This dark comedy a truly shifty affair
Northern Lights actress describes work on mystery piece as ‘brain g ymnastics’
“Who shot who? Who’s going to shoot who? Where’s the money? Where are the keys? Who’s going to get the money in the end, and how far will they go to get it?” Andrea Jorawsky is volleying a selection of the classic mystery puzzlers that are up for grabs constantly in the course of the knotted little black period comedy that gets its Canadian première Friday to launch the Northern Light Theatre season.
Three treacherous backstabbers, paid-up members of the London Victorian underworld, are holed up together in a hideout on a night in 1878 when a blackjack game, their team specialty, has gone terribly, possibly irretrievably, wrong. Jorawsky may be young, but when she says she’s never done anything remotely like Bitches & Money 1878, by the English playwright Martin Henshell, it means something.
Consider her range. At 27, Jorawsky has already co-founded a gutsy experimental theatre collective, Punctuate! — with its own performance venue (the TACOS space in Strathcona), its own producer, resident director, technical director, and its own thoughts about collaboration, storytelling, and repertoire. Punctuate! made its debut in 2010 with The End of Civilization, one of the corrosive comedies in George F. Walker’s Suburban Motel series.
“We told ourselves ‘let’s try to do this play, and stay in the black. And we did! We each made $30. An achievement,” Jorawsky grins. And since that auspiciously solvent beginning Punctuate! has tackled everything from the notoriously difficult Brit Howard Brenton (Judith) to original clowning (Vice Versa and Vice Re-Versa).
The Calgary-born Jorawsky, followed up a theatre degree at Mount Royal in Calgary with a year off testing her attraction to directing — “I thinkit’s something I want to pursue later; right now I’m passionate about the craft of acting” — then acting school at the University of Alberta here. She’s done children’s theatre, of varying weightiness, in both of our official languages — Les Sept Peurs d’Emilie for L’UniTheattre and Under Cover for Concrete. In the latter, she played a young girl who startles the people around her by making the personal decision to wear a hijab. Jorawsky has even tried her hand at burlesque: Send in the Girls’s A Bronte Burlesque.
In Bitches & Money 1878 you’ll see her as Patience, “the brains of the outfit,” as Jorawsky says of the smart, agile-witted character with a scientific bent and commitment to engineering whose plans for her share of the loot include inventing a time-travelling machine “that will change the nature of the next century.” Jorawsky laughs.
“I don’t think the other characters — Jack (Ben Gorodetsky) and Cora (Laura Gillespie) — really understand the full power of Patience’s plans and her 110 per cent belief ... It’s fun to play a character as determined as that. She’s relentless!
“It’s dark. It’s fun. It’s a crazy mystery,” says Jorawsky. As the play “moves around in time, starting in the middle and jumping back and forth,” tricky enough, “the allegiances among the characters shift too, sometimes within a single line ... What is truthful? What is a lie?” The only thing Patience says that is guaranteed true is “this web of lies is so tangled.” Jorawsky calls the enterprise “brain gymnastics ... I feel sometimes that my head is spinning. This is brain gymnastics.”
Last time onstage, in Punctuate!’s Vice Re-Versa at Nextfest, the adventurous Jorawsky dove into clowning. She entered the macabre world of a clown father-son duo created and performed by Elliott James and the late Adam Cope, as the glamorous and sinister stepmother who wedges herself between the pair. A new and mysterious Punctuate! collective project is underway: The Silence Project, which, as the name suggests, is wordless, premières in January.
“We’re always asking ourselves, ‘How do we tell a really good story?’ And then we get into the most interesting challenges.” Jorawsky smiles. “We’re artists. That’s our job.”
With Bitches & Money 1878, she says “I feel like I’ve come back to the craft in a new way ... Fear motivates me, not paralyzing fear but a fire under my ass!”