On Thursday January 18th, The Theatre on King (TTOK) starts their year off in a big way with Ryan Kerr’s production of French playwright Jean Genet’s The Maids.

Part psychodrama and part thriller, the play features the talents of Lindsay Unterlander, Kate Story and Sheila Charleton in a challenging show that is intelligent, suspenseful, and highly erotic. In a theatre known for presentation of bold drama, The Maids could be one of the most provocative plays presented at TTOK to date.

Originally presented as Les Bonnes in 1947 at The Theatre de l’Athenee in Paris, The Maids is loosely based on the real-life 1933 Papin murder case that shocked France and became a popular subject and symbol of class struggle for numerous French artists and philosophers, including Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Christine and Léa Papin were sisters hired in 1926 as live-in maids by retired solicitor Rene Lancien. Known to be quiet women who caused little trouble and kept to themselves, the pair became infamous when they brutally murdered Lancien’s wife and adult daughter in a violent assault on February 2, 1933. Offering no explanation for the attack, the sisters were tried and imprisoned, but not without gaining public notoriety for their high-profile crime.

The real-life case in an interesting one filled with incest, lesbianism, manipulation, and insanity, all of which are covered (or hinted at) in The Maids.

By researching this fascinating piece of criminal history prior to seeing the play, I felt it only helped intensified the drama on the TTOK stage. Although the character’s names and events have been changed, The Maids plays out as if Genet is trying to make sense out of the Papin sisters’ motives, by giving them life beyond the sensationalized headlines and contemplating who they were and what their life was like to lead them to murder.

I highly recommend that audience members taking in the play at least read the Wikipedia entry on the Papin sisters. Trust me: once you read that and then see this play, you’ll want to learn even more about the real-life sisters who inspired this drama.

Genet’s The Maids is a character study of sisters Solange (Kate Story) and Claire (Lindsay Unterlander) who, while their mistress (Sheila Charleton) is away from the great house, delight themselves by wearing her dresses and smothering themselves in her jewels as they indulge in a hyper-sexualized role-playing game of mistress and servant, all ending with the fantasy of murdering their mistress. However, as one sister’s resentment about the balance of power between the two sisters and the actual mistress intensifies, the boundaries between fantasy and reality begins to blur — with deadly results.

Already a fascinating script due to its background story and the strength of its writing, TTOK’s production of The Maids is also brilliantly executed by three of Peterborough’s top actresses. Together, they are a fearless trio who weave together one of the most unapologetically tantalizing productions I have ever seen.

Although it is an uninterrupted one-act play, The Maids is separated into four different scenes without a pause. The first is the initial role-playing scene, the second is a scene between the sisters set in reality, the third is a scene between the sisters and their mistress, and the fourth is the second and final role-playing scene. Each of these scenes examines the nature of the power struggles between the different characters, with each relationship constantly being turned on its head.

Kate Story as Solange plays the older of the two sisters. She is the angrier and more dominant of the pair and seems to be teetering on the edge of insanity. Despite her dominance, she shows painful submission to both her sister and her mistress, which can be analyzed as the cause of her fractured emotional state. Constantly resentful of her role in the mistress’s home, and within society itself, Solange becomes a personification of pain and resentment.

A complicated character, Solange is portrayed masterfully by Kate, who gives this character many dimensions. Kate’s brightest moments are in the fourth part of the show, where she delivers a five-minute monologue of insanity that becomes more and more terrifying as she continues. Equally fierce and fragile, Kate creates a character who lies somewhere between villain and victim.

Meanwhile, Lindsay Unterlander creates an equally complex character as the younger of the two sisters, Claire. Fierce and abusive in her role playing as the mistress, in reality Claire is the meeker and more sensitive of the two sisters. However, there seems to be more contradictions within Claire than Solange, making the audience question her true feelings and motives.

Does Claire really hate her mistress? What is her relationship with the milk man that her sister keeps talking about? Is it possible that, despite her gentle persona, Claire could be more murderous than her explosive sister? Throughout the show Lindsay puts on the different faces of Claire, as if she is creating a single character with split personalities.

Although her role in the show isn’t nearly as large as that of the sisters, Sheila Charleton creates an interesting character as “The Madam” and adds a third element of complexity to the show. It isn’t completely clear what her true feelings towards the sisters are: at times she seems quite maternal towards them, but always with a tone of smug condescension. She is always aware of the class difference between herself and the sisters and, while she seems genuine in her interactions, she also seems to dismiss the sisters as if they were personal pets or objects to be owned.

