fresh • inspired • committed
Bridges
catering
Proud to support U of A Studio Theatre’s opening night receptions Enjoy the show ! 780-425-0173 info@bridgescatering.ca bridgescatering.ca
ON THE VERGE BY ERIC OVERMYER
Cast Alex Cafuffle........................................................................................................................ Melanie Bahniuk Fanny Cranberry....................................................................................................................Lauren Hughes Mary Baltimore................................................................................................................Leila Raye-Crofton Alphonse / Grover / The Yeti / The Gorge Troll / Mr. Coffee / Madame Nhu / Gus / Nicky Paradise.....................................................Michael Anderson Creative Team Director .................................................................................................................................. Kathleen Weiss Set and Lighting Designer...................................................................................................Robert Shannon Costume Designer............................................................................................................ Jeremy Gordaneer Sound Designer....................................................................................................................Matthew Skopyk Set Assistant.................................................................................................................................... Anita Diaz Lighting Assistant...............................................................................................................Beyata Hackborn Costume Design Assistants.......................................................................Karlie Christie, Mona Yi Jiang Vocal Coach....................................................................................................................... Shannon Blanchet Dance Choreographer............................................................................................................. Marie Nychka Stage Management Stage Manager............................................................................................................Andrea Handal Rivera Assistant Stage Managers.................................................................... Linda Mullen, Stacy Vanden Dool Faculty Advisors Stage Management Advisor.............................................................................................Oliver Armstrong Design Advisor......................................................................................................................Robert Shannon Lighting Advisor.......................................................................................................................... Jeff Osterlin Sound Advisor......................................................................................................................Matthew Skopyk
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Production Team Production Manager......................................................................................................Gerry van Hezewyk Technical Director........................................................................................................................ Larry Clark Assistant Technical Director........................................................................................................Rachel Bos Production Administrative Assistant........................................................................... Jonathan Durynek Wardrobe Manager..............................................................................................................Joanna Johnston Cutter................................................................................................................................................ Julie Davie Hair Styling....................................................................................................Lloyd Bell, Michael Devanney Master Carpenter.................................................................................................................. Darrell Cooksey Scenic Carpenter................................................................................................................Barbara Hagensen Paint Crew.......................... Tiffany Martineau, Beyata Hackborn, Brianna Kolybaba, Bailey Ferchoff Tristan Fair, Logan Chorney, Madeline Blondal, Anita Diaz, Rachel Bos Properties Master............................................................................................................................Jane Kline Properties Assistant................................................................................................................. Roxanne Côté Properties Builders........................................................................ Tiffany Martineau, Barbara Hagensen Lighting Supervisor......................................................................................................................Jeff Osterlin Head of Lighting.....................................................................................................................Logan Chorney Lighting Technicians....................................................... Matthew Koyata, Tristan Fair, Logan Chorney Brianna Kolybaba, Beyata Hackborn, Bailey Ferchoff, Johnny Samycia Sound Supervisor................................................................................................................. Matthew Skopyk Running Crew Lighting Operator...............................................................................................................Angus McDonald Sound Operator......................................................................................................................Michael Jenkins Head Carpenter ............................................................................................................................. Rachel Bos Stage Crew..................................................................................................................................... Loic Cremer Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Karen Kucher, Broadway Play Publishing ON THE VERGE OR THE GEOGRAPHY OF YEARNING is produced by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC www.broadwayplaypub.com
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CONTENTS 5 Studio Theatre Mandate • 6 Director's Notes 7 Dramaturgical Notes • 10 About the Playwright 12 Lenin's Embalmers Photos • 13 UAlberta Art Shows 14 Admin, Production, Front of House & Volunteers • 15 Donors
U OF A STUDIO THEATRE MANDATE • To provide sterling training and
educational opportunities for BFA acting, design, technical theatre and stage management students, as well as MA, MFA and PhD students
• To provide research / creative activity
opportunities for the Department of Drama’s faculty directors and designers
• To provide opportunities for connections
with departments across campus through the choice of plays which have cultural, literary and historical significance
• To provide opportunities for the
community at large to engage with the Department of Drama through guest artist collaboration and attendance as audience members
Melanie Dreyer-Lude, Artistic Director, U of A Studio Theatre and Chair, Department of Drama
JAN 18-FEB 2, 2019
M A R 2 9 - A P R 13, 2019
MID-SEASON SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE ON SALE NOW!
