Play explores Medicine Hat after horrifying murders Healing of community takes precedence in Castle in the Sky

Stephen Hunt | Calgary Herald

A few years back, Francesca Albright and her younger brother Jude Allen were aspiring playwrights in search of a subject, when they picked up the paper. The big story of the day was the murder trial of Jeremy Steinke, the 23-year-old on trial for murdering the family of his then-12-year-old girlfriend in their Medicine Hat home. The crime itself was horrifying, the details unimaginably dark and grim, almost beyond the imagination of even the most lurid dramatist.
That's when Albright asked her mentor, playwright Gordon Pengilly, whether he thought there might be a play there. "We asked Gordon, 'Do you think it's too soon to go out there and see if anybody (in Medicine Hat) wants to talk?' " says Albright. "He basically said, 'You know what? If you have the guts, go and do it.' "
Thus, Albright and Allen launched their own investigation into the Medicine Hat murders,which they have shaped into Castle in the Sky, a docu-drama that investigates the fallout the murders had on the Alberta community of Medicine Hat. The play is being presented in Calgary on Friday and Saturday at Ignite, Sage Theatre's festival of emerging new theatre artists at the Pumphouse Theatres. "We gathered over 200 hours of interview time," says Allen, a 26-year-old student in the classics at the University of Victoria. Pengilly took their transcribed interviews and helped the duo structure them into a narrative of sorts, told through verbatim transcripts of interviews with Medicine Hat residents. Albright admits that they did receive some backlash from exploring the murders, but just as often encountered lots of Medicine Hat residents who wanted to talk about the impact the murders had on their lives.
"Our intentions have always been good," she adds. "And the way we figured it is that our story is about the aftermath. It's about the fallout. It's about how they (the murders) affected the people in the town. It's not so much about the incident itself -those people aren't in our play. It's about healing."
While they devoted several years of their lives to exploring the project, and discovered things that weren't generally known to the public, Albright confesses to being no closer to Albright admits that they did receive some backlash from exploring the murders, but just as often encountered lots of Medicine Hat residents who wanted to talk about the impact the murders had on their lives.
"Our intentions have always been good," she adds. "And the way we figured it is that our story is about the aftermath. It's about the fallout. It's about how they (the murders) affected the people in the town. It's not so much about the incident itself -those people aren't in our play. It's about healing."
While they devoted several years of their lives to exploring the project, and discovered things that weren't generally known to the public, Albright confesses to being no closer to understanding how it could have happened.
"There still is a huge why," she says. "We went in there looking for answers and we answered certain questions, but we came out with more. Nobody's ever really going to know what happened. It's just more about certain precautions that could have been taken, or should have been taken, and I'm not talking from the parents' perspective, but the community's -and yeah. sWe'll never know."