While The Madam is on the stage, the sisters who stand so ferociously before the audience without her suddenly shrink in submission. It is difficult to watch the callous way the sisters are manipulated into being less than human by their employer. Sheila creates a woman who is her own kind of evil, although she possibly doesn’t even realize it. The result is a third complex character who is also interesting to watch.

One of the most intriguing things about The Maids is the different combinations in which the three characters exercise dominance over one another. There is the way the sisters continue to switch dominance over each other when they are role playing mistress and servant, and then the way they do the same when they return to reality as sisters. Then there is the dominance of the mistress over the two sisters and her individual relationship with each of them.

This constant power struggle, which flips constantly between characters, is the factor of the show that keeps the audience constantly reanalyzing the bizarre relationships between the characters.

What really comes to the forefront of the drama is just how erotic the piece is. Although it never becomes staunchly sexual, the role playing and power dynamics between the sisters — as well as their violent fantasies towards their mistress — border on a kind of kinkiness that’s subtle at times and anything but at others. It really makes the audience begin to question what the sisters’ relationship and feelings towards their mistress are, not to mention each other.

This is an element in the play that no audience member will be able to overlook, but it also becomes the most fascinating part of the performance. It takes a lot of trust between the two actresses to give that kind of performance, and Lindsay and Kate play off each other incredibly well.

The Maids is an intelligent and dark thriller and one of the boldest and most cerebral shows I’ve seen at TTOK in the years that I’ve been doing reviews for kawarthaNOW. I was absolutely captivated by the show and the performances by the three actresses who bring such an interesting drama to life. Ryan and his company have created another memorable show for TTOK, but I can easily say The Maids is one of the most engaging shows I’ve ever seen in this space. If this is the way that TTOK is opening 2018, then its audience has a lot to look forward to.

The Maids runs from January 18th to 20th at The Theatre on King (159 King St., Suite 120, Peterborough). Performances begin at 8 p.m. and tickets are $15 or pay what you can.

After what has been a long and often emotional journey, local filmmaker Lester Alfonso is putting the final touches on his long-awaited documentary Birthmark, which will have its debut screening on Sunday, January 28th at Showplace Performance Center as part of the ReFrame Film Festival.

As the premiere draws closer, Lester is feeling a new kind of anxiety in regards to showing the film to an audience for the first time.

“It just makes me so nervous,” Lester reveals. “I feel scared because it’s a big deal for me. I mean, my birthmark is on the film, and everyone is going to see it. It’s the first time I’ve shown my birthmark to this many people. It’s a big deal for me to have to go through this ritual. It’s really a ritual of me owning up to my people — my family, my community.”

As the film coordinator for this year’s ReFrame festival, Lester has the unique experience of debuting Birthmark at the same festival he is working at.

VIDEO: Birthmark Trailer

At 72 minutes in length, Birthmark is his first feature-length film and his third completed film. His first film, Trying to Be Some Kind of Hero, made its debut in 2001 followed by his award-winning short film Twelve in 2009. As Lester points out, he seems to complete a film every eight years.

Although Lester and I first spoke about Birthmark in 2016, Lester has been developing the film since 2010. It has been an emotional and often psychological exploration for Lester, one that has taken him on a number of unexpected personal twists and turns with his own birthmark with which, for his entire life, he has had a difficult relationship.

“As a child, an incident happened in which I absorbed and solidified in my head that my birthmark made me the marked one and that I was the cause of bad things that happened,” Lester explains.

While he didn’t often think much about his birthmark as an adult, his mind unconsciously went back to it when trying to come to terms with a sad time in his life.

“When I got divorced, I thought at that time it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me,” Lester says. “I wondered why this had happened to me. When it happened, the first thing I thought of was that it was because of my birthmark. That really connected to a self-loathing I had learned, from believing that I wasn’t as lovable because I had a mark. I thought that was something worth exploring.”

Although Lester had his own difficult relationship with his birthmark, he began the process by filming interviews with others around our community about their birthmarks.

“I started off with an idea, knowing there was this thing about my birthmark,” Lester explains. “But really, I didn’t have an excuse to talk about it to other people unless I had a film to make. I’d be able to say ‘Hey, I’m making a movie about birthmarks’ and then it’d give me an excuse to ask ‘Do you have a birthmark?’

