An actress who hails from Maple Ridge will be starring in a one-woman show based on true stories of her life told through family secrets.
Joanna Rannelli, a 1998 graduate of Garibaldi Secondary School, is the brainchild behind the production that is described as funny, touching, and thought-provoking – and which has also garnered many accolades from across Canada and the United States.
Private Parts: The Secrets We Keep promises to take the audience on a journey of love, loss, and, hopefully, forgiveness.
Kerry Ipema, based in Brooklyn, New York and the co-writer and performer of Six Chick Flicks, is the dramaturg, or the literary editor, and director of the show. Rannelli first met Ipema in 2022 at the Edmonton Fringe Festival.
“When I started to tell my stories to my director, she said, Joanna, there’s a theme here, there’s so many secrets,” explained Rannelli.
“It started to become a parallel between my mother and I, actually, and how secrets can affect us and even years down the road, what they can do to us,” she said.
What ultimately inspired the show was Rannelli’s need to tell her life story.
The production touches on the topics of adoption, death, disease, and forgiveness.
Rannelli has been acting since she was 14-years-old and has been performing and producing in Fringe Festivals for more than a decade.
“This is my first story-telling show,” she said. “I’ve never done a one-woman story-telling show before.”
Rannelli said it has been interesting to be on a stage and not be a character. “You’re it,” she said.
“And to say your own name on stage even, it’s so wild,” Rannelli exclaimed, noting that the production took her vulnerability to another level.
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It was also challenging, she noted, to get into the mind of her mother, and deal with the emotional rollercoaster of her own journey onstage.
Rannelli said she learned a lot from Ipema, who helped her to get her stories out, and how to get them out in a way that was conversational.
“My director and dramaturg is one of the most amazing collaborators I have ever met,” she said, adding that she also learned you can deal with some tough things in your life, as long as they are resolved, because then bringing them back to life is purposeful.
Rannelli hopes the impact of her show will allow others to look at the impacts of secrets in their own lives and understand the power of forgiveness.
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Private Parts: The Secrets We Keep premiered at the Orlando Fringe in Florida in May and went on to the Winnipeg Fringe Festival where Rannelli performed multiple sold-out shows and received rave reviews. At the Calgary Fringe Festival, Rannelli almost sold-out the entire run of the production and she is now up for a Theatre Critic’s Award for Outstanding Fringe Production.
Tickets are now on sale for the show which runs: 6:15 p.m. Friday, Sept. 8; 4:15 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 9; 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 10; 8:50 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 12; 5 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 14; and 6:45 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 16.
Admission is $18 plus a one-time Vancouver Fringe Membership fee of $10 per person.
The show takes place at 1286 Cartwright St., on Granville Island in Vancouver.
To purchase tickets go to vancouverfringe.com/events/private-parts-the-secrets-we-keep.