lnicholls@thejournal.canwest.com
The Edmonton Journal 2007

EDMONTON - One of Edmonton theatre's most consistently surprising little companies will launch its upcoming 32nd season with a play that garnered big interest -- and a big star, Jill Clayburgh -- for its New York premiere last year.

The Busy World Is Hushed renews Northern Light Theatre's relationship with American playwright Keith Bunin, whose breakthrough piece The Credeaux Canvas was onstage at The Third Space in 2004.
NLT artistic director Trevor Schmidt calls The Busy World "an intimate little play, beautiful and painful, about three wounded people, searching for belief -- in God, in love, in each other. Delicate, thought-provoking, under the radar, hard."

Saskatoon's Skye Brandon directs a cast that includes Holly Turner as biblical scholar Hannah, Farren Timoteo as her estranged atheist son, and Schmidt himself as the outsider hired to help with Hannah's latest publication. "I'm scared and excited," says Schmidt, rarely onstage himself at NLT. "I know it will be a life-changing play for me."

3 Different Heavens premieres at NLT next season. This new two-hander from actor/writer Nathan Cuckow, author of StandUpHomo and star of Kill Your Television's Monster, gives us two high-contrast mothers brought together by a terrible accident involving their sons. Schmidt, who directs, explains that "one is urban, liberal, outspoken, ballsy; the other is rural, conservative, low-key, Mormon." The two actors (Blair Wensley, Coralie Cairns) play the middle-aged mothers, plus the other woman's son. "A seminal play," says Schmidt, "and one that will continue to have a touring life after our production."

With the provocative Cherish, Ken Duncum, a New Zealand writer unfamiliar on this continent, brings to the stage a contemporary family consisting of one gay couple and one lesbian couple, with a custody battle involving surrogacy. Schmidt's Canadian premiere production stars Sue Huff, Brad Loucks, Nadien Chu and Richard Meen. "It's all about responsibility to self and responsibility to others," says Schmidt. "Ah, and lost potential; I'm a sucker for that."

In his casting choices and play selection, Schmidt has always been at pains, as he says, "to develop new talent and new work." With the 10th anniversary edition of Urban Tales, which weaves four original new scary tales into a whole, NLT launches another innovation: the country's first live webcast of a professional show.

The scenario that links playlets by Darrin Hagen, Rosemary Rowe, Jason Chinn and James Hamilton is a rock band, BiFurious, of the "where are they now?" persuasion a la ABBA or Fleetwood Mac, trying to create their farewell album. This season's artistic intern Taylor Chadwick returns to head the project.

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