Evelyn Jacob

SPOTLIGHT FEATURE

HE LAST time | inter-

viewed actor Wendy

Noel, she was playing a
lonely, frightened woman
who was obsessed with
death, pregnant with a histo-
ry of miscarriages and strug-
gling to come to terms with
her brother’s death from
AIDS. Offstage, her mood
was black.

Now she’s starring as the light-
hearted sister who manages to
rise above all that is bleak in Irish
dramatist Brian Friel’s Dancing at
Lughnasa, and this time, she’s
feeling great. So let’s hope she
doesn’t have to play Lady
Macbeth anytime soon.

“I love Maggie,” Noel, who is
starring in the Arts Club produc-
tion of Friel’s work, says of her
character.

‘t's a great fun part. She’s a
telief, and | think the audience
tikes that.

“In Kelowna (where she
played the same role) people
would come up to me after the
play and ask, ‘Are yoll really like
that in real life?’ | said, ‘No. |
wish | was!’”

Dancing at Lughnasa focuses
on the relationship of five won-
derful, middle-aged sisters —
their lives, loves, eccentricities,
and how they deal with the return
of their brother, a priest “gone
native” during a posting at a
Ugandan leper colony.

Noel, 36, heard just over a
year ago that an exciting new

STAGE ACTRESS Wendy Noel says after her stint in Dancing

NEWS photo Neil Lucente

at Lughnasa she wiil take a leave to spend time with her family.

work by Friel was sweeping the
London and New York stages.
Better yet, it offered some decent
roles for womer:. So when
Kelowna’s Sunshine Theatre
announced it would mount the
work — the first company in
Canada to do so — she was
attracted to it like a bee to

TERE AE 12504 MARINE DR.
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Okanagan honey.

As it tumed out, she and the
rest of the cast were given a scant
two-and-a-half weeks to stitch the
show together. But what came
out of rehearsals, she says, was “a
wonderful production with a lot

See Jessie nomination page 2B

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