Photos of Alexandra Lainfiesta & Genevieve Fleming by Sewari Campillo
Last weekend took me to Vancouver to see two excellent productions, Clean/Espejos and Bunny, both on at The Cultch as part of the Femme Festival of women-focused plays. Clean/Espejos is a new play by Christine Quintana, a two-hander about an encounter between a housekeeper and a tourist in a Mexican resort. Produced by Neworld Theatre and co-directed effectively by Chelsea Haberlin and Daniela Atiencia, the play examines the heavy psychological toll of abuse. Housekeeper Adriana has fled her family home and her abusive alcoholic father for a job at a resort. She meets Canadian tourist Sarah, there for her younger sister’s destination wedding. Adriana and Sarah first meet after Sarah has drunkenly hurt her knee and bled profusely into her bed. Adriana politely cleans up the mess, even though it’s not her job, as she manages the housekeeping staff. Adriana has just heard that her father has died, precipitating a powerful emotional response. Sarah is portrayed as a bit of a mess, but over the course of the play, we realize that she is coping with long-buried sexual abuse that comes to the surface in a painful conversation with her mother and sister.
Act two of this over two hour play (which could use a bit of judicious trimming), takes us into some fantasy scenes that bring our two protagonists together in scenes that we realize only in hindsight are not actually occurring, for example when they take off together to attend Adriana’s father’s funeral. These scenes may cause some momentary confusion, but do allow us to see a relationship forming between these two damaged women. The play is staged very cleverly as entirely bilingual, with both character’s speech translated into Spanish and English via video projections on the large white bed that serves as a backdrop. The set is stylized with two moveable bed-like structures on an all-white set. Actors Alexandra Lainfiesta and Genevieve Fleming offer committed performances that challenge them with the emotions they are called on to perform; Adriana’s howling grief and rage at her father’s grave was a memorable moment of rawness that will stick with me for some time. While I attended the final live performance of this play, there will be streamed performances from April 5th to 10th for $15. Recommended.
I am a very big fan of Canadian Playwright Hannah Moscovitch. Her plays are always women-centered, smart and filled with punchy dialogue and complex characters. So it is with her 2016 play Bunny, which premiered at the Stratford Festival. Tracing the sexual history of a woman, from adolescence through to marriage and children, the play offers a huge acting challenge in the main role and some juicy supporting roles as well. For much of the play, Bunny (a nickname from her college friend Maggie), named Sorrel by her academic hippie parents, addresses the audience directly. She tells us about her first encounters with 19 boys in high school (just making out, mostly) and her first boyfriend Justin, captain of the football team (Liam Stewart-Kanigan). We see that Sorrel is an outsider, wrapped up in her love of Victoria literature, viewed as a slut by the girls at school, awkward and struggling to connect with others. College offers new vistas and is where she meets her lifelong friend Maggie (Ghazal Azerbad) and enters into an affair with a married professor (Jay Hindle). She becomes a successful professor of Victoria literature and meets Maggie’s brother Carol (Kayvon Khoshkam) who ends up her husband and father to their two children. But Bunny’s journey leads her to the edge of another affair, with a friend of Maggie’s daughter, Angel (Nathan Kay).
As ever, Bunny faces us with both bravery and vulnerability, holding nothing back. In the final moments of this moving play, her friend Maggie, dying of cancer, presses her to open up, to share more of herself. Her exclamation of love for her friend is well-earned in Emma Slipp’s affecting and intense portrayal. She is supported by a strong cast, with excellent direction by Mindy Parfitt, terrific lighting (as ever) by Itai Erdal, a slightly cramped set design by Amir Ofek and effective sound design and composition by Alessandro Juliani. There are explicit sex scenes throughout this 90 minute one-act play; the use of an intimacy coach ensured the actors felt safe, and I was interested to see there was no nudity beyond Jay Hindle’s professor removing his shirt in one scene. I stayed for the post show talkback last Sunday afternoon, and was struck by the sensitivity in Parfitt’s decision to not push audiences too much around the sex scenes, while they are just returning to theatregoing after two years. The cast spoke wholeheartedly about their commitment to Moscovitch’s play, and the support they are feeling from audiences. Another excellent work from this talented playwright, it made me look forward to the next play at the Belfry, opening next week, Moscovitch’s Governor General’s Award-winning 2021 play The Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. Watch this space for my review.
VICTORIA THEATRE REVIEWS 