Ellen Denny, known to Neptune audiences as Belle in Beauty and the Beast and Johanna in Sweeney Todd among others, is making her debut as a playwright this month with her first professionally produced play, Pleasureville, which opens on October 3rd, 2019. Pleasureville tells the story of Leah (Julia Topple) who moves from the city to a small town called Pleasureville and, at the suggestion of her best friend Ash, decides to open a sex shop there. Ash, played by Breton Lalama, is non-binary, and they are the first specified non-binary character in a play in Neptune Theatre’s history. I had a chance to chat with Denny and Lalama yesterday at the theatre.
For Ellen Denny having Pleasureville premiere in Halifax at Neptune is really meaningful. “It is the best,” she says, “[Neptune] feels like home. This is sort of where I got my start as an actor, too. … the faces here are familiar, and this space feels like home. It was so great when Breton arrived, they immediately saw so much queer visibility in the city, and saw a lot of flags up, and felt like the city was welcoming them, and that was so good to hear.” Denny graduated from Dalhousie University’s Theatre Department in 2012 and, about five years ago, she got the idea for her first play, “I discovered the story of my Great Great Aunt Harriet Brooks, who was Canada’s first nuclear physicist, and I just knew that I had to bring her story to light. I felt like I was the right person to do that, as her descendent, and that if I don’t write this play [it might never get written].” The excitement she felt in embarking on the project about Brooks solidified Denny’s love of writing and made her realize that she didn’t just want to tell this particular story, she wanted to be a playwright as well as an actor. “As I stand right now,” she says, “I would love for my career to be a fifty/fifty, and then in the future…who knows?” Pleasureville is her second play, but the first to be professionally produced. She also wrote the book for a new Canadian musical this year. “It’s been a really busy year,” she laughs, “but, this is the highlight of it all. This is what I’ve been waiting for.”
For Pleasureville Denny was interested in writing a small cast comedy. “I was inspired, to me it feels like a very Canadian genre of plays, this kind of rural meets urban comedy. We see a lot of Norm Foster pieces like that, a lot of Mark Crawford… I had that in mind as a model I wanted to practice, and then bring my own voice to that, and [to ask] who [are] the characters I wanted to see in that model that we don’t necessarily see? For me, that was bringing more female voices. The one character, Ash, at some point basically told me that they were non-binary, in that weird way that characters tell you who they need to be. And so, it just became apparent that Ash identified that way. I was really excited by that. I spoke with a lot of non-binary friends at the time to talk about what it looks like for a cisgender woman to write that character, and a lot of those conversations were about how this story is anchored in a cis woman’s perspective, and that as long as I had artists involved all the way along who identified as non-binary shaping Ash and playing Ash- every single reading in my living room, there was a non-binary person reading that part (and that was a commitment I made early on), with those things in place, [it was clear] that this was something that was possible”
Breton Lalama plays Ash here at Neptune and says, “Ash is non-binary, so that can mean a lot of things. For me, and for this part, it specifically means that they don’t identify as male or female, but somewhere in the middle. It’s the first time in Equity Mainstream Canadian theatre that we have a non-binary character specified in the script, which is really cool. And it’s a huge honour to be playing that part, but it’s also a definite responsibility, because you want to make sure that you’re presenting it in a way that is accurate and honest and not just a trope. Ash, as the character, is a law student who has just graduated, so after you graduate from Law School you article for ten months in Canada, so that’s what they’re doing right now. They grew up privileged, their parents are dentists. So they have money, so when their best friend, Leah, moves to Pleasureville they say, ‘why don’t you open a sex shop?’ So, it’s Ash’s idea, but it’s Leah’s baby,” Lalama laughs.
At the beginning of the play Ash is disoriented when they learn that Leah has suddenly moved away from the city where they both live. Lalama relates to Ash’s feelings saying, “You just left for the summer, you spent every day with this person through University, you went away for three months, you get off the train, and they say they’re gone. Like, what?! That’s where [the audience] meets Ash. In that moment. It was important to me to not make them come off angry… but just overwhelmed. Imagine your best friend just ditches you like that? That’s where we start with Ash, so, as an actor, that’s so exciting, because I don’t have to work up to something. I start in the middle of it. It’s a roller coaster from there. {That’s] a gift.” Ash then comes to Pleasureville to support Leah when she begins to “make waves” in the town and organizes a march. “Ash’s best friend in the whole world is Leah and they haven’t seen them in months and there is tension in the friendship, so that brings them there.”