$20 Previews/Matinees, $25 Students/Seniors, $35 Adults | TICKETS: www.northernlighttheatre.com or call 780-471-1586
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DIRECTOR’S NOTES BY KATHLEEN WEISS
“A nomad I will remain for life, in love It has been an absolute delight to explore with distant and uncharted places.” the uncharted regions of the play This quotation by unconventional with these four fearless and endlessly explorer, Isabelle Eberhardt, epitomizes inventive actors from the BFA Acting the spirit of the three bold women Program: Michael Anderson, Melanie travelers in On the Verge. I was drawn to Bahniuk, Lauren Hughes and Leila Rayethe play because I so admire that dream, Crofton. I was additionally gifted with although I am myself an armchair the most amazing design team: Robert traveler, finding adventure in books, Shannon who designed sets and lighting, plays and in the life of the imagination. Jeremy Gordaneer who envisioned the The process of working on this play has clever costumes, and Matt Skopyk who indeed been a feast for the imagination provided the evocative sound design.
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with the creative team and I creating in empty space all the exotic locales encountered in the script. There is nothing more satisfying than scaling a cliff when there is no actual cliff, and it is the movement of actors in space that establishes its reality.
I also want to acknowledge the great folks whose work is less visible: vocal coach Shannon Blanchet, my fabulous stage management team, the wardrobe, props and set artisans and all the student technicians who helped bring it all together.
Of course On the Verge is more than a travelogue. It is a biting satire of attitudes embedded in colonialization and the sometimes prurient fascination North Americans have with foreign lands and peoples. The play also takes us into an unexpected journey into the 1950s which becomes another site of exploration for the intrepid explorers, and opens up an additional critique of North American consumerism.
We now open up the world we have created to you, the audience, and invite the magic of your imaginations to join with ours.
DRAMATURGICAL NOTES BY JASON CHINN “I always have a comfortable feeling that nothing is impossible if one applies a certain amount of energy in the right direction. When I want things done, which is always at the last moment, and I am met with such an answer: "It's too late. I hardly think it can be done;" I simply say: “Nonsense! If you want to do it, you can do it. The question is, do you want to do it?” - Nellie Bly, Around the World in 72 Days
Nellie Bly, journalist and world traveller. Photo via Getty Images.
THE VICTORIAN LADY EXPLORER We first meet Overmyer’s three American adventurers in the year 1888 exploring Terra Incognita (Latin for ‘unknown land’) somewhere between Australia and Peru. In the late 19th century, Victorian era America was undergoing a number of seismic changes. The end of the American Civil War in 1865 resulted in the abolishment of the institution of slavery, the Industrial Revolution changed the means of production leading to urbanization and an emerging
middle class, and innovations such as usable electricity and the steam engine further contributed to the country’s growing prosperity. The role of women was also changing dramatically. The women’s suffrage movement was well underway, which would secure white women the right to vote on August 18, 1920. Many black women and men, Indigenous peoples, and other people of colour, however, were prevented from voting by various means (acts of violence, segregationist Jim Crow laws, etc.) until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. Despite the advancement of women’s rights in the 19th century, most “upperand middle-class women's choices were limited to marriage and motherhood, or spinsterhood” resulting in a “domestic dependency” (Cruea 187). In a society that exalted motherhood as the epitome of a woman’s purpose and dissuaded any acts of independence, women explorers were an anomaly. Journalist Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, 1864-1922) was one such woman. In 1889, Bly completed a 72-day trip around the globe, and for a few months held the record for fastest journey of its kind, besting the fictional Phineas Fogg of Jules Verne’s, Around the World in 80 Days. Impressively, Bly travelled most of the 72 days alone without a chaperone. Overmeyer first conceived of On the Verge when reading about such women
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DRAMATURGICAL NOTES CONTINUED explorers in Evan S. Connell's book, A of an uncolonized land. The two groups Long Desire, and Dorothy Middleton’s share the same physical moment in time, Victorian Lady Travellers (Holden). but exist within different points on the evolutionary timeline. In Overmyer’s On COLONIALISM AND the Verge, this anachronistic structure VICTORIAN SCIENCE is subverted over the course of the FICTION play; the explorers become “primitive” Overmyer also drew inspiration from in juxtaposition to the people they early twentieth century science-fiction encounter. By subverting the colonialist novels such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s, conventions of early science-fiction, The Land That Time Forgot 1 (Holden). Overmyer places the imperialistic These influences are clearly present in Victorian attitudes of superiority under On the Verge. The play shares many of its the scrutiny of satire, exposing these conventions and tropes with the science- attitudes as pompous and misguided. fiction of the Victorian era; a fantastic journey, non-linear flow of time, the In Overmyer’s play, the reversal of the exploration of “virgin territory” and first three adventurers from explorers to contact with “exotic” peoples, to name a the ones being explored also works to few. It also happens that many of these decenter the colonial gaze. Reider writes conventions are rooted in the colonial that the colonial gaze has the ability to attitudes of the time. In his book, distribute “knowledge and power to the Colonialism and the Emergence of Science subject who looks, while denying or Fiction, John Reider examines the work minimizing access to power for its object, of Burroughs and other science-fiction the one looked at” (Reider 7). When the writers under the lens of colonialism. women meet a certain identity shifting Reider writes that the “anachronistic cannibal, we see evidence that the power structure of anthropological difference of their colonial gaze is diminishing. is one of the key features that links They are unable to immediately and emergent science fiction to colonialism” easily identify their subject as “primitive” (Reider 6). This anachronistic structure is since his ambiguous and transformative based on an anthropological theoretical qualities are difficult to document and framework that assumes that “the define within narrow parameters. This indigenous, primitive other’s present is decentering of the colonial gaze is also the colonizer’s own past” (Reider 5). In present in Overmyer’s use of language. the caveman fantasies of Burroughs, first Early in the play, Mary postulates that contact involves the “advanced” explorer “English is the vehicle, and its engine is encountering the “primitive” inhabitants Empire” (Overmyer). Overmyer takes 1
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Holden’s New York Times article incorrectly lists Arthur Conan Doyle as the author of, The Land That Time Forgot.
