BUTCH/FEMME
Alice and Jenny
Photo: Jae Yang
Theatre Passe Muraille & The Green Couch Theatre Company/BUTCH/FEMME written and directed by Emily Paterson, closes Sept. 27.
Writer/director Emily Paterson must think that she is living a dream. As the winner of the University of Toronto’s Hart House Drama Festival, her play BUTCH/FEMME has been given a professional run at a mainline theatre.
This came about because Theatre Passe Muraille’s artistic director Marjorie Chan adjudicated the festival and it was she who chose BUTCH/FEMME as the outstanding production. It seems it was always her intention to have an exceptional student production open the TPM season.
On many levels BUTCH/FEMME is worthy of the honour.
Paterson’s area of interest is Sapphic stories which she feels have been both misunderstood and underrepresented in the mainstream.
The play is set in rural Ontario sometime in the 1950s and Paterson has explained that she wanted to make a connection between past and present Sapphic history, as well as demonstrating how the issues facing historic and contemporary queer communities overlap.
BUTCH/FEMME begins with an unexpected visitor. The doorbell rings and when Jenny (Annabelle Gillis) opens the door, she is shocked to find it is her ex-lover Alice (Tessa Kramer). Alice, it seems, wants to come back after abruptly leaving over a year ago.
As Chan points out in her program notes, the premise of BUTCH/FEMME is not an unusual situation in the playwriting world – two people who come together to confront their shared past.
So what is it that elevates Paterson’s two-hander?
First of all, she has created two very diverse characters which allows for an unconventional relationship in a town where, as we discover, there are only four dykes.
Jenny seems to be very middle class in her shirtwaist dress replete with crinoline and Bolero jacket, her face carefully made up surrounded by neatly coiffed hair. She is the absolute image of Miss Prim and Proper.
Alice is a biker, pure and simple. Leather jacket, jeans, some sort of voyageur dangling belt, boots, scraggly hair. Under her jacket is the ubiquitous T-shirt .
Salma Qureshi Wennekers is credited as costume designer, and she certainly did a bang-up job in this case.
The two first met when Jenny was sitting on the porch of a girlfriend’s farmhouse and spotted Alice the farmhand. Did this relationship first begin with Jenny going after rough trade, so to speak, which certainly makes for a thought-provoking hypothesis.
Another interesting dynamic becomes apparent as the evening wears on. It is clearly Jenny who is the strong one in the relationship. So just who is butch here and who is femme?
Paterson also demonstrates skills as director because she is able to capture naturalism in physicality and realism in dialogue
BUTCH/FEMME
Alice and Jenny
Photo: Jae Yang
Neither Jenny nor Alice change positions unless they have to which shows that Paterson understands how to craft a stage picture. She is also very adept at isolating moments of tension and is not afraid of having her actors hold those all-important pauses. For the audience, Jenny and Alice are engaging in real life conversation.
The director is also credited with movement direction and at this she is simply superb.
How both Jenny and Alice hold their bodies is so tied to character that it visibly adds an extra dimension to their personalities. I’m assuming this is deliberate or why would Paterson list herself as movement director as well as director.
Jenny’s carriage is upright with correct posture. When she sits, it is with delicacy, her skirt neatly arranged, and her feet well positioned. Alice on the other hand shambles when she walks and slouches when she sits, often shifting positions forwards and backwards in nervous energy, as opposed to the serene calm of Jenny.
And then there is the dialogue which is at the heart of the play and about which I am now talking directly to the director.
DID YOU AT ANY TIME, EMILY PATERSON, GO TO THE BACK OF THE THEATRE DURING REHEARSALS TO LISTEN TO YOUR ACTORS BECAUSE IF YOU HAD, YOU WOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT TESSA KRAMER’S ALICE COULD BARELY BE HEARD IF AT ALL
And a sidenote to Kramer. Actors must never be self-indulgent. They owe every responsibility to the audience.
Three basic things are happening on that stage. We hope to find out why Alice left and why she wants to come back. Secondly, we want to know how Jenny has spent the year. And lastly, will they reconcile. As these elements unfold, other details about their lives will be revealed, past and present, together and apart.
Now I heard half the dialogue because Gillis for the most part spoke clearly enough. Sadly, I probably missed about 50% of Kramer and she had the laugh lines. What dialogue I did hear of the two of them together showed a strong sense of characterization, so clearly another enviable skill of Paterson’s is the ability to embed realism into a script, a proficiency that sadly did not get a full realization in this performance.
That being said, like Paterson, Gillis, and Kramer are U of T students who could have promising careers in theatre if that’s where they wanted to go.
Until she could let down Jenny ’s guard, Gillis was excellent in showing a young woman hiding her pain and hurt behind a veneer of coldness with just the right touch of irony in her speech.
Kramer for her part is simply a brilliant actor who absolutely embodied the role of Alice. She was completely believable in everything she said and did, if only we could have heard everything she said. She was almost childlike in her desire to come home. All masks and pretence were stripped away leaving an open heart.
Her Alice became increasingly endearing, and you could see her charm. On the other hand, you could also see why the strength of Jenny would not only be attractive, but comforting.
BUTCH/FEMME should have been a glorious professional beginning for Paterson and her players but the GREAT FLAW that marred the performance cannot be ignored,
One hopes that Paterson has been informed of the problem, and it has been corrected, and that subsequent performances have fielded two actors who are showing off the rich potential of the play.
BUTCH/FEMME – from a second-year class writing assignment, to an award-winning festival play, to a professional production. That’s what anyone would call spectacular.
And all being said, the polymath Paterson is definitely someone to watch.