Lalama, who was born in Toronto, but grew up in the small farming town of Fenwick, Ontario can personally relate to Ash’s feelings about the small town in the play, “As a gay trans person growing up in a white, very Catholic, farm town, yeah… it’s not super hospitable. So I definitely can relate to the vibe of Pleasureville, and bring that energy in, because I know first hand what it feels like to be the person who looks different. And [who] is hated because of who they are. So, that’s part of the reason why this play is so important to me. I think the more we normalize gender and sexuality we can help to decriminalize homosexuality and eliminate transphobia, so that, obviously, is personally important to me.” For Denny, who grew up in London, Ontario, but spent family vacations visiting smaller towns with her family, and performing in towns around Canada since becoming an actor, she needed to make sure she wasn’t falling into stereotypes when creating the town of Pleasureville either. “It’s interesting,” she says, “in early drafts I got feedback from people who had more experience in rural cultures that I still had [those kinds of] stereotypes as I was writing [the play]. So, that was something that I had to work on breaking through. [Initially], they weren’t buying the town. It was really fun trying to create, without seeing most of the town, trying to create the identity of the townsfolk and their journey through the play, and to absolutely break stereotypes. That’s the goal for each of the characters and their experiences.”
One of the themes in the play is allyship. Denny says, specifically, the play focuses on “what it looks like when you are someone who thinks you’re [already] doing all the [right] things [and] how hard it can be to have it pointed out that maybe you’ve still got some work to do.” She adds, “I think that’s a tough conversation to have, and an uncomfortable one, but it’s an important one to have. The central character, Leah, is someone who thinks she’s woke. I think it’s important for us to keep braving our blind spots and listening and doing better. I was going on this journey with the character, thinking, ‘Okay, I need to listen so that I tell this [story] in a way that is inclusive and listening to the voices of the people who have that lived experience.’ [Making mistakes] doesn’t have to be the end of the world, but you do have to own it. It feels good to think, ‘I’m a Feminist… and my “sisterhood,” it feels really nice and you just want to give into it sometimes and make it simple and that’s Leah’s struggle. What has been great is to explore all of this within the confines of a fun comedy. I think there is a lot of really fun physical humour that surrounds these conversations that will, hopefully make it a gentle experience to examine ourselves as the audience watches it.”
Lalama stresses the importance of visibility and representation onstage saying, “I didn’t grow up with anyone to look up to, as a queer non-binary person, there was no one that I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me!’ Childhood is a lot of trying to find someone and being like, ‘Oh, maybe I’m this or maybe I’m that.’ I remember being eight years old and my parents had this big CD thing in their house, and I would go through it and listen to stuff, and I found a k.d. lang CD, and I remember sitting in my room looking at the cover for like forty minutes,” they laugh heart-fully, “and not understanding what I was feeling or seeing.” I tell them this reminds me of the scene in Fun Home where Small Alison sings “Ring of Keys.” “YES!,” they exclaim, “[As a child] you don’t know, but some part of you recognizes it. That is a beautiful, beautiful moment in that show… [Pleasureville] is important, personally, as I said, but also socially. Now that [the next non-binary character written for mainstream Canadian theatre] is no longer going to be the first, we can only have more images of what it’s like to be queer, and trans, and different, many different flavours of that in media. It’s pretty badass that Ellen wrote this and it’s amazing that Neptune is doing it. This is a really big deal to me.”
Pleasureville plays now at the Neptune Theatre Scotiabank Studio Theatre (1589 Argyle Street, Halifax) through to October 20th, 2019. Tickets are $30.00-$57.00 and are available by calling the Box Office at 902.429.7070, ONLINE HERE, or in person at the Box Office at 1593 Argyle Street. October 8th is Industry Night and October 9th is Talkback Night. Shows are Tuesday to Sunday at 7:30pm and Saturday and Sunday at 2:00pm.
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