Coming of the storm

During their brightest moments in the theatre, Sharon Bajer and Elio Zarrillo’s work could be described with the same language the weatherman employs when delivering the daily forecast: sunny one moment, cloudy the next, with the steady chance of a storm.

But the meteorological lexicon struck too close in the fall of 2022, when the playwrights’ homecoming comedy The Outside Inn had its world première in Antigonish rocked by the arrival of an antagonist who stared down on the Nova Scotian production with a destructive, unforgiving eye.

“Hurricane Fiona came just before we were about to start rehearsals,” Bajer says.

According to the American National Hurricane Center, Fiona manifested in Nova Scotia as an “extremely large extratropical cyclone” with a minimum pressure of 931 millibars, making it the deepest cyclone on record to make landfall in Canada.

With winds gusting as quickly as bullet trains, roofs being blown off and cars flipping over, the artistic director of Festival Antigonish was trapped in her house by downed trees and powerlines, while Bajer and Zarrillo headed to Halifax’s Neptune Theatre to avoid the wrath of the oceanic gods.

After the storm died down and it was able to enjoy its run through the puddles, The Outside Inn — originally commissioned by Prairie Theatre Exchange — found its audience, but for both the rational and the superstitious, it was an ominous prologue to a family comedy about removal at a remove.

The Outside Inn, Zarrillo’s and Bajer’s first joint writing project, started with a few car rides home from rehearsal in 2017, when Bajer was appearing in Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s production of Brad Fraser’s Me Now, a show Zarrillo worked on as an apprentice director.

That wasn’t the only thing the two had in common, they soon discovered.

“We both had mastectomies in the same year,” says Zarrillo, whose operation was a gender-affirming procedure. Bajer’s surgery was to treat her breast cancer.

“Then you started to talk about a story or a play about some kind of relationship that involves two folks who had different experiences, but in relationship to each other, going through that kind of journey. And then, I think, quite concertedly, I inserted myself and said, ‘Well, what about this? Maybe I could be the person you write this with.’”

But Bajer wasn’t ready yet to write about that stage in her life; it took a few more years before the idea of working together resurfaced at cruising altitude.

“I was on a flight home from L.A., coming back to Winnipeg, which always sounds significantly fancier than it is, and I heard a kid say something on the plane that just made me think of the play,” Zarrillo recalls. “The kid was having a terrible time, repeating, ‘When are we going to land, mom?’”

Midair, Zarrillo flipped down the seat-back tray table and got to work sketching out a few scenes inspired by the outburst, reflecting on the unsettled realities of a parent-child relationship.

“It was really neat how we began this because some plays begin with a premise and others begin with sketches of ideas,” Bajer says.

The Outside Inn started with a shared experience, and the rest of the show’s development was spent trying to find a way to unite those through narrative.

Before figuring out the play’s final setting, Bajer and Zarrillo considered other locales: a wrestling ring, a restaurant, a kitchen, an apartment or a cabin, but all roads eventually led out of town, Zarrillo says.

Soon, the playwright/performers had also established character sketches of the roles they play: a mother named Lily and her child Patrick who reunite in a physical and spiritual sense in the final setting, a camper van on the outskirts of somewhere.

As the initial components solidified, the two co-writers worked with a pair of dramaturges — Arne MacPherson and Brian Drader — before continuing script development with the play’s eventual director, Annie Valentina.

“I think our goal right from the outset was to talk about this pretty heavy subject matter but in a way that’s both fun and funny, all without diminishing the seriousness,” says Bajer, whose past writing credits include Molly’s Veil, Burnin’ Love and Afterlight.

“Anytime I tell people about the play, I say, ‘It’s about a mother who was diagnosed with breast cancer, and shortly thereafter, her trans adult child shows up on her doorstep asking to move home for a while to save money for their top surgery, so the two of them are undergoing these double-mastectomy journeys,’” adds Zarrillo, whose family drama Volare ran last season at PTE.

“Then I get to the end of my spiel and people are like … ‘Oh!’ And then I say, ‘Yes, it’s a comedy.”

It’s a spiel Zarrillo and Bajer have been fine-tuning since the show’s première in Antigonish, and Bajer says that’s exactly how it should be, with the first run serving as a testing ground for understanding the material and how it’s best conveyed.

“People put a lot of stress on the première, but it’s actually the second production that is crucial,” she says. “You learn so much from the audience, especially in a comedy. Where they’re laughing, where they aren’t, where you’re hitting them and where moments need to breathe. I’m really excited to do this. I’ve only ever done the first productions in Winnipeg of my shows.

“This is going to be a lot of fun.”

An optimistic forecast ahead of tonight’s opening, when Bajer and Zarrillo will take the stage under partly cloudy skies.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com