Epic rethink

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This article was published 17/03/2025 (211 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jessy Ardern’s name is at the top of the script for Prophecy, but the playwright doesn’t recall where she was when she put it there.

“I don’t mean to sound mystic, but I don’t remember writing this play, and I don’t mean because it was so long ago: something just happened and the play came out,” says Ardern, an award-winning playwright from Winnipeg now based in Edmonton, where she’s won multiple Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Awards for outstanding Albertan theatre.

“It was supposed to be a piece about Trojan women, about 15 minutes long. Easy, I thought — no problem. But then I started reading about the experiences of women in war, and something happened. This play just came out,” says Ardern, who started researching and writing it in 2016.

“The more I read, the more I saw that the experience of women during war times hasn’t changed in thousands of years, and then, the more the show spilled out.”

As it turned out, a quarter of an hour was too small a sliver for Ardern to carve out a fully-fledged feminist re-imagining of the Iliad.

“It was never supposed to be this big. It was always supposed to be a fun little project, and then the play happened,” says Ardern, who will be the solo performer in Prophecy, taking on multiple roles in communicating the epic drama of characters including Cassandra, Hecuba, Andromache and Briseis.

“Time is very slippery in this play,” says Ardern, shoeless and sockless in a rehearsal space in downtown Winnipeg.

A two-time winner of the Harry S. Rintoul Award for best Manitoban play at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, Ardern is approaching her newest work with the sure footing of an artist in full command and contemplation of destiny.

Prophecy, a Theatre Projects Manitoba production that opens Thursday at the Rachel Browne Theatre, was fuelled by Ardern’s endless fascination with Trojan women, including the seer Cassandra, and how their stories tend to loop back into relevance before receding into the background.

Theatre Projects Manitoba artistic director Suzie Martin, who connected with and became a fan of Ardern while working for the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival, calls Prophecy “a showcase of four really beautifully drawn characters” that has more humour than you’d expect from a work grounded in war and tragedy.

Ardern is no stranger to inventive Greek adaptation, with previous works including The Fall of the House of Atreus: A Cowboy Love Song.

“It was five generations of Greek myth done by three actors in an hour. It was a total farce. Agamemnon was a bottle of Diet Coke and when Clytemnestra killed him, she put a Mento in him and he exploded,” she recalls.

“So I’ve touched on this mythology before, but from a very different angle.”

Part of what appeals to Ardern about these narratives, including Cassandra’s unheeded warnings, is that they tend to loop together, which somewhat explains why the playwright keeps returning to the mirror of Greek narrative to reflect on modern experience.

“Greeks are having a moment right now,” she says with a laugh. “Suzie and I have been talking about how productions of Greek tragedy have sprung up overnight like mushrooms, and I’m not quite sure why that is, but I wonder if it’s because the Greeks really understood, and I guess, invented this idea of catharsis, which is that you come to the theatre to get all your feelings out — the rage, sadness and fear. I guess it’s the theatrical equivalent of a horror movie: come and feel all the terrible feelings then leave relaxed because it’s all been purged from your body.”

While she’s spent a great deal of her creative life pondering Orpheus, until last fall, Ardern had yet to address her own Achilles heel: she’d never been to Greece. But on a break from stage-managing a show in the Netherlands, she headed for Kalamata.

“I’m sorry to say that nothing dramatic happened to me in Greece, but the country was very kind to me. I flew down and spent a week soaking up the sunshine and staring at the blue, blue sea,” she says.

Greece was swell, but having her work produced in Winnipeg is equally sweet for Ardern.

“I feel so lucky to be back home. I’ve had lots of amazing indie collaborators, and I’ve been so lucky, but this is the first time a professional PACT theatre has programmed my work,” she says.

The piece isn’t all doom, she says.

“If I say it’s a one-woman Greek tragedy, everyone will immediately think it’s going to be a huge bummer, but Greek tragedy has a lot of humour in it, and despite being a story that’s thousands of years old, I think it’s very contemporary. There’s so much push-pull in the production that I find really fun, challenging and exciting.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com