REVIEW: Workshop West drama exposes dark underbelly of Edmonton
Back in 1978, Workshop West was just a gleam in Gerry Potter’s eye. He founded the company to give Alberta playwrights a shot at seeing their works actually produced on a stage. Since then, many plays have graced its various stages. In 2014, playwright Vern Thiessen returned from New York, changed the name of the company to Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre, but continued the company’s distinguished decades-long reputation for (mostly) local work.
Recent successes for the company include Pretty Goblins, Cafe Daughter, Matara and Songs My Mother Never Sung Me.
Their new production, The Ballad of Peachtree Rose – running in the Backstage Theatre in Old Strathcona through November 10 – ups the game again. Not only is it from Edmonton playwright Nicole Moeller but it features an all-female creative team: director Brenley Charkow and performers Alexandra Dawkins, Laura Raboud, Bobbi Goddard and Shannon Blanchet. The production team behind them is female as well.
This play takes place in Edmonton and is the result of years of investigation into the local crime scene. The playwright sat through trials (like Travis Vader) and talked to lawyers, victims, the police and many others to give her tale the gritty feel of reality. It then went through Thiessen’s rigorous play development procedure. (This is the last play in Thiessen’s mentorship as head of WW – with this play he has moved on).
Moeller’s plot reads more like an Edmonton version of L.A. Confidential. It has our quiet burg as a centre for a violent criminal organization. It’s a frightening picture but apparently the playwright’s preparation was intensive and, as I write this, another shooting has been reported in the city – so we are not absolved of offense here.
The play centres around Peach (Dawkins), a defensive street kid who is living a hardscrabble life as break-and-enter artist and her fraught relationship with Max (Raboud) who is a well-connected “soldier” in a criminal organization.
The play is not a local take on Dashill Hammett. Its sensibility, language and relationships are all of today. What Moeller does share with the great crime writer is the ability to spin a highly involving, well-written crime drama that will leave you guessing right through to the final line – driven by fast moving staging by director Brenley Charkow and powered by four excellent performances.
Peach and Max meet in an Avon gathering. Peach is pretty well stretched to her limit by her life of petty crime. Twitchy and paranoid, she’s known to the police and obviously on the road to incarceration. Max is older, calm and ordered, on her way up in the world of the mob. Max sees in her the kid sister who was taken by drugs – and the two form a relationship. Max takes Peach into the world of crime and, in a terrific performance, Dawkins gives us a lost soul who straightens up and turns into someone with a promising future – even if it is in a dead-end dark world. Many of the early moments of the play are taken up with the believable relationship. The performers, in fits and starts and with considerable skill, create a real affinity. The playwright drops a few clues and hanging strands, leaving us with the nagging feeling that something is wrong.
Running at the same time is the story of Belle (Bobbie Goddard in a rock solid performance as a character, and also as narrator), a woman whose mother was murdered. From there, the convolutions of the plot should be left unspoiled but you soon learn that what you think you know, you really don’t.
The production is set in the midst of a series of movable storage shelves filled with cardboard boxes in a warehouse filled with contraband where the two work. There are three workers – they are joined by Sylvie, another rebellious petty criminal. She is played by Shannon Blanchet who assays several roles, giving each of them an internal life. Daniela Masellis’ imaginative and workable set moves about on wheels and becomes whatever the script demands as the play takes us all over Western Canada. Charkow also keeps her players moving fluidly about the stage establishing the ever-changing dynamic between them and keeping their relationship from ever becoming static. A canny and valid technique as the intricate pieces of the plot come together, reset and come together again in a whole new configuration.
The Ballad of Peachtree Rose is enigmatic, involving and ultimately satisfying – and a solid entertainment from Workshop West.
Photos by Marc J. Chalifoux
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