Crabapple Trolls in Production
From story to stage. Clowns, improvisation and audience participation. What a production!
Many film or play scripts come from stories or novels. Sometimes I miss the parts of my stories that are misplaced during the production. With clowns, improvisation and inclusion of participants from the audience, I never know quite what will happen in a performance. There are always surprises!
Crabapple Trolls
I wrote this story when I was in a workshop with Herbie Barns at Manitoba Theatre for Young People. We turned it into a script and then tried out the first part with a Grade 5 class. They loved it.
I played the show in many venues. I whittled it down to its basic scenario and worked off of that. When I travelled, the troll masks could be worn by local actors and I would find a local musician to work with us. With the main characters played by children in the audience, the show was actually fairly portable. Sometimes I used the animated cups talking to each other for the family as part of the storytelling and sometimes Agnes was simply the storyteller and narrator.
The Story Begins
One day Amanda was lying on her bed day dreaming. She was watching the horses and cowboys on her green curtains ride to the flow of the wind. They were her brother Brody’s curtains. Cowboys weren’t for girls. She thought she heard a rustle in the closet.
Her baby sister pushed open the door to her room and crawled in.
“Amanda, is Betsy there?” called her mother.
“Yes Mom, I’ll watch her,” Amanda answered.
Betsy brought in the sweet smell of toast and crabapple jelly. Betsy loved to play in shoes in Amanda’s closet and she loved to feel the fabric of Amanda’s dresses.
Amanda’s closet was full of dresses because her aunt in Vancouver loved to shop and whenever she could she would send Amanda a fancy new dress. Although Amanda could never wear all of them (she didn’t have anywhere to wear them!) she loved to keep them and dream about wearing them.
Her brother Brody thought that she spent too much time daydreaming. Not that he would play with her. He was three years older and felt himself too important to play with her. But there weren’t many other kids to play with in the new development, so instead of playing with her he used to spy on her and criticize her. She was glad that he had gone camping with her father, but she was lonely.
The baby headed for the closet. Amanda’s daydreams were broken. She rolled off the bed and crawled to the closet. She would have to watch that Betsy didn’t get anything small in her mouth and that she didn’t suck on the shoes.
“You’d better not get my dresses sticky,” Amanda admonished Betsy. “You smell like crabapple jelly.”
Amanda saw the dresses rustle a little. Then she noticed some green shoes that she didn’t remember buying. They looked like Mermaid’s flippers with claws. Suddenly a scaly green hand that matched the shoes reached out from between the rose velvet and the crinkly blue. The hand grabbed Betsy’s shirt.
The baby’s eyes opened wide before she could cry and she was gone.
Amanda was stunned. She froze for one minute and then started frantically ripping at the dresses. As she cleared a space, she saw a rough hole where the floor boards had been broken at the back of the closet.
Without thinking Amanda lowered herself through the hole and found herself hanging from the basement ceiling in the dark storage pantry where the preserves were kept. She could hear munching and breathing in the corner. She jumped to the floor and lunged into the corner. She felt a scaly slimy body wrestle with her and slide out of her grasp. She heard Betsy’s muffled cry, then she hit her head on a cupboard and fell on the floor.
When she awoke everything was silent except for the dripping of broken preserves. Amanda would have thought she was dreaming but she could still see the light coming through the hole in the floor. She managed to stand up. She leaned on the door and it opened. She went to find her mother.
Popcorn Philosophy - Reflections on Crabapple Trolls
In this piece I was trying to reconcile memory and move pieces from my past into the present. I loved my creek and our big garden when I was growing up. I sought solace in the bushes by the creek where everything was alive. The creek was the centre of my universe in many ways. It changed from roaring water in the spring to a tiny stream in the fall. There were six kids close to my age at my end of the block. We had freedom to play within the rules that we had to stay on the block and come fast when our moms yelled for us out the front doors. The creek was beside my house on a corner, so we had two culverts we could go through and play in, one each street. All along the banks were bushes and my yard sloped down to the creek. In summer we rolled down the hill and in winter we tobogganed or slid on cardboard. In winter the snow plow would dump a mountain of snow by our yard, by the edge of the bridge over the culvert. We would dig holes and tunnels into it. Our yard was extended by the creek and my dad took care of the grassy field that followed the banks towards Ness Avenue. One culvert led to the fields of the High School and the community centre. The culvert beside my house led to the fields of the golf course where we could hunt for pussy willows and watch white rabbits against the snow turn to grey in the springtime. We used to shovel the creek in the winter to skate along its bumpy surface. We pretended we were ballerinas.
I have a community garden now at the far end of my old street. It’s good to touch the earth. I feel like I’m a plant with roots close to home.
Odds & Ends
Laugh at the Fringe with this clown and her trolls - CHVNRadio.com
Written by Judson Rempel Thursday, Jul 27 2017, 4:30 PM
We had a very different crowd in our studio today, as the clown and trolls from Crabapple Trolls showed up to talk about their show and why they make people laugh.
Aunt Aggie is telling her story to adults and kids at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival this weekend. Crabapple Trolls tells the story of Amanda, who wants to escape her family and stumbles across a culvert where only children can go. The creek is full of life and maybe some trolls.
"It came from a story I wrote about 10 years ago," Aunt Aggie said. "We're finally bringing it to stage for kids and it's so much fun."
The theme behind the show is about memories. "Things that happened in our childhood influence us as adults and they are often cherished memories that make your life richer."
Aunt Aggie is the clown who runs the show, but Sue Proctor is the woman behind the nose. Proctor isn't just your regular clown though. She has her Masters in clowning.
"[I] went to Concordia in Montreal and studied theatre and clown," Proctor said. "It's really interesting how every group of people has a need for a clown."
She says it's just like other studies and even wrote a 130+ page thesis paper on 'The Archetypal Role of the Clown as a Catalyst for Individual and Societal Transformation'.
"When [I] was younger, I clowned . . . at different festivals around the country," Proctor said.
Clowning is something that Proctor loves to do and believes that you sometimes need to be silly.
"It's a wonderful thing to make kids laugh," she said. "It's something we all need. We all need to laugh, we all need to find that enjoyment.
"It's harder to really stop and have a belly laugh and enjoy yourself. Children especially really need it."
References
Proctor, Sue. The Archetypal Role of the Clown as a Catalyst for Individual and Societal Transformation. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/977096/