PAGEANT
Alberta Theatre Projects
Directed by Dennis Fitzgerald
Starring Kira Bradley, Christian Goutsis, Hiro Kanagawa and Ric Reid
Runs until March 2
playRites festival
Playwright Daniel Macdonald has an unusual but apt way of describing his new play, Pageant, which could be the comedic hit of this year's Alberta Theatre Project's playRites festival.
"It's about cars, beauty pageants and a lot of love and hate and revenge," he says.
Set in the Kootenay mountains of B.C., Pageant revolves around stereotypical blue-collar characters who manage to bring out the laughs amid murder and mayhem. There is a David Lynch edge to the script, but it also has a familiar Canadian sound and feel to it.
At the centre of the play is Trudy, a beautiful girl who wins every beauty pageant she enters. A vicious rivalry erupts between two small towns that each claim her as their own. Her estranged alcoholic father, Bud, runs a failing local garage, and her ex-boyfriend, Fenster, is a violent and menacing character with a short fuse.
The play opens with an unforgettable night scene somewhere in the forests of the B.C. interior. Bud and Fenster discuss the right shade of green for a Camaro while a dead body lies at their feet. Who the dead man is, how he got there and what they’re going to do with him makes for a surprise-filled production.
"You find these people stuck on the side of the mountain dealing with some very immediate and pressing issues or concerns," says Macdonald. "And yet the way these concerns are dealt with is really what the play ends up being about."
Bud and Fenster have taken it upon themselves to rescue Trudy – not only from the affluent, upscale Deer Ridge folks who have lured her away from her blue-collar hometown of Preston, but also from the clutches of a misguided plastic surgeon. It appears that the entire neighbourhood is obsessed with physical beauty.
"Lots of plays are about inner beauty, the inner beauty of someone," explains Macdonald. "But this play is about outer beauty. You’ve got Trudy and her desire to be the most beautiful and Deer Ridge’s view of her as being the most beautiful woman in the world, or in the East Kootenay mountains. You’ve got cars and the description of these beautiful cars that Bud puts together and those parallel each other in many ways.
"Beautiful features on a person. Beautiful features on a car. Is there a difference? And who gets to define what beauty is?"
Directed by Dennis Fitzgerald, the play features Kira Bradley, recently seen at Lunchbox Theatre in The Replacement, as Trudy. The men in Trudy’s life are played by veterans of several past playRites offerings – Christian Goutsis plays Fenster and Ric Reid stars as the bumbling Bud.
This year, playRites is all about emerging writers – and for Regina high school teacher Daniel Macdonald, this means the thrilling prospect of seeing the first professional production of one of his plays.
"You get to see what is working and what is not working," he observes. "It’s almost impossible to know for sure about some things until you see at least one run of it on stage with lighting, with sound, with costumes.
"As a writer on your own you can justify anything. You can justify characters, scenes, long monologues, but when you give it to a director or to actors, suddenly you begin to see and hear what doesn’t belong. It works fine on paper, but now somebody has to say it, somebody has to do it, and it might not look like what you saw and heard in your head." |
