Cannibal chronicle

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This article was published 29/05/2025 (479 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dauphin-raised playwright Sophie Guillas’s appetite for small-town folk drama and queer fables emerges in How They’ll Tell It, a gossipy dish set in a fictionalized resort community in her home province.

Premièring tonight at the West End’s Gargoyle Theatre, the first full-fledged production by the What If Theatre Company brings the audience to the shores of Waska, where a once-bustling tourism industry has withered away and died.

What killed it was the type of trauma that envelops a community’s total history — think Waco, Texas or Aurora, Colo. — and to a certain extent dictates its future reputation and atmosphere. In Waska, a cannibalistic spree in 1985 still reverberates decades later, with the wounds still open and painfully fresh, even for the generations born long after the police tape disappeared.

After meeting the entire cast — Jade Janzen, Josh Pinette, Maia Woods, David Lange, Angela Robbie and Laurie Monk — on the first page, the story then shifts to one of Waska’s abandoned, derelict cabins, where Ivy (Janzen) polishes off her own version of the property’s backstory to interested buyers: whether its accurate, and whether accuracy in storytelling is even possible, defines the narrative that afterward unfolds.

“So much of the play has to do with community reception and who owns storytelling,” says What If’s Cali Sproule, who directs, designed the set and serves as dramaturge.

In a small community, says Oakbank’s Sproule, information travels at lightning speeds, often without verification or sufficient interrogation — the printed legend maintains a lasting dominion as it spreads across the regional map.

Guillas, who holds a master’s degree in English from the University of Western Ontario, is a devotee of British playwright Caryl Churchill, and in her scholarship has focused on the intersections of queer history, horror stories and “lady cannibalism.”

Her thesis, which fed directly into the script, began as a slasher novel entitled What’s Eating the Victorians?

She and Sproule — who served as assistant director to Herbie Barnes on David McLeod’s Elevate: Manaaji’idiwin at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre — have been working to bring the story to stage for the better part of two years. Last year, the company held a staged reading as part of the Village Conservatory for Music Theatre’s Festival of New Works.

With additional support from the Canada Council for the Arts and from the Gargoyle, a theatre dedicated to the development of new work, the production runs until June 8.

At last year’s Fringe Festival, Guillas and Sproule, who met through the University of Manitoba’s Black Hole Theatre group, collaborated on 40 Below, earning a three-fish review from Rory Runnells, who called the production “sufficiently sturdy.”

As a poet, Guillas has been published in The Fiddlehead, and her short fiction has appeared in FreeFall Magazine.

Next up for the duo is the creation of a medieval murder mystery called The Garden Hermit, which recently received funding from the Manitoba Arts Council.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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