Through funerals and drunken jokes, women find their place in the world at this year's Vancouver Fringe Festival
Bitches with Baggage sees two ex-friends reunite to mourn a high-school teacher, while A Man Walks Into a Bar emphasizes the importance of healthy communication
Samantha Kerr (left) and Hikari Terasawa in Bitches with Baggage. Photo by Valeria Santos
Vancouver Fringe Festival presents Curious Cats Theatre Collective’s A Man Walks Into a Bar at Ballet BC from September 6 to 15 and Bitches with Baggage by Roomie Productions at Arts Umbrella from September 7 to 15
AS THE SAYING GOES, we all have baggage—but when it comes to the lead characters in Bitches with Baggage, an original play by Roomie Productions premiering at this year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival, that rings especially true.
When two ex-BFFs who haven’t seen each other since a big blowout at high-school graduation find themselves back in their hometown together for a former drama teacher’s funeral, an opportunity for the women to reconnect presents itself. Written, performed, produced, and choreographed by recent Studio 58 alumni Samantha Kerr and Hikari Terasawa, the show delves into what it means to be female-identifying individuals pursuing careers in the performing-arts industry.
It’s quite a personal angle for the two emerging artists. Over a phone call with Stir, Kerr says that sexism, self-doubt, and competitiveness are all ever-present struggles in the entertainment field for women. On top of that, Terasawa—who is originally from Nagano, Japan, and immigrated to Canada in 2018 to further her acting career—has struggled to find her footing in the industry as a woman of colour. All of those experiences are compounded into Bitches with Baggage.
Samantha Kerr.
“I found that since I’ve graduated, I’ve had to create a lot more of my own work and be more of a self-motivator,” Kerr says. “I love being a woman and I love being in this industry, but I just find that there’s an extra level of difficulty to getting in the room for auditions for film, TV, or theatre. So we just have to be self-starters and create more of our own work.”
Kerr’s Studio 58 credits include roles in Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding directed by Carmen Aguirre and Diana Donnelly’s climate-change take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and last year, she performed in The Bright Young Things at the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival. She and Terasawa were roommates while studying at Langara College’s professional theatre training program, and after graduating last year, they cofounded the aptly named Roomie Productions with seven fellow Studio 58 artists.
“It’s been nice to have a team of mostly female-presenting people who can really relate to the story, and who are from all different backgrounds,” Kerr says. “It’s just been such a warm, kind, encouraging space to rehearse in and to explore.”
She describes Bitches with Baggage as “on the verge of absurdist in different dreamscape moments”; though it’s a dialogue-driven show grounded in comedy and drama, it also makes good use of her and Terasawa’s backgrounds in dance and musical theatre.
“This production is relatable for everyone in the industry,” the Coquitlam-based artist reflects, “but I think it can also be relatable for just most women in general—because I feel like we all struggle with finding where our place is in the world, and how loud we can be, and how much space we can take up in all sorts of industries.”
Matt Loop (left) and Sandra Medeiros in A Man Walks Into a Bar. Photo by Andrew Fraser
That same vein of finding one’s place in the world as a woman is present in another show at this year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival: A Man Walks Into a Bar, produced by Curious Cats Theatre Collective. Written by Rachel Blair (finalist for the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play), the play features a woman who begins to timidly tell a joke: “A man walks into a bar and meets a waitress...” When a man interjects to help her explain, things get competitive, and the line is blurred between narrators and characters as they begin to act out the plot of the joke.
Sandra Medeiros, founding co-artistic director of Curious Cats Theatre Collective with Maryth Gilroy and Karen Hamm, is starring as the woman alongside Matt Loop as the man. She describes her character as strong, honest, and “doing her best in a world that isn’t always geared for her”. And as for her male counterpart?
“He’s like any other man,” Medeiros tells Stir categorically. “He’s what you expect a man to be in all the ways, for good, for bad. He’s a human, and I think he’s also doing his best in a world that tells you sometimes how to behave, either as a man or a woman.”
The premise of A Man Walks Into a Bar brings to mind the term “mansplaining”, which first surfaced in 2008 after American author Rebecca Solnit published an essay online called “Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way”. In it, she describes how a man once approached her at a party because he’d heard she was a novelist. When she began describing her latest book about Eadweard Muybridge, the man interrupted her to ask if she had “heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year”, which he had clearly failed to realize was Solnit’s—“mansplaining”, commented a blogger to sum up the encounter, coining the word.
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, it’s essentially a condescending way in which men (albeit subconsciously) often explain things to women, rooted in the archaic assumption that they are more intelligent. And those gender politics are deeply ingrained in A Man Walks Into a Bar. While revealing the joke’s dark punchline would ruin its suspense (which builds gradually as more details unfold), the show is riddled with assumptions and contradictions that ring true to many women’s real-life encounters with men.
Focusing on all these nuances of the female-identifying experience, Medeiros says, seemed like a fitting first production for Curious Cats.
“We all had this visceral reaction to this play.…We as women, of course, have all experienced what is going on for the woman character,” she recalls to Stir of reading the script for the first time. “And so it felt like it was an important story to tell. It has all the different elements that a woman would want in a play—it’ll make you feel and think, and there are darker moments, and there’s also a lot of humour and human connection.”
Sandra Medeiros.
Medeiros is cofounder and artistic director of Naked Goddess Productions, as well as co-artistic director of Portuguese Buns Productions. She has known Gilroy and Hamm, who are codirecting A Man Walks Into a Bar, for about two decades now. The three have collaborated on an abundance of projects together over the years, most recently in Leather and Lace Theatre’s production of Calendar Girls (Medeiros starred in the show, while Hamm and Gilroy codirected).
According to Medeiros, founding a collective felt like a natural progression for the artists.
“We just knew that we got along really well,” she says. “We knew that each of us worked really hard together. One thing we talk about that’s kind of funny, that I think Karen came up with, is if a jar of marbles fell onto the floor, you would see who would reach over to pick up the marbles, who would ignore the marbles, and who would kick the marbles and make a bigger mess. And we’re the people to pick up the marbles—so we wanted to get together.”
Medeiros describes the two characters of A Man Walks Into a Bar as multifaceted, and hopes audiences can see the humanity in each of them. Bitches with Baggage exists on a similar plane of thought; both the women in the show are in the thick of identity crises, and there reaches a point where suddenly things don’t seem so black and white as friends and enemies, or right and wrong.
So while perhaps neither show will be the most comfortable watch, ultimately, they’ll provide opportunities for discussion around the pervading influence of gender bias in modern-day society. A key takeaway might be to listen a bit more carefully to what female-identifying folks have to say; acknowledging everyone’s thoughts and feelings with equal weight is the first step to healthy dialogue.
“It’s very eye-opening,” Medeiros says of the Curious Cats’ production. “I definitely think that people are going to see themselves in these characters. I’m hoping it’ll give them a deeper understanding of men and women, and their own selves. And I think it’ll definitely open conversations for people.” 
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