NEWFOUNDLAND-SET THRILLER RETURNS
Popular historical drama got two Jessie Award nominations in 2017
Tamara McCarthy is the first to admit that horror is not her go-to genre. But something about The Double Axe Murders wouldn’t let go.
“I saw the original production, and I was just spellbound,” said the Vancouver-based director/actor. “I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
McCarthy first saw Berni Stapleton’s play in 2007. She told the playwright then what she intended to do with the Newfoundland-set cabin-in-the-woods mystery.
“We were chatting over red wine and I said, ‘I really want to produce this play out west.’ She laughed and said, ‘Good luck getting my play off this rock.’ ”
As it turned out, Stapleton was correct: McCarthy spent 10 years trying to get The Double Axe Murders
onto a Vancouver stage before she found someone, Presentation House artistic director Kim Selody, to take a chance on mounting a production.
For its 2017 Presentation House run — the first time Stapleton’s work had been performed outside of Newfoundland — the Rusticate Theatre show received Jessie nominations for outstanding performance for Yoshie Bancroft and outstanding set design for Alex Kirkpatrick.
In The Double Axe Murders, Sarah Singleton (Bancroft) embarks on a mission to find out the whereabouts of two men, one of whom is her brother and the other her fiance.
She and a male companion find themselves in the men’s abandoned cabin with a stranger who may hold the key to their disappearance. Based on a true story from 1809, the play was first performed at the scene of the disappearance, Cow Head, N.L. (where McCarthy saw the original production).
“These stories have been passed on verbally through the generations,” McCarthy said.
“Berni, being in Cow Head, was able to hear their accounts. The fish gets bigger as the story gets told every time, but there were documents that she was able to comb through. She was able to find out quite a bit about the actual events and what happened after. What happened after is not in the play, it’s left for the audience to go, ‘Oh my goodness, what happens after this?’ ”
For the remount, the director has tapped the same cast as the 2017 run, including Bancroft (the
Arts Club’s The Orchard, CW’s The Flash), Ashley O’Connell (Bard on the Beach, CW’s DC’s Legends of Tomorrow) and Zac Scott (Itsazoo’s Hidden).
“When we went into the remount I thought, ‘Well, we’ll just restage this, we’ll remember everything we did and be good to go,’” she said. “But we’ve unlocked so much more of what makes these characters tick. And the actors are super-excited to have another chance to tackle the work and delve deeper into their characters.”
Though the play has the trappings of horror, McCarthy is interested in the psychology of people in desperate circumstances.
“These universal themes of isolation, loneliness, love, despair, are what drives these characters, and what I find most compelling about the piece.”
McCarthy said the play also represents an opportunity to champion the work of a playwright whose work often goes unrecognized in the rest of Canada, and to present a three-dimensional female character who is “tenacious and bold and practical and spiritual.”
And she gets to bring her original experience of the play to new audiences.
“The tension in the play is so immense that you couldn’t hear a sound in the theatre,” the director said, recalling the first time she saw it. “I remember sitting there and everyone was so, so, quiet. These are lovely audiences, but they’re bus-tour audiences that come through Cow Head, so you expect the typical chatter and unwrapping of candies. But everyone was in this cabin with the characters.”