Author Archives: Darragh Kilkenny-Mondoux

Crosslight

Wild at Heart: in conversation with the WinterWorks festival’s Rebecca Gibian

We have always found comfort and warmth in the winter in compelling storytelling.

The ferocity of the elements brings us inside, and we appeal to the gift of language and our maps of meaning to escape into shared imagined realities. Rebecca Gibian, programmer of the 2026 Centaur WinterWorks Festival, an evolution of what was formerly known as the Wildside Festival, described this year’s slate of theatre as emphasizing the value of experimentation.

Gibian wants WinterWorks to showcase bold theatre that expands traditional formal constraints.

“The Wildside was about taking an interesting idea offered by emerging artists through the Fringe Festival,” says Gibian, “and giving them a new platform to be experienced by more of a ‘Centaurian’ audience, and potentially welcoming new audiences into the Centaur. WinterWorks is more about evolving that idea towards supporting ambition in the form.”

Bringing experimental works to this stage in the dead of winter puts Montreal’s English-language theatre scene on the front burner. “One could extrapolate a connection between a state of hibernation of an idea and fostering the spirit of experimentation around that idea,” she muses. “That winter is a time to take an idea, keep it warm, turn it over, and then at some point share that idea, while it may be ambitious or in progress, and explode it into the warm space of a theatre.”

The Centaur Theatre is nestled on Saint-François-Xavier, a cobblestoned Old Montreal street, its neo-classical revival architecture giving the appearance of traditional theatrical goings-on. But the Centaur’s regulars know better. There is a wealth of dramatic innovation taking place behind those columns.

“That’s what I look for — a chance to explore the ‘how.’” Rebecca Gibian photographed by Amelia Hellman.

“We’re encouraging audiences to discover WinterWorks in order to know it,” Gibian says, coaxing all and sundry to come familiarize themselves with the festival, now in its second year. You have to be there to understand the intent. “I think people who work in theatre can have an appreciation and understanding for formal experimentation, as in how we tell a story,” Gibian continues, “and that’s what I look for — a chance to explore the ‘how.’”

Gibian lives her life as a director and actor of theatre year-round and says it doesn’t necessarily feel seasonal to her. “Calling it the WinterWorks comes more from an ownership of winter, as Montrealers,” she says. Indeed it is a fitting response to Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival, which has come into its own by similarly championing theatre that challenges conventions and engages with form in imaginative and daring ways. Montreal is a multi-disciplinary city where every artist wears a stack of hats. With so many distinct disciplines and varied skills coming together, Montreal theatre can be so much more than the sum of its parts, with platforms that champion this plurality.

A multihyphenate theatre artist herself, Gibian reflects on the role she plays at the Centaur Theatre. “As someone who has worked both as a director and an artistic director [for Persephone Productions, since 2022], it feels closer to the work of Artistic Direction,” Gibian explains, saying that her role as festival programmer lets her share her excitement for new works, setting these artists up for success in the Centaur, separate from her own artistic storytelling sensibilities.

Gibian’s curatorial eye for the festival is not conscripted by any overall theme; she is interested in daring new forms of theatre coming together in their myriad modes under one festival. This is another way the wild spirit of the WinterWorks festival is preserved. Anything goes.

“It would feel so limiting to aim at a theme,” says Gibian. “But themes which have emerged in this year’s WinterWorks would be connection, the impact of family members, especially of family members who are no longer with us.”

Theatre exploring such themes as these while also playing with new modes of storytelling promises to warm audiences right through the dead of winter.◼︎

The WinterWorks Festival runs until 22 February 2026 at the Centaur Theatre and at La Chapelle | Scenes Contemporaines.

Cover image: Rebecca Gibian photographed by Amelia Hellman.

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Crosslight

Time Image: notes on Tyson Houseman’s Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ

Earth, water, fire, air: these are the elemental constituents of the blue-green ball we call Earth, the home that we all share, and for which we are all responsible.

Each of these elements exists in asynchronous, cyclical, and deep time, according to nêhiyaw teachings. Director Tyson Houseman gently reminds audiences of these simple and fundamental truths in his multimedia opera entitled Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ which runs over three performances at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines in late November.

