A Fox in the icebox

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This article was published 05/02/2009 (6438 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You’ll seldom find Kelli Fox making "nostricle" noises like Renée Zellweger.

In fact, nothing warms the heart of the Vancouver-born actor like a gig in Winnipeg in the dead of winter.

"Vancouver is a beautiful city, but it doesn’t have a massive investment in the arts," says Fox, here to star in the one-woman play The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, which opens today at the John Hirsch MTC Mainstage.

"In Winnipeg, it’s unmissable how invested this city is in its arts activities."

 

A regular on the Stratford and Shaw stages in southern Ontario for more than a decade, Fox made her debut with MTC in the 1989 Warehouse production Frankenstein: Playing With Fire.

She returned to Winnipeg 2001 for the Prairie Theatre Exchange drama A Room of One’s Own, a one-woman show based on the writing of the British feminist author Virginia Woolf.

That one was a monologue, however, while The BBVR has Fox essaying seven characters.

"It’s enormously challenging," says Fox, the younger sister of former TV sitcom star Michael J. Fox.

"Learning the lines is the easy part of the job. You have to keep track of seven completely different story arcs."

This seems to be the season for one-woman plays in Winnipeg. The MTC Warehouse’s next effort, opening Feb. 19, Bad Dates, is a one-gal effort, as is Marilyn: Forever Blonde, part of the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Marilyn Monroe exhibition opening in late March.

BBVR, directed at MTC by Alisa Palmer, who describes it as "a Greek tragedy for the mall set," focuses on a redheaded suburban wife dumped by her husband.

Her neighbour, a brunette, tells her that she has seen the husband at the mall food court with a blond.

As the story unravels, the wife’s act of revenge escalates into a web of life-altering events.

"The playwright makes us sign a contract forbidding us to reveal too much," Fox says. "It’s something I’ve never had to do before."

Australian playwright Robert Hewett has said he wrote BBVR as a response to an accomplished female actor who claimed there were no good roles for women over 40.

The play first became a hit in Sydney. Then it had its North American premiere in 2004 at the Grand Theatre in London, Ont., starring Stratford veteran Lucy Peacock.

Peacock did it for two seasons at Stratford and again at the Vancouver Playhouse in 2007. A few months ago, another grande dame of Canadian theatre, Fiona Reid, performed it at the Citadel in Edmonton.

"When Alisa offered it to me, it scared the crap out of me," Fox, 44, says. "That was a sign that I should try it. Nobody wants to be bored at work."

Three years younger than her Hollywood brother, who started in front of the camera as a boy, Fox at first resisted the acting bug.

But that changed when she was 14 and saw actor Goldie Semple — a member of Richard Ouzounian’s MTC acting company in the early ’80s — in a Vancouver production of The Shadow Box.

Fox graduated from Studio 58 in Vancouver in 1985 but followed a different path than Michael, who starred in the sitcoms Family Ties and Spin City and the Back to the Future movies.

"I didn’t want to leave Canada, and the film industry here was not developed enough," she says. "As a woman, I knew if I wanted roles that didn’t depend on sex appeal, I’d have to wait until my 50s."

In a phone interview from her Winnipeg hotel room, she was polite but unforthcoming about her celebrity brother’s life.

He retired from acting in 2000, not long after he went public with his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. But he did a guest part in his friend Dennis Leary’s cable drama Rescue Me. The episodes are slated to run this spring.

"His health is good," says Fox, whose risk of being stricken with Parkinson’s is no greater than anyone else’s.

"The one thing they know is that it’s seldom hereditary. But there are some theories about environmental toxins."

Fox maintains a residence in southern Ontario but leads the actor’s wandering life. She has already signed aboard for two roles at Stratford this coming season, in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and Canadian Morris Panych’s new effort, The Trespassers.

And she’s happy to come back to Winnipeg any time. As for Zellweger’s public jokes about how cold she found it here last January while shooting the movie New in Town, Fox says she isn’t going to lie.

"Even Winnipeggers know it’s cold if they’re honest with themselves," she says. "I think Renée is on to something. I admit to giggling at ‘nostricles.’ It’s clever and apt, don’t you think? I’ve had ’em."

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

TheatrePreview

The Blonde, the Brunette

and the Vengeful Redhead

Manitoba Theatre Centre Mainstage

. Feb. 5-28

. Tickets $21-$61

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