The Writer Speaks is a selection of interviews I’ve come across over the years on YouTube with a variety of writers including Charlie Kaufman, Christopher Durang, and Emma Thompson. There are many more of course but these are ones I’ve enjoyed and I think any writer interested in learning a bit about the creative process will enjoy these conversations as well.
For myself when I began a more serious attempt at putting something down on paper I read On Writing by Stephen King and I found there were a couple of lessons from King that worked well for me. Probably the most important one is not to share the work until you’ve finished the first draft.
In fact, once you’ve finished the first draft you put it in a drawer and leave it. Let some time pass. Then when you come back to it a month later you have fresh eyes and can read the story with a more analytical mind.
The reason you don’t share the story during the writing process is because you don’t want the story to be influenced by the opinions and thoughts of others. This works well for me but I know there are other writers who like to have input and getting feedback as they write is part of their process. I’m not saying you don’t need to share the work and get feedback I’m just saying for myself early feedback usually disrupts my writing process rather than helps it.
The key of course is to find out what works for you. There is no wrong or right. You’re not Stephen King or Margaret Atwood and what works for them may not work for you.
Anyway, I wish you well on your writing journey and I hope you find the interviews below as informative and entertaining as I have.
Selma Hortense Burke with her portrait bust of Booker T. Washington, 1930s. Smithsonian Archive of American Art. Photography by Pinchos Horn.
Selma Burke was an African American sculptor who played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s and 30s which was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theatre, politics, and scholarship.
Burke used her talent to immortalize such historic figures as author and African-American civil rights leader Booker T. Washington, philanthropist, humanitarian and civil rights activist Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, composer, songwriter, conductor and Jazz musician Duke Ellington, and Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. who advanced civil rights for people of colour in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience.
Among her more famous works is a bas-relief bronze plaque honouring President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms which he outlined in his State of the Union speech to Congress in 1941 as Freedom of speech; Freedom of worship; Freedom from want; and Freedom from fear. Burke’s portrait of FDR is recognized by many as the inspiration behind the design of Roosevelt’s portrait on the American dime, which was something she never received credit for in her lifetime.
Caroline and Maria have written a rich and thought-provoking play about the life of Selma Burke that also explores the meaning of art, the Civil Rights Movement, racism, and censorship. I asked Maria and Caroline what sort of experience they hope audiences are going to have when they come to see the play.
CAROLINE RUSSELL-KING
Our goal is to entertain. Our play is not a lecture on art or a biography, it’s a flight of fancy. Selma lived nearly a century – these are ninety minutes of fun.
MARIA CROOKS
An entertaining, stimulating and very humorous one. We hope the audience will find the use of actors playing statues and other objects to be innovative and clever. We also hope that they enjoy getting to know this feisty, intelligent, gifted artist who deserves to be recognized and remembered as a one-of-a-kind artist and human being.
JAMES HUTCHISON
What was your process like working on the play together and what do you think are the key elements that make for a successful writing partnership?
CAROLINE
I think complementary strengths are important. I’m obviously not from Jamaica like Claude McKay is in the play and Maria is. Maria brings her knowledge of French as I am sadly unilingual. Maria is also a great editor. When I am creating plays in my head form and from can often look the same on the page.
MARIA
It was indeed a very stimulating, interesting process for both of us. We brainstormed together, wrote scenes individually then compared the writing and chose sections that best conveyed what we wished to express. We argued, we laughed, we fought to convince the other person of the merit of our ideas. For me, the most important elements that made for our successful partnership were the respect and trust that I have for Caroline’s extensive knowledge and experience as a playwright. She has written numerous award-winning plays, she is also a dramaturg, a critic, and a playwriting instructor. In fact, she was my playwriting instructor and has done the dramaturgy on all my plays.
JAMES
There’s a note in the script before the play begins where you say, “Selma Burke lived from 1900 to 1995 which is approximately 49,932,000 minutes – here imagined are 90 of them.” I loved that because it’s a humorous observation that illustrates the challenge of trying to tell a life story in the span of a play. So, how do you do that? How do you go about distilling the essence of a person’s life into an evening of theatre?
Selma Hortense Burke with her relief plaque of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From the Archives of American Art Federal Art Project, Photographic Division Collection.
MARIA
We wanted to demonstrate some very salient points about Selma: how gifted an artist she was, her determination to succeed as a sculptor despite having been born Black, poor, and female in the southern US. The obstacles she faced, and the triumphs and accolades that she garnered, the people she knew, including a veritable Who’s Who of the Harlem Renaissance, presidents, and artist she studied with in Europe, the remarkable events that she witnessed, participated in and chronicled of the tempestuous era that was the 20th century. We wanted to do so dramatically but also with humour.
CAROLINE
It’s all about peaks and valleys. I always tell my playwriting students you want to see characters on their best days and their worst days not a Wednesday.
JAMES
One aspect of the play that works really well that you mentioned is that you have actors on stage being the art – the sculptures – that Selma creates. It’s an effective and theatrical way to bring the art alive and to tell Selma’s story. Tell me about how you came up with that idea and what it adds to the play.
CAROLINE
Having her work come to life is very important. In plays there are three types of conflict – person vs person, person vs environment, and person vs self. In Shakespeare’s time characters had soliloquies to express internal conflict. Today people who speak out loud to themselves are either on the phone with earbuds or mentally unwell. So, her relationship with her art is a mechanism to show internal conflict. Secondly, we so often see plays on the stage that could be screenplays or done in other media like TV – I wanted the play to be theatrical. What theatre does really well – is theatre.
MARIA
Caroline had the brilliant idea to have actors portray the artwork and other inanimate objects. This idea is not only dramatic, but as the audience will see, hilarious at times.
Christopher Clare, Norma Lewis, and Heather Pattengale in the Theatre Calgary – ATP Production of Selma Burke. Photo: Trudie Lee.
JAMES
As you got to know Selma from doing your research and writing your play what sort of person was she do you think and what do you think her hopes would be in regards to her legacy and the art she created during her lifetime?
MARIA
She wanted, I believe, to be remembered as an African American artist who created important works and who wanted to uplift her people though her art.
CAROLINE
I think she had a strong vision for her work and the confidence to pull it off – her art speaks for itself. The language of her art is deep and rich – I’m totally in love with her.
JAMES
A couple of the topics touched on in the play are artistic freedom and censorship. Artistic freedom is defined by the UN as “the freedom to imagine, create and distribute diverse cultural expressions free of government censorship, political interference or the pressures of non-state actors.” In Canada the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects artistic expression. And yet in many countries artists are not free to express opinions that differ from those in power and these days there’s the new phenomena of the online mob attacking artists and their work if it doesn’t agree with their particular point of view. The idea isn’t to engage in an exchange and to challenge the art. The idea seems to be to stop the artist and their work. What are your own thoughts about artistic freedom and the kinds of censorship we’re seeing in the world today and what does that mean for the world in which we live? Why is art and artistic freedom important?
CAROLINE
The play is topical because firstly the struggle to create art is always an issue in hard economic times. More importantly the play is about not only those who get to create art but who has the right to destroy it. In Victoria BC two plays have been shut down, one before opening and one mid run. This is outrageous. It used to be the right that censored artist work now it is the left.
MARIA
We both find this trend alarming and offensive. It stymes creativity and will have artists second-guessing their ideas and their work. Unfortunately, today everyone with a computer, cell phone or tablet can disseminate their ideas to a wide audience no matter how unpleasant they may be and find receptive audiences who go along just to be provoking. Unfortunately, both of us have noticed that this kind of behaviour is not limited to right-leaning people or groups, the left, it seems, wants in on it too.
Christopher Hunt and Norma Lewis in the Theatre Calgary – ATP Production of Selma Burke. Photo: Trudie Lee.
JAMES
A script is words on a page. It takes actors to bring the story to life. A director to guide it. A set designer and costume designer and sound designer to build the world of the play. Tell me a little bit about the cast and crew that’s been assembled to tell the story of Selma Burke and what they bring to the story.
MARIA
There are four actors Norma Lewis, Christopher Clare, Heather Pattengale and Christopher Hunt. All very talented Calgarians. Between them they play over 55 characters, art pieces, inanimate objects and even a plaster-of-Paris leg. The director is Delicia Turner Sonnenberg who hails from California and the stage manager is Meredith Johnson. Javier Vilalta is the movement and choreography coordinator. There are of course many other brilliant, artistic crew members who are creating magic in the background to allow this play to shine.
CAROLINE
We are so lucky to have Delicia as our director. Besides a phenomenal cast the designers are great especially Hanne Loosen who has sculped our set and Adejoké Taiwo who sculpted our costumes.
Heather Pattengale, Christopher Hunt, and Norma Lewis in the Theatre Calgary – ATP Production of Selma Burke. Photo: Trudie Lee.
JAMES
Every artist needs their champions. Someone who believes in and loves their work. So, I’m curious to know who has supported you in the making of your art?
MARIA
We have been supported by every artist at Theatre Calgary and especially the Artistic Director of Theatre Calgary Stafford Arima who has taken an artistic risk on this new piece of art.
CAROLINE
No artist is an island. In addition to what Maria said, I think it’s important to recognize the support that we get from friends and family. A play is such an abstract concept before all of the thousands of hours it takes to realize it on the stage. In the early stages it’s very fragile. Every play starts with the thought “Maybe I could write about that….” Every human has the impetus to make art whether it’s a painting, a garden, or a rebuilt motorcycle… it’s the leap into follow-through that’s difficult. I am grateful that my friends and family have supported me for decades through all of the downs, more downs and the occasional up!
JAMES
Having a production on the professional stage is certainly one of those ups and definitely something to celebrate. Who should come to see the play? Is it a play for everyone?
CAROLINE
No, art cannot possibly be for everyone, that’s part of what makes it valuable. Art which is created as mass production is not art. Everyone has their own set of unique tastes in art. This play is for adults who are curious and love to be entertained in the theatre, in the dark with other aficionados. It’s for people who like me get a thrill out of live theatre and love visual art as well.
MARIA
This play is for audiences who enjoy innovative, fascinating theatre with a big dollop of humour mixed in with theatricality.
On September 16th, 2023, friends, family, and members of the Alberta arts community gathered in Medicine Hat to celebrate this year’s recipients of The Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Awards. This year’s recipients include playwright and theatre artist Mieko Ouchi, film and theatre performer Michelle Thrush, and film animators Wendy Tilby & Amanda Forbis.
Chair of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Awards Arlene Strom said, “Albertans can be proud of the contributions of these Distinguished Artists who have pushed the boundaries of art to reflect indigenous identity and expression, present a more inclusive and diverse view of Alberta’s history, and highlight the art of film animation in Alberta and worldwide. Each has contributed immeasurably to the development of the province’s artists, arts communities and expanding art disciplines.”
L to R: Wendy Tilby, Amanda Forbis, Her Honour Salma Lakhani, Mieko Ouchi, Michelle Thrush, Photo Credit Randy Feere
Her Honour, the Honourable Salma Lakhani, Lieutenant Governor of Alberta said, “The women receiving the Distinguished Artist Award this year have offered important contributions to the arts in Canada. We have all been granted the opportunity, through their work, to learn and grow in our understanding of the human condition. Artists such as these are essential to the lifeblood of our communities, and we are truly fortunate to have them as cultural leaders in their respective disciplines, in our province and our country as a whole.”
I contacted Michelle Thrush as well as Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis to talk with them about their work and creative process. You can read those interviews by following the links above. I also spoke with Mieko Ouchi who is a theatre and film director, screenwriter, dramaturg, playwright and a passionate champion for new play development. She is also a fierce advocate for accessibility, inclusivity, diversity and equity across all ranges of artistic output. In our conversation we talked about her approach to storytelling, how she works as a dramaturge to help other artists bring their work to the stage, and what it means to be recognized for her work by receiving The Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award.
JAMES HUTCHISON
You have a big body of work now and I wonder when you look back at that has your approach to telling stories grown and changed over the years?
MIEKO OUCHI
I think as an artist you do grow and change as you write more, and you create more, but I also feel like there’s a heart that always remains the same. And maybe this was best illustrated quite a few years ago when Red Deer College commissioned me to write a play for a group of students. I pitched a couple of new ideas and then I said, “There’s this play that I started writing in grade eleven about the DaDa Art movement and I did some workshops with some professional theatres, but it was never finished, and I’d love to go back and finish that play as an adult.” And that was the project they chose.
And I went back and read this draft of the play that I’d written when I was seventeen and the wild thing is there were lots of things obviously, I had to change and fix but there was a way of writing – of turning a phrase – an approach to text – that remains to this day – and I recognized my voice in that script.
And right now the thing I feel like I’m growing in most is learning to build empathy for all my characters, and I think my goal is continually to make them more than 2D characters and to make them very complex people that actors will have to really dig into and figure out and audiences will too. Because to me those are the most interesting characters for myself as an audience member.
The Citadel Theatre’s production of The Silver Arrow (2018) written by Mieko Ouchi and featuring Natasha Mumba, April Banigan and Lara Arabian. Photo by David Cooper
JAMES
I think those types of characters are the most relatable because they are the most human because we are so complex and grey. And how often have we done something and then said to ourselves, “That’s so unlike me. Why did I do that?”
MIEKO
That’s right. We recognize that people don’t fit neatly into boxes – that they do things impulsively. They do things against their better judgment or in spite of themselves all the time. And I think theatre is such a beautiful place to explore those impulses.
JAMES
As a playwright you bring new works to life, but you also work as a dramaturge and director assisting other artists to bring their work to the stage. What are some of the important elements you feel are needed to help workshop and develop a new play?
MIEKO
I really see my job in those roles as being like a doula or a midwife. So, you’re in the room. You’re highly connected to the event – to the people – but you’re also a little bit separate and you’re there to help, encourage, and support the person who is giving birth to the new play.
So, I feel like I’m there as an encourager. I’m there as someone with a lot of experience to say, “Here are some things I’ve noticed in the past when we’ve made these kinds of theatrical decisions.” You know someone who knows a little bit more about technical theatre and how theatre is put together and can help playwrights who might not have a background in that. I’m really kind of a sounding board and another set of eyes to say, “I really noticed this. Did you notice that?” Or “This really landed on me this way today.” Just some information for the playwright to take in.
Playwright/performer Mieko Ouchi in a reading of Hiro Kanagawa’s ‘Forgiveness’ at the 2019 Banff Playwrights Lab. Photo by Jessica Wittman.
I always think it’s not up to me to fix the play. I hate the word fixing plays because the play’s not broken. We’re just continually digging out new layers and things that we want to explore. And it’s not for me to write the play. I’m there to help the playwright find the best form of the play that they can find and that they can write.
And also, in that sense of a doula I want the experience to be a positive one. So, I think I’m also there to make sure the process is a safe and comfortable and a pleasurable experience to go through because it can be stressful. Just like birth. You’re there to make it be the best and most happy place it can be.
JAMES
You mentioned creating a safe space and I understand that but sometimes we’re dealing with plays that are asking difficult and complex questions and so we have to be open to uncomfortable discussions and exploring possibilities. How do you create a room that is open to discussion and yet is respectful and safe?
MIEKO
I think transparency is really helpful. Just being very transparent about those things and talking about them in advance and to say, “You know we’re coming up on this scene that’s really challenging and there’s a lot of content in there that might challenge us in personal ways.” So, you just give people a heads up and say, “If this brings up feelings and thoughts that are unexpected or that take over in a way that you weren’t hoping they would – just come and let me know and we can take a break.” Everyone has a heads up and there’s an open conversation.
And I think there are other artists now that we can invite into the room. There are fight choreographers. There are intimacy co-ordinators. And there are other people we can bring in who have the tools to help us. So, I think that’s been a really great evolution and it has made those things less like – let’s wing it and hope for the best to having a bit more structure and having conversations around it. I find when people have that space then things stay nice and calm, and we figure it out step by step, and everybody feels more comfortable.
JAMES
You’ve talked about your play The Red Priest and you’ve called it a very transformational experience. And I understand that it came into being because of Catalyst Theatre and they had commissioned some writers – you among them – to write short six-minute pieces. And you wrote something called Eight Ways to Say Goodbye. And afterwards you started working on expanding it because it had a great response.
And then Ron Jenkins made you playwright in residence – even though you’d never actually written a finished play – because he believed in you. And you ended up finishing the play, and it was nominated for a Governor General Award, and it won the Carol Bolt Award for Drama from The Playwrights Guild of Canada, and if you’re going to write a first play that’s a pretty auspicious beginning. So how did writing that play, winning that recognition, and having people believe in you transform your view of yourself as an artist?
Ashley Wright and Jamie Konchak in the ATP 2014 Production of The Red Priest (Eight Ways to Say Goodbye) by Mieko Ouchi. Photo Leah Hennel Calgary Herald
MIEKO
Well, I think one of the key things is I was so extraordinarily lucky to have Ron recognize me so early as a writer and to encourage me before I had that belief in myself. He believed in me before I believed in me. And there was something about the passion that he brought by saying, “I know you can do this. You have a voice. You just have to be brave enough to let it out,” that got me over the finish line.
He encouraged me to take a risk because it was a very personal story. From the outside you won’t know that. But I’d just gone through a really really heartbreaking relationship breakup in my life and that is very much imbued in the play even though the play’s not in any way autobiographical. A lot of the emotional feelings of what happened are in that play. He encouraged me to let that be there. And I think the lesson that I learned from that play with the recognition that it received was that the moments that people all brought to me afterwards – like audience members would say, “Oh, this moment is the moment that meant the most to me,” were all things that were true. They were emotionally true. There was a core of it that had happened to me, and I was revealing something very very honest. And I think to learn that lesson that early as a writer was an incredible gift because it taught me that when I was truthful people connected.
JAMES
How much do you think drama then is exploring our emotional response to the world?
MIEKO
I think it’s everything. I think that’s exactly what it is. Theatre just gives us this incredible chance to explore feelings that you might not have fully explored in real life where we don’t have a chance to say that to our parent or to our partner or to our child, but on stage we can kind of enact that.
Augusto Boal said, “Theatre is a rehearsal for change.” And I believe that too. It’s a chance to try out things that haven’t happened yet or to say, “What would happen if I put this scenario into a play?” So, for me, it’s been an incredible chance to explore not necessarily autobiographical things but emotionally things that I’ve been through or are thinking about.
JAMES
And then people who have experienced that same emotion even though the context might be different can relate to it.
MIEKO
Yeah.
JAMES
I’ve heard other artists talk about the more specific you make it the more universal it becomes.
MIEKO
One hundred percent. I’ve felt that totally. I really did feel that. And it was very exciting because at the same time that I was having this experience I was also working as a filmmaker and making documentaries. Initially, they were about my family and very biographical and even autobiographical types of projects. And so, I think I was in a world where I was trying to find truth. Whatever, that meant to me and to bring that forward. And that recognition really said, “You’re on the right track. Be brave. You’re onto something. Just keep going.”
The Citadel Theatre’s production of The Silver Arrow (2018) written by Mieko Ouchi. Photo by David Cooper
JAMES
You mentioned you went back to a play you wrote when you were seventeen and it seems to me all the writers I know have a drawer full of unfinished work. Sometimes we hit a wall and other projects become priorities and I’m curious about those unfinished projects. Do they go quietly into the drawer? Do they protest? Do they whisper to you? Do they remain dormant? When do you open that drawer and take them out and look at them again and work on them?
MIEKO
Those dormant plays – they’re just kind of asleep right now. They’re having a long nap – at the moment. Yeah, I have a couple. And I think they have to find their right time where I feel mentally ready to go back and explore them.
Meilie Ng as Lily in the 2011 ATP Production of Nisei Blue by Miecho Ouchi.
I have a project that premiered at ATP called Nisei Blue which was a noir detective story. And I felt like I didn’t quite get to the heart of it by the end of that production. It was a very fraught time because my father had just passed away before we started rehearsals. And my mind wasn’t fully hitting on all cylinders, and I wasn’t able to get to the heart of it because of everything going on in my life. So, now I’ve actually started a process of adapting that play into a novel and I feel like I am very slowly archaeologically getting there through a different medium. Sometimes it’s about digging into a play at a different time theatrically or maybe it’s approaching it through a different entry point.
JAMES
So now you’re exploring writing a novel — how is that? Fun? Exciting? What have you learned? Where are you at with that?
MIEKO
Oh, my gosh. So, when I started it was terrifying but also it was weirdly exciting because I thought, “I don’t know anything about this. So, who cares? Throw all the rules out the window. I don’t feel beholden to any rules or any lessons because I haven’t had any yet other than being an avid reader and knowing what I like to read. I don’t know any of the things that we’re supposed to know as a novelist. So, I’m just going to start writing the story from my heart — the way I kind of wrote The Red Priest” And there’s just something exciting to be at the very beginning of a learning process. To be at the bottom of this giant mountain looking up at the peaks and the great writers.
