>>PREVIEW
THE THREE SISTERS
Cowgirl Opera
High Performance Rodeo:
Mutton Busting
Runs January 3 to 6
Big Secret Theatre
(Epcor Centre)
Kristine Nutting wants to know where Calgary’s oldest strip club is, and she is understandably disappointed that I don’t know. Having instigated the annual A Night of Prairie Freaks and Failures at Chez Pierre’s in Edmonton, she now hopes to bring the cabaret to Calgary, following the January return of her gothic Prairie play, The Three Sisters, to the Mutton Busting festival. Surrealism, camp and accordion accompaniment don’t come cheaply for little indie productions, after all, and a night that includes a ketchup-smearing striptease is just the thing to bring in some needed capital.
"The visions in my head I often can’t attain, due to the simple fact that I don’t have money to pay the 20-girl chorus line with needles sticking out of their arms that I see in my head, painted blue," says Nutting, adding, "I want to do that for the next one," referring to the tentatively titled Sausage Love, an absurdist musical on notorious B.C. serial killer Robert Pickton to be co-produced with the Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s Peter Balkwill and composer David Rhymer.
The image of an intravenous chorus line is par for the course for Cowgirl Opera, Nutting’s emergent theatre company. The Three Sisters, a richly macabre reinterpretation of Chekhov’s famous play, has already enjoyed a successful summer fringe tour showcasing a transsexual mommy-daddy, a train-induced miscarriage and cannibalism, all wrapped in the familiar Prairie yearning for life in the big city. Featuring a scene where a dead body is consumed nearly whole, not to mention a psychotic banker who pathologically whispers "pork," the show’s grotesque esthetic is what marks the production as Nutting’s own.
"Everyone makes fun of me because I’m a vegetarian and I always use meat in all my works – sausage and pork," she says. "I am fascinated with the grotesque and the sort of damaged world view in a world where things do go wrong, and I think meat is an interesting exploration of that. And it’s visually arresting."
Owing its creation in part to Mutton Busting curator Eric Moschopedis and his original invitation to 2004’s festival, where the show premièred, Nutting saw her version as an opportunity to apply her own bloody and irreverent vision to a story that took itself far too seriously.
"I just remember thinking how much I hated (Chekhov’s work) and the idea that Chekhov initially saw himself as a comedian writing comedies and how he got taken over by realism," says Nutting. "Not that realism’s bad, I like to drop it in as a little tool, but it’s garnish — it’s not the show."
Weaving elements of absurdist comedy and horrible realization, The Three Sisters is able to use moments of stark clarity to contrast the brutality of its world, where white-faced performers caper for the audience to the swell of the electric keyboard in the wings. But while the jokes are loud and crude, Nutting’s script often gives its characters moments of sincere pity as each one struggles with their relative captivity in small-town Saskatchewan.
A Winnipeg native and master’s-degree graduate of the University of Alberta, Nutting has made a practice of incorporating the Prairies in her work. The company’s first production, Mommy: A Saskatchewan Rock Opera, another original Mutton Busting offering, featured an accordion-playing, small town Saskatchewan girl in gum boots, abandoned by her fundamentalist mother outside a strip club, yearning for Alberta.
The accordion has been one of Nutting’s most surreal motifs, from the 2003 Mutton Busting stage to a bathroom concert at 2004’s Sky High Cabaret during the High Performance Rodeo. In The Three Sisters, the accordion strains lend the play’s murder and depression a mournful quality that perfectly complements its disturbed world, suggesting that an accordion player may be just as indispensable to the macabre as blood.
"The accordion just kind of happened by accident," she says. "I initially started making another piece, an abortion musical, just a little 10-minute nothing, but I built that one around the banjo. I started with this obsession with instruments that I can’t play. So I would get an instrument in order to learn how to play it. So I got an accordion, initially, for Mommy, but I just enjoyed it so much. This fall I went to the accordion extravaganza in Edmonton at the seniors’ centre.
"I was there weeping because it was so great, it was so surreal," she adds, without a hint of irony. |
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