For Beth-Anne, the best way to work up the confidence to ask out her crush is to turn herself into a horse. This fast-paced, one-woman comedy play, titled Beth-Anne, made its world debut at the undercurrents theatre festival this February.
Beth-Anne, played by Monica Bradford-Lea, is a quirky, horse-loving girl with large-frame glasses, hair clips, a horse sweater and a poster board plastered with magazine cutouts of men and horses.
Upon learning that her crush, Alexander, is single, she pulls brown socks over her hands, straps on a tail and puts on horse ears to ask him out. The play chronicles the series of events that follows as Beth-Anne embarks on a comical journey of self-acceptance.
“It’s playful, it’s fun, it’s nostalgic … it’s fuzzy, and hopefully an endearing, laugh-out-loud night out,” Bradford-Lea said.
Written by Bradford-Lea and director Nicholas Leno, Beth-Anne originated as a 20-minute production for the experimental theatre festival, Fresh Meat, in 2018. A condensed version of play then featured at undercurrents’ discovery series in 2020, and the full 60-minute production made its debut on this year’s undercurrents main stage.
Based on clown theatre principles, Beth-Anne relies on minimal vocabulary with famous lines such as “way cool” and “way hot,” exaggerated physicality and audience interaction.
“[Clown theatre is] where there’s no fourth wall and the audience is forever present,” Leno said. “There’s a very specific kind of character that lives [in this world] and works with the audience and is, in essence, very naive.”
Bradford-Lea and Leno said they started out with the idea for Beth-Anne’s character and used improv-based experimentation, coined “clown logic,” to discover the character and world she lives in.
“[Leno] and I … spent a lot of time with this character,” Bradford-Lea said. “Now I find it so easy to slip into her very smoothly, because we know her so well. She’s so deeply in me.”
Audience participation is an important component of the performance, as Bradford-Lea asks audience members onstage to hold her mirror while she gets ready or to serve her food in a restaurant. Bradford-Lea said the incorporation of live theatre involves some improv.
“We talk a lot about how the clown gods will give you gifts, and mistakes, or just the liveness of theatre, are those gifts,” Bradford-Lea said. “Every night is different.”
The play also features three offstage characters—Beth-Anne’s friend Samantha, her crush Alexander and Oprah Winfrey. Beth-Anne’s interactions with these characters were captured through sound designs, composed by Angela Schleihauf.
When she first read the script, Schleihauf said she had the idea to create speech sounds representing the dialogue between Beth-Anne and the offstage characters.
“What would it be like if we had some goofy sounds that are recognizable as some sort of expressivity and have the melody of speech, but don’t carry the words themselves?” Schleihauf asked herself when creating the sounds.
By detaching the top piece from a flute and the reed from an oboe, Schleihauf played around with different techniques to mimic speech sounds. She then digitally manipulated the sounds to create a distinct pitch and rhythm for each character’s voice.
Schleihauf then rehearsed with Bradford-Lea and Leno to incorporate the 130 sound cues into the performance.
As a classical composer by training, she said she enjoyed pushing the bounds of her creativity.
“I really enjoyed the opportunity to be funny in sound and to consider what I could do to amp up the humour and to make it more hilarious,” she said.
Beneath all the comedy, Bradford-Lea and Leno said they hope audiences take away a message of self-acceptance from the performance.
“It’s a story about finding your authentic self—whatever that means to you,” Leno said. “If you are able to find who you are, people will love you for it. Maybe there’ll be haters, [and] maybe you’ll break a few hearts along the way. But people will love you if you love yourself.”
Featured image by Natasha Baldin.