And I’m really intrigued by the interior voice. That’s something this novel has let me dig into with this character that I was never able to share with the audience in a stage production. I think my main character in Nisei Blue is a character with a really rich interior world and so writing a novel has really opened up the story for me because I’m able to share what’s running through his mind. And that’s been exciting. That’s been a totally fresh take on it. And it feels right. It feels like a good way to tell the story.
The Citadel Theatre’s production of Pride and Prejudice (2023), directed by Mieko Ouchi and featuring Morgan Yamada, Nadien Chu, Ben Elliott, Beth Graham and Gianna Vacirca. Photo by Nanc Price.
JAMES
This year there’s been a lot of chat about artificial intelligence, and I believe we’re on the edge of a really big disruption in science, business, and technology. And I don’t know what that looks like, and I don’t know if anyone really does but as an artist I was curious about your thoughts about AI and what sort of impact you think – positive or negative – it might have on the arts and the work you create.
MIEKO
Well, I think as a writer there’s a part of it where my heart just sinks at the thought of it. Because I believe in that human journey of struggling to find the path through writing and to find the path to expression. And to allow a computer-generated draft to be hacked out kind of hurts my soul a little bit as a writer, to be honest. But I suppose there might be some places where it is useful. There’s just something to me about the struggle to figure out the path of the story or the play that’s essential to its final shape and its humanity. And I know that some of the things that I’ve seen that have been AI generated that have been in the voice of Chekov or Shakespeare are kind of like gobbledegook.
As writers, we sometimes have this filler dialogue when we’re struggling and you have one person say, “Hello.” And the other person says, “Hi. Why are you looking at me that way?” And they say, “I don’t know. Why are you looking at me that way?” And nothing’s actually happening. We’re just going back and forth. It’s like we’re getting the rusty water out through the pipes until the clear water comes through and you get to the heart of a scene. And I sometimes feel that AI writing is a bit like that rusty water. It’s filler. It doesn’t really have that human drive and that soul that we need for writing to be compelling.
JAMES
There you go. Art is the exploration of the human soul.
MIEKO
That’s great. I love that.
Medal Presentation L to R: Arlene Strom, Chair Lg Arts Awards Foundation Board, Distinguished Artist Mieko Ouchi, Her Honour Salma Lakhani, Photo Credit Randy Feere
JAMES
So, my last question is about you receiving the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award and I was wondering what the actual evening was like for you where everyone gathered to honour the recipients and what does it mean to you as an artist to be recognized for your work and receive a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award?
MIEKO
Well, it was such a surprise to find out I was receiving the award. It was really just a kind of a heart-stopping moment to hear Kathy Classen on the other end of the phone when she called and told me. I couldn’t quite believe it. And going to Medicine Hat was a wonderful experience.
All of the recipients were able to bring friends and family members along and it really felt like a family kind of weekend. And they rolled out the red carpet for us. They put on this beautiful art festival at the centre with kids doing art. We had our event and then we had a street party with a concert headed up by none other than Hawksley Workman who I worked with on a production of my play The Silver Arrow. He wrote the music for it at the Citadel. They didn’t know that when they set it up but to have Hawksley there was like the cherry on top of the cake.
That night felt like such a beautiful recognition of Alberta and all the people who have supported these distinguished artists to help them get to where they are. So many people talked about the mentors they had along the way. The people who supported them. Fellow artists. Community members. Teachers. Family members. So, it really did feel like a celebration of all that it is to be an Alberta artist and to be someone that has chosen to come here and work or to remain here and work and there’s just something so beautiful about having that connection to Alberta.
L to R: Clint Lawrence, Mieko Ouchi, Michelle Thrush, Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby, Photo Credit Randy Feere
And everybody spoke about that and I think back to my earliest days being a student at Artstrek and having my first tiny little play workshopped at ATP and having Ronnie Burkett as my set designer and Kathy Eberle my high school drama teacher helping me submit my play for that program. And you know Marilyn Potts has been a supporter since way back and then you know Bob White and Dianne Goodman – and all the folks at ATP – John Murrell and so many other folks in this province.
And then all the folks when I came to Edmonton who supported me. You know Stephen Heatley gave me my first summer job at Theatre Network as a summer student. Ron Jenkins supporting me as a first-time playwright and as a playwright in residence. And then all the way up to now working here at the Citadel with Daryl Cloran as his Associate Artistic Director and his support of me and my writing but also my directing on A-House stages.
He gave me my first A-House directing job and he gave me my first commission for an A-House play with Silver Arrow. You really need those folks encouraging you and, in your corner, making opportunities for you to help you find your path.
And so now I get to have that reversed a little bit and in my job at the Citadel I get to support emerging artists and help them get their first assistant directing job or be a part of the playwright’s lab and help them work on their new plays, and I’m really enjoying being able to pass it along and being an opportunity maker for other artists.
Nathan Schmidt as W.O. Mitchell in the Rosebud Theatre production of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell.
Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell is a joyful, fun, and feel-good night at the theatre all brought to life on the Rosebud Theatre’s Opera House stage in a brilliant performance by Nathan Schmidt.
Based on the works of W.O. Mitchell and penned by his son and daughter-in-law, Orm Mitchell and his wife Barbara, the play weaves together an entertaining and insightful script that travels between Mitchell’s fiction and the story of his life.
Mitchell was a writer, performer, and teacher who is best known for his 1947 novel Who Has Seen the Wind. The novel beautifully captures small-town life and the world as seen through the eyes of a young Brian O’Connal growing up on the Saskatchewan prairie. Mitchell is also known for his Jake and the Kid stories which were popular radio plays during the 1950s. No stranger to the stage himself W.O. Mitchell was a storyteller who performed his one-man shows across Canada and penned several plays for the stage including The Kite, The Devil’s Instrument, and The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon.
I contacted Nathan Schmidt to talk with him about the production and the challenges of performing a one-man show. You can read that interview by following the link above. I also spoke with Orm Mitchell to talk with him about his father’s work and the journey Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell took to reach the stage.
JAMES HUTCHISON
Orm, every literary work takes a journey from idea to finished work. Tell me a little bit about the journey that Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell took to reach the stage.
ORM MITCHELL
Well, it’s a journey that took close to twenty-six years. My father had prostate cancer so his last three or four years were not pleasant. He was in a hospital bed in the family room on the first floor of the house in Calgary and he was withdrawing more and more. And Barb and I wanted to keep him engaged. So, we suggested, why don’t you do a collection of your performance pieces that you’ve done over the years in your one-man shows? And he loved the idea. So that came together in a book called An Evening with W. O. Mitchell.
And as soon as that came out, two people came to us who wanted to use that book and turn some of the pieces into a one-man stage show, but Eric Peterson who they wanted to do the piece said he felt uneasy about doing this while a living author is still around and especially an author who has really put his distinctive stamp on the pieces.
There were other people who came to us over the years, and we were always in the role of acting as script consultants. And it never really got off the ground. So about 2008, Barb and I decided we’re going to write this ourselves. We did a really thorough rewrite and we sent it out to Theater Calgary and a few other places, but no one bit. So, we put it in a drawer and forgot about it.
Then during COVID, we realized that theatres were going through a very rough time. They couldn’t have an audience. There was no money coming in. And we’ve been really fond of Rosebud Theatre because they’ve produced W.O. Mitchell’s plays. They did Jake and the Kid, and they did The Kite twice, and we’d heard how wonderful Nathan Schmidt was playing Daddy Sherry in The Kite.
And so, I wrote to Morris Ertman the artistic director of Rosebud and said, “Look, Barb and I were thinking of making a donation to you guys because we know all theatres are struggling and we came up with what might be a better idea. Why don’t you do this one-man show and use Nathan Schmidt because we hear he’s been wonderful. And it’s inexpensive. It’s one person. You can stream it. And you might be able to get some income from streaming it during the COVID years.”
And I never heard back from Morris until about a year ago, July. And he said, “Orm, could you send me that script? I seem to have lost it.” And so, I sent it to him, and we saw him last November and he said, “I have decided to do this show and to use Nathan Schmidt.” It was close to twenty-six years from when the idea first came up to finally getting it on the stage.
Nathan Schmidt as W.O. Mitchell in the Rosebud Theatre production of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell.
Nathan Schmidt as W.O. Mitchell in the Rosebud Theatre production of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell.
Nathan Schmidt as W.O. Mitchell in the Rosebud Theatre production of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell.
Nathan Schmidt as W.O. Mitchell in the Rosebud Theatre production of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell.
Nathan Schmidt as W.O. Mitchell in the Rosebud Theatre production of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell.
JAMES
You call the play Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell and I’m curious about the choice of title. Why did you choose Magic Lies? What’s the significance behind that?
ORM
That’s one of his favourite phrases. And he always used to say when people asked him about his creative process and his stories that every bit is the truth. What he meant by that was that he was a very observant watcher of the world, and he would pick up bits and pieces of people or details of landscape.
And I remember he used to tell his writers in his writing groups that you have to draw on your own autobiographical experience and find images, bits and pieces of sensuous detail, and you have to appeal to your reader’s sense of smell, taste, and touch. You’ve got to make them see something that you are describing. You’ve got to make your reader smell what it is that you are describing. All of those sensuous details that he collects and puts together to form and create that illusion of reality draw the reader into the story. So, every bit is the truth, but the whole thing is a lie. A magic lie. It’s a magic lie because it’s the catalyst that helps a reader explore consciously and unconsciously various universal human truths.
Morris Ertman and Orm Mitchell Opening Weekend Talk Back of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell
W.O. Mitchell with Orm Mitchell at Trent University – Honorary Degree – 1985
W.O. Mitchell and Merna at Mabel Lake Cottage 1984
Mitchell Family Vacation
W.O. Mitchell reading at Trent University
Orm and Barb Mitchell celebrating the publication of their W.O. biography with his mother’s favourite champagne, Piper Heidsieck’s.
Orm and Barb Mitchell at Chapters Book Signing
Orm Mitchell fishing the Highwood River in 2018
Barbara and Orm Mitchell
Barbara and Orm Mitchell
W.O. Mitchell
JAMES
What do you think your father’s reactions and musings would be if he was able to see himself portrayed on stage?
ORM
My father was a master at timing, and he really admired an actor who had that sense of timing. You know someone who pauses in the right places and lets the audience into the story with those pauses. He was once told by someone when he was doing an acting role, “Bill, you’re overdoing it. It’s like an orange. Don’t squeeze all the juice out of the orange. Leave some there for the audience.” It’s a lovely metaphor for an actor who knows not to overdo it. And Nathan was just so good at that, and my father would have admired that.
JAMES
It takes a lot of discipline to put in the pause.
ORM
It’s a wonderful storytelling technique. And Nathan did this beautifully. In the story in which the boys blow up Melvin’s Grandpa in the back house when the dynamite goes off Nathan as W. O. stops and looks at the audience and takes out his snuffbox and he takes a piece of snuff and the audience is hanging there. Okay, the dynamite has gone off. The old man is in the back house. What happens next? And it is a lovely long pause, and then Nathan as W.O. looks at the audience and says, “Let me tell you something about dynamite.” And the audience just loved it.
The other thing my father would have admired was Nathan the actor has to make the role his own. He can’t just mimic my father. He uses bits and pieces of W.O. but at the same time the storytelling if it’s going to be effective – if it’s really going to zing with the audience – Nathan has to make it his own. By opening night he had made it his own and as the show goes on that role will more and more become his, and I think my father would have recognized that and would have admired that very much.
75th Anniversary Edition of Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell. Illustrated by William Kurelek. Available from Freehand Books.
JAMES
Let’s talk a little bit about Who Has Seen the Wind your father’s best-known work. It was published in 1947 and was an immediate success. And at the time the Montreal Gazette said, “When a star is born in any field of Canadian fiction it is an exciting event…Here in this deeply moving story of a Western Canadian boy, his folk and his country, emerges a writer whose insight, humanity and technical skill have given the simple elements of birth and death, of the inconspicuous lives of common man etched against the bleak western landscape, the imprint of significance and value.” Why do you think this book and this story resonate so deeply with its readers?
ORM
Here you have a book that is set in the prairies during the dirty thirties. It’s very specific. One of the things that critics in Canada used to say was, “Who cares about Canada? Who cares about a story where Bill and Molly meet in Winnipeg and fall in love?” W.O. was one of the first, if not the first writer, to put the Saskatchewan Prairie and the Alberta foothills on the literary map.
But then the corollary to that is you want people whether they are in London England, or Australia, or China or wherever they are to read that story, and you want that story to come alive for them. It’s what Alistair MacLeod used to say, “When you write your stories about a specific place and characters you want to make them travel.” I love that line. You want to make them travel. Who Has Seen the Wind sure as hell travelled. It has been translated into Chinese. And it has been translated into South Korean. It has sold over a million copies in Canada, and I think it will continue to travel.
One of the reasons why I think it travelled is that my father was wonderful in understanding the child’s world. He was really good with kids, and he managed in Who Has Seen the Wind to get inside the head of a kid in a way that has rarely been done. He manages to dramatize how Brian a four – five – six – seven – up to eleven-year-old looks at the world – and that’s universal. He managed to create characters and in particular Brian looking at the world in a way that resonates with readers all over the world.
Saint Sammy and Brian: Saint Sammy calling down the wrath of the Lord to smite Bent Candy’s new red barn. Illustration by William Kurelek from the 75th Anniversary Edition of Who Has Seen the Wind. Available from Freehand Books.
JAMES
So, I got the 75th-anniversary edition of Who Has Seen the Wind out of the Calgary library and it’s a very beautiful book. It came out last year. Has beautiful illustrations. The typeset. The cover. The paper that you use. It’s really just a work of art. And I came across a passage early in the book where he’s describing Brian lying in his bed trying to fall asleep.
“For a long time he had lain listening to the night noises that stole out of the dark to him. Distant he had heard the sound of grown up voices casual in the silence, welling up to almost spilling over, then subsiding. The cuckoo clock had poked the stillness nine times; the house cracked its knuckles, the night wind stirring through the leaves of the poplar just outside his room on the third floor strengthening in its intensity until it was wild at his screen.”
And that’s just beautiful and that reminded me of my own childhood and being in bed listening to the sounds of the house before falling asleep, and I know this is probably an impossible task, but do you have a favourite passage? Is there a passage you could select from your father’s writing that is for you perfect?
ORM
There are so many. I was thinking about Who Has Seen the Wind and the last three pages of Who Has Seen the Wind – is a wonderful prose poem. And in fact, when he was writing that he had his Bible open at Ecclesiastes and he was trying to catch the rhythms and pauses and repetitions of Ecclesiastics. It’s a very significant passage for me because I can remember standing in the High River Cemetery when we buried my father and that was the passage that I read from as part of our family ceremony.
But there’s one passage from How I Spent My Summer Holidays which is kind of a companion novel to Who Has Seen the Wind. You can imagine Brian, now grown up and going into adolescence. How I Spent My Summer Holidays at the human level is a much darker book than Who Has Seen the Wind. But there’s a scene right at the beginning where Hugh the narrator, who’s in his 70s, has gone back to his prairie town roots and he says,
“As I walked from Government Road toward the Little Souris, the wind and the grasshoppers and the very smell of the prairie itself – grass cured under the August Sun, with the subtle menthol of sage – worked nostalgic magic on me. These were the same bannering gophers suddenly stopping up into tent-pegs, the same stilting killdeer dragging her wing ahead of me to lure me away from her young; this was the same sun fierce on my vulnerable and mortal head. Now and as a child I walked out here to ultimate emptiness, and gazed to no sight destination at all. Here was the melodramatic part of the earth’s skin that had stained me during my litmus years, fixing my inner and outer perspective, dictating the terms of the fragile identity contract I would have with my self for the rest of my life.”
And I just love that prose that is so rich in detail. And my sense of the three most significant novels that he wrote are Who Has Seen the Wind his first novel, The Vanishing Point, and How I Spent My Summer Holidays. Those are books that will last, I think.
W.O. Mitchell
JAMES
I know it’s hard to sum up the life of a man in a short interview, after all, you and Barb have written a two-volume biography about your father. But how would you describe your father, the writer, the public person? And then how would you describe W.O. Mitchell, the man – your father?
ORM
The main thing he wanted to write was a story set in the real world and to create characters that interact in a very realistic way in order to explore larger human truths. But he wasn’t just a writer who typed stories that would appear in print. He also was an oral storyteller, and he gave his one-man shows – and he always used to call them one-man shows – because he didn’t give the usual literary readings where someone is introduced and then he reads a passage and takes questions from the audience. He gave one-man shows where he went on stage and he performed. And even something like his Jake and the Kid series on CBC – those are oral narratives. He really drew on the oral storytelling traditions of Western Canada.
Hugh, Willa, and Orm along with their mother Merna, Demi Tasse their minature poodle, and Beau their Chesapeake Bay Retriever listen to W.O. tell a story. High River 1956
And I suppose that’s one of the reasons why both Barb and I have this feeling – not an obligation – but this feeling that we want to continue that legacy of my father’s writing, but also both Barb and I were very moved on opening night because we felt we had achieved the goal of continuing his legacy as a storyteller on the stage as well.
As a private person, as a father, he really knew the child’s world. Not only did he know how to write about children, but he also knew how to react with them, and how to interact with them. And my brother Hugh and my sister Willa and I were blessed with a father who was sympathetic and who knew that child’s world, and he played with us, and he was really a wonderful parent to have and to grow up with.
Nathan Schmidt as W.O. Mitchell in the Rosebud Theatre production of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell.
Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell is a joyful, fun, and feel-good night at the theatre all brought to life on the Rosebud Theatre’s Opera House stage in a brilliant performance by Nathan Schmidt.
Based on the works of W.O. Mitchell and penned by his son and daughter-in-law, Orm and Barbara Mitchell, the play weaves together an entertaining and insightful script that travels between Mitchell’s fiction and the story of his life.
Mitchell was a writer, performer, and teacher who is best known for his 1947 novel Who Has Seen the Wind. The novel beautifully captures small-town life and the world as seen through the eyes of a young Brian O’Connal growing up on the Saskatchewan prairie. Mitchell is also known for his Jake and the Kid stories which were popular radio plays during the 1950s. No stranger to the stage himself W.O. Mitchell was a storyteller who performed his one-man shows across Canada and penned several plays for the stage including The Kite, The Devil’s Instrument, and The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon.
I contacted Orm Mitchell to talk with him about his father’s work and the journey Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell took to reach the stage. You can read that interview by following the link above. I also spoke with Nathan Schmidt to talk with him about the production and the challenges of performing a one-man show.
JAMES HUTCHISON
What was your reaction when you first read the script and knew you were going to be playing W.O. Mitchell?
NATHAN SCHMIDT
I’ve done a couple of W.O. Mitchell shows. I’ve been in Jake and the Kid, and I’ve done The Kite twice, so lots about the script felt familiar, and I had experienced W.O.’s writing. So, I knew that he was funny, but the scarier thing was I thought, “Oh, man, I’ve got to play this real person who people know.” Whereas Daddy Sherry or Jake – those are characters. Those live in the imagination. It’s a different thing when somebody lives in the real world. And Morris Ertman our Artistic Director would say “When we open Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell all the family is going to come and watch the show.” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh. I’m going to have to play the father or the grandparent of these people in the audience.” So that was the most intimidating thing.
Morris Ertman and Orm Mitchell Opening Weekend Talk Back of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell
Barbara and Orm Mitchell
Orm and Barbara Mitchell at Chapters Book Signing
75th Anniversary Edition of Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell. Illustrated by William Kurelek. Available from Freehand Books.
W.O. Mitchell
JAMES
Even a one-man show needs a director. For this show, it was Karen Johnson-Diamond. How did the two of you work on the play? What was that process like?
NATHAN
As an actor, Karen has done a number of W.O. Mitchell plays. I think she had been in Who Has Seen the Wind and Jake the Kid and she had a love of W.O. Mitchell as well. So, she came in with a lot of love for the stories and a lot of knowledge about W.O. Mitchell. But she’s also just a wonderfully comedic actor and performer, and so her sense of comedy and her sense of how this thing would play was really just spot on. And all of the direction that she offered to me was really helpful to clarify the joke and to clarify how the show moves forward.
What she really loved about the structure of the play is how it follows him through his life from like six to seven when he loses his father – to ten to eleven – to high school – all the way through to Daddy Sherry and misses a bit of the middle, because as W.O. Mitchell says in the story – he’s kind of focused on the first part of life and the end part of life. Those are the concentrated bits that it seemed his imagination was drawn to.
So, we would do a lot of work with linking. Linking how this story moved to this story and then to this story. And W.O Mitchell had a way of making it feel like it was all sort of off the cuff, but in the end, it was all very planned, and he was coming back to stuff he’d set up earlier and he had really worked out how the punchlines worked and how the ideas and stories came around. So, we did a lot of work like that to try and get into the head of the writer and the storyteller. It was a great process. She was wonderful.
