Granted there are a lot of lines in this play that make me nearly pee myself they’re so simply pleasurable to read.

But this line in particular is the keystone for me, the line that everything rests on for Sugar, sweet Sugar Ducharme. I love the line and I love what it implies: that a person can cram unit after unit of “love” inside of them and pressure cook, compress these feelings, year after year after year until it becomes a kind of a danger. If one does not sufficiently dole out their love with measured regularity one becomes a hazard to their own health and those around them.

I think people who suppress–people like Sugar, who squeeze all their feelings into a zipper-busting-duffel-of-a-hear—feel a little like they ate too much mac and cheese for dinner. Uncomfortable in their guts and in their own skin. Compounded by a decade. If this suppression, this dissatisfaction, this emotional malnourishment continues for too long the idea of transparency becomes a kind of terrifying hope. Please please, the body begs, let me have one small moment of honesty! But please please, let me keep hiding because I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle even that much truth in a day. We humans so often crave honesty from those around us, but only on our terms.

There was a moment—more like an hour—in rehearsal last Thursday that was painfully transparent for me as an actor—not just as Sugar. I’ve been in awe of that hour ever since. Anyone who’s been a part of a rehearsal process, or any kind of passionately charged relationship, will admit that terror exists in the moments where all of a sudden you realize you and the people surrounding you don’t view the world the same way. It’s jarring, strange, and unnerving. Like falling asleep in a land where everyone speaks your mother-tongue and then waking to realize you don’t even know how to communicate your need to find a water-closet. I exaggerate—but only slightly. When I walked into Thursday’s rehearsal I had a much much different view of the end of the play. ‘I thought I knew my own home as well as I knew my own face—as well as I know yours,’ Sugar says in one of the final scenes, ‘I didn’t, I don’t.’

I have harbored a lot of love for this play: we all have. Katie and Louisa for over a year, and Sean and I both since January. It is a play to love, “a filth to nest in,” as Claudia Dey puts it. So it’s difficult to realize that this beautiful Canadian world I’ve been living in isn’t necessarily the same one the rest of the creative team has had in their heads.

There were two ways we could have dealt with this: the Easy-Hard, and the Hard-Hard.

The Easy-Hard is going with the flow of rehearsal. This is how you all see it, fine I’ll make it work, no questions asked. This is Easy-Hard because saying ‘yes’ to everything is so easy, and feels so good, so yielding, and loving, and in the moment. It’s hard because if it’s not TRUE you end up paying for that ‘easy yes’ for a long time afterwards.

The Hard-Hard involves nothing but the capital-T the Truth. It involves transparency. It involves recognizing the thing you love and naming it, aloud. The Hard-Hard puts your guts out there on the table, and dares you to put it together. Even worse: in rehearsal, this has to happen around other people, with their hands working alongside your own.

We went the Hard-Hard. That night in rehearsal, there was a lot of honesty. A lot of gnarled love-regret-disappointments rearing their heads.

This play was darker than I realized. I knew the ending wasn’t all cherry pie, but it took being completely honest about my own feelings about the play to be able to really HEAR what everyone else was saying.

We went through it again and again, the last five minutes of the scene, and miraculously, painfully, change happened. I saw what it was that I was missing before, and it hurt. I realized, in a way, that I myself had been hiding from the real meat of the scene: the meat of the play. We all hope that love is triumphant, that it can be a balm for all wounds: and it can. But like that “bomb waiting to go off,” love holds no prisoners, and wherever there is triumph there is also loss and a great moving-on.

Earlier, I mentioned those lines, ‘I thought I knew my own home as well as I knew my own face—as well as I know yours…’ they continue. ‘I only needed to travel one mile to see it for what it really is.’ It’s frustrating to realize you’re not on the same page. It’s humbling and beautiful to feel your mind and heart physically changed by those around you. It’s a down right MIRACLE to discover that a new Truth might be waiting just on the other side of your front door.

-Sugar Ducharme
(alias Becky Webber)

I have been carrying this image around with me for the last six months in various shapes and sizes, have worked on it in three different states, and couldn’t be happier to share it with you today!

I have become more and more involved with Exquisite Corps in the last year, and I have to say that my favorite thing about working with them is their openness to new ideas. They have always been excited about creating a unique look and feel for each show, and more recently, reimagining themselves as a company. In building this website and creating their new look, as they were willing to look at a wide variety of influences and try out different ideas before narrowing in.

I first heard about Trout Stanley about a year ago, and I was intrigued. As I became more familiar with the play, I became even more excited about the opportunity to do something really ambitious with the artwork. I was feeling bogged down with too many projects based around the computer, and Claudia Dey’s writing so playfully alternates between specific and vague imagery that it begged for something completely hand drawn, and over the top. For those of you who have never seen a hard copy of the play, it is unique in that Dey chose to include drawings to accompany the text. Jason Logan‘s drawings are fairly different than my own stylistically– they are rougher, more diagrammatic– but I tried to channel their direct humor, and their simple hand drawn quality. While I was at first tempted to depict Dey’s larger than life characters, I decided to leave that to the actors, and focus in on the environment of the play, the very “trinketful universe” these blog posts reference, which seemed to embody the mood and meaning of the story in a striking way.

