Myla Southward as Carmen and Julie Orton as Velma in Scarlet Woman by Matthew Wells. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

Lunchbox cooks up a top-notch noir greatest hits

Take a pair of talented dames (Julie Orton, Myla Southward), a wise guy director (Mark Bellamy) who never forgets to make it fun, and a swell script (by Matthew Wells) that’s a greatest-hits compilation of every film noir archetype ever written, and what do you get?

Scarlet Woman, the new Lunchbox show, which is murderously good fun.

There’s a plot — and then some. There’s a young woman who will stop at nothing to uncover the sordid story of her family’s past, which is full of half-sisters from various fathers — it’s a family tradition — most of whom have met untimely demises.

(At least that’s my interpretation of the (hugely convoluted) plot of Scarlet Woman, and I’m sticking to it.)

You have to keep up with this clever show, written by Matthew Wells, as he wheels out a bevy of femme fatales and the bozo men who would fall for them — often, with tragic consequences.

What makes Scarlet Woman such a comic treat is the tightly-choreographed work by Orton and Southward, who each play about a half-dozen characters apiece, each of whom will feel quite familiar to anyone who ever sat up watching Bogie classics on AMC.

What’s dazzling is the way in which first Southward, then Orton, turn on a dime, transitioning from character to character — from femme fatale (Orton) to hardbitten gumshoe detective (Southward) to larger-than-life nightclub owner (Orton) to cowering, naive daughter (Southward) out to seek justice from the man who wronged her family (Orton).

Along the way, we come across a collection of film noir-era southern California castaways who feel as if they just stepped out of outtakes of Mildred Pierce, the Maltese Falcon and Chinatown, as the duo keep up a steady, relentless patter of exposition that keeps changing, and shifting, the deeper we get into the story.

Orton has always been a comedy master, and she’s at the top of her game in Scarlet Woman, where she has perfected her high, arching Gloria Swanson-Joan Crawford withering gaze, her come-hither stare and added a few new ones — scotch-drinking ladies’ man, anyone?

Southward is every bit as good, matching Orton’s Joan Crawford glare with a priceless series of ingenue reaction shots, particularly every time someone says the word “fire.”

It all relies on perfect timing, and a certain wink at the source material, which Bellamy delivers with an elegant piece of directing. The pace never flags, even as the exits and entrances keep piling up, and the complexity of the plot ratchets up ever more. (Almost to the point where you lose track of it, but not quite).

It’s almost as if Bellamy whipped up a combination of all those murder mysteries he directed in his years running Vertigo Theatre, with the farcical comedy of Shear Madness, which he starred in, to come up with the formula for staging Scarlet Woman.

It isn’t easy to turn a Monday at the tail end of a Canadian winter into something special. Lunchbox’s funny homage to film noir manages to pull off the feat.

Scarlet Woman

Until March 23 at Lunchbox Theatre

Four stars out of five

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These actresses all took turns at playing the femme fatale in 1940s film noir.

Lunchbox Theatre’s current offering, Scarlet Woman, plays on the classic stereotype these women made famous.
“It uses all the iconic things we know about femme fatales, all those women who smoked and could be dangerous killers,” says director Mark Bellamy.

Bellamy is returning to his roots with this production — having served as Vertigo Mystery Theatre’s artistic director for a number of years, it’s a genre he feels particularly at home with.

He resigned from that post at the end of last season to pursue a freelance career, and he’s been fully booked ever since.

“I haven’t had any downtime since Vertigo. It’s been really busy. It’s been wonderful,” he says.

Written by Matthew Wells, Lunchbox’s staging of Scarlet Woman marks the first, fully produced Canadian production of the show, aside from its 2011 Fringe tour, where Bellamy first came across it.

“It was really fun and funny,” Bellamy recalls, adding that with its 50-minute run time, he thought it a perfect fit for Lunchbox.