The Kite – Rosebud Theatre – 2019
The Sunset Limited – Rosebud Theatre – 2016
Freud’s Last Session – Rosebud Theatre – 2014
Doubt, A Parable – Rosebud Theatre – 2014
Fiddler on the Roof – Rosebud Theatre – 2008
Man of La Mancha – Rosebud Theatre – 2009
The Spitfire Grill – Rosebud Theatre – 2017
A Christmas Carol – Rosebud Theatre – 2020 & 2021
The Diary of Adam & Eve – Rosebud Theatre – 2011
Oliver! – Rosebud Theatre – 2010
Damien – Rosebud Theatre – 2018
The Drawer Boy – Rosebud Theatre – 2006
May & Joe – Rosebud Theatre – 2011
The Secret Garden – Rosebud Theatre – 2010
Jake and the Kid: Prairie Seasons – Rosebud Theatre – 2011
Underneath the Lintel – Rosebud Theatre Production – 2013
The Kite – Rosebud Theatre – 2005
The Lion, The Witch And the Wardrobe – Rosebud Theatre – 2014
An Inspector Calls – Rosebud Theatre – 2016
Stones In His Pockets – Rosebud Theatre – 2022
The Trip to Bountiful – Rosebud Theatre – 2023
Cotton Patch Gospell – Rosebud Theatre – 2013
It’s a Wonderful Life: The Radio Play – Rosebud Theatre – 2013
Nathan Schmidt as W.O. Mitchell in the Rosebud Theatre production of Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell.
JAMES
This is your 50th performance on the Rosebud stage and so I’m wondering when you look back on all the parts you’ve played do some of those characters have a lasting influence on you in any way?
NATHAN
Yeah, there’s a couple that really stick – that I learned a lot about myself from and sometimes that’s uncomfortable. I was in Doubt by John Patrick Shanley and that was a really uncomfortable play for me to be in. It taught me a lot about who I am when I’m helpless and so those things kind of stick. The character teaches you something about who you really are because your instincts as a person are either in conflict with the character or line up with the character in ways that are surprising. That was a big one. I did a Cormac McCarthy play called The Sunset Limited and that was also another hard one.
As W.O. Mitchell says, those characters marked me. And I think the thing I love most is the relationship that characters create with the audience. One of my favourite things I ever got to do was The Drawer Boy by Michael Healey. I was playing one of the farmers. In The Drawer Boy, this young kid comes to hang out at the farm and find out about these two old guys. It was an older character, and I was younger, and I was really worried because it didn’t feel real. I didn’t feel in it, and I was really up in my head about it and nervous, you know, that I was a fraud or I was going to fail, and then one of the things that actually cinched me into it was – I don’t remember how it came about – but maybe it was offered by Morris and he said, “Here’s a toothpick. Just chew on the toothpick for the whole show.”
And so, I would have these toothpicks in the show, and I just chewed on this toothpick the whole time, and it helped me feel like that cranky grumpy guy in that story. Well, you know, a bit later – after the run, I got a little blue index card in the mail and on it was glued a toothpick, and on the backside, this person had written, “We attended the show and your Morgan was like seeing my grandfather alive again, and he passed away in 80 whatever.” She was so clear that she had an experience of seeing her grandpa that day, and I was able to offer her unbeknownst to me an experience like that. And so, you know that play holds a special place for me too because of that story. It’s quite a lovely play.
W.O. Mitchell reading at Trent University
JAMES
W.O. Mitchell perfected the technique of appearing not to be performing. To be spontaneous and to appear as if he was telling the story for the first time. So, he’d draw his audience in through deliberate mistakes or confusion, he’d say, “Oh, did I tell you? Or I forgot to mention.” And in your performance, you totally capture that sense of spontaneous and unrehearsed storytelling. So much so that my son heard a couple of ladies leaving the theatre and they enjoyed the show, but they remarked that they were surprised that you seemed to lose your place and had to go back. Which means to them it was completely natural. So, to me you’re one of those actors who really achieves a feeling of reality in your performance no matter what part you’re playing. That’s a long speil just to ask, how do you do that?
NATHAN
Morris said this the other day and I think it’s true. I think when we get curious about people then we kind of fall in love with them. And I think it’s true of the characters we play, and I think in the rehearsal there is something about just falling in love with the reality of whoever they are and whatever drives them. You’ve heard it said that one of the actor’s adages is don’t judge the character even if you’re a villain. Villains are motivated by what they believe to be true or good or at least by what is in their best interests.
And I think the actor’s job overall – and W.O. Mitchell did this in spades too – is to collect people. To watch people and to observe what they do and why they do it without judgment and to allow them to steep into you and to become part of you and the energy of being them and how they participate in the world. It’s partly that and it’s partly just having fun. It’s just fun to try and make it as real as possible.
Saint Sammy and Brian: Saint Sammy calling down the wrath of the Lord to smite Bent Candy’s new red barn. Illustration by William Kurelek from the 75th Anniversary Edition of Who Has Seen the Wind. Available from Freehand Books.
JAMES
You know, it’s interesting that you mentioned fun, and I think W.O. Mitchell is able to capture the feeling of childhood and play and imagination and curiosity. What are your thoughts about the child within you in terms of that living in you as an actor?
NATHAN
I have three kids now and when I watch the four-year-old and two-year-old play for them every game is real. They just believe it. My little guy just thinks he’s the Flash. He thinks he’s the fastest thing going and so he’ll be like, “Watch this Dad.” And he will just run through and he’s like, “You didn’t even see me, did you.” And I remember as a kid wearing my North Star Velcro runners and those are the fastest shoes, and I can run so fast in my North Star shoes because they’ve got shooting stars on them and that makes my feet fast. And I believed it to be true.
Our adult logic brains know it’s not true, but it could be in your imagination. And the audience does the same thing. They all know they’re not seeing W.O. Mitchell. Karen said, “Nobody’s coming to see the actual W.O. Mitchell. They’re coming to have an experience of W.O. Mitchell and if we deliver it in a way that doesn’t give them any reason to doubt too much – then the audience will let their imagination see me as him.” And so, you know, I think our imagination is a remarkable and amazing gift, and I think as creatives we may access it a little bit more at times, but it’s there for everyone. They just have to access it.
JAMES
This is storytelling at its simplest and best. One actor. Minimal set. What is it like for you as a performer doing a one-man show? How do you create that connection with your audience?
NATHAN
I’ve done a number of one-person shows now and it gets to be a lonely room as opposed to having one or two other people or a group of actors to hang out with. It can be lonely in that way, but the audience really becomes the best friend of the show. And especially in something like this where it’s such a direct address. The whole point of the show is the relationship of the storyteller to the audience. At the end of the play, W.O. says that this is the thing – the energy of a live audience responding to a story – that’s where it’s at.
And for me, that is where it’s at. I love that relationship. I’m always curious about it and excited about it. Sometimes puzzled by it, you know, sometimes it lands really well, and people just explode with laughter and sometimes they don’t, and you can’t put together all of why that is, but people get to be who they are and so it’s a really lovely sort of bond that I’ve come to love about performing. And that’s the amazing thing about storytelling in theatre. And at the end of the play he says,
“You know…the energy of death lies behind everything I’ve written—it’s death and solitude that justify story telling. Telling stories draws us human aliens together in the mortal family, uniting us against the heart of darkness, defending us against the terror of being human. Writing’s a lonely act—like playing a dart game with the lights out. You have no idea whether your darts are coming anywhere near the bull’s-eye. But this (open handed gesture to audience)…this dilutes the darkness, gives me what all stage performers love—that immediate thrust of a live audience responding to story magic. (Looking out to audience, grins). We were flying tonight!”
How do you write a good story? Well, I think a big part of it comes down to creating believable characters. Flawed characters. Characters that reflect the whole range of human behaviour.
In real life, people want to find love and success and figure out a way to be content with the world. And there’s certainly no shortage of books and seminars out there telling you how to meditate and find peace of mind, how to take it one day at a time, or how to reach for the stars and achieve your dreams.
If you’re looking for an insightful book that provides useful suggestions about how to live a happier life you might want to pick up The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz. Have you heard about the four agreements? Do you know about Toltec Wisdom? If you haven’t – give this little book a read, or at the very least pick it up and put it on your bucket list.
The Four Agreements are:
Be impeccable with your word
Don’t take anything personally
Don’t make assumptions
Always do your best
These four agreements are a guide to reducing conflict, creating peace of mind, and fostering a better world. But when it comes to telling a good story there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell if people always told the truth and never made assumptions. People lie all the time. They’re selfish. Some are sociopaths. Do you really think a sociopath cares about anyone else?
So, with apologies to don Miguel Ruiz and nods to all the stooges, clowns, buffoons, jesters, writers, filmmakers, playwrights, poets, musicians, and scribes in the world here’s a look at the dark side of human nature – the opposite side of the four agreements. Because if you’re going to write a good story then the characters have to be believable, and people often choose the dark side – they lie and cheat and act in selfish ways. And sometimes people lie and cheat to achieve what they think is the greater good.
So, let’s look at the good side of people and the bad side of people when creating a story because no human is entirely good or entirely bad.
The First Agreement: Be Impeccable with Your Word.
The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word. To speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love. *
That sounds like good advice. Be truthful. I like that. I don’t always do it. Nobody does. But it’s a good thing to keep in mind because lies are insidious. They can transform us and change who we are.
But it’s not just individuals that lie. Corporations lie. Governments lie. Entire nations can lie. In fact, one of the things our new information age has made faster than ever is how quickly a lie can spread until it overshadows the truth. And let’s face it if everyone told the truth Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Mike Hammer, and Lieutenant Columbo would be out of a job.
The Flip Side of the First Agreement: Lie.
So, to write a good story why not try the flip side of the first agreement and instead of telling the truth – lie. Do not say what you mean. Gossip and use the power of your word to be deceitful, jealous, and malevolent.
Is that any way to live? Of course not. But if you’re writing a good story lying can be a useful device. Is Tony Soprano impeccable with his word? No. Does Daemon Targaryen use the power of his words in the direction of truth and love? Of course not. Does Homer Simpson always tell Marge what he’s up to in The Simpsons? Rarely.
So, if you want to write a good story let the half-truths, deceptions and lies power your story. Just remember in fiction, as in life, the lies are usually discovered. And when that happens there are usually consequences.
If you’re looking for a movie where the lie is central to the story look no further than Waking Ned Devine. Waking Ned Devine is a film set in Ireland and tells the story of a small town where Ned Devine has won the national lottery. Unfortunately, Ned is dead. And so, the entire town decides to pretend that one of the other members of the community is actual Ned so that they can claim the lottery and split it amongst all the members of the community.
It’s a wonderful film filled with genuine warmth and terrific characters, and it shows that while we often think of lies as being a negative thing – in this particular film – the lie serves to show the warmth and love and joy of being part of a small town. I’d highly recommend it. If you’re looking for a terrific warm-hearted comedy to watch, then I’d suggest you gather your own family and friends around the digital box and enjoy an evening with Ned Devine.
The Second Agreement: Don’t take anything personally.
The second agreement is not to take anything personally. You need to remember that nothing others do is because of you. Instead, what others say and do is a projection of their own reality and their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering. *
I guess that means you should forget what the critics say. Good or bad. Well unless it’s good. Good reviews help sell tickets, do they not? We are herd animals, after all, and we do seek out the opinions of others and in particular, our peer group when it comes to our choice of clothing, career options, and entertainment.
But if you allow yourself to be happy or unhappy based on the actions and opinions of others – every day will be an emotional rollercoaster. Are you happy because the sun is out or unhappy because it’s raining? We need rain just as much as we need sunshine so don’t let the weather or the opinions of others rule how you feel. But that’s a whole lot easier said than done, I know.
I mean who hasn’t been hurt? Who hasn’t hurt others? And often the hurt is unintentional. But if you’re trying to write a good story then having characters that are reasonable or forgiving or are immune to the actions and opinions of others doesn’t offer you a lot to work with. So instead of not taking anything personally maybe your characters should take it personally.
The Flip Side of the Second Agreement: Take things personally.
The flip side of not taking anything personally is to be offended. If you want to write a good story let the opinions and actions of others determine your actions. Revenge, jealousy, and anger are just three of the many emotions your characters can feel when they are easily offended or feel wronged. The pompous, the self-righteous, and the fanatic are all characters fueled by their need to be right.
Those who are offended often want revenge and without revenge, there would be no second pie thrown in a pie fight. There would be no deadly games played by Dr. Evil and Austin Powers. Sunshine or rain there would be no Frank, Charlie, Dennis, Mac, or Dee in Philadelphia. No Selina Meyer. No Liz Lemon. No Michael Scott. No Basil Fawlty. No Hangover! No Galaxy Quest! No Arsenic and Old Lace! In comedy, when you turn the other cheek, it usually gets slapped.
If you’re looking for a story where revenge drives much of the action look no further than Game of Thrones or Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan or John Wick. In all of those particular stories, revenge plays a central role in motivating the characters and driving the plot. I recently rewatched the entire series of Game of Thrones for the first time since the show ended back in 2019. Binge-watching Thrones made certain themes more obvious and one of the themes that powers much of the action for both “good” and “evil” characters is the desire for revenge.
Sansa Stark arranges for the vile and wicked Ramsay Bolton to be eaten by his own dogs. Cold-hearted and ruthless Tywin Lannister is murdered with a crossbow while sitting on the privy by his own son Tyrian Lannister. The double-crossing and lecherous Walder Frey has his throat cut by Aria Stark. Sansa, Aria, and Tyrian are easily three of the more sympathetic characters in Game of Thrones, but they are not above taking revenge. And as an audience, we love to see the underdog win. Because most of the time, in life, the underdog doesn’t win. Most of the time the underdog is crushed and destroyed and left with little opportunity for any sort of recourse, justice, or revenge.
Usually in a comedy revenge doesn’t reach such murderous heights as it does in Game of Thrones unless, of course, you’re talking about Ready or Not or Zombieland. No, in most comedies the revenge is something less lethal more like Jim Halpert from The Office putting Dwight Schrute’s stapler in a Jell-O Mold. Watching the war between Jim and Dwight trying to outsmart and outmaneuver each other is fun because the battle between the two is never won. Victory is only temporary. There are many more battles to be fought.
The Third Agreement: Don’t make assumptions.
The third agreement is to not make any assumptions. Instead, you need to find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. You should communicate with others as clearly as you can in order to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one little agreement, you can completely transform your life. *
How many times have we assumed something and then lived to regret it? The truth is we make assumptions every day. We make assumptions about people’s motives and desires and character. I think the assumption is one of the most powerful tools for writing a good story. Who doesn’t chuckle to themselves when they watch the ending scene of Romeo and Julietwhere Romeo thinks Juliet is dead, but she isn’t dead and Romeo not knowing this kills himself? Okay well maybe that’s not funny but it shows – how on stage – and by extrapolation life – jumping to conclusions can have deadly consequences.
But Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy – nobody dies in a comedy – or is that an assumption? There were more than a few deaths in The Grand Budapest Hotel and the entire world was destroyed in Dr. Strangelove. So, death and comedy are not mutually exclusive. Death being a part of the human condition is often the subject of both comedy and tragedy.
The Flip Side of the Third Agreement: Make assumptions.
So, the flip side of not making assumptions is to make assumptions. If you want to write a good story have your characters make assumptions about people’s motives and desires. Never ask questions. Assume that all gossip is gospel and that there could never be another explanation for things other than the one you believe.
Assumptions fuel misunderstandings and create characters working at cross purposes. Part of its power lies in the fun of letting the audience in on the secret. Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Some Like it Hot would lose a lot of the comedy if we didn’t know that Tootsie was in reality Dustin Hoffman, Mrs. Doubtfire was actually Robin Williams, and Daphne was really Jack Lemmon. Other characters operate from the assumption that each of these characters is what they appear to be – a woman. But we know better, and the fun comes from the exploration of gender roles and sexual expectations in combination with the ever-present possibility of discovery.
Of course, if you want to write a good story this doesn’t mean you can’t hold something back. After all, Sleuth would lose a great deal of its fun if we knew from the start exactly what was going on. I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve read Sleuth. You have read Sleuth, haven’t you? Seen the movie? Not the Michael Caine – Jude Law version but the Michael Caine – Laurence Olivier version. If you haven’t seen it or read it maybe go and see the movie or read the play or at the very least add it to your bucket list.
One of my favourite comedies is Being There starring Peter Sellers as Chance the Gardner. In the film, Sellers plays a man of simple mind who has spent his entire life living an isolated existence in a home with a walled yard where he spends his time gardening and watching television. In fact, his entire knowledge about the outside world is based on what he’s seen and heard on the boob tube. When the “Old Man” who owns the home dies Chance is forced out into the real world for the first time.
The humour comes from the fact that the audience knows Chance is a simple man who only talks about gardening, but every other character in the story from billionaires to the Russian Ambassador to late-night talk show hosts assumes that Chance means more than what he says and thereby reinterpret his words to be much more profound. The result is that by the end of the movie Chance finds himself rubbing shoulders with the political and business elite in Washington D.C. and is even being considered as a possible candidate for President of the United States.
The Fourth Agreement: Always do your best.
The fourth and final agreement is to always do your best. But you need to remember that your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick, but under whatever circumstances you find yourself, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret. *
I actually really like this agreement because it acknowledges that our best fluctuates. We’re human. We’re not machines. And so sometimes when we look back on our lives, we feel we should have done better. But understanding that we’re not always able to be in top form allows us to look at our life with a little more compassion. Maybe we were tired or hungry or had just been through some challenging life event and our ability to respond was compromised. But of course, sometimes even when we’re in top form we don’t always do what’s best for ourselves or for others.
The Flip Side of the Fourth Agreement: Always do your worst.
And of course, the flip side of always doing your best is to always do your worst. If you want to write a good story have your characters try to find the easy way out. Look for shortcuts. Lie their way out of deadlines. Make excuses. Avoid the hard work or try to get others to do it for you.
Comedy thrives on the misadventures of the underachieving incompetent. Think of Inspector Clouseau searching for the Pink Panther – The Three Stooges fixing a leaky faucet – or Homer Simpson trying to prevent a nuclear meltdown. Do the Stooges see themselves as incompetent? No. They see themselves as helpful. Does Inspector Clouseau believe in his crime-solving abilities? Of course, he does. Does Homer’s incompetence prevent him from becoming an astronaut or a secret agent? No. Instead, Homer’s incompetence combined with his predilection to being an underachiever makes the comedy twice the fun.
Of course, the other aspect of doing your worst is causing chaos and destruction. A good villain operates from just such a principle. And one of my favourite villains is Count Olaf from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. A Series of Unfortunate Events is the story of the Baudelaire orphans, Klaus, Violet, and Sunny and Count Olaf’s relentless attempt to steal their inheritance through a number of villainous acts including murder, kidnapping, and arson. Does he succeed? You’ll have to read the books or watch the brilliant Netflix adaptation to find out, but rest assured in the process of going after the Baudelaire orphans Count Olaf leaves behind him a rather long path of death and destruction.
In Life
So, in life, it’s probably not a bad idea to try and follow the four agreements, but if you want to write a good story then you might want to consider the flip side. Because as good as we try to be we don’t always succeed. Sometimes we get jealous. Sometimes we lie to get what we want. Sometimes we cheat. And even though life is tough we often make it tougher by how we live and the choices we make. Just consider the case of George Costanza from Seinfeld. George truly embraces the flip side of the four agreements. He lies. He takes things personally. He makes assumptions. And he seldom does his best. George is a shining example of how not to live your life.
And that’s why we have stories. We’re all flawed humans struggling to make sense of our world and our place in it. Comedy lets us laugh at our struggles and tragedy lets us weep at our flaws. Stories help us cope with our failures. They help us to understand what it means to be human. They allow us to appreciate our good side and acknowledge the dark side and help us to have a deeper understanding of the human condition.
“I believe we move in the direction that lights us up. That captures our attention. That we feel passionate about. But my end destination keeps changing and what makes me happy keeps changing. I thought when I started all of this, I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t know I was going to be aplaywright. And I like playwriting a whole hell of a lot better. It’s really about trusting the path and letting go of the outcome because how can you really foresee where the path will take you? If someone comes along and mentors you they can only tell you what path they took. But that’s not you. That’s not your path. I used to feel like a failed actress but if I had taken different steps along the way, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up loving playwriting so much or being as happy as I am being a playwright.”
Meredith Taylor-Parry Playwright
Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry whose previous plays Book Club and Book Club II: The Next Chapter were big hits for Lunchbox Theatre has a new play at Lunchbox premiering on May 10th called Shark Bite. The two Book Club plays focused primarily on the challenges and joys of motherhood and marriage while her new play turns its attention to the relationship between a grandfather and his troubled fourteen-year-old granddaughter Ava as the two struggle to find the love and connection they once shared when Ava was a child.