“Through the ritual of talking to people, I end up healing myself because there is so much power knowing that you are not alone. I started finding out that people had their own stories. It was just their own personal family stuff, or local lore. It became a local anthropology. But as I talked to people, I ended up having flashbacks of memories from my past.”

While filming these local stories, Birthmark hit a unexpected turning point in 2015 when Lester presented a script to Mysterious Entity’s Script Club that he had created in 2010 while first developing the film. As local performers acted out the script, Lester began to dig up long-buried memories to the surface, which affected the direction of the film.

“After getting the grant to make Birthmark in 2015, as part of the development process, I rescued the script out of the bottom of my drawer and brought it to Script Club in April 2015 and recorded the reading for a podcast called Soundproof. It was an inspired night, a heated conversation came afterward, and I realized then that this was potent. I realized a lot about myself just by taking the story outside of myself and getting others to read it.”

Lester brought his script back to The Theatre on King later that fall and filmed a group of local performers acting out the script. That footage has been used throughout the film to help tell his own personal story.

“I knew then that I wanted to film this experience when the time came,” Lester says. “So in October 2015 Em Glasspool, Dianne Latchford, Susan Newman, Rob Fortin, Ryan Kerr, Kate Story, Sarah McNeilly, Tobias Bernstein, and Simon Turner from The Theatre on King community came out to help. Rob Viscardis shot video. Wayne Eardley shot old school Super 8 film. This is what made it to the film.

“Script Club brought to life my past and the reason I was doing that for my film was because I needed to extract a story outside of myself. Having worked with members of the Peterborough arts community, and having them support my projects, means a lot to me.”

To bring Birthmark to the big screen, Lester has assembled an incredible team to help him tell the story, including local filmmakers Rob Viscardis, Angel Hamilton, and Wayne Eardley, and is working with editing consultant Mike Munn and sound editor Michael Phillips.

“I really lucked out on my collaborators,” Lester says. “Mike Munn said to me the other night ‘You’re really blurring the lines between performance art and biography.'”

Although a few of his friends and collaborators have seen the film, Lester feels that it is important to show the film to a wider audience beyond his immediate circle.

“I need to show Birthmark to people who don’t know me,” he says. “Otherwise I don’t know if I’ll get honest feedback from people who know me. It’s a huge difference for me to be at the sacrificial altar of the church of cinema. I just feel so exposed. I signed up for it, and I knew this was going to happen, but it doesn’t ease my nervousness.”

Lester admits that the most difficult people to show the film to will be his own family — who he has yet to show any of the footage.

Lester made the film for his daughters, Sunny and Georgia, but so far has not had the chance to arrange a screening with them. As a result, they will be seeing the film for the first time at the January 28th premiere.

In the case of his parents, Lester made the request they do not attend the premiere, so that he can show them the film in a more private setting at a later date.

“My mom wanted to come to the world premiere,” Lester says. “It was hard, but I asked my parents not to come. They play such a big part in the film, and I play such a big part in the festival as the technical coordinator, that I’d have to be in work mode the whole weekend. Dealing with showing the film to them for the first time might be a little too much.

“I’m really not sure what kind of reaction it’s going to get. I’d rather show them the film myself afterwards, maybe at another festival, when I’m not also working.”

Now that his journey with Birthmark is nearing its climax, has Lester’s relationship with his own birthmark changed? The answer to that is not so easy.

“It’s hard to get it out of my mind,” Lester reveals. “There might be some technical glitches with the film, and every time something goes wrong I go back to my birthmark. I need to say ‘Lester, you can’t think that’, but I automatically go back to it as a default.

“This birthmark is part of what I’m the most ashamed of and that is something I need to get rid of because it’s not really serving me. There is no need for me to be ashamed of this. That’s the whole ritual of the film. This movie is me, literally, extracting this thing I live with that I was ashamed of and putting it on the screen for people to see.

“Birthmark is my most personal film to date, the hardest film I’ve had to make to date, and my longest film to date. I really want everyone to come and to participate and help me get through this.”

As part of the ReFrame Festival, which runs from January 25th to 28th, Birthmark will be presented on Sunday, January 28th at Showplace Performance Centre at 2 p.m. Audiences can get into all of the films throughout the weekend with the purchase of a festival daytime pass ($29.99 or $19.99 students/underwaged), but admission to Birthmark will be pay what you can for those without a ReFrame pass.

For more information on the ReFrame Film Festival and to read about the other films being presented at this year’s festival, which runs from January 25th to 28th, visit reframefilmfestival.ca.