A new night is dawning for Theatre North West.
The new season of TNW mainstage plays is launching this week and the first play is Fly Me to the Moon, which brings the audience into a tiny little conspiracy as big as all Ireland.
The expertly crafted scrip by superstar U.K. playwright Marie Jones is uproarious with jokes and boiling with moral tension, all with a Northern Irish accent.
TNW's artistic director Jack Grinhaus explains.
"Francis and Loretta are home care workers in Belfast. But when one of their patients, Davy, dies unexpectedly the two cash-strapped ladies are faced with an awful choice: cash in his pension and keep the news of his death a secret for a little while or call the police?
"Their attempt to beat the system throws them headlong into an excruciating - yet hilarious - wild ride. A 'what would you do' of the funniest order."
Anyone interested in a scriptwriting clinic would do well to study Jones's work and anyone interested in an acting clinic would be well advised to watch this play.
The entire weight of Fly Me to the Moon is carried by two actors, and in the TNW instance these are Deborah Williams as Loretta and Kristina Nicoll in the role of Francis.
Local audiences already know Williams. She was most recently cast here in The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon in 2015 and in Bemused the year before that.
She raved about the community support even the imported actors like herself see being lavished on the local professional theatre company. That makes it a coveted destination anytime she can get herself into a production with TNW.
This one is especially tasty for her, since she and Nicoll get a full theatrical workout in Fly Me to the Moon.
"It's such a treat to have female roles that are so substantial and juicy, and characters who are so lovely and fallible," Williams said. "Everyone asks themselves what they would do for a bump of money. Do you tell the cashier when you get too much change back? Do you return all the money in the wallet you find on the street?"
For this role, her acting is informed by a real life moment when she got the cart of groceries to the car only to realize the cashier did not ring through the big frozen turkey on the bottom shelf of the buggy. When she took it back inside to pay up, the cashier scolded her for not just driving away.
Williams is well known as an actor, director, producer, writer and comedian in the Vancouver and Victoria entertainment scenes. She has recently been a fixture at the famed Belfry Theatre in the provincial capital.
"My kids are grown so I work nonstop now," she said. "I didn't have any idea that would be the case, but I've discovered I love doing back to back projects and getting to live all these different lives on the stage throughout the year."
She and Nicoll even joked about swapping Moon roles one night, just to spice things up for the audience and themselves.
This is Nicoll's first time working with TNW, coming in from Ontario, but not her first time working with Grinhaus or his wife Lauren Brotman. She, too, is finding new theatrical wings after parental cocooning while her children grew. She worked instead as the assistant art director for Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, and also as a director.
"It gave me a different appreciation for what it takes to put up a show. I came back to the joy for theatre I started out with," she said.
This is her first foray back onto the stage after those broadening experiences.
"Laughter is so healing and constructive," she said. "I don't actually believe theatre happens on stage between the actors; theatre happens with the audience as they are involved in what's happening on the stage. Why else do we do it? I've been in the homes of Academy Award-winning actors, and the statues don't mean all that much to them. I've been around some of the wealthiest people in the world, and the money doesn't mean all that much to them. So what is it then? What is it the really gets into the meat of what it means to be alive? It is coming together, being a part of a community, being connected to one another in moments of sharing and understanding, and knowing we're not alone in the universe. That's what theatre is all about."
She remembers times when, as a single parent, she didn't have much food for the family table. To distract her kids from the sparse pantry, she would engage them in elaborate storytelling during mealtimes. She called this game Mama K's Restaurant and it was an exercise in "what if" discussions about food. Underneath it all she noticed a personal growth and stronger family bonds as a result.
That was the power of theatre brought into the home, and it exists in equal measure when strangers gather to contemplate "what if" when two fictional women in Ireland stare their own scarcity in the face in Fly Me to the Moon.
The play opens Thursday and runs to Oct. 5. Tickets area available at the TNW website or at Books & Company.
