| Erin Beaubier wears a lot of hats, but doesn’t include a beat-up fedora in her wardrobe. After writing and directing her own script with Foxglove Theatre, she’s set to leave all fedora-related activities to her play’s world-weary hero, a gumshoe with a titular obsession: The Sour Water Strippers.
A film noir tale with all the attendant rain-soaked trimmings – jaded hero, femme fatale and a puzzling series of murders – Beaubier’s second script for Foxglove began improbably enough at her day job, performing data entry for an engineering firm. After stumbling across a drawing for a device called a sour water stripper, her mind began stretching the single idea of that bawdily named piece of industrial equipment into a complete world.
The Sour Water became the name for an exotic strip club presided over by a Madame named Belle Nightly (Leanne Padmos), the leader of a group of renowned burlesque dancers: Sugar (Jennifer Lynn Bain), Spice (Kathryn Waters), Zig Zag (Michelle Brandenburg) and Pix (Nicola Elson). Beaubier’s increasingly noir narrative grew to include Detective Reid (Duane Jones) and his naive obituary writer-cum-sidekick, Billy Bennett (Brad Simon) – two men obsessed with uncovering the connection between the Sour Water girls and a series of puzzling, seemingly unrelated murders.
It’s mystery set in a familiar, dark-tinted mould. But if the play’s origin is a little unorthodox, Beaubier is just as reluctant to compare The Sour Water Strippers to the rest of the familiar noir canon. While she admits that she has been influenced by the most recent popular iteration of noir, Frank Miller’s Sin City, she sees the play as her own particular take on the genre.
"It’s more of a general sense (of film noir)," she says. "I love the old noir films (like) The Maltese Falcon, all that sort of thing, and I’ve been able to go back to a lot of the classics to find music to underscore (the play) – that gritty, dark jazz saxophone that plays on a city street. It’s sort of my own take on that style, so it’s been interesting and fun."
Even if she’s left her Detective Reid to ferret out the truth, Beaubier’s involvement in the production hasn’t cut her out of the action. In addition to writing and directing, she’s lately been doing double duty as producer with both Foxglove’s artistic director (Padmos) and general manager (Brandenburg).
No stranger to the company’s all-hands-on-deck approach to its artistic team, having written and starred in its last production in 2005 (Yearning for Stigmata), Beaubier may be ready to try on a few non-gumshoe-related hats.
"You always kind of have to grab a hat and wear whichever one fits that day," she says.
The Sour Water Strippers runs from June 20 to 30 at the Pumphouse’s Joyce Doolittle Theatre. For tickets, call 263-0079. For more information, visit www.foxglovetheatre.org.
GOLDEN AGE, BLUE HAIR
As the oldest community theatre company in Calgary, tracing its beginnings to Betty Mitchell and the creation of Theatre Calgary in the late ’60s, Workshop Theatre would be hard pressed to find a more appropriate production than John A. Penzotti’s Five Blue Haired Ladies Sitting on a Green Park Bench. Looking back, looking forward, the play’s five eponymous women are bound by their pasts without being mired in them. And hell, you might as well make ’em laugh while you look back.
After Broad Minds’s production of Rose, another play whose park bench serves as an essential set piece, Workshop Theatre provides a character showcase for its five lead actresses – Lynne Cousineau, Zena Drabinsky, Valerie Elder, Jutah Hinds and Dawn Michele. Primarily, the play is about the developing friendships between the women, a chance to prove that vibrancy doesn’t necessarily dull with age. For a company going on 50, it’s nice to see someone aging with style.
Five Blue Haired Ladies Sitting on a Green Park Bench runs from June 22 to 30 at the Pumphouse’s Victor Mitchell Theatre. For tickets, call 263-0079. For more information, visit www.workshoptheatre.org.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Irked that Calgary’s 2006-07 theatre season included only one lunchtime Anton Chekhov play? Begging for shelter beneath The Cherry Orchard from the aerial menace of The Seagull? Sorry, there’s nothing in Calgary for you.
A few hours away in a prairie hamlet, however, Rosebud Theatre offers you Chekhov as written by another theatrical giant, Neil Simon, with The Good Doctor. Through eight sketches of comedy and drama, Simon’s series of vignettes whirls Nathan Schmidt and the production’s company of eight actors through the fevered imagination of a writer on a deadline (the poor man).
The Good Doctor will be keeping open office hours on the Rosebud stage until September 1. For tickets and information call 1-800-267-7553, or visit www.rosebudtheatre.com. |
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