Sketch-comedy-storytelling show Lxdy Parts: Babes finds laughter in the darkness of motherhood
At The Cultch’s Warrior Festival, comedic writers Katey Hoffman and Cheyenne Rouleau explore a messy new life phase
Katey Hoffman (left) and Cheyenne Rouleau. Photo by Owen Wong
Lxdy Parts: Babes is at The Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab from April 16 to 18
IN 2016, BESTIES Katey Hoffman and Cheyenne Rouleau took the Vancouver Fringe Festival by storm with The After Party, where teenage outcasts Jules and Fiona try to find a prom-night blowout with the help of a little drug-induced time travel. (It’s a long story.) Nabbing the Cultchivating the Fringe Award, it went on to become a stage phenomenon called The After After Party.
Among the hilarious adolescent adventure’s fans was Pi Theatre’s Richard Wolfe, who asked Rouleau and Hoffman to create a new, equally irreverent show. It was out of this that the sketch-comedy series Lxdy Parts was born.
Fast-forward almost a decade, and times have clearly changed. Resurrecting the comedy night for the first time in five years at The Cultch’s Warrior Festival, Lxdy Parts: Babes will tackle motherhood—a far cry from the party-hearty antics of The After After Party, the show that gave birth to all this.
“They were kind of pre-motherhood caricatures of ourselves,” Hoffman reflects. “And I was thinking about this just this morning about Jules and Fiona: my two toddlers behave in those ways! Just the ridiculous scenarios that they get themselves into, and they’re always scheming with each other.”
Clearly, Hoffman and crew are seeing life through new eyes these days. In Lxdy Parts’s unique interweaving of storytelling and comedy sketches, she and Rouleau—along with director Pippa Mackie, plus performers Leslie Dos Remedios and Brynn Peebles—explore, with brutal honesty, their experiences of having small kids.
“Motherhood is so multifaceted, and I don’t know if anything can truly capture what it is,” Hoffman offers. “So I think what we’re trying to do with this Lxdy Parts: Babes is just a big mashup of all the ways it’s changed us—just what it means to be a mom. And I think we’re leaning into the humour that is found in being a mom, but also going to the darker places too, because maybe that isn’t portrayed enough. We’re trying to capture all of it in this kind of imperfect, messy show that is a lot of fun, because at the end of the day, that’s kind of what motherhood has been for me.
“Motherhood is so hard,” she adds. “There are some dark days—dark—but it’s also magical and wonderful and silly and terrifying. So I think we did feel a bit of responsibility with this installment, whereas in the past, maybe we were... I don’t want to say flippant, but maybe a bit more chilled-out.”
Anyone who has seen Hoffman’s observations on motherhood on her Instagram feed for Life With Kiki (her YouTube kids’ show) knows she pushes back against the type of social media–sanctioned perfection that’s constantly fed to millennial moms. Whether trying to stuff a stack of diapers in a suitcase or attempting to get a toddler to wear a toque in the winter, she’s a refreshing antidote to the perfectly coiffed Insta-moms preparing braided brioche and peony bouquets while their toddlers sit contentedly and watch.
“It’s so unreasonable—the expectations of mothers nowadays,” Hoffman says. “I’m not sure if it was always like that, but I don’t think it was as bad. You have to be perfect, and you have to be doing it all, all the time, and you have to go back to work, and you have to bounce back with a perfect body, and it is just so, so sad.”
Adding to the pressures on millennial moms, she adds, is the fact that moms of her generation want to parent differently from the way they were raised.
“So we’re holding ourselves to this,” the playwright explains. “Society is, you know, holding us to a standard, but we’re also holding the standard to ourselves. Because, I mean, we love our parents. They did the best they could with the resources they had—they didn’t go to therapy like we are. And the ironic thing is, we might be fucking up our kids in a completely different way because we’re so in tune with our emotions and we’re so into gentle parenting that, yeah, maybe it’ll turn out to be worse for the next generation—I don’t even know!”
You can expect some of those ideas to pop up amid the monologues and skits in Lxdy Parts.
“One sketch is about reckoning with who you are now versus your old self,” Hoffman notes, “and another is about the expectations on men versus women.”
Hoffman and Rouleau pen all the sketches, while their special guests perform self-created monologues on the theme. The script-creation process with Rouleau has changed in these years of early wakeup calls and early bedtimes: both put their kids to bed, then write in the evenings. Hoffman admits she felt rusty going back to writing after a five-year break, but the chemistry she and Rouleau have developed over the years soon kicked back into gear.
“We quickly slipped right back into our usual way, which is we have a conversation when we’re writing,” Hoffman explains. “She takes one character’s voice, I take the other, and the sole aim is to make the other person laugh. And so when Cheyenne is laughing, because she has impeccable taste, I know that I’ve done a good job.”
When she looks at those laughs in Lxdy Parts: Babes, she realizes that the subject matter has changed drastically from The After After Party, but the sense of humour still feels the same.
“What’s always been important to us in our comedy, is that there is truth,” Hoffman reflects. “We find humour in the darkness and the dark parts of our life. You know, The After After Party was about these really desperate, sad teenagers who were absolute losers and loners and couldn’t get into a party, so they had to go to the most drastic, absurd measures. But at the end of the day, it’s quite sad. And so I think with Lxdy Parts: Babes, there’s so much to laugh about, because if we weren’t gonna laugh, we’d cry. That’s motherhood.” 
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