YAGA retells the story of the wicked old witch, from a powerful woman's point of view
The play by Kat Sandler launches Touchstone Theatre’s 2022-23 season
Colleen Wheeler. Photo by Emily Cooper
Touchstone Theatre presents YAGA by Kat Sandler from October 27 to November 5 at Historic Theatre at The Cultch
BABA YAGA IS among the best-known figures of Slavic folklore, widely seen as a female ogre who lives in a forested hut built on chicken legs that’s surrounded by a fence topped with human skulls. The wizened, villainous monster steals, cooks, and eats her victims, who are usually children. She rides in a mortar propelled by a pestle that she carries in one hand while in the other she holds a broom to brush away any trace of her tracks, commanding a flock of black geese. There are numerous other interpretations of the character, from Slavic goddess to Earth Mother, trickster to agent of change. The one that appeals most to Dora Mavor Award-winning playwright Kat Sandler, however, is that of the wicked, old witch—and it’s an archetype that the artist gleefully turns on its head in YAGA.
Kat Sandler.
Kicking off Touchstone Theatre’s 2022-23 season, YAGA is variously described as part thriller, part comedy, part revenge play, and part nightmarish fairy tale. Set in a small, isolated town, the genre-mashing work is on one hand a mystery centred on the disappearance of a college bad boy who happens to be heir to a yogurt empire. The town’s female sheriff (Genevieve Fleming) reluctantly lets a big-city private eye (Aidan Correia) help solve the case. The prime suspect is a seductive university professor, a forensic bone expert with a murky past and a hunger for young men, played by Jessie Award-winning actor Colleen Wheeler. Things veer toward the supernatural, however, as the mythic Baba Yaga starts injecting her dark magic into the tale, the play speaking to female rage, pain, and power.
“It’s really about a woman who is retelling her story against the way men have told it for centuries, of the wicked old witch,” Sandler says in a phone interview with Stir. “That, historically, is scary to us….Women just don’t get to have as much fun [as men] traditionally as anti-heroes. The stories that we’ve been told about them are really interested in seeing women that are good and pure, and if they’re bad it’s because something terrible has happened to them. I’m interested in bad girls who are allowed to be bad.
“There are lots of reasons Baba Yaga is the way she is; she is the person that was envisioned by men as this ugly, old witch that lives alone,” she adds. “I know so many women—even my own mom!—who are in their 60s and up and who are so hot and cool, and there’s a whole generation of women that I think don’t need to go gently into that good night. We can write sexy, vicious, funny parts for women for that age group. This is about women telling women’s stories.”
The artistic director of Toronto’s Theatre Brouhaha, Sandler, who’s also a screenwriter and director, has staged 17 of her original plays in the last eight years, including the simultaneous double bill of The Party and The Candidate (at The Citadel Theatre, where cast members raced back and forth between two theatres to perform in two political farces) and Late Night, a theatre-TV hybrid produced with Moses Znaimer that recently aired on VisionTV. Sandler’s Mustard (Tarragon Theatre, presented in Vancouver by the Arts Club Theatre) won the Dora Award for Best New Play, while Bang Bang and YAGA were nominated for the same honour.
Sandler was drawn to theatre because it was “the quickest way to get a story out of my brain and in front of an audience”, she says. “I don’t even really think of myself as a writer; I just want to get the story into someone’s mouth so we can talk about it. Stories become reflective; they actually mirror what society is finding funny and scary back to us.”
YAGA premiered in 2019 at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, and in Vancouver it is being directed by Touchstone Theatre artistic director Roy Surette. It works especially well as a theatre piece, Sandler says, because of certain plotlines that can only be effectively accomplished through certain theatrical devices that take live audiences on a journey. It’s a trip that Sandler says is magical, leaving viewers wondering what’s real and what isn’t.
What is not ambiguous is the way the play hones in on female strength.
“What’s fascinating to know about Baba Yaga is that she’s presented in so many different ways in different cultures that really run the gamut: from a wise woman to a healer to a mystic guide to someone who will help heroes on their quest,” Sandler says. “I love getting to see things from her perspective and how that translates to the modern day, from this old woman who lives in the woods eating bones to this sexy, wildly intelligent osteologist who sleeps with her students. She’s a powerful woman of a certain age with a massive intellect.”
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