None of the usual promotional blurbs are really happening

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This article was published 09/11/2022 (1430 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Did you know this is the corner where we’re all going to die?” Ellen Peterson asks, waiting for the perfect moment to cross the street at the nexus of Bannatyne Avenue, and the twin streets of Arthur and Albert.

The playwright follows up her morbid prediction with a bubbly giggle.

Such is Peterson’s sense of humour: make them laugh after almost making them cry. The Winnipeg playwright has a wry wit, evidenced as soon as she begins to speak. “My favourite flavour is funny and sad at the same time,” she says, sitting in an Exchange District cafe on the day of the first snowfall.

Peterson has a knack for making the best of bad situations: a few years ago, when she had an infestation of ladybugs in her bathroom, rather than lunge for the nearest can of insecticide, she decided to set up a bug circus – “a theatre by, for and about bugs” – constructing miniature sets and having the little spotted beetles starring in productions by playwrights such as Ibsen and an ascendant local talent named Canker McWormy.

Making lemonade from lemons is a good knack for a creative person to have, because it is more often that things go wrong than that they go right in such pursuits. It came in handy two springs ago, when Peterson was in the early stages of developing a play about two tightrope walkers crossing the Niagara gorge in the 19th century, entitled Daredevils. March 4, 2020 was the first reading. “Wasn’t that eight days before it all went down?” she asks.

It was. No need to explain what “it” was. “It” is still happening. “It” is still hurting people. “It” is still affecting our world in ways immeasurable and innumerable.

Suddenly, Peterson — who has written plays such as the Eight Tiny Reindeer of the Apocalypse, and a 2018 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility for the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre — found herself at an impasse, stalled in the middle of the before and the after. She started to assess Daredevils and recognized some problems. “Like, how do I find a great actor who’s also a great tightrope walker?” she asks. “And I don’t know about you, but those early months of the pandemic, I really thought we were doomed.”

That doom led Peterson to look elsewhere. She liked her first idea, which may still see the light of day, but recognized that life was short, and that she should spend her time wisely.

“If I only get to write one thing, what should it be?” she asked herself. “What is it that I care about the most?”

It’s a lot of pressure to put on your own shoulders, but Peterson says that’s not always a bad thing. “I think every play should feel like that.”

The thing she cared about is complex, and can’t be explained, lest the resultant play be spoiled in an article meant to promote it, she says. “I still need to find a way to talk about it without giving it all away,” she says.

Not such an easy thing to do with a play like None of This Is Happening, a vaudevillian parable for… something… which debuts this week at the Rachel Browne Theatre, produced by Theatre Projects Manitoba and directed by Alissa Watson.

Peterson won’t say much about the plot, but will talk about the tone, which blends slapstick and vaudevillian effects to deliver a brutally frank message. One character is still a tightrope walker, another has a love destined to go unrequited, and another builds sculptures made of garbage. Trust her, Peterson advises, it will all make sense when you see it.

Much of the material used in the play originated in Daredevils, but the core, secret conceit has been percolating in Peterson’s mind since 1999, when she woke up to something feeling amiss. A key component of the playwright’s approach to writing is to jot everything down. Sometimes, in the car, she’ll beg a passenger to grab a pen. Her notes app on her phone overflows with half-baked concepts that need a little more time in the oven.

When it comes to writing, “everything is compost,” she says. From the detritus of a rotten banana peel may one day sprout a rose.

Peterson’s latest is a bouquet of her vaudevillian and dry sensibilities, from the Marx Brothers to Buster Keaton. There’s something about vaudeville — in its simplicity and complexity — that has always appealed to her.

“I have a fascination with people who do risky things in the name of entertainment,” she says: Harold Lloyd holding onto the clock. Keaton letting a building collapse around him and risking his life in the process.

“I want to do more work that feels death-defying,” she says. Maybe not so literally, but in spirit. “I think we need to do work that feels immediate.”

Taking risks is why she got into theatre, making her stage debut as an inexplicable martian in a Christmas production during her days at River East Collegiate. “It certainly wasn’t for the money,” she says.

As far as risks go, Peterson’s latest work is now in the hands of director Watson, her crew, and a trio of local actors — Monique Marcker, Simon Miron and Jane Testar — which she says makes it feel less scary. “They’re all brilliant,” she says.

Still intrigued by the lack of explanation, trying to get more out of the playwright, a reporter asks once more if Peterson can tell the readers what None of This Is Happening is truly about.

“It’s about humankind being at a crossroads,” Peterson offers cryptically.

Between what?

“Between yes and no.”

Ben.Waldman@freepress.mb.ca

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