Preview
PARANOIA
The Wind-Up Dames (Ground Zero Theatre)
Created by and starring Renée Amber and Brieanna Moench
Directed by Abby Charchun
Runs October 22 to November 1
Pumphouse Theatres
When actor friends Renée Amber and Brieanna Moench get together, spooky things happen.
The first time Amber stayed overnight at Moench’s place, someone tried to break the door down and, in their panic to call the police, Moench smacked into Amber and gave her a black eye.
When they toured the fringe festival circuit a summer ago, the two were billeted at the house of a creepy couple who wouldn’t let them go into certain rooms and kept a meat cleaver lying around.
And the last time the pair shared a stage, at the 10-Minute Play Festival during the 2003 High Performance Rodeo, Moench dared to utter the theatre world’s cursed M word – Macbeth – and her pants suddenly split in half in front of the audience.
After all that, you’d think these women would want to avoid each other. Quite the contrary – the duo, who go by the tag of The Wind-Up Dames, are determined to turn their bizarre chemistry into an evening’s entertainment for Ground Zero Theatre.
The title of their new show is, appropriately enough, Paranoia. And it’s a comedy.
"In a lot of our experiences together there’s this comedic paranoia because these strange things are always happening," says Moench. "And we kind of create these scary atmospheres for ourselves."
"We have the ability to work each other into a frenzy – all the while with a knowledge that it’s actually quite fun," adds Amber. "It’s like when children play and they try to scare each other."
With Paranoia, they’ve picked a classic setup to scare – if not split – the pants off each other. The show’s premise is straight out of a horror movie like Cabin Fever, with Amber and Moench playing a couple of gal pals who head out to a remote cabin in the woods for, in Moench’s words, "a girly weekend." Predictably enough, when darkness falls, things start to get scary.
What the friends wind up encountering, however, isn’t a psycho in the woods or a gross-out disease, but their own psychological terrors. The title, after all, is Paranoia – meaning irrational fear.
"We’re trying to deal with as many paranoias as we possibly can, from the superficial, banal fears, like being socially awkward, to the more archetypal ones," such as the fear of death, says Moench.
"The idea is that the fear lives in our minds and in our bodies, that we create it," says Amber. "That’s a huge issue right now – the culture of fear."
In fact, as they describe it, the show sounds less like Cabin Fever et al. and more like Bowling for Columbine, where Michael Moore puts forth the theory that fear, not guns, is at the heart of America’s rampant violence. And, like that film, Paranoia aims to be funny as well as thought-provoking. Moench and Amber can’t really help it. "We’re trying to deal with real issues," says Amber. "But we’re also really goofy people."
Although they only graduated from the University of Calgary last year, both are already familiar faces on the local theatre scene as individual performers.
Amber, a member of the Loose Moose improv troupe since the age of 15, made her professional debut in Theatre Junction’s original Arcadia production and has also acted for Lunchbox, Sage Theatre and Theatre Calgary, where she just recently appeared as the moody daughter in Hay Fever. Moench, meanwhile, has been a Ground Zero regular since 2000 and played the Calista Flockhart role in last spring’s production of Neil LaBute’s Bash.
The two first teamed up at the U of C while taking a physical theatre class. "We came from two totally different performance backgrounds, but we really admired each other," says Moench. "We thought, ‘Imagine combining these two totally different styles. I wonder what we’d come up with?’"
So far, they’ve come up with PeeL, their first show, which played the fringes in 2002, and that unfortunate skit at the 10-Minute Play Festival, which, not surprisingly, was the inspiration for Paranoia.
Starting as professional partners, the two have since become good friends – jinxed or not. "We have a lot of fun together," says Moench. "I think that comes through onstage." |
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