The stage is scattered with bowls, speakers, a long strip of reflective foil, mirrors and twigs. When the ensemble of four takes the stage together, Houseman at the centre of it all, back to his audience, begins to pan digital cameras across these items, which create a live video projected on the wall behind the stage, revealing in close-up each of these pieces transforming before our eyes into skies streaked with Northern lights, mountain ranges, and forests. At the heart of a natural disaster lies the personal history of Houseman’s relationship to the land of the West Coast.

We are told in the press release that “Houseman’s practice focuses on aspects of nêhiyaw ideologies and teachings — speaking to land-based notions of non-linear time and the interwoven relations between humans and their ecologies.” This sounds abstract. But I can confidently say that I was left with a keen understanding of this practice after experiencing askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ.

The creators recently told Sophia Jama of Westmount Magazine that the title describes “a year, it is summer; it is the earth, it is the ground.” In other words, it is a place in time across time.

Tyson Houseman performs onstage at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines. Photo by Joseph O’Malley.

The piece begins with lights in a night sky, which Houseman brings up onscreen, crouching amongst the household objects that create the shapes projected up on the wall ahead of him. The night sky breathes with refractions through a bowl of water, and dance as another water bowl sits atop a set of speakers, creating mandalas of moving light and colour. Above the mountain range implied by the shadow of tinfoil, towering trees appear as his camera crosses branches lined up on small stands.

Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ is an opera in form and content, the resonant baritone of Jonathan Adams singing in nehiyawewin, evocative of an arrhythmic Gregorian chant, accompanied by cellist Leah Weitzner on the viola de gamba, and Montreal-based composer Devon Bate creating a cosmic texture of complementary sounds on an electric guitar and laptop.

While the performance incorporates common consumer technologies to spectacular ends — cameras, speakers, projectors — it is unmistakably operatic in scale. Not only because its narrative is sung resonantly throughout, in another language, in a heavenly range, but because of the dramatically heartbreaking tragedy at its climax. Everything eventually ends.

Houseman’s quartet reveals in sound and onscreen a vista of the beauty of the mountains and forests of British Columbia, the colonial name given to this land. Slowly, loudly, we see lights turn orange, textures grow tongue-like, as the song of the story swells to a cry of agony. The forest is on fire.

As the flames die down, the colour and sound decrescendo to a peaceful void, wherein photos and videos presumably of the director’s family emerge. A verdant restoration grows around these videos and their sounds of laughter, of a childhood from which Houseman shares personal scenes. This deeply affecting inclusion brings the whole work of Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ out of the abstract and down to earth, encouraging love of our home and native land.

Leah Weitzner and Devon Bate perform onstage at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines. Photo by Philippe Latour.

Davon Bate shared with me that the piece is headed to the Vancouver PuSh Performing Arts Festival in January, where it will no doubt be felt by West-Coast audiences as a welcome homecoming. Surely, Houseman, originally a BC-based artist, has a unique connection to those lands, waters, forests, and mountains.

The monumental quality of Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ carries well and comes across even to this metropolitan Montreal audience like a dirge, a lament grieving the irreversible damage that climate change has wrought upon nature. Houseman’s human element reminds us that the age of the Anthropocene will have destructive impacts but also become the site of our stewardship of the natural world, and our familial relationship to it which we too easily forget. It is a credit to this small ensemble and Houseman’s mastery of puppetry and performance art that such a vast scope of perspectives on the world is so vividly brought into the theatre’s interior space.

I can always depend upon the programming at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines to bring timely and thought-provoking themes to their stage, and Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ is without exception a testament to their mission.◼︎

Cover image: © Tyler Houseman

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Bee’s Knees: notes on the 2025 Fringe Festival

It is overcast but warm on the middle stretch of St. Laurent boulevard. Boutiques and bars have spilled out onto the sidewalks with temptations, a mango cut into a flower and topped with tajín blooms in one hand, a half-empty water bottle warms up in the other. The Mainline Theatre hardly attracts any attention from its modest new digs as a street-level merch table. Parc des Ameriques on the corner of Rachel is where the heart of the Fringe Festival beats.

Summer is a metaphor for bounty, rest, reconnection, and recreation. It feels less apt when the reality of summer in our current era brings orange smoke-veiled sun and moon, heat waves and flooding rains. But now is indeed the winter of our festival’s beer and cider tent.

Perhaps a sunset is the better estivalesque comparison for the Fringe Festival and its home in the now-gone Mainline Theatre. There is no question that the festival will endure, but it has always been headquartered and hosted hospitably from the Mainline Theatre, so this year seems like the end of a chapter, but not the story’s completion.

