The Drowning Girls and Comrades

Content

Introduction

THE DROWNING GIRLS

Acknowledgements

Characters

Act One

Notes

COMRADES

Acknowledgements

Characters

Act One

Historical Notes

Notes

About the Authors

Copyright Page

Introduction

Everyone loves a wedding.

In 1999, audiences at the Bride of Frankenfringe, the eighteenth annual edition of the Edmonton Fringe, were startled to see two brides in full white wedding regalia disappear into a pair of claw-foot tubs.

The venue was Catalyst Theatre. And the far-from-blushing brides emerged, sodden and dripping, back from a watery grave to chant—with a certain cheerfulness—a sort of duet catalogue of destinations, both classic and inventive, for fellow corpses. Iceboxes, meat pies, suitcases, trash bins, cellars, tubs of acid. . .. This macabre list went on, with special emphasis on death by drowning. The Drowning Girls was, as far as I know, the first time in Canadian theatre that Percy Shelley, Ophelia, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, and the passengers on the Titanic had ever been referenced in the same scene.

The waterlogged brides, it turned out in the course of this odd and original fantasia, had been married, briefly, to a real-life Edwardian opportunist named George Joseph Smith, who drowned a succession of his short-term wives, with new insurance policies, in the bathtub during the early years of the last century. Undressed, undone, and underwater, all in a month, said one, with a certain rueful wit.

Fringe buzz, the most electric means of communication at Edmonton’s monster summer festival, jump-started The Drowning Girls. Audiences flocked to the debut theatrical experiment devised by a couple of University of Alberta acting grads, Beth Graham and Daniela Vlaskalic (who both donned the bridal white), and one of their professors, Charlie Tomlinson (who directed). For one thing, audiences, including me, were struck by the complex tone of the new play, a certain playfulness, even whimsicality, in the face of dark, no, gruesome subject matter.

A notorious serial-murder tale, which might have invited a narrow moralistic optic—killing women is bad; so are psychos—was the aquatic playground, instead, for speculation about a female mystery. How could these women have been duped into acquiescing, fatally, in Smith’s monstrous crimes? How could they not have noticed his transparent lies? How could they have allowed themselves to become estranged from their families, and from common sense?

The result was something of a group portrait of a culture: women in a man’s world. The contemporary topicality, though never bludgeoned (or drowned), floated free of the period setting.

But even more, perhaps, audiences were drawn to the blithely offbeat theatricality of The Drowning Girls. In addition to splashes of H2O, and a certain quirky Victoriana, the piece gave off waves of eau de Fringe. Its insights were inseparable from its striking visual aesthetic and its performance style. As a debut for a trio of collaborators, two of whom spent the whole show soggy, it was auspicious, to say the least.

The Fringe, then and now, is a laboratory for theatre artists with an exploratory bent and the chutzpah to take a leap into left field—where people try things they don’t know in advance if they can do. Graham and Vlaskalic, trained actors, notably skilled and fresh from theatre school, wouldn’t have called themselves playwrights at the time. But they were keen to collaborate on something new, a performance piece they would create, for themselves, from scratch. Vlaskalic came across the story of George Joseph Smith, with its eerie, half-lit puzzle of the wives, and their apparently limitless pliability when it came to a man of independent means. She and Graham enlisted the versatile Tomlinson, an actor himself, as well as director and writer.

And The Drowning Girls was born, in a fortuitous double-image image: a bathtub filled with water. So was a new and adventurous chapter in the lives of its actors/creators: a playwriting partnership that went on to Comrades the very next year (directed by Tomlinson), as well as For Ever For Always, The Last Train (which won the 2003 Alberta Playwriting Competition), and Mules—and continues to this day.

That hit premiere production of The Drowning Girls did its bit for the Bride of Frankenfringe’s box office dowry (1999 ticket sales were the highest ever in twenty-eight annual editions of the Fringe). And it scooped up a Sterling Award as Outstanding Fringe Production. More than that, though, the rebirth and subsequent successes of the piece tapped directly into a certain Fringe oxygen, the liberation of the acting brigade from working on other people’s plays in favour of creating and performing original work. Image and performance based, and developed collaboratively, it is cited frequently as an inspiration by actor co-ops with bright ideas—particularly since The Drowning Girls didn’t expire after the Fringe.

Too often, a Fringe premiere is also the final curtain for the experiment. I’d hate to admit how often I’ve erroneously predicted an extension of the Fringe into the season proper. The Drowning Girls is a rare and warming example of artists capitalizing on what they learned in the course of their original investment. In 2008, fully eight years after its original outing, Graham, Vlaskalic, and Tomlinson revisited their inaugural piece. They fashioned a new full-bodied, full-length version of The Drowning Girls: two acts, three actors (Graham, Natascha Girgis, Vanessa Sabourin), three claw-foot tubs. The newly refitted play ran at the 2008 pylayRites Festival at Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects, then returned home to Edmonton to drench the Catalyst stage under the Bent Out of Shape Productions imprimatur.

The undertow of multiple seductions, marriages, and watery demises is now amplified by the slightly older Margaret (Girgis), desperately on the brink of spinsterhood, and married but a single day before her fatal aquatic misadventure. Narratively, of course, three has a more serial rhythm than two, as befits the subject matter, with its practised villain. Just when the protean predator, Smith, had fine-tuned his homicidal technique, he misstepped, and got caught.

The script included in this volume is both expanded and tightened, the perspective afforded by an eight-year hiatus between drafts. Suspense, the dimensionality of the characters, the sense of a corseted world with its own rules. . . all are enhanced by the major rewrites—without losing the quixotic tone, the wit, the strange lightness that are the signatures of the piece. The most explicit anachronisms have been eliminated; Dennis Wilson, for example, is returned to pop culture. But the modern implications are clear for anyone who has ever been swept off their feet, abandoned herself, and later wondered exactly what she’d been thinking.

The production, seen by both Calgary and Edmonton audiences, was deluxe. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you. . . plumbing! The world of three doomed brides, who enthusiastically, joyfully, embraced their fates (a woman needs to be married), was evoked in a stunning, stylized design. The dark, surreal lustre of the original theatrical imagery, enhanced by a trio of designers—Bretta Gerecke (set), Narda McCarroll (lighting), Peter Moller (sound)—included three outsized tubs with overhead showers on a stage of gleaming bathroom tiles.

The birth and evolution of the show into its current seaworthy form, ready to be handed over to actors other than its creators, says something buoyant and important about the Fringe itself, and the uses to which the festival’s invitation to experiment is put by developing artists. The same thing is true of Comrades. The Jazz Age two-hander premiered at the 2000 Fringe with co-authors Graham and Vlaskalic, cross-gender, in the lead roles of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

This time, a seminal historical crime captured the imagination of the pair, thanks to Tomlinson, who brought it to their attention. The 1920 murder trial and subsequent execution seven years later of two Italian immigrant labour activists counts as one of the most outrageous frame-ups of the twentieth century. Even at the time it looked manufactured. Later, the names Sacco and Vanzetti, the shoemaker and the fish peddler, would come to define an era, martyrs to American xenophobia and paranoia, sacrificed on the capitalist altar, targeted for their renegade political views.

Emblems of a terrible and rampant injustice, the