Review: Conjoined sisters sing a story that’ll settle in your soul


Time distends, truths are revealed or peeled back, and you’re never sure if what you’re seeing and hearing is real or the fervid imaginings of the duo.

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The bond between sisters is a special thing.

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It’s especially true when the siblings in question are conjoined twins. Juno (Rebecca Sadowski) and Venus (Kaeley Jade Wiebe) Hollis, daughters of Jupiter and his mermaid wife Ida Mae are not only connected by a “thin bond of flesh,” they make do with three legs and arms between them. You’d think that it would cause playing the guitar they hold between them an impossibility, but the two have figured out a system involving Juno strumming and picking, Venus fretting the chords.

It’s the twin’s talent as a musical duo that allows them to think beyond the house their father has kept them carefully hidden in, far from the prying eyes of the residents of Square Lake. Cloistered on a farm surrounded by cornfields, Juno and Venus have barely any contact with humans other than the awful, shaven-headed Barlow Boys. The only time they get a hint of the outside world is when they tune their radio to the locally-produced Red Rooster Music Hour, enjoying the spectral sounds of gospel, folk, country and blues floating through the airwaves.

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It all sounds like something out of a mid-’80s Tom Waits album, though Trevor Schmidt (director and book) and Wiebe (music) have fashioned something beyond where even the bard of carnies, outsiders and sideshow freaks normally wanders. By turns charming, funny, horrifying, sweet and sad, Northern Light Theater’s Two-Headed/Half-Hearted pulls on emotional muscles you never thought you had as Juno and Venus sing and occasionally narrate their strange life in rhyme. Sitting together on a bench in front of their ramshackle house as the audience wanders in, surrounded by significant artifacts of their life, the two squabble, sulk, make up, gradually showing their very different personalities.

In between the musical narration of their family’s history, they also sing about their shared fascination with both conjoined twins and mythologies through the centuries. Such as Chang and Eng, perhaps the most famous conjoined case in the modern era, and the Japanese mermaid Amabie who — legend has it — had a bird beak for a mouth and three tailfins. Morbid and weird stuff, but no more so than the Appalachian plaints you’ll hear on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

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It’s all a bit of a fever dream. Time distends, truths are revealed or peeled back, and you’re never sure if what you’re seeing and hearing is real or the fervid imaginings of the duo. Like characters in a Flannery O’Connor novel, the “Harmonizing Hollis Sisters” are caught up in a destiny both heartbreaking and clear-eyed, best summed up in the lyric, “Some bonds you can break, by choice or by fate, while some can’t be torn from the day you were born.”

Schmidt, Wiebe and Sadowksi have done genuinely great work here, but plaudits need to be given to a couple of other contributors as well. Two-Headed/Half-Hearted benefits from the talents of lighting designer Roy Jackson, who keeps the stage set in eerie gloom aside from a few spotlight moments, while Deanna Finnman needs congratulations for the twins’ Patsy Cline-inspired wardrobe, which of course features three armholes. The indeterminate era, which could be somewhere in the ’30s or ’40s, is nicely conveyed by a junk drawer set filled with small seahorse and starfish statues, a gramophone and cello, doll parts, a straw hat carelessly thrown at the foot of the stage.

There are plays that leave you feeling satisfied, and others that give you a sense of lightness, but Two-Headed / Half-Hearted will have you thinking about it for a long time after.

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REVIEW

Northern Light Theater’s Two-Headed / Half-Hearted

when May 7

where ATB Financial Arts Barns

tickets Starting at $20 at northernlighttheatre.com

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