Power trio A new stage farce has fun with three female icons
It’s a wild, flight-of-fancy premise: in 1942 occupied France, the Nazis are about to kidnap England’s Princess Elizabeth — until spy Julia Child saves the day. But how to sneak the future queen back to Great Britain? The duo recruits another secret agent to help out: chanteuse Josephine Baker. And they all discover a fiendish plot that could shatter jolly ol’ England.
This is the twisty, creative farce devised by playwright-director Kato McNickle, who lives in Groton and teaches playwriting at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. The show, titled “Kitchen Spies,” is getting a staged reading Saturday at the Norwich Arts Center’s Donald Oat Theater. It’s the first public presentation of the comedy, and McNickle is looking forward to gauging audience response as she continues to develop the play.
In writing “Kitchen Spies,” McNickle was inspired by facts and rumors about these three famous figures — more on that later. The resulting work showcases strong central roles for actresses, both as the heroines and the villains.
McNickle says it was difficult to create a World War II spy piece and carry out her other mission as a playwright: “I have made it a priority to create meaningful and dynamic roles for women of various ages and cultural backgrounds. Part of that equation for me is making sure I have at least as many women in a cast as I do men.”
To solve that issue with “Kitchen Spies,” she wrote the multiple male roles so that a single actor could play two or three parts. The minimum number of actors for the play are five women and four men. But the females get the central, meaty roles.
“Women in this particular play are the ones who get all the cool fight scenes. They push the story forward, and the men are there as part of the plot, but they’re not driving the plot,” she says.
With Julia Child as a main character, one of those fights is a knock-down, drag-out brawl set, naturally, in a kitchen with kitchen implements.
When it came to action, McNickle also knew she wanted to Princess Elizabeth “to have mad ninja skills.”
Other zany plot points: The Germans create a Princess Elizabeth doppelganger, and there is a Winston Churchill automaton. (Or, as the script describes the latter: “A mechanical man in the shape of Winston Churchill, also a bomb.”)
The basic elements of “Kitchen Spies” came together in pieces over time. The first inspiration: McNickle happened to be watching a TV program about Julia Child that mentioned rumors that she had been a spy. In actuality, Child worked stateside as a secretary for the Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. intelligence agency during World War II, and, after WWII, she lived in France. Those two things became conflated in people’s minds, and, voila, the story grew that Child had been a spy.
“I turned to my spouse when we were watching this (program), and I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if it turns out she really saved France? That would just be a really funny title.’ And I wrote it in my notebook: Julia Child Saves France,” McNickle says.
At that point, she didn’t even have an idea of what that nugget might turn into.
Later on, she noticed shows about Princess Elizabeth’s birthday and jubilee, and McNickle began pondering how, as a teenager, Elizabeth was in the service and learned how to drive ambulances and repair engines.
That prompted McNickle to imagine Elizabeth winding up in France with a spy Julia Child during the occupation. They would be in the French resistance, which McNickle started researching.
“Partway into that research, I decided, you know what? I just want to research this with complete rumor and innuendo,” she says with a laugh.
With a little Wikipedia reading here and a little spy-movies-onTurner-Classic-Movies watching there (and a viewing of “Duck Soup” to get a sense of how to satirize war), McNickle moved along in the process — and then brought Josephine Baker into the mix.
On an old bookcase where she sticks random photos of things or people she thinks are cool, McNickle has a picture of Baker dressed in a tuxedo for her nightclub act in France.
“She really was a spy,” McNickle says. “The other stuff (in the play) is complete fiction, but (Baker) really worked as a spy . ... They were actually using her sheet music. They would write codes, and they would write things on the music and pass the music around.”
Baker headed to the south of France when the German invasion happened, but, for storyline purposes, McNickle has Baker staying on during the early part of the occupation.
McNickle has quite a writing history. Among her plays: “A Yankee Trader” premiered at The Virtual Theatre Project in Los Angeles, and “In Search of a Better Life with Elvis” was presented at University of California San Diego’s Baldwin New Play Fest. Her awards include being a Clauder Award recipient for “Ariadne on the Island.”
Her work is wide-ranging; she says, “I try to change up and write in forms I haven’t tried yet, or might be a little afraid to try.”
She had never attempted a full-length farce and satire like “Kitchen Spies.” As she got about 20 pages in, she discovered how really plot-driven the genre is.
In addition, she says, “I had to put a damper on some of my language tricks about writing plays and composition of plays because the plot had to move. So we couldn’t sit there in any kind of patter or something . ... You need to get there just as efficiently with the dialogue to get to each of the large plot-turn beats.”
McNickle usually writes for a small cast, but “Kitchen Spies” boasts a large ensemble. For the reading, that features Suzanne McCormack (Julia Child), Emily Dykes (Princess Elizabeth), Sharece Sellem (as Josephine Baker), Michael Vernon Davis, Andreas Halidis, Helen Cronin, Henry Savin, Virginia Wolf, Rick Fiocco, James Kenney and Bryant Geary.
“Kitchen Spies,” 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Donald L. Oat Theater, Norwich Arts Center, 62 Broadway, Norwich; $10; (860) 8872789, boxoffice@norwicharts.org.