I first met Meredith back in 2011 at Playworks Ink a theatre conference focusing on playwriting run by the Alberta Playwrights Network and Theatre Alberta. At that time Meredith was just beginning her playwriting journey and she was in the early stages of working on her play Survival Skills which won the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2013 and was produced Off-Off-Broadway in April 2014 by the 13th Street Repertory Company in New York City.
Meredith is a gifted playwright who is as adept at comedy as she is at drama, and her newest play is a touching and heartfelt glimpse into the age-old challenges of family members trying to reach out across the generations. I contacted Meredith back in March to talk with her about Shark Bite, life-changing decisions, sources of creative energy, and playwriting.
JAMES
One of the things we experience both as an audience and as an artist is a divergence of opinion regarding the work we see and the work we create. And by that, I mean the same movie or book or painting can be praised as the most meaningful and deeply moving experience of someone’s life and someone else will not feel a thing. One person can love it. Another person can hate it. Do you have an explanation for that divergence of opinion in ourselves and in others, and what does that tell you about us as humans?
MEREDITH
I think to sum it up in one sentence – people are complicated. Think of how complicated we are in our personalities and our histories and our experience. So of course, one piece of art is going to mean something completely different to someone else, or they’re going to experience it in different ways. That being said, what I’ve always been told about writing was that the more specific you are to your own experience the more you’re going to relate to a wider group of people.
So instead of trying to figure out what your audience wants, go to the heart and truth of your own experience as much as you can, and you will reach more people. That’s how you find your people. Your audience. The people that want to listen to what you have to say and to what story you want to tell. Because if you’re authentic through your writing and tell your story and your truth, then you seem to reach those people out there who are listening for it. They want to hear it because they experienced something similar.
JAMES
Have you ever had a critical moment in your life where someone or something you’ve encountered has resulted in a decision that changed your life’s path?
MEREDITH
Absolutely. I just feel weird about getting into it because I’m going to get pretty personal but what the f*ck! So, I got involved with a guy who was married back on the East Coast and if you flipped open a sociology textbook you could find a paragraph with our pictures above because it was that typical.
“I’m not happy with my marriage. I’m so sad. And now that you’ve come along, I understand what real love is. Maybe I’m finally ready to leave my wife. But no, I made vows. But I’m so unhappy. And you’re so great and amazing. Let’s get an apartment together! No this is moving too fast for me, I need to think. Blah blah blah.”
And I’ve written about this. I’ve written about this a number of times. Trying to work it out. That’s when I first started writing. That’s what I was writing about. It finally came down to this very dramatic scene in a small rural town in Nova Scotia, where I was sitting in a car and all three characters were there. The mistress, the husband, and the wife and they were screaming at each other. And I thought, “Oh my God, this is a Women’s Television Network fucking movie. And I am part of it. I’ve let my life become this drama.” And it was so clear to me that if one person did not withdraw that this crazy dysfunctional silly drama would continue on for who knows how long. That’s a lot of energy and a lot of pain and a lot of suffering. And I didn’t want any part of that anymore and I wanted to step out of the drama.
So, I did. I went home. I talked to my wonderfully smart, kind, and very wise roomie at the time who was my best girlfriend. And she organized a girl’s camping weekend around the gorgeous Cabot Trail in Cape Breton with a few good friends. By the time we had finished that trip, I decided I was going to get in my car and drive across Canada, cause I love a good road trip, and figure my life out. Those women and that weekend changed my life. Never underestimate the power of the female friendship. So, within two weeks, I packed up all my stuff, dropped it off at my parents and started a road trip and ended up out here. That’s how I ended up in Calgary. So – life-changing.
If I hadn’t done that God knows I’d still be back in Nova Scotia. I never would have had a little look-see and gander around Canada and figured out where I wanted to be. I’m sure I never would have ended up in the arts. I never would have had enough guts to go and do my BFA and my MFA. There’s no way I would have ended up as a playwright.
It’s a really interesting movie. But in the book, there’s a line that goes, “Who we want to be doesn’t matter when there’s no way to get there.” And that really brought to mind the idea of guidance and mentorship in life for me. It’s like how do we figure out how to become the artist?
MEREDITH
I think our picture of who we want to be isn’t the destination. I believe that. When someone says I don’t know the path to get there it’s like – take a fucking step in the direction of where you think you want to go and then watch the magic happen. Because in my life, every time I’ve done a big bold move the universe has come in tenfold.
For example, you may ask how does an elementary school teacher manage to take a road trip across Canada with no job prospects and end up out in Calgary? It’s because within a week after I’d made that decision to leave, I had a big unexpected financial windfall.
I believe we move in the direction that lights us up. That captures our attention. That we feel passionate about. But my end destination keeps changing and what makes me happy keeps changing. I thought when I started all of this, I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t know I was going to be a playwright. And I like playwriting a whole hell of a lot better. It’s really about trusting the path and letting go of the outcome because how can you really foresee where the path will take you? If someone comes along and mentors you they can only tell you what path they took. But that’s not you. That’s not your path. I used to feel like a failed actress but if I had taken different steps along the way, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up loving playwriting so much or being as happy as I am being a playwright.
Anna Cummer, Cheryl Hutton, Kira Bradley and Arielle Rombough in a scene from the Lunchbox Theatre production of Book Club II: The Next Chapter Photograph by Benjamin Laird
I remember making a decision when I was turning thirty. I already had two degrees. I had a Bachelor of Education and a Bachelor of Sociology. Should I go take a Bachelor of Fine Arts and spend all that money or should I go to SAIT and take the film and television course, which was notoriously hard to get into at the time, but it seemed more practical, because I thought, “Well, I could still be on camera. I’ll just be working in television. Maybe I’ll be hosting a show or maybe I’ll work in news.” And that seemed the more practical choice. And if you took a poll of all my friends, which I did, because I used to do that in order to try and make decisions, they all said, “Oh, SAIT. Doesn’t that sound more practical? It’s only two years. You’re not going to spend as much money. I can see you doing television or radio. You’ve always been interested in it.”
Maybe SAIT was more practical, but I went with my gut intuitive feeling that I would not be happy. I got accepted into SAIT. I probably got in because I was relaxed in the interview. I wasn’t hanging all my hopes and dreams on it. I got in, but then I phoned them up and I said, “You know what, I’m declining my seat because I’m going to go to the University of Calgary and I’m going to take my Bachelor of Fine Arts and Drama.” And the admissions person said, “Well, good luck to you.” He was nice. He was just kind of astounded because people wanted to get into the program so badly.
But I just had this epiphany moment and when I made that decision, I decided that from then on, I was going to make bold moves like that. I wasn’t going to do what culturally looked right or what my friends were telling me to do. I was going to go with my gut. And I feel like I’ve been rewarded. I feel very grateful for the life that I live now. I work hard to let go of the feeling that I’m a loser unless I’m a famous Canadian playwright or I’m making good money doing this. Which is so ridiculous because it’s such a crapshoot and there are so few people that are going to go into the arts and make money. Maybe it should just be enough that you’re happy with yourself and you’re happy with trying to get your work out into the world. Sometimes you do, and that should be sweet enough perhaps.
“The Biotechs” Meredith, Tanis, Jenny, and Krista – Banff 2019
JAMES
You mentioned friends. Who do you have in your life that can be brutally honest with you and how brutally honest are you with yourself?
MEREDITH
I subscribe to the philosophy of less brutality and more gentleness. So, I have a really good group of girlfriends who are honest with me, but we’re all each other’s biggest fans and we’re all really gentle with each other. And as far as being honest with myself in a workshop situation, for example, where you bring your play in and you lay it out and all the actors read it, I invite honesty. I just keep assuring people that I want to know if there’s something that doesn’t feel right to them. And you will get a lot of different opinions because as we said before, people are complicated. People respond differently to art. One scene that someone might love and adore another person may think is completely unnecessary. One character that I’m in love with someone else might find creepy.
So, I let everybody know at the beginning I want their honest feedback and that has come with experience. I certainly wasn’t like that at the beginning of my career. Not at all. But now I can handle anything. Just give it to me straight. I will write everything down because I feel like I have a really good inner bullshit meter that will tell me one of two things. Either: “You know what, that comment doesn’t serve the play OR shit they’re right. I didn’t see it before but now that they’ve given me that feedback I have to go back and fix that part. Oh my God, that entire scene has to come out and I have to write something else. What am I going to do? How am I going to fix that?”
Occasionally, I just note a comment and wait for two other people to tell me the same thing then I’ll go back and have a look at it. But I still have the dial on the bullshit meter that says, “Thanks for your feedback!” while I’m thinking, “No way would I touch that. I don’t care if you think that character is creepy. You can not like that character and that’s fine, but I’m not going to change anything or take that character out.”
Arielle Rombough, Kira Bradley, Anna Cummer, Kathryn Kerbes, and Cheryl Hutton in the 2016 Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club by Meredith Taylor Parry. Photograph by Meredith Taylor-Parry
JAMES
Let’s talk about creative energy. That’s been one of the challenges I’ve noticed over the last decade with my own writing because I’ve always thought of writing as something finite. In other words, something that gets used up in the day. It’s like a jug of wine, right? You drink as you write and by the end of the day the jug is empty, and you’ve used it all up. And if you use it up on other activities like blogging or writing commercials, which I used to do, there’s nothing left at the end of the day for your stories.
But just the last week I started to think about creative energy more like turning on a tap. In other words, it’s always available. It’s just you have to turn the tap on to use it. So, I could be at work and let’s say I’m a commercial writer, I turn it on. I create whatever I need to make a living. I turn it off when I head home. And then that night, I’ve got a two-hour block where I could turn the tap on again and do my own creative writing. How do you think of creative energy? The energy you use to create your art. Is it a finite thing to use up in a day? Is it a flowing thing? I’m just curious.
MEREDITH
There’s got to be something in the tap when you turn it on. You have to figure out how you replenish that supply or keep that supply flowing. And for me, it comes from other people. For example, my energy has completely changed since we started talking even though this morning, I had a bit of anxiety about doing the interview because I wanted to think carefully about my answers. But now that we’ve started talking about playwriting, I don’t give a shit because I get so excited and all the anxiety goes away. This crazy energy builds up in me and it’s fun because I love talking about writing and I love talking about plays and I love talking about making art.
And if you look at any of my plays they went from one level to a much higher level it was always because of an infusion of creativity from other artists offering their talent, ability, different points of view and brilliance to the project. For example, with Shark Bite Maezy Dennie, Robert Klein, Chantelle Han, and Ruby Dawn Eustaquio were a dream team. I keep getting dream teams at Lunchbox. Like the dream team I had for Book Club and Book Club II. It’s impossible to have all of that artistic talent in a room together and not get inspired. And I know that I need that. It’s just that sometimes I forget to seek that out. I’m pretty good at doing workshops if a workshop pops up from the Playwrights Guild of Canada or whatever. I will do a workshop because I know that I’m going to come out of that two-hour workshop and be full of creative energy, which is going to help my writing that day or the next day or in the weeks to come.
Meredith’s Mother Elizabeth Taylor, Meredith, and her sister Emily Taylor Smith on an Opera Tour in Budapest 2019
And I need to expose myself to other forms of art if I want to get creative energy to put into my own art. I need to visit art museums. I need to look at visual art. I need to listen to a lot of music and different kinds of music. I need to read fiction. I need to go to plays because that will replenish my creative energy. My mom and my sister and I would go on these amazing opera tours pre- Covid. There’s a company out of Ontario called ARIA tours and they handpick the wine that you’re going to drink in the two-star Michelin restaurant where you’re going to dine. And thanks to my Mom, I’ve gone to New York and Scandinavia and several different countries in Europe, and I’ve eaten great food and toured world-class art museums during the day and seen so much opera. I’m truly blessed to have been immersed in such amazing art experiences.
And getting outside. Walking or gardening or yard work. Even shovelling snow. You’re outside. You’re getting your vitamin D. You’re getting some fresh air. You’re doing something kind of mindless that you don’t need your brain for so your brain starts wandering and coming up with creative ideas or starts solving a problem in a play that you’re working on or comes up with an idea that you might use for a play.
All this stuff’s been said before though. I’m not making this up and you just have find what works for you. And those are the three things I can think of that work for me every time: being around creative people, experiencing art in other forms and going outside and walking or just moving your body in other ways like yard work.
JAMES
How has COVID made an impact on you over the last couple of years? How has it impacted you personally and professionally?
MEREDITH
It broke my stride as an artist, I think. It did a lot worse for a lot of other people, so I don’t mean to sound whiny, but I had just rented a desk at cSPACE in the sandbox which is a co-working space at the King Edward. And I would go in once a week dressed up for work with my lunch and my computer and sit at this desk with other people who were renting space. And there’s all this art in there already and a lot of nonprofits and a lot of arts companies and organizations. And I’d go and I’d sit down and work and in a few months I finished an adaptation I was working on. And then COVID hit, and I thought, “Well, I’m not going to go into work anymore.” And for a while they shut down completely. So, now I’m like, “Should I do that again?” It was productive at the time but right now for whatever reason, I’m not super motivated. I already feel really busy.
And the pandemic was the perfect storm for my teenagers and they both encountered a lot of mental health struggles that were worsened during the pandemic and came to light during the pandemic. So, we started a whole journey with both of my kids and that’s taken its toll. It’s been really hard on us as a family but we’re getting through it.
Summer 2021 – Greg, Leo, Noah, and Meredith – Dinosaur Provincial Park – Alberta, Canada
But it also gave me time to rest and say, “Okay, we’re in a pandemic right now. I’m going to support my kids with their mental health struggles and get my kids through grade nine or ten or whatever it was because they’re working from home and they’re going to need my support to get through it.” Neither of them was doing very well independently. They really needed support and help to get through the online learning. So, “I’m going to give myself a break as a writer and I’m not going to feel like I need to be writing every day right now.”
JAMES
You mentioned you have a production coming up with Lunchbox Theatre called Shark Bite. This is the third play of yours to grace the Lunchbox stage and here’s the description, Ava a troubled urban teenager goes to her grandfather’s remote cabin for a visit. The two soon learn that the easy days of their relationship are far behind them and when George tries to find some common ground between them through a hike in the woods, a dangerous turn of events leaves Ava in the position of trying to save them both.
First, I’m curious, Ava’s fourteen and I’m just wondering, what were you like when you were fourteen? What did you think about the world? What was your life like? What did you spend your time doing? And reflecting back now, how much of that fourteen-year-old version remains today and how much did you use it to create the character?
MEREDITH
Oh, God, that’s a tough one. That’s a big question. Okay, so the first part of the question was thinking about yourself at fourteen and I see myself as a gawky, gangly teenager. My nickname was String Bean. And I was a card-carrying perfectionist. I was working really hard in school to try and get good marks. I did extracurriculars. I did sports. Even when they made me miserable I still did them. And then I was looking at everybody else and going why can’t I just be normal like her? Or comparing myself to other people because there was always someone who was better on the basketball team than me and there was always someone who was getting higher marks than me and had a boyfriend when I didn’t. So those kinds of things. Feeling like there’s something wrong with me. That I’m out of place. That I don’t fit in with other people.
I did spend time out in the woods with my father because he was a big outdoorsman. So, the stuff about hiking through the woods in the play and the spruce gum and looking at animal tracks would have still been a part of my world a little bit at fourteen. I don’t know how old I was when I gave up snaring rabbits. When I finally went, “Oh my God this is horrible. And traumatic.” Little t. That was definitely still part of my world at that time.
But when I was writing the play, I also tried to look at it from the point of view of teenagers and I wrote an imagined character who wasn’t really one of my teenagers, but I was certainly drawing from some of their experiences. And then Maezy helped me too in that final workshop that we did in 2021 with Stage One. She helped me be more truthful and authentic. There’s pretty much no other place I’d rather be than sitting in a room with a bunch of actors, trying to make a play better, and then getting to see it. I’m grateful for all the people that I get to work with through Lunchbox and I’m grateful that I’m going to get to work with them again because it’s a pretty damn great place to work.
Maezy Dennie as Ava and Robert Klein as George in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor-Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
Robert Klein as George in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
Robert Klein as George and Maezy Dennie as Ava in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor-Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
Robert Klein as George and Maezy Dennie as Ava in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor-Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
Maezy Dennie as Ava and Robert Klein as George in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor-Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
Maezy Dennie as Ava and Robert Klein as George in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor-Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
Robert Klein as George and Maezy Dennie as Ava in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor-Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
Robert Klein as George and Maezy Dennie as Ava in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor-Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
Maezy Dennie as Ava and Robert Klein as George in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor-Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
Maezy Dennie as Ava and Robert Klein as George in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Shark Bite by Meredith Taylor-Parry. Photo by Tim Nguyen
JAMES
One of the themes in the play is an examination of self-harm. And the play really made me think about our culture and the fundamental role punishment plays in our society. The desire to punish ourselves is a message that might find its roots in the very nature of our own culture. In other words, ideas like no pain, no gain and the need to make sacrifices in order to achieve something. So, I’m curious about your own thoughts and what you hope your play opens up in terms of a discussion about self-harm and punishment.
MEREDITH
Self-harm wasn’t originally in the play. I workshopped the play with the St. John Theatre Company just before the pandemic in the fall of 2019. Pamela Halstead was the dramaturge and I also worked with a lot of really talented playwrights in that little circle. We were all finalists in a playwriting competition that was put on by the St. John Theatre Company and in order to enter the competition you had to have ties to New Brunswick or New Brunswick roots. Which I do. I was born there.
And one amazing playwright in attendance in Saint John, John-Michel Cliche said that when he thought about the presence of the lighter in the play he immediately thought about self-harm, and I replied – “Wow.” Sometimes you put things in your play, and you know they’re really important, but you don’t know what the hell they’re in there for. And then someone like Jean-Michel comes along and says, “Well, what about this?” And that opened up the idea of self-harm and I started thinking about it, and then it came into my own life through what my teenagers have been experiencing over the past couple of years. And then it came into the lives of a lot of my parent-friends, who have teens, and you know, pandemic aside, just being a teenager in this age is really, really, really, hard. Right? In this age, of TikTok.
So, I believe there’s a reason why Jean-Michel turned to me and said, “I thought about self-harm when she took that lighter.” Coincidence? I’m not sure. I’m experiencing this with my kids and I know so many people who are experiencing this and this needs to be talked about because this is a big commonality among teenagers right now that’s not being talked about a lot. And there are parents from my generation who are going, “What the hell? I don’t get this. I don’t understand this at all.” So, I think it’s really good if we talk about it a bit and we get some more information out about it and it sparks conversation among audience members.
I also think it really illustrates the generation gap between Ava and George because he’s an even older generation because he’s the granddad and how does a teenager maintain a relationship with a grandparent? How did I maintain a relationship with my grandparents at that point? When you’re fourteen and vulnerable and going through stuff that you don’t want your grandparents to know about because they might not understand it or they might judge you for it, so you don’t really show them who you are. You just have this kind of superficial relationship. They just know that you do well at school and you like horses. You don’t talk to them about what’s really going on. I felt there needed to be issues that illustrate the characters struggling to connect while dealing with topics that the granddad doesn’t understand.
And I don’t know everything there is to know about self-harm but from what I’ve learned about self-harm, and from what people have told me – because I haven’t experienced it myself – is that it is different from punishment. My understanding of it is that you’re inflicting a physical pain to avoid or rescue you from or to stop a profound emotional pain that is being visited upon you, rather than it being a punishment. It’s more like an action to protect you from pain, or to take you out of a painful place that you’re in so that you can avoid experiencing emotional pain.
For more information about self-harm check out the links below:
When you think about life how much do you think about the cycles we experience and the linear progression of time we experience because there are cycles and an individual cycle can be different. So, we have the seasons, and each season has similarities to previous seasons, but each season is also unique, right? This summer was hotter than last summer or whatever. And just as we experience cycles in life on an annual basis, we’re also on a linear track. We’re getting older each day. So, our time here diminishes. And when you look at life, how much do you think about the cycles of life and how much do you think of the linear progression of time?
MEREDITH
I think more about cycles. That’s how I mark time. I really love the change of seasons in our climate. I could never be a snowbird. I have friends who are retiring, and I look on Facebook and they’re like, “We’re snowbirds now and we’re going to go down and live in Florida.” My grandparents did that. And I think, “I couldn’t do that. I’d miss the change of seasons. It’s nice to take a break from winter and go away for a couple of weeks but I like that cycle.”
And every year it seems to light me up even more. I’ll be sitting at my window, and I look outside, and I see birds starting to come around because it’s starting to get a little bit milder and I’ve got bird feeders in the yard and I’m like a little kid, “Oh my God, I saw my first Robin.”
