Chelsey Fiddler will be one of the stars of the show, although she won't be on stage when her classmates perform their school play this week at College Heights Secondary School.
Scripts were handed out to all the Grade 11s and 12s (even some Grade 10s) taking part in the farcical comedy Kodiak Flapjack: Man of the Frozen North, except to Fiddler who went home from school early that day. The next day the school got the news that Fiddler had taken her own life. It was especially hard on the drama class, because she was one of the veterans in that course that is always more than a course, it is a tight-knit family of students and teachers.
Their teacher/director Audrey Rowell told them she did not require the class to carry through with the performance. There were other ways to get graded without going through an onerous theatrical production.
That idea got shot to the frozen northern ground by the grieving cast and crew. Chelsey would never want them to quit the play. In fact, they decided, it was going to be the best effort they'd ever given.
A second commitment was also needed. This was a zany comedy. It asked of the cast to channel the fun and delight that Chelsey represented in their lives.
It shows when the cast talks of her. There are no tears and plenty of smiles.
Drama is the kind of program where peer relations are different in the first place than the core academics. The commodities are emotion and interpersonal connections. It's the kind of setting where people can work through their innermost intuitions together.
"She'd have loved seeing me in drag," said Lino Zemliak, a young man playing a female school principal, decked out in a wig, pearls and conservative skirt-suit.
"She was always trying to get me to wear skirts and I never liked to, so she'd have loved to see this costume I have to wear," said Grace Norn, who portrays the daughter of the uptight principal.
Their world at a private girl's school is upended when the owner dies and wills the facility not to the principal, as was expected, but to a young Alaskan trapper who, to their chagrin, takes the gift seriously and moves in to take over and run the place.
All the school's previous conventions get flushed as swarthy Kodiak Flapjack takes over and replaces their hoits and toits with some back-country common sense.
"Yeah, an 18-year-old bush man taking over a girls' school - nothing creepy about that," said Hannah Bilodeau, who plays one of those students suddenly having to adjust to a surreal turn of events. She assured the viewers, though, that this was a script loaded in laughs.
"It's so great after all that's happened at our school this year," said Bilodeau, who listed multiple crises, the most recent being a bus crash that injured members of a CHSS sports teams on a road trip.
Flapjack's costume alone is worth the price of hilarity, from his coon-skin cap to his too-short shorts. Actor Kohan O'Connor joked (it was a joke, right?) that he dresses this way all the time. The play was a coincidence, but it's where he likes to be as much as out on the field of sports battle where he's also an active participant.
"Theatre is where you get to be yourself around a bunch of people who feel the same way," O'Connor said. "You get to do all kinds of goofy things, without judgment."
Bilodeau connects so well to theatre "it's something I might want to do after high school," she said. "I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, so I could just, instead of going to school for years to become a doctor, just pretend to be one."
Norn said "I come back time after time because of Mrs. Rowell, and I was actually not going to take drama this semester but it was the only class that Chelsey and I had the option of taking together, so we both went for it."
Norn has also been in productions with Zemliak since elementary school, so that was more continuity in the cast.
"Lino lives for roles like this," said Norn, giving him an up-down glance in his heels and pantyhose. "There's a lot of physical humour, too, a lot of action."
"We actually have stunts. There's a fight scene. I get to slap people," said Zemliak. "So that's nice. It's heartwarming, and it's always setting up a joke, but there are tones of seriousness when you look deep into the meanings."
The layer that underlies even that is the dedication of this play to Fiddler.
"I taught her for four years, and now there is no part of the drama department that doesn't have some kind of attachment or memory to her," said Rowell. "I told the cast 'look, I don't know how to step forward, I don't know how to help you get through this, I am not doing well getting through it for myself, but we just have to know for each other that there are going to be good days and bad days, and we will always have each other.'"
Kodiak Flapjack: Man of the Frozen North has performances on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at the CHSS school theatre. Each performance starts at 7 p.m. and the opening night box office proceeds go to the bursary set up in Chelsey Fiddler's name.