I got much more obsessed with this project than I intended too, immersed in building this wall of things. Last week, while visiting my grandfather’s house by the Jersey shore, I was shocked to open a closet and find the exact vacuum that I included in the junk pile, a memory I hadn’t even realized I was drawing upon. I hope that these images intrigue you and invite you to enter the amazing melding of past and present, fact and fiction, trash and treasure, that Claudia Dey has created in Trout Stanley.

-Alison

Grace and Sugar Ducharme, twins, live for one another.
Period.
Wholly and completely.

But in doing all that living for someone else, are they losing a part of themselves?
Maybe.
But maybe not.

For me (and for Grace), the journey of Trout Stanley is the uncovering of one’s most basic notion of ‘self’.
One’s purpose.
That deeply-rooted desire to find that thing that makes life worth struggling for, worth living – even if it’s a life lived solely for oneself.

At the outset, we meet Grace at the height of her game – deeply entrenched in her habits and opinions, and fiercely protective of the world she has so carefully constructed. Then, faced with the possibility of losing Sugar, she crumbles. We watch as her huntress persona unravels and then ride shotgun with her on the split-second road trip from predator to prey.

When everything you’ve lived your entire life for is taken from you, is that life still worth living?
Do you throw in the towel and chalk it up to a life wasted?

Is a life ever truly wasted?
Do the people we give ourselves to ever really leave us?

“I know what my purpose is now. It’s to be the las’ one standin’. The las’ one standin’in a dyin’ town. One day, even the sun’ll burn out, but I’ll still be here. I’m the one who knows the stories. I’m the one who knows what’s happened. Better’n anyone. It’s in my clothes, my skin, my eyes.”

As an actor, I pray for roles like this.
They’re rare.
To be given the opportunity to lift this character out of life as she’s been living it, carry her through the lighting strike of impossible change, and then drop her down on the other side (and into whatever it may hold – safety? growth? failure? utter destruction?…) is an incredible privilege.
It’s my purpose.

But aside from all of that, this is just a really damn good play.
It’s dark, it’s offbeat, it’s wryly comedic and it is absolutely, completely devastating. I’ve been living alongside this script for a year now and still every read-through, every rehearsal and every fight call is fresh, exciting and a joy to be a part of.
New discussions are had every day. New questions are asked.
We are never bored.

Claudia Dey (GO READ HER NOW) is a firecracker with language. And, better yet, she has something to say. We (I have complete confidence that I can speak for my castmates and director on this…) feel so, so proud to help her say it.

Plays like this are why I act.
To get as close to these curious people as I can.
To try to understand why Grace does the things she does, why she makes the choices she makes.
And then, to bring what I find to you.

But I’ve had Grace to myself for long enough.
I can’t wait to share her with you.

Together we learn from these characters.
Together we grow.
We will find different truths.
We will identify with different choices.
And, maybe, we will find out a little more about ourselves.

What’s your purpose?
What’s yours?

- Grace Ducharme
(alias Kathryn Lynch)

So here I am in Vancouver, British Columbia, ostensibly on holiday but surreptitiously doing a study of the BC accent for Trout Stanley.

I’m discovering that the accent lies somewhere between Sarah Palin’s Alaska accent and a flat US sound. Of course there are the “sorry”s and the “out and about”s (and trout) but the most fascinating thing is the rhythm. The Vancouverites that I’ve spoken to have a tendency to inflect up at the end of multisyllabic words. But it’s not every multisyllabic word, more like every third in a sentence or ones that end in “ing”. It’s lovely and I find that I can kinda slip into it now when I’m around a crowd.

Coat of Arms

I’ve also been doing just a little local research on Tumbler Ridge and Chetwynd, where the action of the play takes place. Tumbler Ridge is what they call a company town. A mining company built it essentially for the employees of the mine. So the roads and sidewalks are wide and straight. Everything has a crispness to it. My host at a dinner said it was like the town in the movie Pleasantville.

Chetwynd, on the other hand, sprouted up as a small highway town. It is a hodgepodge of styles that have developed over a hundred years or thereabouts with very little planning. I’m not going to be able to go up there while I’m In BC but I imagine it to be like the towns along the New York throughway in upstate New York but smaller.

Town map

I’ll be heading back to Boston next week to rejoin the ExCorps team in time for the final few weeks of Trout Stanley rehearsals and tech week.

Until then, later eh,
Janelle

PS: Watch this: Dinosaur Tracks in Tumbler Ridge BC