And as I get older that stuff becomes more important and interesting to me. I notice it more. I enjoy it more. I enjoy that spring cleanup and getting out when the earth is starting to soften up a little bit and then you go out and you work in the yard all day and you smell the dirt and the air starts to warm up a bit in the spring. And I love the fall equally with all the smells and sometimes that beautiful weather that keeps going into fall when the skies have never been bluer, and it’s really crisp in the morning. And I love the first snowfall of the year and so I think I focus more on cycles.
And I know there are cycles with parenting because parenting is tough. And it makes parenting a whole lot easier because when you’re in a really tough cycle, or a really tough phase it really helps to look at it and realize, “You know what, this isn’t going to last forever. And right now, it’s really, really tough. But in a few years, they’re going to be a grown-up and we’re going to be sitting down having a coffee together, or going to a movie, or going for lunch and everything is going to be okay.” And it’s really useful to remember that when you’re going through a difficult phase.
JAMES
This too will end.
MEREDITH
“This too shall pass.” My mother used to say that all the time and I honestly believe that. And maybe it sounds trite, but it helps me sometimes to say it to myself. When I’m in my own little mire of bad thoughts or bad times or bad luck. It can help me to say, “This too shall pass.” So, I think in cycles. Definitely cycles.
JAMES
Back in January 2016, we did an interview where you talked about your play Survival Skills which is a fictionalized story about a father committing suicide based on your own experience with your own father completing a suicide after he had received a terminal diagnosis, and in that interview, you said, “You want to write the kind of play where people are going to go home and talk about it, think about it and talk about themselves a little bit. You know, my God, if it got people to think about their own mortality a little bit, how could that be a bad thing? We all run around scared to talk about it, but we’re fascinated by it at the same time. The idea that we’re mortal, just to have that discussion opened up wouldn’t hurt.” So, I thought, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about mortality and the fact that we’re all at some point in the future going to die. Have your own thoughts on mortality evolved over the course of your life?
MEREDITH
I think they’ve evolved but I can’t really say I spend a ton of time thinking or talking about it either. You know, it’s funny, at that point in time, I was obviously thinking we need to talk about death. It needs to be in a play. But right now, I don’t have a lot of thoughts to share on the topic to tell you the honest truth. I still think what I said was valid and I like what I said.
JAMES
Maybe there are times in your life where you feel the need to discuss your mortality, and maybe there are other times you don’t.
MEREDITH
And maybe you could take out the word mortality and punch something else in there like self-harm or punishment or shame or any of the other things we’ve talked about. I mean isn’t that what one hopes a play does? When I wrote Book Club a lot of thought went into how many moms are experiencing the same things, and shame being one of them, for not being the best mother on the planet. A couple of my plays deal with that theme. But if we don’t talk about it and bring it out into the light, we’ll just go on pretending to the people around us that we’ve got it all under control. Perhaps when we open up and laugh about the things that make us feel ashamed as moms or just human beings and shine a little light on it, perhaps that is a little bit healing.
There’s a Brene Brown quote, and I have it on my mirror in my bathroom. “I think laughter between people is a holy form of connection, of communion. It’s the way you and I look at each other and without words, say, I get exactly what you’re saying.”
So, if you write a funny line in your play about something rather important and your whole audience is laughing about it, there’s a shared humanity in that. Perhaps the audience is thinking “I get it. I get what you’re saying. I’m with you.”
Besides the fact that everyone just laughed at something you wrote down and were fortunate enough to bring to actors and a director and the rest of your creative team and they’ve poured their creativity into it and together you’ve just made a big room of people laugh and walk out together feeling happy and connected.
Playwright Kristen Da Silva. Photo by Patrick Hodgson
“I wrote a comedy with a character who has terminal cancer, and I didn’t know whether that was going to work, whether people were going to be willing to go there and laugh in the same breath as they’re going to cry. I lost my aunt to the same cancer I wrote about, and you know we didn’t get to confront some things in real life, because we’re not always capable of doing that with our loved ones, but I got to confront some of those things in the play. So, I think that comedy is a doorway to some tough conversations. And I set out to entertain people, but I don’t shy away from tackling things that might be more difficult or might evoke sadness, because I think there’s something really cathartic about feeling all of those emotions in one night.”
The Rules for Playing Risk, Where You Are, and Hurray Hard are just a few of the plays where playwright Kristen Da Silva takes a comedic look at the loves, ambitions, and struggles of the everyday people in her plays. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I love her work so much. These are people you can relate to and understand and identify with. These are stories about people trying to navigate the intricate, and mystifying road of relationships, love, and sometimes even death all delivered with humour and humanity.
All the more interesting is the fact that prior to diving into playwriting and acting full-time Kristen spent the first part of her working life in the corporate world. Home on maternity leave with her youngest son, and feeling a need for some intellectual stimulation, she wrote her first full-length romantic comedy Book Club. Other plays were soon to follow including Gibson & Sons and Hurry Hard both winners of the Playwrights Guild of Canada Comedy Award.
Her most recent play, The Rules of Playing Risk, a touching story about a grandfather and his estranged grandson getting to know each other for the first time, premiered in April 2021 in a video-on-demand production from Theatre Orangeville. I contacted Kristen over ZOOM back in February 2021 to talk with her about her creative process, thoughts on comedy, going down rabbit holes, and what she’d say to her younger self if she could go back in time.
JAMES HUTCHISON
A couple of days ago, I watched this documentary from 1964 called Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, and it reminded me of my childhood, because I grew up in the ’60s, and I was watching the cars and the way people were dressed, and I had this avalanche of nostalgia hit me, and I found myself diving into memories of my childhood. I was wondering, for yourself, do you have triggers that take you back to your childhood? And what was that childhood like?
KRISTEN DA SILVA
My favourite part of my childhood was camping. We used to go up to Wasaga Beach where there was a campground, and we had a trailer, and the smell of smoke from a campfire and the smell of Avon Skin So Soft still brings me right back to my childhood. My parents, like everyone, used Skin so Soft as a bug repellant.
The winters were a bit tougher because when I was seven we moved to Nobleton – which is a village surrounded by farmland. It was very different from the neighbourhood where I had spent the first seven years of my life – where there were a lot of families packed in tightly together with kids, and it just facilitated kids playing more easily. In the country to play with someone, you had to be driven to their house.
But at the campground kids used to play all day, and I remember coming back at whatever time curfew was, but all day long we just ran around and played capture the flag and explored the woods. I have great memories of that.
JAMES
I guess when I think back to my childhood and what’s different today is the sense of freedom children had to play. To explore. I remember riding all over Calgary on my bike, you know, going for miles, all over the place.
KRISTEN
Yeah, it’s very true. It’s really changed. I would lose my mind if my kids were gone all day, and I didn’t know where they were. But that was normal in the ‘80s. There were no cell phones. No way to really check-in. It was just come in when the streetlights come on.
JAMES
Supper time is when the mothers are standing on the porch shouting for the kids.
KRISTEN
One of my aunts used a whistle to call us back. When we heard the whistle, we came running. And other than that – we were on our own.
JAMES
At what point did you find yourself being on stage and telling stories, and where do you think that impulse to perform comes from?
KRISTEN
I think it started with dance. I didn’t really enjoy dance in terms of the lessons, but I remember really enjoying the recitals. That feeling when you go out on stage and you’re suddenly not as bound by your own awareness of yourself, and you can express yourself in braver ways through performance and through playing a character. I think that’s what really drew me to theatre and kept me coming back time and time again.
And I remember when I would go to a movie, I would leave the theatre and still be in that world. I was a big reader and I think I was living in a fantasy a lot of the time. Every activity I did as a kid I turned into a story for myself. I remember going skiing and weaving a tale as I was riding the chairlift about what I was there doing and where I was in the world. I spent a lot of time inside my head. Inside fantasy. And I think being on stage was an extension of that.
I first started acting in school. I believe we did Rapunzel, and I think I played Rapunzel’s mother. I played Mary in the school Christmas pageant, which was in French. I remember going to the manger and we were speaking French. And then after that, once I got into higher grades, there was a school play you could audition for every year, and I always did that.
JAMES
So, it’s interesting to me that you’ve got this storytelling narrative going on in your head and this love of fiction and literature, and then you go to university and major in political science and labour relations. How does that happen?
KRISTEN
Well, I’ve thought about it a lot because it really is strange. And the weirdest part is that my parents encouraged me to major in theatre. And I said, “No.”
I think I felt scared of failing. If I were to pursue what I really cared about – and it didn’t work out – that felt like too big a thing to put on the line. These weren’t conscious thoughts that I had back then, but now looking back on that decision I think that’s the main reason I didn’t major in theatre.
Also, it wasn’t a usual career choice at my high school. I didn’t know anyone who had done that in my peer group or slightly above my peer group. I couldn’t look to someone else and go, “Okay, so that’s a path I could take.”
JAMES
What were the university years like for you? Because I understand you did keep your foot in the theatre circle. You joined an improvisation troupe.
KRISTEN
Yeah, I kind of didn’t deliberately do that. You know honestly, when I think back to that time I was really overwhelmed by the experience of attending university, because keep in mind, like from the age of seven on, I lived in this tiny village, and we had one stoplight, and you know even going to York and seeing that many people in one place was a really new experience for me.
I don’t think I was really sitting down in an organized way and thinking through things. You have to declare a major, and I had done very well in my last two years of high school in history and in law, and I thought, “Well, I’m good at these things. I think maybe I’d like to pursue something like that.”
And then at York, in order to graduate, you have to do an arts credit in your first year, and you can pick any art. I picked theatre because that was what I was already familiar with and liked. It was because of that that I got into the improv company because the professor who taught me, Fred Thury, ran Vanier College Productions, which at that time was sort of like a theatre program for non-majors. It was where people could continue learning about the craft and perform.
He asked all the people that were in his acting class to audition for Vanier College Productions, and – I think even before that happened – they’d already cast the improv company, but somebody had left, so he approached me during class one day and basically said, “You’re going to come and be in this improv company.” It wasn’t really, “Do you want to be in this?” It was, “You’re going to be in this.” Which is sort of how Fred was. He was like, “You’re directing the next play. I see your potential, so I’m not going to give you a choice.” Which I think, given my personality, and how wishy-washy I was – is what I needed.
And after that happened, I was smitten. We were performing sketch/improv shows once a week, but we were rehearsing and writing new sketches, I think, two or three times a week. Some years I was also involved in a mainstage show. It became really busy and was also social, and you know you’d think, before class I’m just going to pop over and help with costumes, then you find yourself there for three hours. Oh, shoot, I missed my whole lecture. I really got distracted and sidetracked, and I had a lot of catching up to do on my other classes.
JAMES
You mentioned you grew up in a small village and you talked a little bit about your friends. Have you retained any friends from your childhood or the university days? And, if so, what’s it like having that long connection with someone?
KRISTEN
I have friends from my camping days. We don’t see each other very often, but once in a while we might chat over Facebook. I’m still in touch with my best friend growing up and we see each other once in a while. We’ve lived in separate places a lot since childhood. She was in Kelowna for several years and then, you know, once you have a young family, you don’t see people as often as you’d like.
The people I’ve stayed closest with are the people I met in university doing improv and doing Vanier College Productions. I’ve made a few very close friends through that, and we lost touch with each other for a little while, but we reconnected probably ten years ago. Some of my closest friends are people I met in university.
What does it mean? I mean, I think it’s just that thing of having a shared experience with someone, someone who understands how dear you hold a place that other people, who have not been a part of that, find hard to understand. We went through these experiences in university that shaped us as people, and as artists, and there’s that sort of mutual history together that matters.
And there’s just that thing of people who have been there for you through your life, the people who have been there for your major milestones, good and bad. They become the people that you trust the most, and you turn to, and in some cases, and for me, this is very true, they become your family, your chosen family.
So, they are very important to me. And particularly in the last few years, as I left my previous career behind to embark on playwriting and acting as a full-time pursuit. That was really scary. And those were the people that kept me focused, cheered me on, and bolstered me, and let me know I’m doing the right thing. And when you lose faith, having somebody there who can say to you, “Don’t lose faith, you are on the right path” is totally invaluable. That’s the role we try to play for each other.
I think anytime you see somebody who’s been successful at something often it’s because of the people around them, who support them. Maybe we don’t appreciate that enough and how important that is, because doing something all on your own and maintaining your own momentum takes superhuman confidence.
JAMES
So, I’m wondering now, at this age and with the life you’ve lived, and the wisdom you’ve gained, if you were to have a time machine and you were able to go back to the campus when you were a young student in the bar having a beer, and you went up to your younger self, what advice would you give her?
KRISTEN
I actually think the way things turned out and the path I took is exactly how it had to happen in order for me to arrive where I am, and I’m happy with where I am. I’m grateful for where I am.
So many things had to be in alignment for me to pursue this career and one of the things that absolutely had to happen was I had to go into the corporate world, because if I had not done that – I wouldn’t have had the money saved to make a go of it.
The business skills I developed are really useful as an entrepreneur, as someone who’s trying to manage their own business, if you will. I have a great agent now, but certainly, in the first few years, everything, marketing my work, negotiating, all of that was me. I learned a lot of those skills in business.
And I also wouldn’t want to tell myself to avoid things that were painful or avoid things that you could look back on as regrets, but you can’t, because as cliche as it sounds, all the things that you’ve done and gone through become where you draw your stories and your understanding of the world from. Life is an incredible teacher. There is no shortcut to learning some things.
So, I wouldn’t want to go back to myself in university and tell myself anything that might change what I decided to do, because I think what I decided to do is why I’m where I am right now.
JAMES
So, you’d buy her a beer and say, “You’re on the right path, kid.”
KRISTEN
Yeah, I think I would probably just give her a pat on the head and maybe tell her it’s going to work out. I think that’s what I would do.
JAMES
I want to talk a little bit about some of your thoughts on theatre and writing, but I want to start by asking you about some of the writers you like and admire and who they are and why you happen to like their writing, and I’m thinking particularly playwrights, but it could be novelists, or other writers too.
KRISTEN
I’m really interested in who else is writing comedy, and I’m big into Canadian writers in general. I’d hate to leave anyone off a list because I have so many friends who write. If I were to pick a single play that really moved me recently it would be What a Young Woman Ought to Know by Hannah Moscovitch. I listened to it on the Play Me Podcast where they do radio readings of Canadian work.
There are some American playwrights whose work I like as well. Annie Baker comes to mind. Currently, I’m reading a Lynn Nottage play called Sweat, which is fantastic.
And in terms of other reading, I tend to gravitate to things that are not comedic. The last novel I read was The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, and I highly recommend it. I finished it at 2:00 am and, without giving too much away, there’s this twist, one of those gut-punch sort of things. The power of really good writing amazes me.
JAMES
We talked about you majoring in political science and I have a BA in sociology. And I’m wondering if political science and sociology are about exploring the balance between the individual and society. And I’m wondering if that’s a fundamental subject of drama, right? Conformity versus individualism, and the tension between those two. So, I’m wondering what are some of your thoughts about freedom and conformity and stories? Do you see any of those themes in your own writing or in writing that you like?
KRISTEN
I view reading as one way to better understand things I have never experienced, or I never could experience myself. I don’t know how much I have to say about the specific subject of individuality versus conformity, but certainly good stories often have a character that’s willing to challenge their status quo or the status quo of the world. To make things better, and that’s certainly a theme that’s appealed to me.
I think reading things that are written from a point of view you don’t personally own can grow empathy and understanding for other people and find the commonalities between yourself and other people because there’s always something, regardless of what the story is, relatable in there. Someone has written this story, and it might be their own story, or it might be a story about their community, and that’s such a gift to be able to open a page and grow your understanding.
JAMES
So how does comedy provide insight into the world? Because you’re a comedy writer, and I agree, I like finding the comedy writers. Why do we need comedy? What does it do for us? How does comedy help us understand the world?
KRISTEN
I think it plays a huge role, and I think that’s because it’s really hard for people to be vulnerable and comedy is a way for us to put down our guard. Laughing with someone is a really quick way to find common ground. We both found something funny, and now we’re laughing. There’s a science behind what laughter actually does in our brain, and some of those brain chemicals allow us to feel a little more open for a while after we feel them. In that way, comedy is like a doorway into being able to examine ourselves without the level of fear we might feel doing that directly.
I think comedy is a huge opportunity to bring people in and have them hear what you have to say. It’s very disarming to laugh. And when people are relaxed, and they’re enjoying the story you can say some things and you can get some things across in a way that you might not be able to do off stage.
I wrote a comedy with a character who has terminal cancer, and I didn’t know whether that was going to work, whether people were going to be willing to go there and laugh in the same breath as they’re going to cry. I lost my aunt to the same cancer I wrote about, and you know we didn’t get to confront some things in real life, because we’re not always capable of doing that with our loved ones, but I got to confront some of those things in the play. So, I think that comedy is a doorway to some tough conversations. And I set out to entertain people, but I don’t shy away from tackling things that might be more difficult or might evoke sadness, because I think there’s something really cathartic about feeling all of those emotions in one night.
Debra Hale, Melanie Janzen, Kristen Da Silva in Theatre Orangeville’s production of Where You Are. Photo by Sharyn Ayliffe
JAMES
In our correspondence, I mentioned that I finally got around to watching all nine seasons of The Office and you wrote back, “Oh, that’s one of my favourite television series.” Why does The Office appeal to you? What do they do well? Why is this one of your favourites?
KRISTEN
The first time I watched The Office I was going through a very tough time. I was living on my own for the first time in my life, I had a one-year-old son, and it was a very stressful, lonely sort of time. And someone said, “There’s this show you should watch, The Office, it’s funny.”
So, I put it on one night, and there was just something so comforting about it. It was about everyday sort of scenarios where people are just going to their office job, and the company they’re in is a paper company, and everything feels kind of low stakes from that point of view, but the personal stakes are really high. Steve Carell is a genius in his role. And that character is so believable, even though he’s so outrageous. The writing is funny, the characters are solid, and you feel like the actors are having fun. It became like comfort food to me.
JAMES
You know the entertainment industry has a tendency to label people. This actor does this type of character. This writer does this type of writing. In what ways is that helpful? And as a comedy writer in what ways do you think that’s a hindrance?
KRISTEN
That’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I don’t know if there would be resistance to seeing something of mine that isn’t funny at all. I think over time, as I’ve written more, I have become more comfortable with putting more drama in my comedy, but I don’t yet feel compelled to write a pure drama, and whether or not people would embrace it – I don’t know.
As an actor, I do both. I have done a lot of comedy on stage, but I’ve done drama on stage as well. And in terms of film and TV work, it’s mostly drama. I think that some of the best comedic actors are also some of the best dramatic actors, because I don’t think the skill set is different. I just think that with comedy, there’s a technicality that sort of comes in about timing, and for some people that doesn’t come naturally to them. The really great actors are gifted with that skill, and they always say you should play a comedy like a drama. You should take it very seriously. Whatever’s going on should mean the world to your character. I think that’s what makes comedy work. If we go back to The Office, you know, Dwight is just as serious as can be. And it’s funny, because the actor, Rainn Wilson, has chosen to commit to that.
JAMES
Now that you’ve written six, seven, eight plays are you noticing any particular themes in your stories? Is there anything that you gravitate towards now that you’ve got a body of work?
KRISTEN
Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. The same themes show up in everything. For me, it’s a lot of stuff around relationships and familial history. Mothers and daughters. Daughters and fathers. Fathers and sons. Brothers. Pretty much everything I’ve written, except one thing I think, speaks to those themes and explores the challenges inherent in those relationships. A lot of things around people trying to work out what happened in their past and make amends.
I’ve just finished writing, The Rules of Playing Risk. It’s about a grandfather and his estranged fourteen-year-old grandson who he doesn’t really know and whose father he didn’t really know either. The story is about what prevented the grandfather and his son from having a really meaningful father-son relationship and how that has impacted the grandson.
The play also deals with trauma and with PTSD. Not in a very open way, it really only deals with it through how the characters have adapted (or maladapted) to their own traumas. I was interested in the idea of how many generations does this affect – what gets passed down and how far-reaching some of that stuff is. I have a personal connection with that. And in the research for this play about this grandfather and grandson I took a lot of details from my own family history.
Both of my grandfathers were in the Second World War, and when I asked my family what my grandfathers had told them about their memories of being in the war it was sort of shocking to me that, at least in my family, they never talked about it. I mean, they would have gone through some horrific things that we now understand carve a lasting imprint on the brain and affect everything about somebody.
And I was interested in that. You know, how does a person go through this terrible thing that must have had a deep impact on him at a young age, and then come home, marry, and have kids immediately. That had to impact him and the way he parented, and it had to have impacted everyone around him. And so, I was curious to see how that showed up in my own family when I was growing up. And how does it show up in me now?
