Meet my sister, Stella. She's your sister, too. She is hanging out with our other sister, Blanche, on stage at Theatre Northwest.
For the next three weeks, they are the city's symbolic siblings who are going to push each other's buttons, natter and nag at each other, and also shine love from here to mom's house where they are locked outside in a home-based standoff none of us has likely had, yet all of us can probably relate as the family drama unfolds.
Stella and Blanche are much more than conjured characters, even though they are the dominant forces in the play Meet My Sister on now. They might feel a lot like the connections in our own lives because they were transposed from the actual realities of playwright Bonnie Green.
Stella might be portrayed by Stratford actor Linda Prystawska and Blanche might be played by Sharon McFarlane of Toronto, but these sisters could have any of our names.
"Bonnie Green wrote it based on her own mom and sisters and when she began to write she thought it was going to be a serious play, but out poured the comedy and it all came out as this quirky, funny, heartfelt comedy," said Prystawska during a break Thursday in rehearsals before opening day.
She has that understanding because at the beginning of the rehearsal process, Green spent a few days with the cast and crew and was in constant contact with director Sharon Bajer.
Playwrights are not usually so personally invested in the performances of their works, but this is, after all a world premiere shared between Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops who got the first three weeks of the show followed by the same cast and most of the same crew taking on the second half of the run in Prince George.
"I don't think I've ever been able to say I was in a world premiere," said Prystawska.
"It's so great that it's a Canadian script, written by a woman, and has us older actors up here on stage. I love working with other women, love doing female plays, because there has traditionally been a real lack of those. Almost all the great classic parts were written by men and for men, but there is a real change going on and I love being part of that."
Most often, actors get parts for established plays, usually tired and tested. She relishes this change to be the first sister Stella the world has ever seen, because of all the direction insight she got to soak up as part of the inaugural cast.
It would help the Canadian theatre industry immensely, she said, if playwrights had the chance to workshop their scripts in draft form so they could better polish the dialogue and pacing of the new creation. It might not be known to fans of the stage and screen arts, but what a writer puts on the page is often off the mark and the only way for a playwright to catch the problems is to see actors speaking the lines in confidential readings and performances, a process called workshopping a play.
Prystawska has a professional fantasy of a workshopping industry that could aid the writing industry, and the ultimate winners would be theatre fans here and around the world if the plays were that much better.
Since they got to be the laboratory for Bonnie Green's mad science, this cast of three (the lone man in the cast is Julien Arnold in the role of Sly, the boy next door who is now, like the sisters, all grown up) drew much closer than most casts do, especially since they get to perform the play in an extra long run split between the two cities. The three of them have gone from familiar to familial, Prystawska said, "and some of that is because of the subject matter, which just connects to our everyday lives, so when we're not on stage the conversations we have flow into what's going on with our own families and our own places in our lives."
It was not a perfectly seamless transition from Kamloops to Prince George.
Yes, the cast is the same and they know the lines and movements better now than any cast on the cusp of opening night at Theatre Northwest, but no two theatres are the same so the set had to be adjusted for the differences.
"When the set was designed, they knew it was going to be at Western Canada Theatre first and then move into our space, so it was built to be adjusted for our space, but it still took some hard work to make the adjustments," said TNW's production manager John Reilly, who led the build-in of the house mom won't let the sisters pry her out of even though the new owners are on their way to take possession.
"The rehearsal process was tough," said Prystawska.
"There is a lot of snappy back-and-forthing and playing off each other, a lot of props being carried around the stage which plays a big part in where you have to be and how you have to move. It's lots of fun, but it was gruelling at first, with all the technical stuff you had to get into our bodies as well as get the lines into our heads. And because it was a brand new script, there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of collaboration, a lot of back and forth with Bonnie to work out the kinks and get the best sense of meaning. It was more elastic, in a way."
This hilarious inside laugh about families, sibling dynamics, and Canadian small-town life is on now at Theatre Northwest until April 17.
Tickets can be purchased anytime at the theatre's website, or go to Books & Company to pick them up in person.
