The tacit understanding that eccentricity and passion, illicit or otherwise, are inimical to Alberta history gets exploded in the course of this intriguing little show created by MAA & PAA Theatre and produced by the Provincial Archives of Alberta. We meet two characters who embody both concepts, separately and together. One is the English-born photographer Ernest Brown, whose oeuvre constitutes a visual history of this city, especially valuable considering Edmonton's benighted penchant for tearing things down, then wringing its collective hands only when it's too late. He even provided the civic landscape with a solid building, the Ernest Brown Block on Jasper Avenue, which opened in 1912 (and got seized eight years later).

The other is Gladys Reeves, an English emigree as well, who landed a job at the Ernest Brown Limited in 1905 as a typist, door answerer and wrapper of frames. Then she moved up to photographer's assistant, then photographer. And for 40 years she carried on a torrid affair with Brown, a married man of the bewhiskered Victorian variety. As we learn in the course of this two-hander, co-fashioned by director David Cheoros and historian/archivist Karen Simonson, Brown was a man of decisive opinions, some of them strikingly progressive for his time and some of them just plain odd. His letters, the source of authentic dialogue, reveal that he looked forward to the two-hour work day, for example, in an era, yet unborn, when "Christianity, not Church-ianity" would prevail. This "stern British patriarch" thought nothing of inviting Gladys, whom he nicknamed GaGa (I kid you not), to tea with his wife and son. She understandably declined.

The co-authors frame the story as flashbacks from Brown's funeral, as projections of vintage photographs and letters play behind and across actors Mark Anderako, who plays both father and son, and Heather D. Swain. If there is something significantly missing at the centre - no doubt because history doesn't document it - it’s the mystery scene where the spark is ignited, and propriety on both sides is sidestepped. When Gladys tells us that Ernest was the grand passion of her life, we have to take it on faith. There's a moment when you long for a little poetic licence.