Neil Foster and Liam Macdonald in Theatre Orangeville’s production of The Rules of Playing Risk. Photo by Sharyn Ayliffe
JAMES
If you look at the plays you’ve written and characters you’ve created is there a particular character or a couple of characters that maybe are closer to who you are as a person?
KRISTEN
I don’t know. I’ve never thought of that. I would probably have to say that the character I’ve got in this new piece, The Rules of Playing Risk, whose name is Maggie is probably the most like me in terms of how she thinks and how she responds. Our backstories are different, but I would say in terms of personality, she’s probably the closest. She’s quick-witted but cares about people, and she engages in the world with humour, more so than anything else, which is very me. There are probably parts of me in everybody I write. Probably, there are parts of you in everybody you write too.
JAMES
Even some of the nasty characters? The not-so-nice characters?
KRISTEN
Oh yeah, that’s the interesting stuff, right? Like, where did those come from? Are those the things we don’t like about ourselves that we’re exploring on the page? I haven’t written a lot of villains because my plays don’t tend to have a villain. The only play that I can think of that really has someone who was set up to appear to be a villain at first is Five Alarm where there’s the rivalry between the two main characters competing in this chili cook-off. And a lot of that was extracted from my own life. The character isn’t based on me, but some of the things that end up explaining her behaviour I could relate to.
For her, it was the feeling of being left out of things, and she acts this way, because she feels rejected. And I can remember feeling some of those things in my life and certainly, I’ve observed other people who are very spiny and have a hard time letting people in or being vulnerable and that stems from having been rejected and not feeling safe around other people.
JAMES
I suppose that’s because as humans, so often, our behaviour is designed to protect us.
KRISTEN
Yeah, exactly. I think most people want to experience a true connection with others. And it’s just, there are so many things that happen in our life that scar us and make that hard. The more things that someone’s been through the harder it is for them to find the courage to open themselves up and to be hurt again. There are people who struggle with that forever and never resolve it. And it’s sad. Unfortunately, tragic things happen, and people become so defensive over a lifetime that they can’t let others in. That theme shows up a lot in my writing.
JAMES
Do you think a lot of theatre and stories are about characters attempting to be their authentic self and maybe that’s why we relate to it? Is that one of the appeals of drama? Watching characters trying to do that. And then how hard is it for people in life to be their authentic selves?
KRISTEN
It’s really hard. I do think that’s the appeal. I think that’s the appeal in writing it too. Sometimes you can resolve things through writing that you can’t resolve in the world, because in writing I have the ability to force the conversation between two people. And as a writer, I can choose to allow that person to take whatever step, even if it’s just that tiny step that allows the conversation to start. I can force them to do that.
In the real world we all have people in our life that you want to say, “Stop! Everything you want is available to you. If you would just lay down your defences and reach out for it you would have richer, more meaningful relationships and that might mitigate some of your feelings of being rejected.” You see these people struggling to belong, and a lot of the time their struggles are self-defeating. You’re right – it’s fear-driven. No one wants to be hurt, and vulnerability is the most important ingredient in connection, but it’s so hard for most of us to be vulnerable.
JAMES
We started talking about comedy, and now I think we’re talking about tragedy.
KRISTEN
I think they’re the same.
JAMES
Are they?
KRISTEN
I think they are. I don’t know about you but if you were to break down what your comedies are about you could take some of these same subjects and make them into a drama. If you took out some of the jokes and changed the dialogue.
Even my play Hurry Hard, which is about these people who want to win a local regional bonspiel, is really a story about this estranged couple whose marriage ended because they weren’t able to find vulnerability together and figure out their problems.
And it’s also about this relationship between two brothers where this tragedy happened. The older brother was on track to having an incredible NHL career, and a stupid choice by his younger brother led to an accident that basically took him out.
And they both have to live with that in their relationship – the level of guilt, on one hand, that has made this relationship dysfunctional and then, on the other hand, this guy who loves his brother, but his brother took something away from him and that’s left him bitter about what his life ended up actually being.
All of these storylines could be put into a drama very easily and still work. I don’t think comedy and tragedy are very different.
JAMES
Subject matter may not be different, but the tone is.
KRISTEN
Yes.
Adrian Shepherd-Gawinksi, Bruce Davies, and James Hawksley in Lighthouse Festival Theatre’s Production of Hurry Hard. Photo by Melissa McKay
JAMES
How would you describe your writing process?
KRISTEN
I think most of my writing happens when I’m not in front of my laptop. So, before I start writing, now, usually I have had the idea in my head for a while, and I have started to work out some of the details, so when I get to the actual phase of sitting down to start writing dialogue I have a sense of who the people are already. Their voices have been in my head. I’ve probably already played with some lines of dialogue, I’m starting to figure out the relationships, I know what the conflict is and I’m working out the details.
So, I do a lot of thinking before I sit in front of my computer, and then I tend to write in bursts of a day or two where I’ll sit at the computer the whole day and I’ll get a lot of writing out. Usually, the first thirty pages of something new flow out of me and they’re really easy to lay down. When I’m writing a two act play once I get to a point where there will be a natural intermission there’s always a timeout. I almost feel like I lose momentum at that point, because I’m trying to figure out act two.
The first few times that happened, I panicked. And then once I had worked my way through that painful period a few times, now I expect it to come, so I don’t panic. And I will take as much time off as I need. There might be a break of a month or two in between writing. I have things I need to work out, because I don’t really do detailed plotting. I don’t plot it out on paper. I plot it out in my brain, but I also leave space for the characters to tell me what’s going to happen. I think at some point the characters start talking, and they start doing things, and then you’re just there to report it. I think they need room to do that.
JAMES
Do you find you always know where the play is heading in terms of an ending? I know John Irving – this is so bizarre to me – in interviews, he says that he always comes out with the last sentence of his novel. He writes down the last sentence for The World According to Garp or Cider House Rules – he writes down the last sentence and then he writes the story, and he said, he has never changed the last sentence. That just shows you how unique writing is. There’s no other writer in the world who does that. But that’s how he writes. So, maybe talk a little bit about endings and when those come to you and how they help you in your writing process.
KRISTEN
I don’t always know the ending. I usually have an idea of where it will go, or I have two or three alternate endings in my mind where it could end up. And that’s because I find as you’re writing you’re taking new paths you didn’t expect.
At some point something occurs, and you follow it, and it opens up a different lane, if you will, and you need to be able to be open to that effecting where the story ends. And I think part of the pleasure of writing is discovering that. The reason I don’t write a detailed plot is because I think I would lose interest if I already knew where it was all going to go. I think part of the joy of writing, for me, is discovering the story.
JAMES
A lot of your stories deal with relationships and romance. Are you a romantic?
KRISTEN
I have to admit, after all these plays I’ve written about love that I must be a romantic. I didn’t think I was before. I really didn’t.
I don’t know what your childhood was like, but my parents and family weren’t effusive, and we dealt with life through humour. That’s how we would show love. That’s how we managed disagreement. We managed most things through humour, and humour is a door. Humour can be used to open a door, but it can also be used to close things off.
So, I have had a hard time with romance in my real life. But I think there’s a part of me that really yearns for that and has always wanted the world to be more ideal. And you have to believe in love, right? What else is there? If you can’t root for love and root for the most powerful thing in life then suffering will quickly outweigh everything else. I think, again, back to what we really, really truly yearn for, above all else, is connection. It’s human connection. We are social creatures who rely on each other.
JAMES
I read in a couple of interviews you gave that your friends say you have a tendency to head down rabbit holes.
KRISTEN (Laughs)
Oh, God.
JAMES
How do these rabbit holes serve you in terms of your creative life? Are the results useful?
KRISTEN
I think it’s always useful. You might not need the specific information or knowledge that you’ve gained but there is something useful about constantly challenging your brain and opening new pathways and learning new things. So, something will catch my interest, and my interests are varied, and I think what my friends find amusing are the unexpected topics I’ll go down a rabbit hole on.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I got super into astrophysics, and I was trying to understand string theory, and I still don’t understand it. I watched hundreds of hours of video and read more things about it because once I’m curious about something my brain doesn’t want to let go of it until I understand it.
I sort of hyper-focus on things and that includes writing, which I think is a gift as a writer to be able to hyper-focus and get a lot done in a short period of time, but as a human, it’s a gift and a curse, because you can get distracted by it and end up down a path that really isn’t overly productive. Maybe it will be later, but I don’t think at any point in the future anyone is going to call on me to save the world using string theory.
JAMES
If this is a plot point in a play when you say, “No one is going to call on me to save the world using string theory.” We of course know you’re going to need it.
KRISTEN
Exactly. Well, I better do more research then because I’m just not ready yet. I actually don’t understand it.
JAMES
I’ll bet half the people studying it don’t understand it. Let’s talk a little bit about the first play you wrote called Book Club. Tell me how that came about and why you decided to write it.
KRISTEN
Book Club is the only play that I wrote without any plan going in whatsoever. Like none. It started as a lark. I was on mat leave with my youngest son, and it’s physically busy, but it’s not intellectually very challenging, and I needed something for my brain to work on. I really didn’t write it with a lot of intention. In my later work, if I was going to talk about a subject, I gave it some thought as to what I was trying to say, as opposed to just improvising the whole thing. So, that play, I think, is quite different from the rest of my work.
JAMES
You had mentioned to me that Norm Foster is a mentor and somebody you connected with. How did that relationship happen? How did you connect with Norm, and what sort of sage advice has Norm Foster provided you in your career?
KRISTEN
Oh, gosh, we initially connected on Twitter. I had made a joke and I wrote, “I wish community theatres would do a goddamn Norm Foster play every once in a while.” Which is obviously a joke because it’s hard to find a community theatre that doesn’t have a Norm Foster play in its season. But I didn’t know him, and I tweeted that and someone else – not Norm – took exception to my tweet.
JAMES
They didn’t understand it as a joke.
KRISTEN
No. I thought it was obviously tongue-in-cheek.
JAMES
Yeah, I thought it was obvious too. I thought it was funny.
KRISTEN
Because he’s extremely well produced. Like he is the most produced playwright in Canada, and it’s well earned.
JAMES
If only Tom Hanks could get a break.
KRISTEN
Right. “I wish people would recognize Tom Hanks and put him in some movies.” It was that kind of a joke. Anyway, someone took exception to it and that person responded angrily to my tweet and listed all the places that Norm’s been produced, and I didn’t even see it. I’m at work and my friend texted me and she goes, “Oh my God, you gotta go on Twitter. Somebody didn’t like your tweet and Norm Foster responded to that person defending you.” So, I went on Twitter and Norm basically had said, “I think she was being tongue-in-cheek, and I thought it was funny.”
And then we followed each other, and I was talking to another new playwright, and he had shared his play with me, and in his play he had a foreword he had written, and it included a quote from Norm about his play. And I wrote him back and I said, “Did Norm Foster read your play?” And he said, “Yeah, if you send him a play, he’ll read it.” And I thought, wow, that’s wild that he takes the time to read other people’s plays, because people must be sending him plays constantly.
So, I sort of put that knowledge away, and I still didn’t really have the guts to ask him, because I didn’t know him. And I thought that’s sort of an audacious thing to ask someone, you don’t even know, to spend three hours reading your play when you don’t have a name, and no one knows who you are.
But then one day, I think he had just liked a tweet of mine or something, I decided why not just ask? At that point, I’d written Book Club, and I thought it wasn’t terrible, maybe it won’t be a waste of his time. Maybe he’ll have something to say about it, and maybe he’ll offer some feedback. So, I found myself writing a message. And as I’m writing the message, I find myself not just saying, “Will you read the play, but will you mentor me?”
And, he responded and said, “I’ll read your play. Send it to me.” So, I sent it to him, and he read it right away, and I thought, “Wow how generous that he not only will read my play, but he will read it immediately and provide me with paragraphs of commentary on it.” So, he read Book Club, and he wrote me an email that said, “It’s very difficult to write comedy, and you know how to write comedy.” And he said, “I would love to mentor you. I want to be who discovers you.” And that was the start of what ended up being, to this day, a really meaningful friendship in my life.
He didn’t teach me how to write, but he did help me figure out what worked and what didn’t work. He gave balanced feedback, you know, as complimentary as he was about it, he also had things to say that helped sharpen it. And so, I would ask him questions, if I was confused about something, or if I was struggling with something. And it could be related to the writing itself, or it could be related to the industry.
Because he knows how the industry works. And I didn’t know. I didn’t understand anything about it. I didn’t know how playwrights made money. I didn’t know who made decisions, or how to submit things, and how you get your work produced. I didn’t know any of that. He gave me really solid advice, and he opened doors for me by introducing my work to other people. That is what eventually led to me being produced professionally. There aren’t enough words to describe how important he’s been in my career.
JAMES
Every artist needs their champions.
KRISTEN
Absolutely. And he’s had success and he has the grace as a human being to be willing to send the elevator back down and help other people succeed, and nurture other people with their writing, whether they show great promise or not, he will still read and give notes to people. He has an incredibly generous spirit to other writers because he is really passionate about writing.
JAMES
I’m going to take a little side shift here.
KRISTEN
Okay.
JAMES
Because the reality is we’re in COVID. And we’re in lockdown, and we’re experiencing it, and I’m just wondering what have you found the most challenging, for you personally, living in a pandemic?
KRISTEN
Well, being very honest it’s mental health. Anxiety. I didn’t write for the first nine months of the pandemic or do anything that I loved really, because I was using so much of my energy and my personal resources to manage my way through how scared I felt.
I felt really worried about the sickness itself. Especially in the beginning when we had very little information. I remember thinking, “Can I be outside? Am I going to get sick if I walk my dog?” We didn’t know anything about the virus yet. We didn’t know how contagious it was or how deadly it was. And so, I was scrubbing my groceries down with Lysol thinking if I didn’t do that my family might get sick and God forbid one of them could die, and as a mom of three kids, like all parents, you worry.
So, there was that, and I love my career. I love what I do, and I had an amazing exciting season lined up, and now all of a sudden, I had to watch each show sort of wash up on the shore. Cancellations came in waves. Things got cancelled or postponed, and I know a lot of artists probably felt the same way – it’s not just your livelihood. If you work in the arts, it’s not something you just do to make money. It’s the opposite, right? We almost make no money, and we do it anyway. So, there’s something in it that’s completely integral to our existence. And that being threatened sent me into an existential crisis. I thought, “What would I do if theatre didn’t recover? How would I find meaning for myself? My children give me a lot of meaning and purpose, but theatre also gave me a lot of meaning and purpose.”
JAMES
It’s part of your identity. It’s part of who you are.
KRISTEN
Absolutely. My entire life has included theatre and performing. So, it’s been a profoundly challenging year, but it’s also been a very ground-breaking sort of breakthrough year in terms of understanding that you cannot build your whole life around one thing – that’s very dangerous. So, you have to figure out where your inherent happiness is and how to find joy in life if things you count on right now were to go away, because they can. That’s what we’ve all learned. Things can go away very quickly.
Andy Pogson and Beryl Bain in Lighthouse Festival Theatre’s Production of Five Alarm. Photo by Daniel G. Wiest
JAMES
I want to talk about honesty, and I want to talk about it on three levels. How important, do you think, is it to be honest with yourself? How important is it to be honest in our personal relationships, and how important is honesty in the writing and presenting of stage plays?
KRISTEN
It’s vitally important in all three areas, I think, again, going back to vulnerability, which requires telling the truth and looking at yourself with a clear eye. Like being able to see the things about ourselves we might not like, and not reject those things but embrace them and accept them. You know, accepting that we’re fallible, that we all have flaws, we all make mistakes, make bad choices. Being able to confront that with honesty, but not with condemnation. I think that’s meaningful when you’re talking about being honest with yourself, but it’s also meaningful when you talk about being honest within relationships. I think dishonesty is often a protective measure. There’s that feeling that if I’m honest about something – whatever that might be – if I’m vulnerable, I might be rejected. They might not accept me anymore.
But deep truly meaningful love and intimacy only comes from the ability to be extremely honest. You can’t build a relationship with somebody on dishonesty because the other person is operating without information that they might need in order to understand why you behave the way you do, and you’re also not able to be yourself. So first, you have to do the work of confronting that in yourself. Why do I react to that? Why does that trigger me to be really upset or feel threatened or angry? You have to be willing to look at things that have either happened to you or that you are ashamed of.
The topic of shame and how it keeps us from being honest with ourselves is also very interesting to me. As a kid I struggled in school to complete things, and I struggled with being able to pay attention. And the way that the world reacted to that was that I was not behaving. I wasn’t being compliant. I was a troublemaker. I didn’t care. I was lazy about school. And those labels stuck to me. And so now, whenever there’s something in my life where I’ve dropped the ball my immediate reaction is to feel shame. I feel ashamed that I’m not as good as other people at organizing my life.
And it’s the same in interpersonal relationships. I think we avoid that feeling of shame because it’s so threatening, because to feel that we aren’t worthy of other people’s acceptance and love is threatening. You know – the idea that we can be ostracized and wouldn’t have people around us, that we would be abandoned. Fear keeps people from being vulnerable with each other.
And on stage, if you want the audience to go on a journey with you, you have to have vulnerability. So as an actor you have to find that. As a writer you have to find that. You have to tell the truth about things. You have to be willing to tell an honest human story showing people that are flawed and still lovable.
JAMES
You mentioned your play, Where You Are, was more personal, because it was inspired by your aunt who suffered from the same cancer as one of the characters in the play.
KRISTEN
Yeah.
JAMES
Why did you feel the need to explore that and create a story around that experience?
KRISTEN
Because I love my aunt so much, and I guess it was sort of a love letter to her. She inspired that story. And I wanted to do what I could to keep parts of her here. I didn’t know how to say goodbye to her and close that chapter. And writing something felt like a way to express what she meant to me. But it also, in a way, helped me process my own grief.
My aunt was given a year when she was diagnosed. And you’ve got one year to do everything you’d want to do, and at the same time, you’re battling an illness. It made me think about my own mortality a lot and what it would be like to know that you had a finite amount of time left. The play, however, is not about my aunt. A lot of the piece is fictionalized. Most of it is very fictionalized. It’s just about the experience.
JAMES
It’s inspired by that experience.
KRISTEN
It’s inspired.
JAMES
Sometimes audiences don’t understand that even though your aunt died from the same cancer the actual story you end up writing from that has touchpoints…
KRISTEN
…but is different. Exactly. One of the main things in the play is the decision to treat the cancer or not. And that came from a conversation with my uncle. He told me she had struggled really hard with the decision to stop chemotherapy because she didn’t want to let her sisters down. She didn’t want to say to her sisters, “I’m not going to do everything I can do to prolong my time here.” Because it comes down to time. When you have a terminal cancer all the treatment is designed to buy you more time, it’s not going to cure it.
And with my aunt and many people who go through cancer treatment, the treatment itself is very debilitating. She would have the chemo, and that whole week she would feel miserably sick. And just as she started to come around it would be time for another round of chemo. And so, she had to make the decision whether she wanted to prolong the time she had or accept that her time might be shorter, but that her quality of life would be better for the last months that she had. And I wanted to explore what it would feel like to be terminally sick and to be thinking about your loved ones and trying to make decisions that are best for you but also honouring your loved ones and the sense of obligation you feel, and that’s really what the character in the play struggles with.
In the play, she has a hard time telling her niece that she’s sick because she doesn’t want it to change their relationship and then everything between them will suddenly have a different colour. Which it does once you know someone’s sick. Every time I spoke to my aunt – every time I saw her – I thought, what if this is the last time? And I remember saying goodbye to my aunt. She had a celebration of life, for her birthday. And I knew saying goodbye to her that day after this celebration would be the last time I would look her in the eye and say goodbye. And we said goodbye like it wasn’t the last time. We said goodbye like it was just another visit and we would see each other again at Christmas. And we both knew we wouldn’t.
So, there was a great deal of pain, but there was also a great deal of beauty and grace the way she navigated all of that. It was really inspiring. And I thought, you know, if I can do anything, I can write this story and maybe if I write this story, it will help other people also understand their pain.
JAMES
What’s been some of the audience reaction to seeing the play? What have you heard back from people?
KRISTEN
It’s been really touching, because I’ve had people reach out to me on social media that saw the play elsewhere and wanted to tell me that they really connected to it because of a personal experience they were either going through or had gone through. And in some ways, although it’s tragic and there are parts of the play that are gut-wrenching, there’s also a message of hope to it and ultimately joy, and that’s what I wanted to achieve. I’m really proud of that piece.
JAMES
Do you think that play indicates a shift in your writing?
KRISTEN
Yeah, I do. I think that’s the first time I really tackled something more challenging. And then it emboldened me to continue to explore things that aren’t light-hearted. It’s comedy, but it’s also real life. And real life is tragic sometimes. I hope that people can find something in the finished play that helps them process their own life in some way.
Shaun Chambers and Matthew Parker in The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells adapted for the stage by Derek Webb, at The Jack Studio Theatre, London.
