A digital audio play presented by the Arts Club until September 15, 2021
Tickets from $10 (or $30 for all four in the ‘Listen To This’ series) at artsclub.com
Posted February 16, 2021
Annie, a part-time instructor in the UBC Creative Writing department and tenure-track hopeful, is a character in Bronwyn Carradine’s digital audio play, Unexpecting. Carradine, like Annie, has a terrific ear for dialogue and that’s a good thing because Unexpecting was initially written for the Arts Club stage and was ambushed by the pandemic.
In order to turn the stage play into an audio play, Carradine had only dialogue and sound effects to work with – just like the olden days when families clustered around the radio listening to radio drama.
In the play, Annie is married to Josephine (Jo), an artist whose paintings of vulvas are not exactly flying off the easel. But Annie has an interview that will lead to that well-deserved tenure track job; and Jo has an exhibition with the potential for a deep-pockets buyer.
Things are looking good. All they need now is for the long-awaited adoption of a baby to come through to make their little family complete. Naturally, and not unexpectedly, the shit hits the fan.
Unexpecting opens in the world of realism: realistic dialogue, a believable and interesting situation and credible characters: Annie, Jo, their zany friend Pam and pregnant Sawyer. I was buying it until things went goofy and the play started to feel like farce: Pam shoved into the closet, a dishwasher crammed full of empties, ludicrous cover-ups (Jo claiming, “the door sticks” and won’t open it when Sawyer turns up) and general pandemonium. It’s possible that, on stage, we might get into the swing of things and find it funny: farce can carry you away if it’s good enough.
But as the silliness ramped up, my investment in Annie and Jo went down.
However, directed by Ashlie Corcoran, Artistic Director of the Arts Club, the action keeps hopping and the cast hurls itself into it with flat-out commitment. While Annie (AJ Simmons) and Jo (Emma Slipp) are the main characters, the most interesting one to listen to is Pam (Ghazal Azarbad). Pam is an over-the-top, nutty, heart-of-gold sort of gal. You can really ‘see’ her; I’ll bet she’s outrageously dressed, dripping with big jewellery and carrying a handbag that’s loaded with everything but the dishwasher.
Sawyer (Elizabeth Barrett) is the most problematic character. Without giving too much away, she’s in law school, pregnant, never been to a club, some sort of twenty-something innocent. The playwright doesn’t fill in the blanks and we’re left wondering how did she get pregnant? Who’s the father? What’s her story? We want to know.
Unexpecting is the stuff of sitcom without the laugh track. But Carradine rescues the play at the end when she takes a deeper dive into love, friendship, the dynamics of relationships, parenting, work and the real-life challenges facing couples of all combinations trying hard to put it all together.
Coming out of the Arts Club’s inaugural Emerging Playwrights Residency, Carradine, a Studio 58 grad, is young and proof that nurturing young writers pays off, especially if Carradine is able to put aside the less-credible, less-engaging aspects of sit-com and gives us the straight goods sans the farcical elements.