tyler.

Tickets are available by calling the Station Arts Centre at (306)232-5332.

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“Whoever said that farming is the foundation of all the arts is quite correct. When all is well on the farms, all is well elsewhere.”

–Xenophon in Oeconomicus, c. 370 B.C.E.

My characters, Mindy and Joe, Sky and Solo, and Tyler–family, friends and neighbors– are challenged by each other, by the wind and by new technologies. How will our inventions, ubiquitous as the wind, and powered by memory and imagination, change us, in our human hearts? How will we feel about ownership, betrayal, loss and forgiveness? What about love? These questions, I believe, are some of the challenges of the current century, “until the day breathes and the shadows flee.”

This play was developed with the assistance of The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The Banff Centre, Alberta Playwrights Network, University of Saskatchewan, Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre and Workshop West Theatre in Edmonton.  I also thank the Canada Council for the Arts and Moira Day for travel assistance. Besides Kathy Thiessen and the amazing cast and crew of this production, I would also like to acknowledge Edmonton theatre artists John Wright, Maralyn Ryan, David MacInnis, Jesse Gervais, Natasha Napoleao, April Viczko, Paul Morgan Donald, Daniela Masellis, Amber Borotsik, Anna Davidson and especially Michael Clark, who helped this play grow and, for being part of the Saskatchewan premiere of a new Canadian play, I would like to thank you.

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