Clockwise from top left: Cara Gee, Rebecca Applebaum, Lauren Bride, Donna Maloney, Julia Lederer, Laura McCoy, Liz Peterson, Aurora Stewart de Pena, Nika Mistruzzi, Sochi Fried, Jolene Devoe, Monique Moses
This is the amazing cast of my Fringe show, 36 Little Plays About Hopeless Girls. They will be seen on the cover of Eye Weekly Magazine tomorrow. Aren’t they all so cute and interesting? Well, they sure are. I heart them lots.
Here’s the article:
Aurora Stewart De Peña’s Fringe play is an existential opus on femininity — without the vagina monologues.
A girl falls asleep in front of City Hall at 5am, only to be awakened by a nosy stranger who finds it hard to compliment her looks. A girl wants to order a cup of coffee but the waitress won’t fetch it until she utters the right, imploring “please.” Two girls watch their cheap rental apartment become infested with millipedes but are too afraid to stomp the bugs. A girl lies down in the middle of a busy Toronto intersection, exhausted from simply existing, as her best friend stands beside her, fighting off traffic with her fists.
Aurora Stewart De Peña’s hopeless girls are everywhere and nowhere. Her work, 36 Little Plays About Hopeless Girls, receiving its second run at this year’s Fringe festival after a successful stint at the Tranzac Club in 2007 (excerpts were performed at past Hysteria and Summerworks festivals), honours these paralyzed, confused women in the midst of something far more gripping than a quarter-life crisis. A young playwright and director with a production company she co-founded with Nika Mistruzzi, Birdtown And Swanville (named after the avian-laden area of Trinity Bellwoods where she lives), De Peña hits upon the saddest sect of despondent women: losers who don’t know they’re losers.
“A lot of the people in this play are not going to succeed,” says De Peña, who says some of the characters in 36 Little Plays About Hopeless Girls are based on her high school classmates from Stratford, Ontario. “Some people are just set up for failure; they’ve tried to fight against their circumstances, where things have been grim, and are determined to rise against whatever situation has befallen them — and it just doesn’t work. Judging from the name, people might think this play’s about suicide. And while some of the characters might end up that way, the work is just about not being able to hack it, about not really being made for this world.”
Comprised of not 36 but 39 one- to two- minute plays, which run over the course of an hour (dramaturge Chris Dupuis says that 36 had a better ring to it), the play has 13 local actresses making up a cast of bartenders, waitresses and negligent mothers with intersecting stories. They’re a Toronto indie-theatre-scene wish list, and include Lauren Bride, a curator for Trampoline Hall, Liz Peterson, who acts enigmatically in Alex Wolfson’s work, Rebecca Applebaum, who sang in the band Europe In Colour and game-show host Nicole Stamp. (“Nicole was nominated for a Genie,” Aurora tells me. “She’s keeping us professional.”)
(Note from Nicole: For the record, I was not nominated for a Genie!!! This is a beautiful rumour that I should probably encourage, but unfortunately it’s just not the truth. I was once nominated for “Person who made the ugliest face in the ugly face contest”, but I only came second.)
With cardboard props and choreographed routines set to MIDI ring tones, 36 Plays is not only a great bang for your buck, but a DIY play inside a DIY festival. It’s the Fringe within the Fringe.
As the cast get ready to work out an ’80s-inspired dance routine during a rehearsal at Rolly’s Garage, I notice there’s never any girl-on-girl-crime in this industrious, all-female cast. Peterson remarks that the rehearsal process has been particularly supportive.
“Right when we started rehearsals we decided to make it a rule that no one could talk negatively about their bodies because it’s such a large cast. And someone was like, ‘Are we still allowed to have our periods?’”
An actress herself, De Peña, as well as her production-company partner Mistruzzi, feels that the only way to escape casting-call hell is to write the parts yourself. Mistruzzi and De Peña, both Stratfordians and alumni of the Randolph Academy (“We’re triple threats,” jokes De Peña), did their own thing upon graduation, like staging short works at Extermination Music Nights and Queen West bars while dancing in The Best, house band for Loving in the Name Of. Last summer’s production of Things I’ve Found at the Tranzac reprised fly-girl culture, the free-wheeling ’60s and a nasty breakup based on treasures found from the Bloor and Lansdowne Value Village.
Their Fringe work has a similarly nihilistic bent. A character played by De Peña in Things I’ve Found could very well be 36 Little Plays’ mascot: Sharla, a wannabe fly girl who swears she’ll break her trashy, bar-fighting ways for a shot at the big time (repping the Wayans Brothers), but who is caught in a throw-down with the biggest bitch in school, sending her to “juvie for life.” The existential dread you feel for the girl, perfectly captured with De Peña’s throaty voice and determined high kicks, is not a common local-theatre experience.
De Peña agrees that carving a niche in Toronto’s theatre scene is a difficult job in and of itself — never mind the “lady playwright” connotations.
“I remember there was a double bill by Hannah Moscovitch at the Tarragon a little while ago, and it was a big, big deal. But I think what would be better is if theatres could just do plays, instead of promoting works as, ‘Oh there’s a new play by this woman!’”
Even the Hysteria festival, Buddies’ annual celebration of works by women which, we concur, is great, can seem tokenistic.
“We should really be beyond that,” says De Peña. “It’s not like we’re all doing the same thing. You can’t condense all of female experience into one night,” she says. “It’s not a genre!”
So, even though De Peña’s work piles on a diversity of perspectives, it does not pretend to be definitive or life-affirming. It’s not about giving birth or repairing your relationship with your mother. In fact, her work shows women fucking up. Like the characters in the short stories of Lorrie Moore, De Peña’s women are sublimely tortured by their own narcissism; dribbles of humanity seep through, rupturing the relationships presented in each vignette.
“It takes five minutes to write a one-minute play,” says De Peña. “To have a story that’s contained in one minute, you just have to make sure that something changes for the characters in that period of time. Everyone in this play has a fatal flaw.”
36 Little Plays emancipates women in a necessary way, allowing them the decency to be just as hopeless as the men they’re supposed to redeem.
“So much theatre is written by women about men. Which is fine at first, and I certainly understand that. But we don’t have to treat them like the answers to everything and it should seem more obvious now to us that they aren’t.”
“I know that I am probably never going to save a man,” De Peña continues. “Instead, I’m interested in writing about the girls who will never save anyone.”
Good article, huh? If you want to come see this play (which, by the way, I think is dynamite- (as is the other Fringe show I’m in, the funny gay musical “It’s Just A Phase)- you can check out the showtimes and stuff here!
