The secret lives of women, out loud: Shannon Calcutt brings her new show Things I Shouldn’t Tell You to SkirtsAfire, Theater News

The last time we saw Shannan Calcutt on a stage in Edmonton, she was wearing a red nose, a wedding dress, and an irresistible air of hopefulness.

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That’s how the engaging Izzy shows up for a blind date, heart on sleeve, in the first of Calcutt’s hit clown trilogy (Burnt Tongue, It’s Me, Only Better! and Out Of My Skin) that’s tickled audiences across the country.

When we see Calcutt this week, she won’t be wearing a red nose or a costume. She’ll be starring in a new solo show, her first since Out Of My Skin in 2000,  as … Shannon Calcutt. In Things I Shouldn’t Tell You, premiering at SkirtsAfire Thursday, she’s sharing herself. “It’s about me, it’s about my life.. It’s kind of a love letter to women, being a mother, and a daughter, and perimenopause,” declares the cheery voice on the phone from Las Vegas. “It’s the first time IN MY LIFE I’m not playing a quirky over-the-top character…. I put on some mascara and lipstick and that’s it!”

“I had never heard of perimenopause,” Calcutt says. “I didn’t even know the word…. Nobody warned me.” And when symptoms like brain fog, shaky memory dry mouth, insomnia, loss of libido started, she was freaked out.  “What is happening to me? “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this? Not my mom, my aunts, not even Sex in the City…. I thought two things, I was either losing my mind, or it was early-onset dementia.”

The new show is all about that, framed in personal terms, interacting with the audience, fuelled by clown energy, the spirit of inclusiveness, and the call for a community, bonded by laughter. “We’re all in this together.”

She talks about things that are, unaccountably, mysterious, secret. taboo, even. “I talk about how I’m raising teenagers (she has two) and caring for my mom who has Lewy body dementia … and then every day a new perimenopause symptom and trying to negotiate everything.”

Calcutt’s first show, a couple of decades ago, had an eight-page script; Things I Shouldn’t Tell You has 52. “It’s about memory loss, and I’m trying to memorize it. So the joke’s on me!” (more laughter, and the  moment to warn you that Calcutt has one of those contagious laughs that would make people at the next table in cafes lean in, enviously).

Where has Calcutt been? She came to Las Vegas in 2005, to be in the Cirque du Soleil’s X-rated cabaret Zumanity (Izzy’s hilarious routine with home-made Ziplock baggie breast implants was a showstopper). “I planned to stay a year … and here I am!”

Zumanity didn’t survive the pandemic. So after 15 years, Calcutt started working at Spiegelworld in Vegas, “as a clown, then a director, then resident director.” And more recently, she finished a 10-month contract with Cirque du Soleil’s Mad Apple, as Anita Dick — “so, high-brow comedy,” she laughs —  “a cocktail waitress who crashed the show… It was a lot of fun!” (a favoured Calcutt phrase).

More lately still (her Cirque contract ended last May), Calcutt directed “an immersive experience” as she puts it, in Vegas’s giant, and hottest, new venue The Sphere. On a massive screen, the movie The Wizard of Oz is showing. “In the tornado, if you’re wearing a hat it’ll blow off…. It’s really a fun experience.” After the movie, in the atrium, Calcutt has devised an immersive encounter with the Wizard whose face is on screen. “And the audience gets to interact.” As she describes, the Wizard considers requests, in an apotheosis of improv technology. “I’d like to win a million dollars,” say, and the Wizard might say “with the exchange rate in Oz it comes out to $42.17.” Or “I want the Winnipeg Jets to win the Stanley Cup” and the Wizard might say “I’m a Wizard, not a miracle-worker.”

“They get to be in the moment with him. So it’s a lot of fun!”

In addition the Saskatchewan-born Calcutt, a noted clown teacher and mentor on both sides of the border, leads workshops for Cirque, and teaches at the clown school. And she’s spent a lot of time and anxiety negotiating care facilities for her mom, four in the course of a year; this very week her mom moves from Saskatoon to the little town of Wynyard, Sask.

So, “my day job is show director for The Wizard of Oz Experience.” Her night job is … playwright. And for two years, working on Things I Shouldn’t Tell You, she’s been on Zoom with her own playwriting mentors, clown guru Jan Henderson and storyteller star T.J. Dawe: “together, and laughing.”

“The show starts with a warning,” says Calcutt. “Kind of like a public service announcement: this is what’s coming” (laughter). She recounts a scene of being in the laundry room, holding up two pairs of panties — her daughter’s with period stains, her mother’s with urine stains, a veritable life arc in underwear. “Women spend their lives in diapers, Pampers to pull-ups to pads,” and back again, as she says. “It’s truth-telling,” and there’s a kind of continuity with her professional clown skills, she thinks. “I’m calling on my clown courage to talk about these things — there’s nothing I won’t say or talk about — and have a laugh.”

Act I is the personal report. “I’ve always been a very confident person; now I have insecurities, suddenly I’m anxious like I was when I was a teen. I have acne; I talk about this as our second puberty….” Act II of the new show is “an opportunity to ask me anything or tell me anything,” says Calcutt. And, again, the fearless clown expertise in improv and interaction is the fuel. “This should not be shameful experience,” she says of perimenopause. “It should be as loud as life, and that for me is the clown energy, the desire to trumpet the truth.”

“It’s a wild ride, and I think it’s universal…. It’s having a laugh at all the craziness. We should  be approaching it with humour and connection, have a laugh together, and celebrate our ridiculousness.” As opposed to “hiding in the party and having a cry by ourselves, with a bag of chips. Which I’ve also done.”

Vag of Honor, party favour at Things I Shouldn’t Tell You, SkirtsAfire 2026. Photo supplied

Calcutt thinks of the show as a launch for a new thing, perimenopause coming-of-age parties, with their own Sweaty Betty mocktails (“here’s my gift registry, let’s have a second puberty sleepover!”). And it comes with party favours, a chance to have your own Vag of Honour air freshener to hang in your car or closet.

“I always tell my students ‘ if it’s personal it’s universal’.” Calcutt laughs, “and now I’m having to practise what I preach.”

PREVIEW

Things I Shouldn’t Tell You

SkirtsAfire Festival 2026

Created by and starring: Shannan Calcutt

Where: Walterdale Theatre

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Tickets: skirtsafire.com