“You can tell Matthew Wells watched a ton of film noir to absorb the style and ambiance of it, as it’s very much written in that cinematic idiom. There are fast-talking dames and all kinds of great hyperbole,” he says. “It’s a loving spoof of all of these great films…. Everything is done with a wink to the audience.”

Scarlet Woman features two actors: Julie Orton and Myla Southward, each of whom plays about 10 different characters throughout the show.

Bellamy says that despite Scarlet Woman’s comic touch, it has “a complex little plot.”

“There are more twists and turns in this show than I have ever worked on. Wells wrote the most complicated plot a person could make, which becomes part of the humour,” he says.

But Bellamy is loath to reveal much of that plot. All he’ll say is that the mystery revolves around a stolen fortune, multiple mistaken identities and a dead tycoon.

Add some crooked lawyers, some gangsters, some atmospheric lighting with plenty of shadows and, of course, a femme fatale or two, and you’ve got Scarlet Woman.

Bellamy says one–act murder mysteries are fairly uncommon and are “a bit tricky” to pull off.

“Normally, in a mystery play, you need an act one cliffhanger that isn’t going to be in a one-act play,” he explains.
That said, Bellamy adds, even large theatre companies are starting to incorporate shorter plays into their season lineups, plays that run without an intermission.

“We’re trending away from the two–act structure, and one-acts are becoming a little more common,” he says.

Read More: http://www.ffwdweekly.com/article/arts/theatre/in-praise-of-dangerous-dames-10488/

New York-based playwright Matthew Wells wrote Scarlet Woman, presented by Lunchbox Theatre starting Monday, March 4.
Photograph Courtesy Lunchbox Theatre

Scarlet Woman

Lunchbox Theatre takes a turn to the noir in its new production, Scarlet Woman. The play, written by New York-based playwright Matthew Wells, features two actresses playing 12 characters and explores the archetype of the femme fatale. Wells talked with Jon Roe about his love of noir and the strange way female characters are empowered by the genre.

What drew you to this idea of writing a play about the femme fatale? It wasn’t my idea originally. It was originally commissioned by Candy Simmons, an actress friend of mine who had been doing a one-woman show at a Canadian fringe festival for a couple years and wanted to do a two-woman show. She called me up and said, “What do you know about film noir?” And I tried not to lecture her. She described the idea, she wanted to get into this whole femme fatale thing. She wanted something that was going to be femme-fatale based and look at female characters in that kind of universe.

Do you have a favourite noir author? Raymond Chandler probably. Not even probably, that would be definitely.

What is it about Raymond Chandler that you like? It would be a mix of the darkness of the world and yet the lyricism of the prose. It’s lush the way he describes the world. It’s also very point-of-view lush. I think the Philip Marlowe character as a narrator and a detective has become so much of an archetype that we forget what it was like to read him for the first time. I think everybody has their favourite Chandler book. Mine is The Big Sleep. It’s that vision, the way he describes Los Angeles, and the world this guy moves in, that makes me come back to it all the time.

So when you were approached with this idea, you jumped on it because you loved Chandler so much? Yep, Chandler—the books and also the movies. (Dashiell) Hammett to a certain extent, but he doesn’t do the femme fatale as much as this. Chandler always has bad women, there’s always either a bad blond or a bad brunette, or sometimes, like in The High Window, there’s both.

What is it about the film-noir genre that makes it perfect for exploring the relationship between two female characters? One of the reasons I like film noir is because it’s weird—it gives with one hand, but it takes away with the other. It empowers women, but it’s usually empowering the bad women. The women get a say over what they do, who they’re with. But those women are always the ones you have to watch out for. They’re portrayed as man-killers—not even portrayed as man-killers, a lot of them do end up killing men just to get what they want. It’s this weird, we’re-going-to-empower-you thing with one hand and, on the other hand, we’re also going to condemn you for it.

Scarlet Woman: Monday, March 4 to Saturday, March 23 at Lunchbox Theatre, 160, 115 9th Ave. S.E. $17 – $20. 403-265-4292 ext. 0, lunchboxtheatre.com.