Festival chief and Artistic Director of Mainline Amy Blackmore programmed this edition of the Fringe Festival with an eye to which shows would grace the Mainline stage for the final days of its operation. An Uncomfortable Dinner Party, written by Alice Siregar and directed by Keith Fernandez, was an audience favourite, and a cast of illustrious members of Montreal’s homegrown performing arts leaders kept every show of A Love Unbecoming sold out throughout its run.

The spirit of the Fringe, however, endured best in the studios — the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal and Aux Angles Ronds. The range from found performance spaces to hold outs of traditional black box theatres indicates that the Fringe Festival will see a beautiful sunrise come Summer 2026.

Regarding Antigone written & performed by Banafsheh Hassani

Banafsheh Hassani in Regarding Antigone. Photographed by Philip Sawaia for The Sky is the Limit Theatre / Sort Of Productions.

The Montreal Fringe emphasizes fun hand in hand with creativity and risk in its favourite shows. Earnest works of theatre do take their share of stages at the Montreal Fringe, but they sometimes feel incongruent among the carnivalesque presentations of the rest of the fest. So, when an unflinching and realist work of theatre asks an audience into a dark studio on a sunny afternoon for an uneasy and challenging experience, it must deliver.

In Regarding Antigone, Iranian Canadian playwright and lone performer Banafsheh Hassani brims with playful laughter and absurd subversions of delivery, smiling uncannily at her audience. Inspired by both true events and the ancient Greek tragedy of the ill-fated Theban princess Antigone, the three characters she plays, Hassani says, are inspired as much by the fallibility of war photography, by revolutions, and state propaganda.

“I was pushed by a desire to be known to make art about the politics of where I came from and who I was. I had to build an understanding with my audience from the ground up. It was only by defining myself as the Other that I could be known,” Hassani reveals.

Still, there is dark humour in Regarding Antigone, and the play offers a geographic and historical context without narrowing specifics, allowing the audience the space to imagine tragedy’s universality.

Countercurrents written and performed by Alice Shuang Wu

Alice Wu and Tei Wei Foo in Countercurrents. Photographed by Alexia Maldonado Juárez.

Alice Wu’s Countercurrents casts the playwright as Veronica, a Chinese Canadian journalist, against the backdrop of our not-soon-forgotten Trucker Convoy in Ottawa. Laura Donohue plays Veronica’s editor, a conspiracy theorist influencer and shadowy figure of Alt Right extremism who sympathizes with the protesters’ cause. Wu’s ambitious piece attempts to fold themes of what it means to be a Canadian, an ally of truth, and a loving family member while navigating disinformation, cultural politics, internet brain poisoning, and the distrust of one government following the abuses of another.

Contemporary theatre is tasked with inventing new and innovative ways to stage our engagement with the internet, conveying the feeling of being online rather than the potentially uninteresting real-world mechanics of using technology. Countercurrents adeptly deploys the actors and successfully utilizes the studio space on the shoestring budgets of a Fringe show. The eerie, increasingly menacing modes we see the internet manifest onstage is a credit to Dana Prather’s direction.

I am pleased to see that this piece is written, directed, and performed without recourse to cynicism. “My hope with this work is to build bridges instead of barriers, offer hard questions instead of simple answers, and go beyond just amplifying my voice to uplifting my community,” Wu tells me. What remains by the end of the show is a convincing depiction of the online world encroaching into the domestic space while railing against its inherently malevolent forces.

Hive Mind

The Fringe Festival is more than the sum of its hive. Photograph by holly Greco.

Theatre in its most innovative and experimental form is a collaborative medium. Perhaps it is the Canadian cultural instinct to cut down our tall poppies, but Montreal theatre generally does not make individual stars. We do, however, get very excited about performing arts collectives.

A festival like ours has had its heroes, its community leaders, and its perennial darlings of summers past. But it is a festival that endures with a spirit that moves through the community of volunteers, technicians, publicists, producers, and performers, each activated by the shows themselves and the sheer energy of live entertainment.

The Fringe’s indomitable spirit is symbolized by the bee on its branding, a nod to their use of the #FringeBuzz hashtag. As we know, bee populations are struggling. But I have no doubt they will outlast us all for their teamwork bordering on the mystical. The Fringe Festival is more than just the sum of its hive.◼︎

Cover image: Tei Wei Foo in Alice Wu’s Countercurrents. Photographed by Alexia Maldonado Juárez.

