A dance with destiny

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This article was published 15/11/2023 (854 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Marie Beath Badian can’t resist being romantic.

She gives her houseplants first names — she introduces the Free Press to Chester the monstera, a close personal friend. She gets tongue-tied describing a Saskatchewan sunset.

And the Scarborough, Ont.-born playwright holds up filmmaker Richard Linklater’s elegiac Before trilogy, documenting the love story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), as an all-time favourite.

“The Before trilogy is my Star Wars, full stop,” says Badian.

What makes that trilogy so beguiling is the sweeping arc of its characters’ story, told over the course of 18 years. In Before Sunrise, two 20-something strangers explore Vienna together, the result of an “admittedly insane” suggestion. In 2013’s Before Midnight, it’s hard to dismiss the powerful potential of chance meetings, of innocent glances and of fateful hellos.

That’s the type of love story Badian loves most, and with her latest play, The Waltz, on through Nov. 29 at Prairie Theatre Exchange, she wanted to “capture that lightning-in-the-bottle of two people who were meant for each other, but didn’t know it.”

Taking a cue from the Before trilogy, The Waltz is a belated sequel to an earlier comic piece that ran at PTE in 2018. Inspired by Badian’s mother’s story, Prairie Nurse starred Stephanie Sy and Dutchess Cayetano as two Filipina women who move to rural Saskatchewan in the late 1960s to work in the medical field.

Badian felt the characters still had a story to tell after the show ended.

“And I was really craving different kinds of stories,” she says. “Particularly with The Waltz, I just wanted to see two brown people fall in love onstage. I think there’s room for multitudes of our story, and I was just really exhausted about seeing brown people in stories of trauma and crisis.”

The Waltz, which picks up a few decades later, is centred around two gen-X Filipino teenagers (Ericka Leobrera and Anthony Perpuse) who meet in small-town Saskatchewan. Romeo and Bea are strangers, but they feel a celestial kinship: their moms both worked together at the hospital in Prairie Nurse.

It’s not necessarily a true story, but it very well could be.

“While doing research for this show, I came across a quote from David French, who wrote Salt Water Moon as part of his Mercer cycle, and it really set me free,” says Badian.

“He said he writes ‘emotionally autobiographical work’ and I thought that to be such a brave encapsulation of what we do.

“I also think I’m trying to tell stories to attest to the range of experiences of the Filipino diaspora. More and more, I’m trying to hone in on my personal experience as a gen-X kid who grew up in the suburbs, the kid of the first wave of Filipinos to come to Canada. I feel like the more specific I can get about that experience, the more it speaks to the richness of our culture here in Canada.”

Like Romeo, Badian grew up in Scarborough.

“There was a hella lot of Filipinos in my neighbourhood, so I honestly didn’t know I was a visible minority until I went to university,” she says, noting about two-thirds of the students at her high school were Filipino.

When it came time to cast Romeo and Bea, she knew who to choose. Leobrera and Perpuse weren’t strangers: she taught Leobrera at Humber College in Toronto and acted with both of them in a fringe production called Through The Bamboo, directed by Nina Lee Aquino and written by Andrea Mapili, the director and assistant director/choreographer of The Waltz.

After its run at Toronto’s Factory Theatre last year, The Waltz was named one of the Globe and Mail’s top Toronto productions of 2022.

“It’s just so rare in Canada to have a couple kicks of the can to see how different audiences respond to it,” Badian says.

Even rarer is the chance, even in 2023, for a Filipino story to get a moment in the spotlight, she says. Getting a “second stage” for The Waltz is something Badian is excited for, but at the same time, she hopes more stories from BIPOC creatives see the light of day.

The Waltz is the first of two productions at PTE this season centred on Filipino experiences, with Hazel Venzon and Darren O’Donnell’s Everything Has Disappeared — imagining a moment where every Filipino person in society vanishes — due in February.

“What’s rad about Winnipeg is there’s such a density to (the Filipino community) and such diversity in the storytelling,” Badian says. “To have the absolute courage and vision for (PTE artistic director) Thomas Morgan Jones to program two Filipino plays in one season is radical, and that’s bonkers to say in 2023.”

Badian just wrapped up the script for The Cottage Guest, the third part of the ongoing Prairie Nurse-Waltz universe.

Could another stop at PTE be in the cards?

Wouldn’t that make for a lovely story?

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com