Talking to the moon

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This article was published 02/05/2025 (475 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To find tranquility in an overstimulating world, Wren Brian often uses theatre as a temporary escape into self-reflection.

She’s been doing it professionally since 2009, but personally speaking? The admittedly introverted playwright has drifted off into daydreams for as long as she could string together a sentence or a friendship bracelet.

“I went off and played by myself. I’d pretend I was an animal and sometimes that was with other kids, but then it would shift to going off to do it by myself at home. I told myself stories a lot. I would mutter to myself and walk, which sounds really insane,” she says.

“I was very embarrassed about it, actually. It’s weird to be saying it out loud now, but that’s what kids do: we do kid things and we imagine.”

Brian never stopped: in her newest work, Billie and the Moon, opening today at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, the titular character is just beginning to consider their place in the universe.

Billie (played by Kris Cahatol) is a first-time summer camper, paired by the buddy system with a campsite veteran (Megan Fry) to provide assistance navigating the microcosmic lakeside community.

Written without a specific gender identity in mind, Billie the kid is challenged by everyday concerns, such as anxiety, frustration and the fear of missing out, a struggle so commonplace that its acronym, FOMO, has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Raised in Whitehorse, Yukon, trained at the University of Winnipeg and now based in Scotland, Brian thoroughly understands Billie’s out-of-place predicament.

“That all fed into Billie’s experience,” says Brian, 34, a winner in 2017 of the Harry S. Rintoul Prize at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival.

Billie needed a bit of summertime solace in nature, but instead entered a noisy environment with its own set of rules and expectations.

Seeking companionship and understanding, Billie looks to the sky, where the funny man in the moon (Toby Hughes) does more than stare back: he talks.

Brian began writing the story for Billie in 2017 as a member of the Sandbox, MTYP’s playwright’s unit, under the direction of Andraea Sartison and Rick Chafe.

“Dora Carroll and I — Dora’s now the assistant director — were paired together and we improvised a scene of a child looking at the moon, speaking to the moon, and the moon answering,” recalls Brian.

A three-page treatment followed and then, during a cacophonous presentation at the Carol Shields Festival, came the idea to set the story at a summer camp.

“Why did Billie want to go to the moon? Maybe they were seeking that quiet night,” says Brian.

During her third year in the Sandbox, Brian dug into Billie full-time rather than generating more ideas for children’s shows.

Brian herself never attended summer camp, but was an ardent Girl Guide. Drawing on that experience, she built out Billie’s camp world, which includes the responsible Counsellor Andy (Rhea Rodych-Rasidescu) and the chaos agent Counsellor Rickie (Hughes).

But the similarities between Billie and the glowing satellite are the play’s central celestial connection. The moon, Brian says, is required by nature to come out and play every night, but does it always want to?

It was easy to project Billie’s inner life onto the lunar surface, but perhaps more rewarding to consider the other side of the reflection.

“It’s the moon’s nature to be alone,” says Brian, who says she often needs regenerative periods of solitude to be less prickly and more present.

“Taking moments of quiet solitude help me to be a better functioning person.”

Outside, alone, away from the stresses of the world is often where imagination flourishes.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com