“The Invisible Man is a gem… this wonderful story is chock-full of fifteen characters – excluding the titular Invisible Man – all brilliantly realized by a super-creative and multi-talented company of three actors undoubtedly putting the force into tour de force! This is a master class in extended acting and characterization… a smart, tirelessly inventive telling of this enduring tale.” ★★★★★ The Review Chap
That’s just one of several four and five-star reviews for playwright Derek Webb’s adaptation of The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells which had a highly successful run in London at the Jack Studio Theatre a few months before COVID shut things down. In addition to being a prolific and successful playwright, Derek is also the founder of the Pint-sized Plays Festival which presents plays in Pubs during the Tenby Arts Festival and culminates in a script slam presentation on stage at Theatr Gwaun in Fishguard, Wales.
Now almost two years after The Invisible Man last appeared – or didn’t appear on stage – theatres are starting to cautiously welcome patrons back to live performances. I contacted Derek at the end of August to chat with him about his writing and this year’s Pint-sized Plays Festival which features favourite plays from previous years including my own ten-minute comedy Never Give Up.
Playwright Derek Webb
JAMES HUTCHISON
I read that since 2001 you’ve lived in North Pembrokeshire, and I’m wondering what’s the community like – the people – the culture – what is it about the area that made you want to make this home?
DEREK WEBB
Well, we lived in Surrey near London, and we had been down to Pembrokeshire many times on holiday. I was working as a freelance copywriter with some companies down in Swansea and Cardiff, and I used to come down to South Wales quite often, and property prices down here were about a tenth of what they were in London, of course, and we found a house and fell in love with it, and we decided to move down.
We’re in North Pembrokeshire which is predominantly Welsh-speaking. It’s the language of the home. But we found it absolutely charming. And they were just lovely people and very welcoming and not standoffish at all. We just loved the people and love the place.
JAMES
You’re a playwright and author and a poet and so when you go to the theatre what are your hopes when you’re sitting there and the lights are going down and the curtain is about to rise.
DEREK
There are plays which you can watch and it’s like you’re looking through a window at it, and there are other plays where you’re actually there. You’re actually taken away. And those stories are the ones that stick in my memory. And it’s such a wonderful thing because it’s live. Because it changes night by night, and because it can be totally immersive and involving. Unlike cinema or television, there’s no actual barrier at all. It’s live. It’s life.
JAMES
Is there a play or two that you can share with us that sticks in your memory?
DEREK
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is just wonderful. I think it’s probably my favourite play actually. There’s layer upon layer upon layer of things happening. It’s in two different time frames, but things coalesce at the end. It’s quite magical.
And another play that sticks in my memory is David Mamet’s Oleanna which is actually running in London at the moment. I remember seeing it a good few years ago now with Lia Williams and David Suchet. And it’s very, very relevant now because of the #MeToo movement. It’s that sort of thing. The university professor and the student, and turning tables and not knowing, as an audience, which one to back. It’s wonderfully involving. Those are the two that sort of strike me immediately.
JAMES
How did the idea for the Pint-sized Plays Festival come to you?
DEREK
Tenby is a small seaside town in Pembrokeshire. And each year they have an arts festival which is fairly low-key. There are two or three proper venues, and they have talks and music and a few other things. It’s not a big festival. It’s just a week.
I’d been involved with theatre companies writing and acting and directing, and I felt that the theatre world still seemed to be very elitist. And the inspiration for the idea was to try and create something that took theatre literally to the people.
I was talking with a committee member of the Tenby Arts Festival, Chris Sierwald, and the idea was about doing plays in actual pubs and not pub theatres. That was the important distinction. Not in a pub theatre. So, not in a dedicated space, but actually doing it in the pub itself – in the bar area. And we thought we’d just try it. So we started a competition and had a hundred and fifty-odd entries or whatever, which was quite good from a standing start, I thought. And we ended up with six winners and four runners up. The idea was that we’d run the six winners in pubs in Tenby over two nights, and then all ten plays would go up to a theatre in North Fishguard where we’d have a script slam, where the audience gets to vote for their favourite play and favourite script.
Chris, my contact at the Tenby Arts Festival, who was well known in the town, stood up and said, “Ladies and gentlemen we’re going to do these plays here in the pub.” And then, with a lot of trepidation, I stood up and said, “And the first play we’re doing is – and announced the play.” And what was amazing was that this pub that was really busy with a lot of people talking went quiet and they listened to the play. I have to admit I was surprised at how well it went down – and relieved! These weren’t theatre audiences, you know. These were pub people. Out for a drink.
Gary Crane as Todd Sparks and Ben Gabel as Nigel Davenport in Never Give Up by James Hutchison at the 2017 Pint-sized Plays Festival
JAMES
So, what type of play works really well in a pub?
DEREK
Mainly comedies but we had a play called, Sorry, which was basically two monologues to the audience really. There’s a woman talking about how this kid had broken into her home and he’d stolen, and then there was a monologue from the kid, and at the end of the play there’s a scene where the two meet for a sort of reconciliation because he’d been arrested, and it turns out that he’s actually her son. It worked really well. I was worried about putting that one up because most of the things have been comedies, but it worked, and subsequently we’ve done a few dramas and, by and large, they have worked as well. The audience has been appreciative. Which is extraordinary because if you asked a lot of these people, “When did you last go to the theatre?” They’d say, “I’ve never been to a theatre.” And yet they were there obviously understanding and enjoying the play.
JAMES
How has COVID impacted things?
DEREK
In 2020 COVID hit here in March by which time the competition was underway. So, the Tenby Arts Festival decided to cancel. They weren’t going to run anything. So, we ended up videoing all the plays and all ten winners went up on YouTube.
This year we didn’t have a competition, and we’re actually in rehearsals at the moment because we’re going to run the Pick of Pint-sized Plays – which isn’t the best of – it just happens to be plays that the actors and directors have done in the past and said they’d like to do again.
Interestingly, one of the plays we’re running is called Pub Play. And it’s written by a guy called Doc Watson. And it was a runner-up in the very first year. It didn’t run in the pubs, but it ran in the script slam, and it won the script slam.
And two or three days ago on a Facebook post Doc was talking about his playwriting, and he mentioned Pint-sized Plays and said that he’d been working in theatre as a stage manager for years and years and years but had never actually written a play other than a few odd sketches. And this play, called Pub Play, which he wrote for Pint-sized Plays was his first play, and subsequently he’s gone on to write other things.
And that’s a great thing about Pint-sized. It has actually introduced a lot of people into writing and writers into writing 10-minute plays, and many have gone on to write other stuff which is really terrific. We’re proud of that.
And then hopefully next year we’ll do another competition and get back to where we were. That’s the basic plan.
Jackie Williams and Nick Wears in Mrs Thrale Lays on Tea by Rob Taylor in the 2018 Pint-sized Plays Script Slam at Theatr Gwaun in Fishguard, Wales.
JAMES
You’ve been writing for many years. And you write plays and novels and poetry and screenplays and I’m wondering when you look at your body of work now do you notice in your own writing any reoccurring themes or topics that you like to explore?
DEREK
A lot of my stuff is comedy. I’ve done some biographical plays and that interests me in terms of taking somebody’s life and actually trying to distill it into a ninety-minute piece of theatre.
JAMES
One of your plays is Call Me Dusty which is about Dusty Springfield. Tell me how that play came about and how that project developed.
DEREK
We decided to set up a small theatre company called Ignition in 2012, and it just so happened that 2013 was going to be the 50th anniversary of Dusty Springfield’s first solo single – I Only Want to Be With You. So, I started researching and went through eleven or twelve biographies, and I listened to more and more of her music, and I really got into it.
She was absolutely extraordinary because she was this very self-conscious very young sort of convent schoolgirl who wanted to sing and to be a great star, and she was also a lesbian, and she was trying to balance these two things in the ‘60s and the ‘50s.
Now, what I didn’t want to do was a musical. I wanted to do a drama. So, all the music in the play is Dusty Springfield herself singing. And the actress playing Dusty Springfield doesn’t actually sing. There’s one time where she’s doing her first appearance on Top of the Pops, which was her first solo single. And at the time on the television show they mimed. They didn’t have live acts. So, for us to have her miming I Only Want to Be With You was exactly what happened on Top of the Pops.
Jessica Sandry as Dusty Springfield in the Ignition Theatre production of Call Me Dusty by Derek Webb
JAMES
Not too long ago you did an adaptation of The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.
DEREK
With The Invisible Man, I wrote it so that three actors could play all the parts like in The 39 Steps – so each actor plays five characters. And it was terrific fun because the audience can see what’s happening. They’re in on the jokes. There’s a point when the police catch the Invisible Man and they manage to slap these handcuffs on the Invisible Man’s wrist. But, beside the chain holding the handcuffs together, there was a piece of stiff wire, so they stood out from the policemen’s wrist and look like they’re attached to the Invisible Man, and the policeman gets pulled across stage. And that worked really well. The actor playing the policeman was actually a magician. He added lots of little magical things into the script. We toured it around Wales to about ten venues and then Jack Studio, which is a Pub Theatre in London, took it up and ran it for about three weeks just prior to COVID hitting.
I also adapted The Lady Vanishes from the book that the Hitchcock film was based on – which has proved very successful and it’s being produced by Bacchus Theatre of Canada in October as an online production. I’m looking forward to hearing that.
Andrew Lennon, Stefan Pejic, and James Scannell in the original Ignition Theatre production of The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells adapted for the stage by Derek Webb
JAMES
I read that the first stage play you did was Dog Eat Dog which is a play about an advertising executive who moves in with a group of homeless people. That was in 1998. How did that play evolve? And what was it like going to opening night and seeing your first production on stage?
DEREK
Scary, because you’re thinking, “Oh my god.” And exhilarating, of course, at the same time.
As a kid I wrote a lot of poetry, and I think I might have written a play, and I started a novel during my first marriage, and then I went into advertising and ended up as a creative director, which was great, but what that did is take all the creative energy away. So, I mean, I was writing all day – and by the time I got home I was absolutely knackered.
When I got to my second marriage is when I started writing plays again. My wife, Briony, said, “You really should try writing again.” And so, I started writing some radio plays. And I wrote Dog Eat Dog for an amateur company in London. South London Theatre. They’re a big company, and they have a lot of directors and very good actors and do a lot of good stuff, and a friend, Marcelle Clow, was directing and – I think she probably said, “Could you write something?” And I wrote Dog Eat Dog and that was the first stage play as such. And it went down well, and that was the start!
JAMES
So, you write both drama and comedy, and I’m wondering if the process differs depending on whether or not you’re in the world of comedy or the world of drama?
DEREK
I structure everything to start with, so I know where I’m going. I know people when writing novels go, “I’ll just go where the novel takes me.” Well yeah, but I actually want to know where I’m going. And that discipline is certainly the same for both drama and comedy.
The Agatha Crusty series, which is probably the most successful series I’ve done, started because a local drama company had done a couple of my one-acts and liked them and the director said, “Could you write a murder mystery for me to direct?”
And I sat down with Briony to try and come up with some ideas, and this goes back to Pint-sized Plays in a funny way as well, because they were an amateur company – and their audience is not a theatre-going audience. What they do is watch television or film. That’s their point of reference. Not the theatre.
So, in trying to write something we went through loads of television-type ideas – reality TV – quiz shows – whatever. And then we got onto detectives and Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot and suddenly the name Agatha Crusty popped into my brain – out of nowhere and – that’s it – Agatha Crusty!
At the time I was working on a committee to save a local theatre here in Pembrokeshire which the council wanted to close. I was on the committee, and we thankfully managed to save the theatre. But being on that committee totally did my head in – and the first – Agatha Crusty is called Agatha Crusty and the Village Hall Murders and what happens is the Village Hall Committee gets murdered one by one by one. Which was my way of exacting vengeance on them you see.
Is this a clue? Steve Martin, Heather Harris, and Mike Rutter in the 3A, Milton Keynes production of Derek Webb’s Agatha Crusty and the Village Hall Murders
Now writing subsequent Agatha Crustys you have to structure it well because you need to know who did the murder and how they did it and then work backwards. Apparently, sometimes Agatha Christie herself used to write a novel and she’d get to the end of the book and she would change the murderer and then have to go back through the book and put in clues to make that character the murderer. So, whilst Agatha Crusty and The Village Hall Murders might be a comedy and Call Me Dusty might be a drama the process is actually very very similar in both regards.
Sometimes though serendipity takes over halfway through something, and an idea gets introduced, and that coincides with something else, and that links to something else, and the brain suddenly has all these things there and bing! Literally, out of the blue, the thing can go off on a different course. And it can just coalesce in a wonderful way and sometimes when that happens you get to the point where you can’t type fast enough.
There’s a series I do called Roy Brown, and I’ve written about six Roy Brown comedies now, and there’s Roy and his friends and when I’m writing it they really are talking to me. It’s absolutely wonderful. I just write down what they say.
And in the first one I wrote Roy Brown has this idea that the bluestones, which are the small stones in the middle of Stonehenge which are from Wales, should be returned to Wales like the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece. I wrote that back around 2000 and to get some publicity I sent some letters into the local papers purportedly coming from Roy Brown saying, “Stonehenge back to Wales.”
Then a friend in Cardiff rang me and said, “Have you seen the Western Mail today?” The Western Mail is sort of the national newspaper of Wales. I said, “No.” And there on the front page, it said “Pembrokeshire Group Wants Stonehenge Stones Back.” And they’d been to a woman from English Heritage (the organization which runs Stonehenge) who nearly fainted when they told her this idea. They had also contacted a couple of politicians who were appalled at the idea and even ran a leader in the paper decrying Roy Brown. But the thing was, they hadn’t checked the source at all. They’d just worked off this letter: the letter I wrote for Roy Brown.
And I had to confess to the Pembrokeshire reporter, and I said – “It’s not true.” And she said, “I thought that. I told them they should check the story, but they didn’t.” Two days later they had to print a retraction which was “Pembrokeshire Playwright Confesses.” But then because of all the publicity we got a big audience.
Going Viral before Social Media with Roy Brown: Reclaiming Stonehenge
JAMES
So, Derek, we were talking about Dusty Springfield, and she’s been gone a long time, but in a sense, I suppose, we’re talking about legacy. She has this work and a legacy. Do you ever think about your own legacy and what you’d like for your own writing?
DEREK
What are you going to leave? I mean there are certainly things I want to write before I go. A couple of things I want to sort of explore. At the moment I’m writing a play about Richard Trevithick. He invented the steam engine – the railways. Not James Watt. Not the Stevensons. Trevithick had the very first working steam locomotive in Wales, in fact. And he was a fascinating character. Trevithick had loads of ideas, but he was absolutely useless at money, and he never got the fortune he thought he deserved. For some reason he never quite made it, and I’m trying to understand him.
That’s what it’s about – it’s exploring things – exploring people and motivations. And perhaps it’s trying to understand yourself, isn’t it? Maybe – you know – you’re writing things not just to explain things to other people but trying to explain things to yourself about yourself. I mean it’s the actor’s thing about when you’re playing a character – you don’t actually play the character you look for the character in yourself and express that because you actually bring the character out of you because it’s all in there somehow.
To find out more about playwright Derek Webb and his plays such as The Invisible Man, his series of comic Agatha Crusty Mysteries, or Roy Brown Comedies, among many others check out his website by following the link: Derek Webb Playwright.
This interview was conducted on August 21st 2021, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Because of COVID the Pint-sized Plays Festival ran a special show in 2021 featuring an evening of outstanding plays from past festivals.
A Night to Remember by Andrew Turner Carol: Jackie Williams Nigel: Gary Crane Marc: Roger Leese Directed by Cynthia Jennings Winner in 2016
Two Woofs for Yes by Neil Walden Brenda: Allison Butler Ted: Steve Butler Directed by Sarah Sherriff Runner Up in 2016
Bottle for a Special Occasion by Bill Kovacsik Martin: Bern Smith Judith: Jean Smith Runner Up in 2018
The Next Ivan Shiransky by Jim Geoghan Ida: Carol Macintosh Carl: Nick Wears Directed by Carol Macintosh Winner in 2020
Pub Play by Doc Watson Man: Roger Leese Woman: Jackie Williams Extra: Steve Butler Directed by Derek Webb Runner Up in 2008
The Emperor’s New Clothes by Derek Webb Dave: Nick Wears Brian: Adam Edgerley Pub Landlady: Sarah Sherriff Directed by Sarah Sherriff Runner Up in 2015
Vent by Gavin Harrison Lisa: Andrea Thomas Derek: Nick Wears Kelvin: Steve Butler Directed by Carol Macintosh Winner in 2014
Attack of the Killer Banana Spider by John Moorhouse Josh: Tom Wears Sol: JakeWears Directed by Bobbie Sheldrake Winner in 2015
A Little Scotchie by John Spooner Stephen: Bern Smith Rachel: Anna Munro Directed by Sarah Sherriff Runner Up in 2020
Mrs. Thrale Lays on Tea! By Rob Taylor Mrs. Thrale: Jackie Williams Dr. Johnson: Nick Wears Polly: Melissa Pettitt Directed by Derek Webb Winner in 2018
NOTE: ‘Winner’ or ‘Runner Up’ refers to the writing competition, not necessarily the Script Slam
Producer/Director Matt Boda – Absurd Hero Productions
“Where preparation and opportunity meet is what makes luck seem so magical. I think if you prepare yourself for an opportunity, such as selling a movie script, then you can attract that scenario by actively working toward making yourself prepared and making it not so much about luck anymore and making it more about fate.”
***
Producer/Director Matthew Boda has ambitions of taking his company, Absurd Hero Productions, into the big leagues and producing film and television across multiple genres. I connected with Matt through the Austin Film Festival where my comedy Masquerade had been a finalist in the playwriting category in 2018. After chatting with Matt about that script we got to talking about his love of film and television and I was immediately impressed by his boundless energy and enthusiasm for telling stories and so we set up a time to continue our conversation. I connected with Matt over ZOOM at the start of May to find out more about his personal vision for Absurd Hero Productions and his plan to bring new stories and screenwriters into production through his Get It Made X initiative.
JAMES HUTCHISON
Tell me a little bit about your logo for Absurd Hero productions. What does it mean and what does it symbolizes?
MATT BODA
It’s from the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is, you know, a Greek character being punished forever and eternally having to push a boulder up the side of a mountain only to achieve the task and then have the boulder roll back down the mountain and he has to do it all again. Over and over and over. And it becomes an absurd task. There’s no meaning. There’s no reason to push the boulder up the mountain. There is no benefit, but he does it anyway.
It’s also a super hard thing to do. To push that boulder up a mountain every single day. So, it takes a hero’s spirit to be able to accomplish the task and do it anyway, in spite of its meaninglessness.
And essentially, Albert Camus who is an existential philosopher wrote his own version of the myth of Sisyphus and likened the absurd hero to modern man. Life inherently has no meaning except for the meaning that we give it.
So, knowing all that philosophy I went out to do one of the most difficult things that there is, and that’s to create a production company from zero not knowing anyone. Not having any direct contacts. Not coming from money. To do an absurd task. To try and become a filmmaker and make a production company and be involved at the highest level of making content that lasts forever and that’s super beneficial to the people that watch it and it felt right to me to do it under the brand name of an Absurd Hero.
JAMES
I have a quote for you by filmmaker Ted Kotcheff. He directed The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz which featured Richard Dreyfuss, First Blood with Sylvester Stalone, Weekend at Bernie’s, a lot of different films and he’s done a lot of television. He said, “Everything about filmmaking tries to distract you from that first, fine, rapturous vision, you have of the film.” I’m wondering how much you agree with that, and how do you keep that spark alive to make you see a film through from idea to screen?
MATT
Well, I agree with it completely because essentially what happens is the vision comes into the mind of the creator. Whatever way you believe it gets there – whether it’s a muse, or it’s God, or its creative energy, or whatever – something inspires the idea in the first place.
For me, it comes in a flash. I have a vision. I see the whole movie in a moment in my mind’s eye, and it fills me with the desire and motivation to do the work to pull that out of my mind, and put it into the real world, and see what it will look like.
So, saying that everything after that is designed to get in the way of the original vision is completely true, because you have to compromise with the reality of what you can create and your fantasy of what you had envisioned.
So, it’s like, “Okay I guess I can’t have him on top of the Titanic.” “Well, what if he’s in a little rowboat on the side of a dock on a lake?” “Okay, well does it embody the same theme that you were trying to express for the character on the deck of the Titanic?” “Yeah, it actually does.” “Okay then, let’s put him in the skiff.” “Cool. Problem solved.” That’s the compromise between fantasy and reality that any filmmaker has to go through in order to see their vision go from inception to completion.
JAMES
One of the projects you have in development is called The Container. Where did the idea come from for that project, and how did that develop, particularly in light of the times we’re living in, and how current and significant the subject matter is.
