Young stars add travel to resumes
In Flight of the Viscount, David Belke’s new continental caper premièring Thursday at Shadow Theatre, a young English aristocrat on the lam from his ancestral responsibilities is pursued clean across Europe, Amsterdam to St. Petersburg, by the determined maid who’s been sent to fetch him home.
For his production, director John Hudson has acquired two of Edmonton’s most accomplished young talents, Jamie Cavanagh as the reluctant new Viscount of East Warrington on Worsted and Caley Suliak as Maggie, the relentless family servant. (Hudson leaves to veteran Nathan Cuckow the fun of being everyone they meet on this high-speed pursuit through the European capitals.)
Cavanagh and Suliak may be young — both are in their mid-20s — but their resumes are surprisingly fulsome and genre-busting: new works, classics, brave new Fringe experiments. And, hey, they’ve both played Hamlet. We caught up with them last week on a break from rehearsals at the Varscona.
CALEY SULIAK
Theatre gradually distracted the Calgary-born Suliak from her original double dream, she laughs. “I wanted to be a football player and a ballerina. … I never really made a decision to be an actor.”
The theatrical drift took her to Edmonton, and Grant MacEwan University. She graduated in 2007 with big musicals like Urinetown, The Full Monty, Crazy For You, and actor challenges like “writing the most boring script in the world,” and figuring out “how to make it fascinating, full of subtext.”
From the start, Suliak says the roles she landed were all over the theatrical map. “I’ve played an old woman, and I’ve also played Hamlet in Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead.” Men, ingenues, in the case of Archy and Mehitabel, a beatnik cat: “But I’ve noticed a common theme,” she laughs. “I tend to either kiss boys, take off my clothes, or get killed.” Sometimes all three, as in the case of her stunning work in Kenneth Brown’s Spiral Dive Trilogy, as an alluring and mysterious wartime refugee.
In its three instalments, THEATrePUBLIC’s Spiral Dive has toured the country’s fringes, with Suliak revisiting the role she created. “I feel like I’ve done some of my best work at the Fringe,” she says. And she tests herself further this summer with her first one-woman Fringe show. Ami Jane, says Suliak, is a classic girl-gonewrong story, inspired by the tragic arc of a friend in Calgary: “Someone who’s presented with a very good life, gets into drugs, goes haywire,” as Suliak describes it.
Meanwhile, she continues to co-write Mummers Plays — “classic characters, the troll, the knight, the princess …” for the Deep Freeze Festival on 118th Avenue. And this season she ventured into burlesque with the Send In The Girls troupe, most recently as glum Katherine of Aragon in Ellen Chorley’s Tudor Queens. With Flight of the Viscount, Suliak gets to duplicate onstage the lark of travelling across Europe, which she did in real life last year. “As the Spanish villain, Nathan is so funny! I laughed so hard I cried.”
JAMI E CAVANAGH
It sounds like a punchline. But Cavanagh was on his way to being an accountant, he says, when something of a theatrical nature diverted him. It was meeting Chris Craddock, playwright/actor/ comic improviser deluxe. Suddenly, adding up numbers and being well-heeled didn’t seem as appealing as it once had.
The dexterous Cavanagh, it turned out, was a natural for improv. He was still in high school, making up stuff on the spot, when he starred in The Overnight, a comedy by his Rapid Fire cohort Matt Alden. “And suddenly I was in Winnipeg at the Fringe.” Since then, Fringe audiences have seen him as Zastrozzi, the most accomplished swordsman in Europe in the George F. Walker play; he’s starred in a Fringe revival of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago. The list goes on. And summers have included, too, roles with the Free Will Shakespeare Festival.
By the time all this started, the drama major/women’s studies minor was in theatre school at the University of Alberta (he graduated in 2011). And Studio Theatre acquired a versatile leading man. He was the guileless Nicholas in Nicholas Nickleby. He was Romeo. He was Hamlet. He’d be starring as the much-maligned title character in Studio’s upcoming The Last Days of Judas Iscariot if he weren’t busy with the viscount who goes AWOL in the new Belke.
The point here is that the Cavanagh resume is crowded, with summers a particularly high-traffic zone. He’s travelled widely to international improv tournaments with his Rapid Fire co-stars. He does long-form Chimprov. The blend of improv and theatre, arguably, adds a distinctive lustre to both, in this theatre town.
“I’m onstage every week of the year. With nothing to say!” — a crisis situation that is meat and drink to improvisers. Cavanagh grins. “When I get to work onstage with an actual script and words to say, making it fresh seems easier.” Improv, he thinks, gives acting “something volatile, something on-the-spot.”
Speaking as we are of grand adventures, Cavanagh is about to embark on his. In July, he’s moving to Toronto to test the waters there. And the Fringe will be minus a leading man this summer. Cavanagh says he’ll be back next season for Craddock’s version of The Velveteen Rabbit at Christmas, and in the spring for Genius Code, Surreal SoReal’s residency project at Catalyst.