Stage vet writes one for all ages
Chorley’s Murielle tackles darker themes than her kids-only fare
In a scruffy, booted age, she wears sparkly strapless party dresses and high heels to opening nights. She’s buoyant and blond, not averse to judicious back-combing, and she loves pink. She once spent most of a year as Cinderella (an honorary tiara would not go amiss). But there’s something subversive about Ellen Chorley just the same.
In the course of a theatre career that’s already taken odd and whimsical turns, Chorley might just have become this town’s most surprising artist. She runs a kids’ theatre company, Promise Productions, for which she writes repurposed fairy tales, and acts from time to time. She’s the instigator and curator of the Snow Globe Festival of Children’s Theatre. She’s also a founder, along with her friend Delia Barnett, of a sassy nouveau burlesque troupe called Send in the Girls, which teasingly discards princess partywear to discover the corsetry beneath.
The show that premières Thursday night, under the joint banner of Promise and Blarney Productions, involves “the biggest group of people I’ve ever worked with,” as Chorley says cheerfully of a collaborative nine-actor enterprise, with its own playwright (Chorley), director (Blarney’s Wayne Paquette), choreographer (Amber Borotsik), composer (Joel Crichton), set/costume designer (Cory Sincennes), projection designer (Showstages.com), and mask/props designer (Tessa Stamp) — in short, everything but words. Murielle defies the usual classifications, as you might reasonably expect of a joint venture between a theatre outfit devoted to kid audiences (The Fairy Catcher’s Companion) and one with a bent for probing adult dramas (Orange Flower Water, The Good Thief)
“There are darker, sadder things about this one, for sure,” Chorley says of the new entry in the Promise ledger. Things that make Murielle more clearly a play for grown-ups and kids alike. For one thing, its heroine isn’t a kid; the title character is an old lady. Murielle wakes up one morning to discover, on her porch, a mountain of memory. It’s a waist-high stack of letters, every letter she’s ever written in a long life, all marked Return to Sender. Which certainly explains why Chorley is coddling her paper cuts as she makes time for a chat earlier this week. She’s just folded 120 paper airplanes.
With Chorley, versatility started early, and grew topsyturvy. “I trained as a ballerina,” she says of her younger self, dreaming of pink tutus and pointe shoes. “At age 11 I wanted to be a writer-slash-Broadway dancer. At 14, a veteran of countless Stage Polaris shows, I decided I liked theatre even better.”
The teenage Chorley penned the obligatory angst plays, but she was besotted with musical theatre. “I listened to musicals instead of pop music; it was fun to discover I had a voice!” Grant MacEwan University’s theatre arts followed, then her first pro outing, in the chorus of Grease at Calgary’s Stage West. After many musicals in Calgary, Chorley found herself in 297 performances of Alberta Opera’s musical version of Cinderella.
When she threw over the idea of writing more teen angst plays — they just didn’t suit her — it was to do her own cheeky, humorous version of the fairy tale, Cinderella The Wizard at the 2007 Fringe. Promise Productions was born. “I like to play with familiar, staple tales, twist them, make them surprising,” she says of a canon that includes The Twelve Dancing Princesses, a hip-hop riff on Hans Christian Andersen, and an ingenious version of Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare involving corporate takeovers. “If I can, I do like to have a strong girl onstage, someone who can take control of the situation.”
That girl might be Chorley herself. For the first Snow Globe Festival two years ago, she acted, she wrote, she produced, everything. This past Christmas, she produced and designed the three festival shows, and wrote one of them (Birdie On The Wrong Bus). Time’s at a premium; only occasionally does Chorley still take roles in other people’s plays — Chapter Two at the Capitol Theatre, for example, or the black comedy The Wedding Ruiner, or even more unexpectedly, the murderous Clytemnestra, in Human Loser’s version of Electra last summer. “It’s really fun to be so bad!”
As for her fascination with burlesque, Chorley says blithely that it all started “with my pole-dancing lessons, for fitness.” Her friend Barnett was doing “strippercize” and they concocted a political satire striptease about arts funding, for one of Nextfest’s “performance parties.” The idea, says Chorley, was to take off a piece of clothing for every government cut. With Tudor Queens and A Bronte Burlesque, Chorley brings “a character-driven story arc” to a form that normally doesn’t aspire to such complications as character. “The first time I did burlesque,” says Chorley, laughing, “I was so nervous I couldn’t get my costume on. My hands were shaking too much ... If acting is Red Bull, burlesque is Red Bull and vodka.”
What do burlesque and kids’ theatre have in common? Chorley doesn’t hesitate. “A relationship with the audience. We know you’re there. It’s give and take.”