DRAMATURGICAL NOTES CONTINUED the metaphor of proper Victorian English as a vehicle for colonialism and subverts it into an old beater broken down by the side of the road. With each new person they meet, the adventurers are exposed to new ways of speaking. As Fanny proclaims, “I have seen the future, and it is slang” (Overmyer). As the women become assimilated by language in this foreign land, their proper Victorian tongue loses its power to dominate.
Studies Writing Faculty Publications. Paper 1. http://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/gsw_pub/1
Cruea, Susan M., "Changing Ideals of Womanhood During the NineteenthCentury Woman Movement" (2005). General
Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012.
Holden, Stephen. “A NEW PLAY'S CHARACTERS TRAVERSE TIME AND LINGO.” The New York Times. 1987. www. nytimes.com/1987/03/27/theater/a-newplay-s-characters-traverse-time-and-lingo. html. Accessed 4 Nov. 2018. Overmyer, Eric. Eric Overmyer : Collected Plays. Newbury, VT: Smith and Kraus, 1993.
adapted from the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald by Simon Levy
Dec 5-15, 2018
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ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT BY JASON CHINN
Eric Overmyer. Photo by Vegar Valde.
Eric Overmyer was born in 1951 in Boulder, Colorado. Overmyer graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon with a B.A. in Theatre and has trained for the stage at the Asolo Conservatory at Florida State University. On the Verge (or The Geography of Yearning) premiered at Centre Stage in Baltimore, January 5, 1985, directed by Jackson Phippin. On the Verge is Overmyer’s most popular and most frequently produced play and has been performed throughout North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. On the Verge has also been translated for productions in Oslo and Paris. Other plays include; Native Speech, Mi Vida Loca, In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe, In a Pig’s Valise, The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin, Figaro/ Figaro, Don Quixote de La Jolla, and Dark Rapture. 10
Overmyer set aside playwriting for the most part in the late 1990s to focus on producing and writing for television. Notable writing credits include episodes of Law & Order, The Wire, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and Boardwalk Empire. As producer: The Cosby Mysteries, Homicide: Life on the Street, Law & Order, The Wire, and The Man in High Castle. Overmyer is a four time Emmy Award nominee and the recipient of the Writers Guild of America Award (Outstanding Dramatic Series) for Saints & Strangers and the Edgar Award (Best Television Feature/ Mini-Series Teleplay) for The Wire. Overmyer is married to Canadian-born actress, Ellen McElduff.
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LENIN’S EMBALMERS PHOTOS BY ED ELLIS STUDIO THEATRE, OCTOBER 11 - 20, 2018
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PHOEBE TODD-PARISH: LIKE NEW December 11 - 22, 2018 & January 2 - 12, 2019 FAB Gallery Like New explores the idea that objects embody our deepest emotional and psychological reserves, acting as receptacles and markers of time and in space. Through book works, prints and installations, found (or rather "sought") images, text and objects are used in order to underscore their infinite ability to (re)collect; to inspire fiction and relay fact. ULTRAVIOLET January 11, 2019 at 7:30 pm Convocation Hall UltraViolet promises a cutting edge experience
with virtuosic music performed by an agile and effervescent mixed quartet of musicians: Allison Balcetis (saxophone), Roger Admiral (piano), Chenoa Anderson (flute) and Amy Nicholson (cello). KILBURN MEMORIAL CONCERT: QUARTETTO GELATO* January 17, 2019 at 7:30 pm Convocation Hall With their thrilling stage presence, superb musicianship and exotic blend of repertoire, this Canadian classical crossover quartet has earned international acclaim for their signature style. *Admission is free, however, online registration is required.
Visit ualberta.ca/artshows for more information on the 2018-2019 season of Fine Arts events.
WE’LL WALK YOU HOME.
