The University of Lethbridge’s first main stage production of Phyllis Nagy’s play Weldon Rising takes the audience and the cast back in time about 30 years.
It meant director Richie Wilcox had to educate his eight member cast about the golden era of disco on the backdrop of the mean streets of New York City.
“It’s set in the 1990s, but there are also flashbacks going back to the 1970s. So I had to tell them all about disco and Studio 54 and people like Bea Arthur and Bette Midler
“They didn’t know them, which was definitely surprising to me so it aged me,” said director Richie Wilcox.
“There's a lot of music in this so I had to teach them about Janet Jackson songs and the like,” he continued.
Weldon Rising is about four witnesses to a hate crime and how witnessing this act of brutality affects their lives.
“And it’s about how these people come together at the end,” Wilcox added.
“ It’s not a comedy, but there is quite the comedy relief in Marcel,” he said.
The cast includes real life drag queen Jordan Payne as the drag queen Marcel, one of the witnesses to the crime.
“ We see him in the ’70s all full of life and then we see him as he declines and see how he ends up and struggles,” Payne said, adding, being a drag queen himself, he identified with some of the challenges Marcel faces.
“ My mom loves it. She finally got the daughter she always wanted, but my dad doesn’t support it,” he said, adding he started dressing in drag for the launch of a now defunct Lethbridge alternative culture zine, the Fourth Wave Freaks.
“ I was asked to dress in drag for a zine release for the Fourth Wave Freaks. It was something I always wanted to do and I got such a great response, it just took off after that,” he said, adding getting ready for his own show doesn’t take nearly as long as it does to put together all seven feet of Marcel including stiletto heels and towering purple wig.
“ For me it’s not about the look, it’s about the music and the lip synching and knowing all the words. So it usually it takes me a maximum of 45 minutes to get dressed,” he said, adding the biggest challenge is covering his “bushy eyebrows.”
“I think it addresses the issues we have to deal with in our society. I loved the character of Marcel. It’s important to look at the motivations for violence. I just wanted to promote discussion of how to approach violence,” Wilcox said.
“It’s been quite an amazing experience. I hope the audience has fun and enjoy themselves but also think about what they would do if confronted with a violent crime,” he said.
Costume designer Jorge Sandoval said the character of Marcel comes from the streets, so when designing him, they didn’t want a campy, exaggerated drag queen.
“It’s a time capsule, so costumes and make up had to reflect New York in the ’70s through ’90s,” he said.
“Marcel comes from the rough, ageless New York. He comes from the streets so we didn’t want a crude, theatrical drag queen,” he continued, adding he put in a lot of research into makeup styles of that era.
Set designer Ben Toner was born in 1992, after the events of the play so he also had to research the set and styles of New York City.
“It takes place in the grungy, meat packing plant district of the city, so we had to recreate that. And one of the set pieces has two floors, so I had to think abut that too,” Toner said.
“We had to recreate a world people don’t know that well,” he said.
Weldon Rising runs Oct. 20-24 at 7:30 p.m. at 7:30 p.m. each night in University Theatre.
Tickets are $18 regular, $13 senior/alums, and $12/students. Get yours at uleth.ca/tickets or call the U of L Box Office: 403-329-2616
A version of this story appears in the Oct. 21, 2015 edition of the Lethbridge Sun Times