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Crosslight

Time of the Season: notes on Centaur Theatre’s Strawberries in January

Our lives take detours. People come and go. 

Those we form connections with define seasons of our lives, sometimes in association with spaces, be it the city or the countryside. And through it all, the music we discover, the music those we feel connections to have introduced to us, colours all that time. Years later, a song and the faces and spaces it may evoke can draw us back to those distant connections. 

This sojourning storytelling is staged playfully and tastefully in Centaur Theatre’s production of Strawberries in January.

In this musical, a pair of very dear friends make a juicy pact to marry and start a family, a pact proposed with a basket of unseasonable January strawberries. Two other strangers become entangled in a country inn and form a tether that must be followed like unravelling yarn to their reunion. All four are connected by fond friendship spanning seasons, and so many songs. 

The path to the happy endings for these two couples is meandering and musical, preferring quid pro quo comedy to conflict or drama. The opening night audience took this in with good faith, generous laughs, and relief. Because a romantic musical must be part of a balanced diet of theatre-going. 

The story of Strawberries in January, originally Des fraises en janvier, written in the 1990s by Montreal playwright Evelyne de la Chenelière, seems perfectly suited for musical adaptation. Many composers have contributed tunes to this piece over the years of its development, including acclaimed composer Habib Zekri. 

“The big question has been, how can this work?” Andrée Lanthier for Centaur Theatre.

Nick Carpenter, musical director of Strawberries in January spoke with me about the original songs written for this production, the songs which have endured from previous — originally Francophone — productions of this piece, and the folk flavour that makes this play distinctly Quebecois in either language. 

“All these different cooks added their voices, their idiosyncratic methods, and styles to the show,” Carpenter explains. “The big question has been, how can this work? Can this show hold all these different voices? One of Habib’s contributions is that he can write a Broadway number. He really understands the Broadway idiom. But it’s all held together by the band we have. The band is still a folk band. Plus, our actors who play instruments on stage — guitar, piano, ukulele.”

On the French side of our theatre scene, Montreal hosts large-scale Francophone productions of Broadway hits like Mamma Mia, Waitress, and, this summer, Chicago. But our English theatres are more selective with the musicals they stage. Strawberries in January struck a specific intersection that no other musical this year has, representing Montreal and the province of Quebec with a minimalist sensibility to arrangement and design, and showcasing some of our city’s most exciting talent on stage and in the wings. 

Unique to this production among previous stagings of de la Chenelière’s beloved play is its subtitle. What made Centaur’s production “a musical fantasy?”

“A fantasia is a piece of music where a composer just follows their heart,” Carpenter explains. “They’re not staying inside of a prescribed form. So, they’re not writing inside Sonata form, or within an A-B-A structure. They’re just letting loose and letting their own voice and feelings sort of take them where they may. And that’s a little bit like what this play is.” 

“There are songs that sometimes just erupt and then they’re gone.” Andrée Lanthier for Centaur Theatre.

The structure of this musical adaptation flows seamlessly between action and song, defusing the awkwardness often associated with musical theatre. Carpenter intended it that way.

“There’s certainly the eccentric dramaturgy of the play,” he tells me. “There is a fantasia-esque quality. There are songs that sometimes just erupt and then they’re gone. And that is also part of the fantastical. Anything can happen. A song can show up, and it can be any gosh darn shape it wants to be.”

In 2023, the Centaur’s Artistic Director Eda Holmes spoke about her desire to program delightful diversions on her stage, saying “We’re not making broccoli,” meaning theatre is not meant to be joyless but insistently good for you.

Strawberries in January: a musical fantasy delivers on this promise — the kind of show that brings warmth and joy in the dead of winter. Moreover, it rounds out the winter theatrical programming of a city that takes its theatre seriously, and speaks to the tensions at home and abroad, among which there must be room for the romantic. 

Strawberries in January was just the light and sweet treat that Montreal’s English theatre community needed, a welcome detour through our city’s bleakest season.◼︎

Cover image: Éloi Archam Baudoin, Métushalème Dary, Ryan Bommarito, and Madeleine Scovil. Andrée Lanthier for Centaur Theatre.

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Dead Media Tell No Tales: notes on How to Survive in the Wild

Can we talk about theatre without talking about the medium itself?

