Bringing True Crime to the Stage: Marquita Lynn Walsh’s She Is Here

Publicity poster for She Is Here by Marquita Lynn Walsh. Livestream tickets available for the April 25 performance.

During the first two years of COVID, theatre companies across Canada provided innovative live-streamed productions, and it was a joy to be be able to watch a range of works from the comfort of home.

Once the theatres were fully operational in person, most of them dropped their online access, which can be expensive as well as cumbersome.

But the LSPU Hall in St. John’s, Newfoundland continues to include a livestream for some productions, including late April’s new play, She Is Here.

Marquita Lynn Walsh’s first full-length play is based on a painful true story: the murder of a teenage girl in a small town in Newfoundland twenty-six years ago, by a young man who was only sixteen. He was sentenced to life, and released in 2013.

The murder victim’s mother runs a café that memorializes Samantha Walsh.

And the playwright, I learned from the play’s director, Jillian Keiley, has family ties that make this an acutely personal story for her to dramatize and fictionalize.

Here’s the description of Marquita Walsh’s new play:

“Based on the tragic and true story of Samantha Walsh, which shocked the province in the winter of 2000, She Is Here follows the disappearance and murder of a young girl in a remote Newfoundland community, threatening its idyllic safety forever. Years later, our protagonist, Jess, returns to the community for Come Home Year and is met with the disturbing news that the murderer’s family is also returning. Childhood memories of the harrowing search for the missing girl come surging back as Jess, now a folk singer, struggles to find her voice again.”

This is challenging material. The play’s cast is excellent, and Keiley is one of Canada’s premiere directors. Definitely worth trying to see, and the livestream is appreciated.

There have been previous efforts to depict true crime in Canadian theatre, ranging from the famous Donnelly family trilogy by James Reaney to Pig Girl by Colleen Murphy. Murphy’s December Man explores the aftermath of the Montreal Massacre; and, of course, the powerful Unnatural and Accidental Women by Marie Clements is an indictment of the social forces that made some women’s lives (and deaths) easy to ignore because they lived in Vancouver’s run-down Single Room Occupany hotels.