In one of the early scenes from the new sketch comedy series Southern Interior, women are doing yoga on stand-up paddle boards on Kootenay Lake with the Nelson bridge in the background.
But one of the women, older and not as fit as the rest, has fallen off her paddle board and can't seem to get back on. As she awkwardly struggles 鈥� with actor Lynne Karey-McKenna playing this to maximum comic effect 鈥� the others are blissfully ignorant of her plight.
Their self-absorption is among the light-hearted jabs taken at Nelson in Southern Interior, a series of six 10-minute comedy sketches that satirize and celebrate the city, written and shot with an all-local cast and crew while designed for TV audiences.
The paddle board sketch moves on to different stories and scenes, but occasionally returns just for few seconds to show us that Karey-McKenna's character is still in the water, still struggling, and still funny. Later still, a drone camera zooms far back above the bridge to show that all her yoga compatriots have gone home, the sun is going down, and Karey-McKenna has the entire expanse of Kootenay Lake to herself, finally on that damn board.
Nelson filmmaker Amy Bohigian, who directed the series, has been living and breathing Southern Interior since she conceived the concept four years ago. Her work culminated in three screenings last week at the Capitol Theatre, beginning with one on Thursday just for cast and crew and their guests.
"To be in the room with everybody watching that, I was just overjoyed," Bohigian said. "Just having everyone in one place was just so joyful and humbling."
Four actors 鈥� Karey-McKenna, Michelle Hart, Lucas Myers, and Jonathan Ramos 鈥� play multiple parts in the sketches accompanied by various supporting actors and extras. The lead writers were Hart and Jackie Atkins, and the project was produced by Gregory Mackenzie with cinematography by Bohdan Doval.
Bohigian said Southern Interior is now being pitched to Canadian streaming services, and expects a release announcement soon.
Veteran actor Myers has been doing one-man shows for 22 years, and collaborating with the cast and crew in Southern Interior made him realize he missed his earlier days in theatre.
"One of the great joys was creating a show with a group of people and having that sense of collaboration and the sense of accomplishment," he said. "It's like being on a team and winning a game."
Myers saw the filmed sketches for the first time from his seat in the audience Thursday night. His main response, he said, was relief. The sketches looked both absurd and believable, he said, and that was the goal.
"We were all believable as people," he said. "The moments were true ... We were all real human beings in those situations."
The locations were easily recognizable to Nelson audience members. The sketches were shot at such places as the Kootenay Co-op, Whitewater Ski Resort, the Hume Hotel, Potorium, South Nelson Elementary School, the Capitol Theatre, the Nelson Farmer's Market, City Hall, Gyro Park and Lakeside Beach.
Some of the sketches have their serious side, showing us that the cool people of Nelson can be all the things they pretend not to be: judgmental, racist, homophobic, superficial, pretentious, insensitive.
"Good comedy exposes truths," Myers says. "There's kernels of of truth in all of these things, and I think comedy is such a good way to access those, because it's a gentle way to kind of be like, 'Hey guys, you know, we have these these judgments and these perceptions, and we're human.'"
Bohigian says they wanted to make some sketches that were pointed. She wanted the series to have a point of view.
"You want the audience to start processing something that maybe they haven't before, and that was the core of the whole show. We are holding a mirror to some things that aren't easy, but at the same time, comedy is the thing that can get people to kind of loosen up and laugh a bit about about themselves."