When we speak of film and literature, those works and their respective media are taken at face value. But theatre of the 2020s seems to embody Marshall McLuhan’s most famous line that the storytelling vehicle, the medium, is its own message.

The medium of theatre can emphasize or subvert the message of the text in a way that audiences can feel in real-time, which is always exhilarating when well executed.

How to Survive in the Wild at the Segal Centre Studio is about friends and their petty professional and personal betrayals as byproducts of the cutthroat tech startup scene, told through a TEDX talk-style presentation by our main antihero, Kevin, who the actor Jonathan Silver portrays. This format exemplifies the time-honored tradition of one-man theatre that the real-life tech world draws upon to harness the power of individual stories. How to Survive in the Wild doubly enfolds that tech industry theatrical device within the black-box theatre.

Persephone Productions’ artistic director Rebecca Gibian translated the play’s text from its original French presentation, which was performed to wide acclaim at Théâtre Duceppe in 2021.

Every act of translation is an act of betrayal. But this breezy English-language version of Manuel de la vie sauvage by Quebecois actor and playwright Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard wears its linguistic sources honestly.

English and French in this city’s contemporary theatre scenes bear their familial resemblances in shared casts, writers, and directors. How to Survive in the Wild brings this to the fore with a mix of anglophone and francophone actors and a medley of accents ringing true to Montrealers in the audience.

Emilia Hellman for Persephone Productions.

The most visually striking elements of the show are also its most technical. When Persephone Productions previously brought Pool, No Water to the same Segal Centre stage, its lighting effects and state-of-the-art, hyperreal technical flourishes were a delight.

Similarly, How to Survive in the Wild employs vertical screens which convincingly approximate the aesthetic of FaceTime calls. Just this simple use of projections in a highly contemporary and technologically implicated story works its own kind of magic, and video and lighting designer Chris Wardell, assisted by Zachary Weibel, are a credit to what audiences have come to expect from this youthful team.

Persephone Productions was historically a company charged with giving voice to young and emerging theatre artists. But under the stewardship of Gibian and her new hires, we have seen an inclusion of not only emerging artists but also the seasoned and experienced, while turning toward more of-the-moment theatrical works.

Veteran actor Brian Dooley enters and exits as various Old White Guy clichés that wield arbitrary financial kill-switch power over the upstart founders, but allows them playful distinctions. Stories of frightening technological advancements are best told within multiple demographics.

The text gives this cast a plethora of pithy and well-written lines, which nonetheless affords the gravitas necessary for the third act’s tragic turning point. The theme of a plausible technology that could allow the living to stay connected to the departed is within Chekhov’s purview, and the conclusion’s payoff is as satisfying to see as its consequences are unsettling. Nothing in this story is too strange to stay science-fiction for long.

Emilia Hellman for Persephone Productions.

Following the performance, Geordie Theatre Company Artistic Director Jimmy Blais posted another McLuhanian line on social media:

“Man becomes as it were the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.”

I can only speculate that this post was inspired by viewing How to Survive in the Wild on its opening weekend. The audience in attendance is confronted with the show’s fatalistic message of our universal mortality, the crude facsimiles of humanity that A.I. churns out at an alarming rate, and the ever-present sense of theatre’s precarity as an artistic medium.

But a good story about the dark facets of technology shows that man’s love for the machine world is a fickle one, and if we are ofttimes the sex organs of the machine, our progeny persists where we planted love onstage millennia ago.

Nothing flies in the face of dreadful fatalism like the spirit of youth.◼︎

Cover photo: Emilia Hellman for Persephone Productions

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Shining, Gleaming, Streaming: Nancy Webb & Emelia Hellman on Bangs

There’s a quote from the beloved series Fleabag that I’ve seen taken out-of-context in our clip-based, video content zeitgeist.

The protagonist’s sister, in an attempt to feel a sense of control over her life, gets the most horrendous asymmetrical haircut. Later, the pair storm into the salon where this criminal act was committed and the male hairstylist dismisses them saying, “Hair isn’t everything.”

Our heroine then unleashes a tirade on the coif’s importance: “Hair is everything,” she exclaims.

Bangs (2024) is the first short film produced by Hellgirl Productions, though the talented Montreal-based cast and crew are no strangers to each other. In particular, the friendship between the filmmaker and comedian Nancy Webb and the photographer and actor Emelia Hellman is clear in the good-natured conversation they share with me the day before Bangs premieres at the Fantasia Film Festival.

