Portrait of a misfit

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This article was published 27/03/2018 (3083 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 2016, Winnipeg-based actress Tracey Nepinak worked on a double-drama for Theatre Projects Manitoba titled Reservations. In the second of two short plays, Nepinak had to recite an entire lecture on philosopher Martin Heidegger that might have challenged the memorization skills of even the most accomplished of actors. Bear in mind: most plays offer the benefit of give-and-take with fellow actors to break up the text and provide cues to the next lines.

In her new play for TPM, Nepinak has all the lines, playing the title role of a Mennonite woman who is driven to the edges of her community because of a refusal to play by its rules.

“This is 10 times (the amount of text), or maybe 20,” says Nepinak. “But I love the challenge. It’s terrifying but it’s satisfying too.”

Nepinak is not alone on the rectangular stage, a flat expanse interrupted by a rude bump at one end. Four other performers, actors and dancers, silently share the space, acting as chorus, or townsfolk or human props.

“It’s a beautiful journey and it’s fun and exciting working with the dancers,” Nepinak says, adding that the character of Crazy Bone is a compelling enigma.

“She’s an outsider,” Nepinak says. “She’s a part of the community, but different.

“She’s kind of quirky. As you go through the play, you ask: Is she crazy or just different?

“She is just passionate and not able to fit into the structure expected of a 1950s-era housewife,” Nepinak says. “She’s expected to play and she can’t do it.

“I guess that’s her struggle, coming to terms with just being who she is, and people not allowing her to be who she is.”

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Playwright Patrick Friesen admits the character of Crazy Bone is based on his own great-grandmother.

“She was an inspiration,” Friesen says. “I wouldn’t say she resembles her exactly, but my great-grandmother has always been an inspiration in my life. She died when I was 10.”

Friesen, 71, was born in Steinbach and lived in Winnipeg before his teaching career took him to his current home in Victoria, B.C. A Short History of Crazy Bone, which started life as poem, was as much a product of his Mennonite background as his celebrated other plays, which include The Shunning and The Raft, which were both produced at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

This drama, directed by Andraea Sartison, offers a poetic portrait of a misfit.

“She had been born in Ukraine, and came over as a four year old and had a rather dramatic life,” Friesen says. “By the time I was born, she was quite old and staying with her grandchildren. She’d stay with us for a month and then stay with another grandchild.”

Those month-long visits left Friesen with some vivid childhood memories.

“Somehow, I absorbed something from her,” he says. “I remember sitting beside her in the backyard shelling peas, with her old working hands into a bowl, in an old-fashioned dress from Ukraine.

“She was a trickster. I did observe that,” Friesen says. “She had a twinkle in her eye and she would make people do odd things and they didn’t know they’d been manipulated into a joke.

“Around a table, she would start an argument and then back away, and half an hour later, people would say: ‘How did this start?’ And she’d be sitting there smiling.

“I think I connected with her through all that stuff, as a teenager,” he says. “She was a maverick, a rogue, and I latched onto that as a kid.

“I always wanted to write about her because I think, by her existence, she gave me permission to be a writer,” Friesen says. “I grew up in a community where that wasn’t the first thing you did.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing