Firehall Theatre dishes up a dark season finale
‘Death and the Maiden’ opens this month
Director Laurel Candler jokingly calls this Firehall Theatre season “Descent into Darkness.”
It started with the jolly Canadian comedy “Jitters.” It moved on to the edgy all-female “Ruthless! The Musical,” about suicide and murder, and ends with the grim psychological thriller “Death and the Maiden,” opening April 26.
What began with laughs will end with some hand-wringing. And Candler loves it. As a Firehall Theatre board member, she remembers when frothy comedies and musicals filled the entire season. Now, there’s much more to digest.
“I’m thrilled to see that,” she says. “There are several of us that were trying to steer things in that direction. And hoping that, as the Firehall, we’d kind of get a reputation for doing things other community theatres don’t tackle.”
They don’t always succeed, she adds.
A few productions may have gone too far. But audiences have mostly embraced the change in direction.
“I think you have to upset some people in order to push the edges of the envelope. But we’ve had good houses. Our last few seasons have been really well-received.
“It’s nice to be involved in stuff you’re actually interested in doing.”
Even by recent standards, “Death and the Maiden” is intense for Firehall Theatre. Ariel Dorfman’s paranoid 1990 play has just three characters, but their intentions are a mystery throughout.
Genevieve Jones plays Paulina,
a former political prisoner who was raped by a cruel doctor whose face she never saw. She only knows his voice, and his habit of playing Schubert’s
String Quartet No. 14 while abusing her.
Years later, her husband Gerardo (Michael Bedford) has a flat tire and is assisted by a doctor (Tim Denis) whose voice she recognizes as that of her rapist.
She takes him captive to force a confession, but her husband isn’t so sure.
For much of the play, it’s uncertain whether the doctor is guilty or Paulina is going mad, and Dorfman’s play doesn’t provide all the answers.
“One of the things I liked about the play, the first time I read it, was this open-endedness,” says Candler.
“You spent the entire time reading it going, ‘Oh, I know what’s going on,’ and then of course the next page happens and you go, ‘Maybe I’m wrong.’
“Nobody’s really off the hook here, regardless of what happened.”