Hellman and Webb co-wrote the film, with Webb directing and Hellman leading a cast of Montreal’s most sure footed improv comedians. Screened alongside nine other shorts, Bangs is programmed as part of Les Fantastiques week-ends du cinéma québécois, where a record 100 Québec-produced short films are shown over the festival’s run.

On the night of her 30th birthday, while she awaits her dinner party guests, Hellman’s character hacks at her fringe before the mirror and gazes wide-eyed at the change she appears to immediately regret and then bravely embrace. As her guests arrive, she greets them, anticipating their reactions to her transformation. But no acknowledgement comes. No response to indicate whether her impulsive shearing was a stylish success or a veiled cry for help. And therein lies the psycho–thriller fun of Bangs.

“You almost always regret cutting your own bangs. And yet, we are endlessly compelled to do it.” Emelia Hellman for Hellgirl Productions.

“We were interested in the idea of the creation of a new persona when you turn 30,” says Webb. “There is an existential crisis that happens in the 30s. It feels like, ‘I don’t know exactly what I want, but if I don’t get exactly what I want, I’m going to lose my mind!’ It’s a very urgent need, to know who you are, and performing that in front of your friends, and having that all hit the fan.”

Leading lady and co-writer Hellman offers thoughtful insight about women’s hair in cinema.

“For women, especially in film, cutting hair is so loaded,” she notes. “When a woman needs to make a change, or goes through a trauma, it’s often signified through cutting her hair, and we wanted to play with that and satirize that. Specifically, you almost always regret cutting your own bangs. And yet, we are endlessly compelled to do it.”

Webb adds that she got to experience the scrutiny, the concern, and the pop cultural baggage that comes with being a woman who shaved her head when she buzzed her own a few years after her 30th birthday.

“I have alopecia, so I thought, ‘why not try it?’ But I did wonder if friends were going to start sending me concerned texts,” she laughs.

“It’s a very urgent need, to know who you are.”

In her 2015 autobiographical exploration entitled Girls Will Be Girls, Dr. Emer O’Toole, who is Assistant Professor of Irish Performance Studies at Concordia University, writes thoughtfully about how shaving her head seemed to make people assume she was aggressive and abrasive, while leaving her legs and armpits unshaven marked her stark raving mad. 

Hellman reminds us that women wandering through cinema insisting upon their sanity while losing it at every well-meaning friend and lover condescending to her madness is a canonical trope of its own. “There is power and agency in being able to decide how you look,” says Webb. “But there’s also so much scrutiny around women’s bodies. It’s a real hellscape.”

The influence of Rosemary’s Baby, for example, is keenly felt in this film, while the dialogue between the increasingly unhinged hostess and her guests is hilariously improvised in the style of Portlandia, or Bridesmaids, where comedic chemistry crackles between well-paced scenes. 

Webb and Hellman credit their score composer, Ryan Dodgson, and Naomi Silver-Vézina, Bangs’s director of photography, for helping to strike a balance between creating the tension key to a thriller’s premise while allowing just enough room for laughs. “We really wanted to externalize the terror,” explains Webb, “and that’s why we went with a thriller-horror vibe.”

As our self-consciousness in the world multiplies in the age of information, we look to genre storytelling to make sense of ourselves. More than other local platforms, the Fantasia Film Festival delivers audiences the next generation of creative filmmakers who bring their unique sensibilities to the fore.

Slasher and thriller subgenres are always reflections of the anxieties of their age, and Bangs drives home a deeply resonant, vain, and nonetheless universally relatable hang-up of millennial women.

Hair may not be everything, but it frames our faces, and in doing so, shapes our identities.◼︎

Cover image: Emelia Hellman for Hellgirl Productions.

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Love-Hate Relationship: notes on Love the Sinner at the Montreal Fringe Festival

You know it when you feel it.

Often in pop music or guilty-pleasure television, you get that sickening sense of your own inner teenager and the sins they committed against your newfound adult wisdom and taste.

I try to be compassionate against the little brat I once was. But I recognize that brat in so much that is gaudy, emotional, and what might commonly be considered morally wrong. So, I also try to be compassionate to that defensive prickling up within me, that cringe.

