Cannibalistic capitalism Sick + Twisted takes bite out of medieval fairy tale By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:56 PM CST Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024

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This article was published 11/12/2024 (624 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two innocent children will be abandoned outside of the Canada Life Centre Thursday night before the Winnipeg Jets take on the Vegas Golden Knights.

It’s all part of a penniless single father’s plan to give his kids a leg-up, says Debbie Patterson, the director and co-writer of Sick + Twisted Theatre’s Hansel & Gretel in Portage Place, premièring Thursday night in the Colin Jackson Theatre at Prairie Theatre Exchange and running to Dec. 22.

“We’re imagining that Hansel (Emily King), Gretel (Carlyn Graff-Czehryn) and their father (Michael Schellenberg) live in a tiny house in the old Free Press parking lot behind the mall, and that the house is going to be demolished during the (mall’s upcoming) renovation,” explains Patterson, who co-wrote the show with Fiona Smith and Andrea von Wichert.

“The dad can’t afford to get a new place, so he decides to abandon the kids outside a Jets game, hoping that someone rich enough to buy tickets would be rich enough to give his kids a better life.”

Soon, the overall-clad kinder make their way to the last candy shop in Portage Place, where they’re in for an unsavoury surprise.

Fictionalized with inspiration drawn from reality, Hansel and Gretel is Sick + Twisted’s second annual holiday panto, the company’s take on a genre of live theatre teeming with comedy, musical numbers, gags and slapstick.

With the audience encouraged to cheer for its heroes and boo any villains, the panto style engages playfully with the rigid barriers one might expect from a production in a seated theatre setting.

For this year’s show, the writers decided to put a theatrical twist on arguably the biggest story in the ongoing saga of downtown Winnipeg: the proposed redevelopment of Portage Place.

Having seen an early rendering of a reimagined mall, the writers considered how to comment, landing on a Brothers Grimm tale of cautionary consumption, navigational breadcrumbs and the cannibalistic tendencies of capitalistic adventures.

“After they’re left outside, the kids find their way to Portage Place where a single candy store is still in operation,” Patterson says, a subtle allusion to the downtown as a food desert.

Under pressure to change their business model to better suit the wellness bent of the mall’s new owners, the chocolatiers pivot to health bars, but where oh where will they find a cheap source of protein?

After writing the script in September, the production was given renewed relevance when in November the real estate development arm of True North, the entity which owns the Winnipeg Jets, officially acquired the 37-year-old shopping centre, along with the land it stands on and all associated assets.

The $650-million redevelopment plan will include 216 housing units, a health services tower, a main-floor grocery store, community centres and social agency spaces.

The news of Portage Place’s next phase of life piqued Patterson’s interest. After moving to Winnipeg from Thunder Bay in 1992, her first job was in the mall, running Prairie Theatre Exchange’s annual Robert Munsch show, adapting the children’s author’s work for a live audience.

“Back then it was a fancy new mall. They had Holt Renfrew and Birks,” she says.

In recent years, though the mall’s food court has remained a vital gathering space and the Pitikwe Skate Park (inside the former Staples) has become an exciting beacon of youth-centred community space, most of the neighbours PTE had when it moved to the mall in 1989 have jumped ship.

The corporate exodus from Portage Place, and the mall’s upcoming redevelopment, stimulated the writers to consider the way land is used in the city and “how capitalism changes the way we interact with each other and with the land,” Patterson says.

That’s very much in line with the ethos of Sick + Twisted, a company that consistently challenges the status quo while poking fun at real-world issues. Founded in 2016, the company was created to address the lack of representation of deaf and disabled people in the professional theatre industry.

The latest transformation of Portage Place, which True North Real Estate Development expects to be complete by 2028, will continue to dominate headlines for the next three years and beyond.

With its version of Hansel and Gretel, Sick + Twisted will get out ahead of the conversation.

If it were up to Patterson, a newly imagined Portage Place would begin with an open door.

“I think making the community feel welcome here should be the priority,” she says.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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