Perfect closing night choice

by Jean Graham

We’ve seen a lot of new plays in the past two weeks, many from new and exciting voices. It has been a true celebration of women playwrights in the province (well, mostly in St. John’s, to be honest, but still). So I can’t think of a better way of ending PerSIStence Theatre’s Year of the Arts Women’s Play Festival than with a reminder that women have always been here, creating and contributing.

And what a treat this production was! Joan Sullivan (no slouch as a playwright herself) selected Chickens from Janis Spence’s impressive catalogue of work and put together an A-List cast for an engaging reading. The play is definitely of the 1980s, with its smoking in hospital waiting rooms and land-line telephones, but that’s not a bad thing.

Mary Lewis delightfully reprised her role from the original 1988 production and was joined onstage by Mary Lynn Bernard, Petrina Bromley, Aiden Flynn, Wendi Smallwood, and Berni Stapleton. Yes – all that talent and experience, all those perfect senses of timing on one stage with a fabulous script. I’m sorry you missed it, too, and happy for you if you, like me, had the joy of watching it.

The four women portray lifelong friends, called to another (dying) friend’s hospital room by her of icky kid brother (Flynn), who is just as deliciously repellent as an adult, it turns out. He knows the devastating secret the women share – a booze- and drug-fueled prank that morphed into tragedy – and he fully intends to ruin all their lives by making it as public as he can.

Spence’s skilful script lets suspense ebb and flow, hints at secrets and reveals them at just the right pace. As PerSIStence’s Artistic Director Jenn Deon noted in her comments, the script also gives every actor some very meaty material to work with, and this wonderful ensemble really made the most of it in this production. 

Stella is a formerly promising novelist prone to overdoing it on the booze; Wendi Smallwood finds every nuance of this complicated character, communicating grief, pride, or shame with the shrug of a shoulder or the duck of a head.

Petrina Bromley perfectly portrays Nancy, a too-tightly-wound housewife who careens through the show, barely toned down by a proffered muscle relaxant, cajoling and confessing as she sees fit. Bromley’s expressive face communicates layers of emotions, whether she’s speaking or not.

I would love to ask Mary Lewis how it felt to be femme fatale Barb 35ish years later from the first time she did it. I don’t recall seeing this production then. It was the eighties, though, so, who knows? It’s possible I did. In the 2024 version, Barb is this woman who’s been beautiful all her life, and who takes full advantage of that, but she’s as layered and complicated as can be. 

Berni Stapleton’s Daphne has built a successful clothing company from less than nothing. She’s smart, tough from necessity, used to finding solutions to insurmountable problems. Stapleton is a prolific writer, of novels, plays, non-fiction and her extraordinarily expressive voice conveys every bit of meaning that Spence intended, and maybe even some the playwright didn’t recognize.

Mary-Lynn Bernard brought Spence’s stage directions, and a fairly judgy operating room nurse, to life with aplomb and just enough expression. 

It was an inspired choice to close the festival with Chickens. The play was first produced in 1988 at the LSPU Hall. I don’t have space to tell you everything that’s wonderful about RCA Theatre’s digital archive, but yourself a favour and check it out. Start with the Chickens  page [https://archive.lspuhall.ca/play/chickens/] and go from there.

It’s been a wonderful couple of weeks. The Year of the Arts Women’s Play Festival, is, I suppose, a one-time only event, costs being what they are and funding being what it is, and the Year of the Arts being literally just one year of government largesse. 

While that’s a bit of a shame, and I would love it if I were wrong about that, we can at least celebrate what it has been. For playwrights, it’s been a chance to present their work to the public with professional directors, actors, and crew. For audiences, it’s been the chance to see work in development and work that’s already been successful.

Persistence obviously put work into encouraging a range of submissions (or they got very, very lucky) and put off a festival showcasing an arts scene that is diverse, revolutionary, thought-provoking, and well-established.

Congratulations!