I afford allowance to that feeling throughout the runtime of Rachel Renaud’s Beatrice Warner-directed play, Love the Sinner. In slowly embracing this Fringe-cringe watching grown actors in Catholic school girl uniforms, set to the musical hits of my own high school experience, my fellow audience and I are soothed — though not absolved.

The play centres on two teenage high school girls, one of them cisgender and one transgender, who comes out as trans over the course of the show. Catholic school student Lenna falls in love with Connor, who reveals herself to be Elle, aspiring to transition into femininity, against Lenna’s puritanical prayers.

The text frames this as Lenna’s loss. And overall, the direction of the piece judges it to be a whimsical misunderstanding of very young people.

The drama drawn out of the teen lovers is paralleled with google-eyed penile puppets re-enacting the rite of confession and slinging puns as they increase in size with every re-entry to the stage. This device comes randomly in a show about Catholic school teenagers, but undeniably brings a characteristically Fringe Festival lightheartedness to the piece.

“I think it’s about two people who are both in their own ways victims of overly oppressive religious indoctrination.” Beatrice Warner, director of Love the Sinner.

I spoke in May with director Beatrice Warner at Beanduck Studio about her process directing a play about the wince-worthy caprices of teenage romance. She affectionately loglines Love the Sinner as, “Queer coming-of-age struggles with religious indoctrination. And dildo puppets.”

“It’s a love story,” Warner says. “On the surface, it might be about two people and the harm that one of them causes the other. But I think it’s about two people who are both in their own ways victims of overly oppressive religious indoctrination.”

The play and its director are clearly invested in representing Lenna, whom the playwright Rachel Renaud portrays, as situationally bigoted, transphobic until liberated from church and high school. This might present a conflict of interest for the playwright and performer embodying this character, with voice pitched up to giggling adolescent neurosis.

Though, Lenna, in her fearful bigotry, is easy to abandon at the moment when she throws the house lights on and addresses the audience, taking a survey of who still empathizes with her after she fails to support her partner’s transition due to her Catholic hangups.

A veteran of film and video, this is Warner’s debut directing actors for theatre, while Renaud directed a show in the Fringe Festival last year, Still Alive, by Leya Graie. As a viewer, I identify a thread of hostile confining spaces, as in their short film Convalescence (2023), for example, the real history of taking feminine bodies and restricting them. The plot lines of both these works mirror the explosive, not necessarily reactive or violent, but rather glimmering expansion of realization that can happen under that kind of pressure.

Renaud is drawn to institutional settings for all they can reveal about the relationships between characters coerced to conform, and the much more interesting results of rebellion. In Love the Sinner, it is not Renaud’s Lenna who enjoys the thrill of teenage rebellion; rather, she asks in several ways for the audience to forgive her the shortcomings of her younger years.

The play’s large-scale levity is a key ingredient of Warner’s vision for the piece, and the emotional release this show’s representation can offer the trans audience who identify with these characters, cloistered from their true selves in the context of a Catholic school, is effective.

“I’ve been transitioning for just over 3 years now,” Warner tells me. “And for me, the most glaringly obvious aspect of womanhood is how much smaller womanhood makes you, as a human being. You feel like you have to be. I feel like Rachel’s work is touching very broadly a more expansively defined term of womanhood, on the notion of that compression, that restriction, that comes with moving through the world in femme, female, or AFAB bodies.”

Elle, played by the incredibly talented Sadie Leigh Bennet, is basically understanding her trans femininity 17 years earlier than Warner did.

“I look at the character of Elle and it’s like she’s not only a young version of me; she is an alternate-reality young version of me,” says Warner. “And that’s cathartic for me to be creating this character alongside Sadie, who has this opportunity that maybe I never got to have.”

Love the Sinner insists on joyful resistance against shame. By the show’s conclusion, the audience is able to shake off any discomfort, and with it goes much of the cringe that is held in my chest.

“There are many times that I feel dysphoric about not having had the opportunity to live as a trans girl,” Warner confesses. “But there are so many ways in which I access that now in my life. And one of them, I feel, is through this play, getting to have a second-hand experience of that by creating the character, with Rachel’s writing, and Sadie’s performance.”

Love the Sinner is ultimately about trans adolescence and transness as adolescence, in the sense that to be trans is to become, to grow, and importantly, to outgrow.◼︎

Love the Sinner continues through 16 June 2024 at the Conservatoire de musique et d’art dramatique du Québec, 4750 Henri Julien Ave.

Cover image: Emelia Hellman

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