Which voice is witch?

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This article was published 05/04/2023 (962 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Baba Yaga is an elderly woman, trailed wherever she goes by a caravan of fraying hair and an aura of mystery. Her face curled into an impish, devilish smirk, the folkloric character of Slavic tradition typically lives in a chicken-footed hut in the middle of remote forests in countries like Slovenia, Bulgaria or Ukraine.

She also eats children.

Marina Stephenson Kerr — at least, presumably — does not.

Despite the dietary differences, the Winnipeg actor is tasked with playing the titular ogress in playwright Kat Sandler’s comedy Yaga, on until April 22 on the MTC Warehouse stage. It’s a wicked role for Stephenson Kerr, 60, who had to do some serious research to get into the spirit of the witch.

The Saskatoon-born Stephenson Kerr looks anything but scary: she has big blue eyes and an upturned nose that resembles Joni Mitchell’s, her provincewoman. Her voice is calming. But Baba Yaga? She’s something else entirely: a complex character of fantastic power, who can wield it either for good or pure evil.

“I would say that she’s as old as medieval times. She’s an ugly witch who flies a mortar and pestle,” says Stephenson Kerr, who lives in a non-footed home in Crescentwood and prefers to walk to work on the strength of her human legs.

Long-obsessed with horror and Eastern European stories, having acted in playwright Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, a play about the 1989 Romanian revolution, and deployed her best Bulgarian lilt in David Edgar’s Pentecost, Stephenson Kerr was practically salivating over Sandler’s script when director Ann Hodges sent it her way in February 2020.

But if she was to play Yaga, along with five other roles, Stephenson Kerr knew she had to sound authentic.

“Eastern Europeans really use their whole mouths, the facility of everything vocally and orally, to wrap their lips around the language,” she says.

Suddenly, mid-sentence, her diction and pronunciation shifts, r-r-r-olling her R’s and flattening her TH’s. “In Eastern Europe, dey use every bit of their mout. Deh teep of deh tongue, deh teet, deh lips.”

Ana Toumine, an opera singer who served as the production’s Ukrainian language coach, taught Stephenson Kerr the subtle differences between regional accents, including between the more throaty Russian enunciations and the Ukrainian ones, which tend to be “more forward.”

“One of the simplest things she taught me is that in Ukrainian, you can almost speak what is written phonetically. O isn’t O, it’s oh. There are no diphthongs (a combination of two vowels into one syllable, ie: nyet),” she says. “Ukrainian is very much pure sound, with a lot of frontal, dental, tip-of-the-teeth work.”

Stephenson Kerr is a practised mimic: throughout a 30-minute conversation, she slips into Bulgarian, Romanian and rural Saskatchewanian accents, along with an impression of her mentor, Henry Woolf, the late British theatre pro and creative companion to Harold Pinter. She also dips into the stylings of the late Winnipeg thespian Doreen Brownstone, a British ex-pat, and of her own late father.

That vocal variety requires consistent usage and training. For months, Stephenson Kerr trained with Toumine and spoke to herself in the Yaga dialect, an amalgam of a few regional accents. “Ana was solid gold,” she says.

But one coach wasn’t enough; she started to approach strangers for tips. “I’m shameless. I practically attacked a woman at G.J. Andrews on Academy Road when I noticed she had a Ukrainian accent,” Stephenson Kerr recalls. “I could tell she thought it was strange, so I backed off because I realized I came on strong.”

Stephenson Kerr had better luck in the ladies department at The Bay, where she met a woman named Oksana while buying pyjamas. The actor treated her new friend to coffee, and got Oksana to read any lines that were to be spoken in English with a Ukrainian accent.

On her hour-long walks to the theatre, Stephenson Kerr listened to Oksana’s and Toumine’s recordings. When it came time to rehearse with castmates Toby Hughes and RobYn Slade — members of the Outside Joke improv troupe who each also play multiple roles — she felt immersed in the playwright’s voice, which Stephenson Kerr describes as “female, smart, powerful and articulate.”

She says that Sandler’s writing also leaves tiny breadcrumbs for the audience to piece together the narrative arc of the show, which centres on a missing-person case headed by a cocky private investigator and a small town detective.

She slips into an impression of a promoter. “This show is a full meal deal,” says Stephenson Kerr. “To quote Toby Hughes, it’s like a whole season of a cop show that ends with solving the crime (squeezed into) two hours.”

When she heads into rehearsal, Stephenson Kerr says goodbye in her own voice.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com