The Martlet

It’s not every day that aliens beam your dog’s ashes into outer-space. But to one little girl, that’s exactly what she’s hoping for.

Orbit, a one-person play by recent UVic creative writing and environmental studies graduate Brie Wittman, won this year’s Intrepid Theatre Petri Dish award and has landed a spot in Intrepid’s popular Fringe Theatre Festival.

Although it started out as a third-year drama workshop assignment, Orbit has evolved to skillfully engage diverse audiences from UVic’s Find Festival to Intrepid Theatre’s Uno Festival in preparation for the Fringe debut.

On May 31, Orbit held a small audience captive at the Uno Fest preview.

Kaitlin Williams, the UVic actress who plays the 12-year-old girl named Chloe, brought the monologue to life with genuine laughter, tears and an impressive thread of youthful emotions.

By expanding Orbit’s original half-hour run time to an hour, Wittman teases out a comprehensive array of social issues through the imagination of Chloe.

But while the play spotlights issues surrounding mortality, race, loss of innocence and alienation, Whittman spares the audience a bludgeoning with Orbit’s charming pre-teen innocence.

Wittman said she has been honoured to examine these topics with Victoria’s well-regarded theatre community.

While the play is still being tinkered with in advance of its Fringe performance, Wittman expects the themes in the play could have much more life in them, perhaps to a Chloe-aged intermediate school crowd.

However, Wittman is quick to point out that while Orbit’s grounding in adolescence makes it accessible to a youthful crowd, the play is “relevant to everyone, and by viewing it you’ll discover surprising things within yourself.”

Victoria’s 22nd Annual Fringe Festival runs August 21st-31st.