A cross-border Fringe story, with a fistful of firsts: meet the creators of Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS

This is a cross-border/ cross-festival/ cross-platform/ cross-time zone story in which the Fringe has a plum role (and Zoom has a bit part).

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The route to Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS, opening Thursday at Mile Zero Dance (aka Fringe Stage 30), “has a lot of firsts,” says Rainier Pearl-Styles, with Nicholas Chieffo its co-creator and co-star.

The clown characters, as she explains, are two guys going to a grocery store, “and realizing they don’t fit into categories of manhood society places on people. They spend the next 40 minutes trying to figure out how to be men, in a way the world will approve…. It is a play! There is a plot!”

And it was developed largely on Zoom, since Pearl-Styles, the new managing producer of Common Ground Arts here, moved to Edmonton from the U.S. on the first day of the Fringe six years ago (a sign, surely!) with her theatre artist wife Emilia Fox Hillyer, a puppetry specialist. And Chieffo, Boston-based, “a brilliant musician and composer” as his stage partner reports, works with the Fork & Shoe Co-operative. “Things started to really open up for them after Emilia and I moved to Edmonton: five shows a year, a new works festival, an in-house band … a lot of what they do seems like Common Ground Arts stuff!” says Pearl-Styles, who now oversees  such varied multi-disciplinary ventures as the Prairie Mainstage Series, the Found Festival, and RISER, an initiative to support and mention indie theatre artists.

Rainier Pearl-Styles and Nicholas Chieffo in Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS, Holy Scoundrels Theatre. Photo supplied

She and Chieffo have collaborated before, “me as a director and facilitator, and Nicholas as music director and composer,” with puppets by Fox Hillyer. The pandemic was an instigator, since she joined him in the Boston apartment he shared with his roommate Fox Hillyer. “We all got laid off from our food service jobs. And we started making little virtual puppet shows, a fun thing to do when we were all stuck together inside.” They called themselves the 13 Pratt Theatre Company, named for the street where they lived.

Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS is something of a return to the stage for Pearl-Styles, who arrived in Edmonton with an Ivy League double degree in theatre studies and religion, and a master’s in applied theatre. ”Most of my artistic practice has been in devising, and new work creation, but I’ve often been on the facilitator side of it.” One of the theatre projects she’s most proud of facilitating, for example, involved “a group of people responding to Macbeth and its themes,” and arriving at a show that wasn’t an adaptation of the Scottish play, but a piece “about the choices we’ve made and getting stuck in a cycle of violence.” It led to a master’s thesis that was an alternative curriculum of sorts, designed, she says, “to prove that you learn about Shakespeare without reading Shakespeare.”

100 Foreskins For My Hand In Marriage, the solo performance she premiered at the Calgary Fringe last year under the Fork & Shoe banner, was “the first time I’d performed in a full-length play in five years. A lot of fun,” she says of a piece that re-tells ancient biblical stories of King David from the perspective of his wives.

“Writing, creating, and performing together isn’t something Nicholas and I have done before…. We came up with the name The Holy Scoundrels to have a container for the sort of work we want to do.” Additionally, neither had ever developed new work on Zoom, another first. “It’s a very different process than it would have been if we’d been working in person….” says Pearl-Styles. Instead of “showing up in a room and playing around till we came up with something … we’ve both been doing a lot of independent writing and bringing it to the Zoom room.” From the themes they came up with, an outline emerged. “And from the outline a flow of scenes … and writing it from there.” Pearl-Styles went to Boston for two weeks for a development workshop; Chieffo came to Edmonton for a weekend of photo shoots in May.

They’ve had a clown consultant, Jan Henderson, the best in the biz. And what has emerged is a clown character dynamic of the classic Joey and Auguste tension. Like Fingers and Shrimp in Dayna Lea Hoffmann’s Rat Academy, and Mump and Smoot, Pearl-Styles plays Jeff, the Joey character who’s “in charge and grumpy.” Grungled, played by Chieffo, is the Auguste, a more wide-eyed, eager-to-please naif of the pair.

“We talk a lot,” Pearl-Styles says of the characters, but Henderson has been advising the actors on how to make the show more “muscular” and let the physicality do some of the talking.

Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS, Holy! Scoundrels! Theatre!. Photo supplied.

Why a grocery store? That setting “was one of the first things we decided,” says Pearl-Styles. “It’s a microcosm of society at large … just two guys doing something everybody does at some point.” And that opened conversations about “perceptions of gender identity…. I’m someone whose gender expression matches my own identity as a cis person,” which means the scrutiny isn’t particularly focused or intense, not like the world’s “hyper-perception” of Jeff and Grungled. The grocery store voice-over, “Attention shoppers!”, says Pearl-Styles, is the sound track of the patriarchy “enforcing certain rules.”

And as for the Fringe, it’s a big draw in Pearl-Styles’ new world north of the border. “One of the big excitements to moving to Edmonton was the Fringe, getting to be part of the Fringe scene, getting to know the Fringe community.”

It’s a deep dive, since in addition to Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS, (which runs through Aug. 23), she’s curated the five other Fringe shows with it in the lineup at the 100-seat Mile Zero Dance BYOV on festive Beer Street. “I tried to curate a variety of pieces, from Edmonton, Canada, internationally.” And the line-up there includes a large-cast dance show (Storybook Skin), a puppet show (12 Angry Puppets), a musical satire (Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour), a solo show (tony wrestles a stranger), and a couple of two-handers (Gerald, Jeff and Grungled…).

“So many requests,” says Pearl-Style happily. “So hard to pick!”