Hey, hey, where's Claudia Dey? The poet-turned playwright had a big stage success in 2005 with Trout Stanley, then dropped off the theatrical map. Sure, she's been busy with sex how-to guides, but when can we expect a new play?
I put that very question to Dey last night when I spotted her at the opening of a new revival of Trout Stanley - a play critic Robert Cushman recently named one of the best Canadian plays of the decade - at Bread and Circus, the cosy, licensed 85-seat Kensington Market venue that's gained currency since My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding premered there.
Alas, I have no happy news to report: There aren't any plays in the pipeline, Dey says, and there may never be.
If you're yearning for a new Dey stage work then, you're just going to have to buy a ticket to Germany or Switzerland next year. Because that's where Trout Stanley is being transformed into an opera.
Dey dropped me an email with the details this morning:
Trout Stanley was first performed in its German translation in Switzerland at Theatre Marie (April, 2008) followed by a production at Schauspielhaus Bochum (January, 2009). The actress who played Sugar in the Theater Marie version of Trout Stanley - Mona Petri - is writing the libretto for composer Daniel Fueter. They are working on a modern chamber opera in Zurich - to be staged in 2011 in Switzerland and Germany.
For those of you unfamiliar with the play in question: Trout Stanley takes places on the 30th birthday of Grace and Sugar Ducharme, twins who live in a small British Columbia town between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley. Grace wears sexy zip-ups and works at the local dump, while Sugar stays at home wearing the sweatsuit their mother died in ten years prior.
Along comes a mysterious stranger named Trout Stanley - "it's a fish name," he explains, not really explaining - who talks Sugar out of suicide and then woos her. Grace, however, thinks there's more fishy to the fellow than his name and suspects he's is a killer on the run (a Scrabble-champion-cum-stripper is missing from a nearby town, you see).
In the chamber opera version of this quirky piece, Dey has been told, the twins will be mezzo-sopranos and Trout will be a baritone. I'd like to see that.
In the meantime, Heart in Hand Theatre's likeable, low-rent production of Trout Stanley provides a welcome reminder what a unique voice Canadian stages are missing while Dey pursues her many other muses. It continues until May 2.