Graduating Rosebud student gives depth to diverse roles

Times Contributor 

 

Natalie Gauthier performed I, Claudia in Rosebud, April 6 to 8. It was the culminating production of her four years as a Theatre Arts student at Rosebud School of the Arts.

In this play, by Canadian playwright Kristen Thomson, Gauthier acts all four characters, starting with 12-year-old Claudia, who is, on top of the usual pains and fears of a 12-year-old in puberty, going through the trauma of her parents’ divorce and her father’s remarriage.

She also plays Drachman, a new Canadian, the custodian at Claudia’s school. And Claudia’s recently-widowed grandfather. And Leslie, her father’s fiancé.

Thomson wrote these characters with such insight, and Gauthier portrays them so distinctly, so powerfully, the audience identifies with the hurts and hopes of each one.

Gauthier’s portrayal of 12-year-old Claudia is so convincing, it brings back our own memories of what it’s like to be no-longer-child but definitely-not-adult.  She’s struggling to emerge from her cocoon – at least she hopes it’s just a cocoon – and wonders if maybe, under all her awkwardness, she’s actually, truly, a butterfly.

We relate to Drachman as he reminisces over the broken dream of a prominent theatrical life in his home country, which was over almost before it began.

We feel for Claudia’s grandfather as he sorrows for his wife and longs for a new love. And we feel tenderness as each of these aging men sacrifices his own wellbeing to protect Claudia’s fragile happiness.

We want to hate Leslie, who broke up the marriage of Claudia’s parents and is about to marry Claudia’s dad – yet we ache with her too, and we understand her own confused hopes. We understand, reluctantly, that perhaps she too is a butterfly, struggling to free herself of a cocoon that doesn’t fit.

We laughed aloud and wept silently as we saw ourselves in Gauthier’s characters — in their pursuit of simple happiness, in their inability to avoid failing each other, in their desire to do just one thing that is good and right.

Gauthier — who says that, in I, Claudia, she reveals more about herself than in any of her previous performances — worked hard to process the emotional depths of these characters. She hoped, she says, that she’d convey that same depth of emotion to the audience. And she has done it. She has done it well.

With this Final Project complete, Natalie Gauthier is scheduled to perform in Winter Tale at Full Circle Theatre in Calgary in May. This fall, after graduation, she’ll stay around the village to perform in Rosebud Theatre’s Our Town.

 And after that? What performances will come from Gauthier in years to come? In what ways, and how deeply, will she touch future audiences? I, for one, can’t wait to find out.