SEPT/OCT: MON - FRI:
7PM - 12:45AM SUNDAYS: 7PM - 10:45PM
NOV/DEC: MON
- FRI: 6PM - 12:45AM 6PM - 10:45PM
SUNDAYS:
780-4-WALK-ME www.safewalk.ca
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ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF
PRODUCTION STAFF
Melanie Dreyer-Lude Chair, Department of Drama Julie Brown Assistant Chair, Administration David Prestley Theatre Administrator / Events Coordinator Liz Ludwig Graduate Advisor / Executive Assistant Connie Golden Undergraduate Advisor Helen Baggaley Office Coordinator Jonathan Durynek Box Office Coordinator
Gerry van Hezewyk Production Manager Larry Clark Technical Director, Timms Centre Matthew Skopyk Sound Supervisor Jeff Osterlin Lighting Supervisor Don MacKenzie Technical Director, Studios Darrell Cooksey Master Carpenter Jane Kline Properties Master Joanna Johnston Wardrobe Manager Karen Kucher FAB Costumer Julie Davie Cutter Jonathan Durynek Production Administrative Assistant
With assistance from Faculty of Arts staff: Pamela Osborne Marketing and Communications Advisor Erik Einsiedel Communications Associate
FRONT OF HOUSE Jake Blakely, Danielle Dugan, Akari Fujimoto-Hoekman, Terri Gingras, Konstantine Kurelias, Laura Norton, Emily Pole, Candice Stollery, Molly Thomas, Jake Tkaczyk, Sandy Xu
VOLUNTEERS Katie Austin, Debbie Beaver, Susan Box, Hridya Chaudhary, Joan Damkjar, Victoria deJong, Jonathan Durynek, Pooja Happy, Michael Jenkins, Randa Kachkar, Don Lavigne, Kevin Liang, Sareeta Lopez, Jair Lugo, Marlene Maylj, Angus McDonald, Tom and Gillian McGovern, Sylvia McKain, Jennifer Morely, Arisa Nakagawa, Hao Ni, Christina Nguyen, David Prestley, Amir Shah, Gerri Slaney, Ira Tuzlukova, Levon Vokins, Jaime Whiting, Diane Wong
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DONORS Heartfelt thanks to the individuals, foundations and organizations listed below for recognizing the importance of the arts by directly investing in the Department of Drama’s innovation and leadership in theatre training and performance. A round of applause to our supporters! Baha & Sharon Abu-Laban Jane Alton Vera Apletree Robert & Linda Ascah Diana Bacon Doug & Annalisa Baer Barbara Baer Pillay William & Carole Barton William & Kathleen Betteridge Lindsay D. Bell Julia Boberg Richard Bowes Janita Broersma-Zylstra Joseph Piccolo & Julie Brown Jean-Pierre Fournier & Sharon Busby Adolf & Kathleen Buse Nancy Cheng Brent Christopherson Lesley Cormack Robert Longworth & Linda Crawford Kevin & Lorna Crockett Ellen Daniel Richard & Karen Davies Brian J. Deedrick Jim & Joan Eliuk Leonard & Jackie Evenson Jennifer Ezekowitz Ian Dymock & Dorothy Fabijan Lyle Trytten & Elizabeth Fair Stuart C. Fink Richard Leaker & Sandra Foy Mike & Anna Giles
Kelly Handerek Royle Harris Brian Taylor & Dorothy Haug Christopher R. Head Steven Hilton John & Brenda Inglis Pavel & Sylva Jelen David W. Johnston Joan Johnston Margaret Keene Jane King Amin Malak Lawrence & Nicole Mallet John & Peggy Marko Gordon & Norma McIntosh Rod & Heleen McLeod Larry Prochner & Barbara McPherson Andrew & Anna Mioduchowski Roderick & June Morgan Peter & Elaine Mueller Robin C. Nichol Ruth Nishioka Audrey O'Brien Jack & Esther Ondrack Tom & Judy Peacocke Ronald W. Pollock Charles Roberts Bente Roed Kenneth & Joan Roy Terrance Rowswell O'Connor Award Fund at the Edmonton Community Foundation
Alan & Ramona Sather J Marilyn Scott Alison Scott-Prelorentzos Linda N. Seale Jan Selman Albin J.E. Shanley Solberg & Shirley Sigurdson Dale & Daryl Springer Gloria M. Strathern Thomas Usher Gilda L.F. Valli Margaret Van Dyke Henriette Van Hees Sonia Varela Doug Warren Alan & Lorraine Welch James Wetterberg Lorris & Kathy Williams Susan S. Wong Jerry & Debbie Yee Rozelle Young Diane E. Zinyk Various Anonymous Donors Rotary Club of Edmonton Glenora Estate of Josephine Anne Bensted I.A.T.S.E. Local 210 Health & Welfare Account
This list includes those who donated to various Drama funds from September 1, 2017 to October 31, 2018. Apologies for inadvertent omissions or errors. Contact 780-492-2271 for corrections.
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