MATT
That project is making its rounds. I’m super proud of it. It scored really well on the Blacklist. Everyone that reads it gives it their praise, and I’m super grateful for that.
That idea came in a flash from my mind’s eye and that’s usually born from needing to find a solution to a problem. In the beginning when I first started making films my ideas were visions about myself and my own life experiences, and so I started to make art about my life experiences, and I wasn’t getting the kind of response that I wanted to have with the work. It was too personal.
It was me all over everything. Me the director. Me the producer. Me the actor. It felt like a one-man-band in a way that alienates the audience. It makes them feel like they can’t identify with the story because all they see is you trying to work out your own problems on the screen. And I had fallen into that trap a couple of times because I had run with someone telling me to “write what you know.” Which for me was a mistake, because it made me dive into this selfish realm that a lot of people get into where they think they need to show that they can do everything, as opposed to embodying the true spirit of filmmaking which is completely collaborative.
So, I was stressed out after a big movie that I had personally financed called Blood Sweat and Years, that even though it was shot well and had great music, just fell flat, and I was in need of a new idea. And I was actually in line to go to a movie in the middle of the day and my mind was hijacked, and what I saw was a little girl looking through a crack in a shipping container at the waves and the ocean and when she looked back into the container I saw all these people. They were all Chinese people and they were stuck in the shipping container, and I saw this whole movie in my head and it all ended in this terrible tragedy, and this little girl was the only one who lived to tell about it. In my mind’s eye that’s what I saw. So I immediately went home, and I found out through a little research – and thank God for Google you can go directly to the source – I started finding out that it was true. That before China became the giant manufacturing mogul it is now Chinese people used to flee the country because there were no opportunities in China, and they used to do it via shipping containers coming through ports in America like Long Beach. And I read all these articles, so I started to formulate it around China, and then I realized that all that stuff was actually twenty years old. So, I shifted and I did a bunch of research and I created this framework that took this really neutral approach to writing the movie, that’s about a group of North African migrants stuck in a shipping container.
It’s eighty-eight pages long, and it’s like a thrill ride that ends with a wallop. It punches you in the gut. It’s a humanitarian film in the same vein of Cary Fukunaga’s film Beasts of No Nation on Netflix or Hotel Rwanda. That’s how The Container came to be.
JAMES
But it would not have existed, I think, unless you had worked, originally on Blood Sweat and Years, because the creative journey of that film involves you doing the previous film and learning from it. So, now how much do you draw upon your personal life? How do you balance that mix of taking from your past experiences to tell a story that isn’t necessarily about you individually, but might reflect some of the themes, feelings, ideas, and experiences you’ve been through?
MATT
It’s really simple. Now, I imagine being someone else. Just like an actor. I imagine what I would do in that person’s situation, but I let them do it just like the actor lets the character do it. So you know, let’s say I was from Eritrea, and I was living on a thousand calories a day, and I had scrounged up every cent I had to try and escape, and I just think what would I do in that situation, but I don’t imagine my face as the person accomplishing it. I imagined the face of a little girl, or the gentleman, you know, that needed something that I’ve never needed in my life but if I did, how would I go about doing it. I put other faces on it and that removes me from the equation so it’s not a self-centred approach. It’s universal.
JAMES
A film from twenty or forty years ago reflects the time they were born in, and yet some films even though they might have been made fifty or sixty years ago, still feel like they have a universal appeal or a universal story. What do you think it is in great films that makes some of them feel timeless?
MATT
It’s definitely making the audience identify with a core theme of the story. So, for instance, in The Container, it poses the question, “As you sit there and complain about what you’re going to eat tonight and how fast your internet is – imagine this: “What would you do if you were in this container and you’d paid a thousand bucks that took you eight months to save and you had your daughter with you and this was your last chance to get out of the country. You know, the country that made your life a living hell. What would you do if you were someone else?” And it takes the audience out of who they are and it makes them reflect on what they have. So, the audience has to identify in a very personal way with what’s happening in your subject matter and what’s happening in your concept, or it’s going to be forgettable.
JAMES
With film you’ve got two hours. In series television like Game of Thrones you have seventy hours. I think the difference in the amount of storytime you have means that film has to be much more concentrated. Much more to the point. Do you think films work best when they have a single protagonist that you’re seeing the story through?
MATT
I think they’re two different mediums that both approach story in a different way. For film, it’s much more focused. It’s like, “What do you want the audience to get out of this one movie, because they’re only going to watch it that one time and then it’s over and the world your telling begins and ends in that movie?”
Whereas the purpose of a TV show is for people to fall in love with the actors, and they get plot and structure and story through the whole thing but the most rewarding part is being fed this story that feels so real in this episodic way so you can spend so much more time with a character, as opposed to learning a theme.
You know, films to me are themes. Like Fight Club has all these themes you can dissect forever whereas in Game of Thrones I love Tyrian, and I love Sansa. They’re like my sister and my uncle and you know they’re my family because I went through all this hardship with them, and I know what they went through. I know their story and their stories are just like me knowing my best friend’s story who you know maybe he was a drug addict and his dad died. The thing about the episodic story is you love the person, whereas in a film you love the idea and you love the people that are expressing that idea.
Matt on set – Absurd Hero Productions
JAMES
Right, well let’s talk about ideas. What kind of ideas do you enjoy exploring what kinds of stories attract your creative energy?
MATT
Well, you know, nowadays, I’ve just been super focused on executive producer roles where I champion multiple projects. So, I’ve got all these fires burning now and I created this program, Get it Made X, which is essentially a union for non-union writers.
So, any writer that’s accepted to the program comes into the fold with all the rest of our members, and they all compete for funds that we put into the program as well as they pay membership dues. So, all of that all gets put into a pot. And they compete to make proof of concept films with that money and we make multiple projects so right now I have five of them.
And I can talk about each one of those projects the same way that I talk about The Container. Because what we do is reverse engineer long-form materials. So, if somebody has a script they love and its scoring well in the screenplay world what we do is have them write a five-page version. Maybe the most pivotal scene that really showcases what the world of the film or the show or whatever it is would be about. And we go that extra mile because I have a production company. I own all the cameras. I have 5000 square feet of office space and everything you’ll need as well as all of the contacts and the relationships and the infrastructure because I’m in Los Angeles and I’ve been doing this for twelve years.
So, we go right to the source and make these films and then we put these packages together with known entities and then we go to the studios. Because I have contacts at the studios, but they won’t read words on a page from an unknown writer. They just won’t do it. But what they will do is watch a five-minute film that’s well produced.
So, I’m like, “Hey what are you guys looking for?” “Oh, we’re always looking for easy horror stuff.” ” Okay, well I’ve got this thing about a demon baby and a crazy girl next door concept.” “Ok, send me the demon baby thing.” Boom, I text him a link that goes to a proof of concept movie, and he watches it and at the end he goes, “Hey, do you have the full script?” And then we send the book and the full script and all the people that are attached to the project. “Oh, you got the guy from Weeds as the main actor. Or, “Oh you got the guy from Brooklyn Nine Nine to direct it.” Now all the studio has to do is inject funds into a group of artists that are already mobilized, and a product will emerge. That’s what we’ve been doing now, and it’s just awesome.
JAMES
So, what then is your vision for Absurd Hero Productions in the future? What is your goal.
MATT
What I imagined us to be is like Bad Robot. Bad Robot makes film and television shows across all genres. And if I have the right number of members in Get It Made X, I’ll be able to turn out twelve films across all genres, a year. So, my vault will be full – just filled to the brim with ideas that are packaged on paper and have known talent that have said that they will be a part of the project.
JAMES
Getting a film made is a tough business, so I was wondering how much do you think luck plays a part in a person’s success?
MATT
Where preparation and opportunity meet is what makes luck seem so magical. I think if you prepare yourself for an opportunity, such as selling a movie script, then you can attract that scenario by actively working toward making yourself prepared and making it not so much about luck anymore and making it more about fate.
JAMES
You’re prepared to take advantage of the opportunities when they present themselves.
MATT
And luck is opportunity in disguise. You know what I’m saying? If you’re prepared for the opportunity and you get it, it’s going to feel like luck, but no it wasn’t really luck it’s because you were ready to take on that opportunity.
Matt – Early Days in LA
JAMES
You said you’ve been doing this for 12 years in LA. What brought you to LA? How did you get there?
MATT
I lived in Florida, and I started in Miami. I was in a rock band until I was 25 and I got way too caught up in that scene in terms of just all it has to offer in terms of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.
So, I had to rebuild my belief system mentally from the ground up about what I expected out of life and what my life was going to be now that the rock band was over. I made a lot of decisions in terms of, you know, not allowing chemical dependency to become this everyday thing in my life. I had to shed that whole older beginning of being in a rock band, and of being rebellious, and being the lead singer, and being the center of attention.
And that’s how I ended up in LA when I was 25. You know, new brain power and new motivation, and that’s when I started from the ground up. And I rode a bike. I didn’t have a car. I rode a bike and went to any film place, and I literally said I’d work for free for a week to show you guys who I am and my attitude and to see if you guys want to hire me.
And it was no, no, no, no and then a lighting rental house said yes, and they hired me, and I learned lighting, and I met people. I got into the union for camera and lighting, and I spent the next eight years working on movies and television and being a lighting technician, and I did camera a bunch too.
JAMES
But I think the first 25 years of your life has been really informative for you in terms of your journey and who you have become.
MATT
Yeah, I just wish I didn’t waste so much time. You know what I’m saying. You can get off the elevator at any floor. For me, I decided to go to the sub-basement for some reason.
JAMES
How important is forgiving yourself for those years to having a more positive and better future now?
MATT
As an artist, you know, having internal conflicts is the reason why I feel I need to have a voice. I feel like the only way to dissipate these internal pressures for me is through art.
Matt on Set – Absurd Hero Productions
JAMES
What filmmakers and films do you find inspiring? Who speaks to you? Who do you get excited about?
MATT
I collect 11 x 17 movie and TV posters. Right now I’m looking at posters for Game of Thrones, The Tudors, Neon Genesis which is an anime from Japan, Silver Linings Playbook by David O. Russell, Cary Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation all the way to stuff like Blue is the Warmest Colour, which is a crazy indie that came out of France.
But my favourite stuff is historical fiction. Like The Last Kingdom which is about the Danish coming over to England when England was multiple nations in the eighth and ninth century during the reign of King Alfred the Great. And I’ve watched that series, like three times and it’s got four seasons now and I’ve watched each season three full times and they’re ten hours each. Same thing with Game of Thrones, you know, every single night I’m watching a piece of something, you know, all the way to shows like Billions, or Homelands.
JAMES
So, having lived a different life when you were younger and being your age now what would you say to your younger self? What sort of advice would you give to your younger self?
MATT
You know pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. I took the crazy route and then wallowed in my suffering so a lot of my joy was robbed from me.
I guess I would just say, “Just go easy on yourself. Don’t beat yourself up so much. You know, dude just keep going. Who cares? Does it really matter that much? Just try and don’t give up, because if you give up – it’s definitely not gonna happen.”
The worst part is that for the vast majority it never happens for them. They write three or four scripts and then they don’t write any more. And that’s it. It’s done. They’ve written a bunch of scripts that maybe placed in a few contests, but they never got made. But Get It Made X is going to be a way for people that are in the non-union realm to compete with everybody that’s in the union realm without having to wait to win the lottery – so to speak – and we want to do that for as many people as possible.
“When you sit down as a playwright and you start to think about a character that’s going to inhabit your world, that’s a piece of coal. Until you put that piece of coal under pressure, you’re not going to reveal all of its facets. So, characters have to be put under pressure. And that’s where you as a writer, and your audience is going to discover all of the facets of that character. And you’re going to turn that piece of coal into a diamond. With facets that shine and shape and inform. It’s pressure. But the pressure can be lost if the writer gives it too much time.”
Trevor Rueger has been an actor, director, writer and dramaturge for over 30 years. In 2011 he received the Betty Mitchell Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance as Billy Bibbit in Theatre Calgary/Manitoba Theatre Centre’s production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. As an actor, he’s been seen at Theatre Calgary, Lunchbox Theatre, Sage Theatre, Vertigo Theatre, Stage West, and the Garry Theatre.
His directing credits include When Girls Collide, Columbo: Prescription Murder and Columbo Takes the Rap for Vertigo Theatre, Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets, Life After Hockey and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) for Lunchbox Theatre, Heroes for Sage Theatre, SHE and Matadora for Trepan Theatre, Medea and 33 Swoons for Rocky Mountain College and Courage for Lost Boy Productions
For 20 years he was an ensemble member and writer for Shadow Productions. Trevor was also an original ensemble member of Dirty Laundry which is a weekly improvised soap opera and for 10 years he was chair, writer, and producer of the Betty Mitchell Awards which recognizes excellence in Calgary Theatre.
I’ve worked with Trevor several times over the last decade as a dramaturge and I’ve always found his feedback on my plays to be insightful and constructive. He asks the right questions. Questions that make me think about my story and characters in a manner that results in a better draft.
I sat down with Trevor at Alberta Playwrights Network where he’s been the executive director for the past eleven years to talk with him about his career and his approach to acting, directing, and working with playwrights. Our interview took place in late January, a few months before the current pandemic and lockdown, and so the impacts of COVID-19 on the Canadian Theatre Community were not a part of our conversation.
JAMES HUTCHISON
I’m curious, how did you get interested in theatre and what were some of those early experiences and influences?
TREVOR RUEGER
I didn’t get involved in theatre until high school. I come from a family that was certainly not against the arts. We as kids were just allowed to find our own way. So, when I was a kid, for me, it was sports for the most part.
I was a middle child with six years difference between me and my younger sibling out on an acreage where the nearest neighbour, who was five years older than me, was two miles away. So, I spent a lot of time by myself inventing games and inventing sports and I was quite imaginative and creative, and I was a bit of a gregarious kid as my mother would state.
So, in high school, my mom said, “Well, you should probably take a drama class because you’re such a ham.” And I said, “Okay.” So, I did.
And on the first day of the drama class, it was announced that auditions for the school play were happening that afternoon, and so I signed up for an audition. The play was called Present Tense and it’s a fun little play about a kid in the 50s who’s having trouble with his girlfriend and he imagines that his girlfriend is having all of these wild and crazy love affairs with everyone but him. So, I auditioned for the play and the next day I was cast as the lead in the show.
JAMES
Had you not been cast, who knows?
TREVOR
Oh, exactly. Absolutely. And so, I took drama and played sports all the way through high school. And there was a bit of a pull between my basketball coach and my drama teacher as to which I should focus on. And when I was in grade 12, there were some conflicts between my basketball schedule and my drama schedule and suddenly my schedule all worked out, because unbeknownst to me until I found out many years later, my basketball coach and my drama teacher had gone behind my back and negotiated my schedule.
High School Years
JAMES
Oh, that’s cool. So, then you went off to the University of Calgary to pursue a degree?
TREVOR
I didn’t start out pursuing a degree in theatre. I did one year of General Studies and then I was going to go off into the Education Department where I was going to become a math teacher. But I took drama 200, which was the introductory acting class with Grant Reddick. Halfway through the course you get your grade, and you have a little meeting with the instructor.
So, I go into Grant’s office and sit down and Grant says, “The work is really coming along and you’re really doing well and here’s your grade. How are you doing in your other drama courses?” And I said, “I’m not taking any other drama courses, I’m actually, in General Studies and going into the Education Department.” He went, “Oh, no.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He went, “You should probably take the other drama classes.” And I went, “Okay.”
So, I went home and had a challenging conversation with the parents about switching my major and going into the drama department.
JAMES
How did you approach that? I mean, you said they were pretty open but a number of years ago there was more of a thought that you picked a career and stuck with it. You didn’t have options. Now days people will have four or five careers.
TREVOR
That was certainly their major concern. This does not seem like a career choice. This does not seem like something you can make a living at. This sounds like something, that while it may satisfy you in one way, is going to be incredibly challenging. And so, they’re really looking out for me, right?
JAMES
As parents do.
TREVOR
Yeah, absolutely. It was a difficult conversation. It was three or four years later that I finally realized they were acting out of love and protection and wanted the best for me. But I kind of had them over a barrel because they had made a promise to all of their kids that if you went to university or college they would pay for it. So, I threw the gauntlet down and said, “That’s fine. I am out of here and you’re really reneging on your promise.” So, there was some negotiation and my dad kept pushing me to do a fallback degree afterward. But oddly enough, all the way through my university I was working professionally as an actor. I was studying during the day and doing shows at night.
JAMES
What kind of shows?
TREVOR
I got my first paycheck from Stephen Hair for doing a straight play called Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie at Pleiades Theatre back in that time. I think I played a police officer who had six lines.
Pleiades Mystery Theatre – Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie
JAMES
So, you’re in university and right away you get taken in by the Calgary theatre community. How do you think that helped you build your career here in the city?
TREVOR
I have to take a step back slightly because I already knew a lot about the Calgary theatre community before university because my high school drama teacher Kathryn Kerbes was a professional actor and did some shows while she was a teacher. And her husband Hal Kerbes was quite well connected and a fantastic artist and actor, singer, and costumer. He did it all. In fact, our high school drama class was thrown a party by Hal and Kathryn Kerbes at their home after we graduated where they invited all of their theatre friends over. And so, at that point, I was already quite well immersed and I already knew a few of the people who were part of the cast of my first Pleiades show.
JAMES
So, how do you approach a character? How do you get into the mind of the person you’re going to be? The character you’ll be portraying.
TREVOR
I start big. I start with a big wide canvas. And then I bring the lens into smaller and smaller and smaller details. The first thing I look at is the narrative journey and arc of the character. And then figuring out within that arc what the character wants. That to me is the fundamental question approaching any material. What does the character want? Then once I discovered that I ask how does the character fit into the story? Then I start to look at the text. What does my character say? What does my character say about myself? What do other characters say about my character?
And then I start to develop a physical vocabulary that comes from the world around me and the world that we’re creating in the rehearsal hall and then ultimately on stage. If I’m in a family drama one of my tricks is to look at my relatives and steal their moves. I’ll decide within the family structure who is the most influential on my character, and then I’ll pick up their mannerisms.
So, for instance, I was playing Happy in a production of Death of a Salesman at the Garry Theatre directed by Sharon Pollock. And I just watched the physical mannerisms of the actor who was playing Willie, and the actor playing my older brother Biff and it wasn’t mimicry, but I just went, with a similar physical vocabulary.
JAMES
Any particularly fond memories of a role that you really enjoyed working through and capturing,
TREVOR
I’ve enjoyed a lot of the work I’ve done but the work I did as a young actor with Sharon Pollock at the Garry Theatre was really great stuff to be able to cut my teeth on. The Garry Theatre was a pretty amazing experience because I was directed by her in roles that I would never have had an opportunity to even audition for at other theatres in Calgary or across the country. I played Alan Strang in Equus, I played Happy in Death of a Salesman and I played two or three characters in a production of St. Joan. But I was so green. I was absorbing the work without actually being able to articulate what I was doing.
Cast from the 2016 Stage West Calgary Production of Suite Surrender by Michael McKeever
JAMES
What was it like for your family to come and see you on stage?
TREVOR
They were always supportive, and they came to see as much of the stuff that I was in as they could. And my dad was quite gregarious as well and spent a fair amount of time telling stories in various pubs in and around Forest Lawn, and I would go and meet him every once in a while in the afternoon for a beer after class. And going through university my dad was always, “ You know you could get your education degree.” And in year two it was, “You could get a real estate license.” Year three it was, “You know, you could probably turn these drama skills into sales. I know a guy who owns a car dealership. You could sell cars on weekends. Or you could always learn to be a backhoe operator.” So, he was always just going, “Get something else to fall back on. It doesn’t have to be another four-year degree.” And my dad would introduce me when friends would come over to the table as this is my son he’s going to university. Well, finally there was that day my dad introduced me to one of his pals who’d never met me before as, “My son. He’s an actor.” I went alright.
Realizing the divas are about to discover they’ve been roomed together, assistant Mr. Pippet jumps into the arms of hotel GM Mr. Dunlap
JAMES
So, tell me about what attracts you to directing and what type of shows are you attracted to?
TREVOR
Here’s the thing that I discovered which leads me very well into the world of being a dramaturge. It’s not that I dislike the performance aspect of being an actor. I quite enjoy it. I love putting on the costume. I love walking out in front of an audience. I love hearing them react and knowing that you’ve had an effect on them in some way. But when you get into the run of a show, it’s the law of diminishing returns. So, what I discovered when I started directing, which has led me into dramaturgy, is I love making big discoveries. And that’s the rehearsal hall. It’s the same way as I was just discussing how I approach a character right. Starting with this big broad canvas. So those big discoveries. What is this world that we’re going to create? Who are the people who inhabit this world? How do they connect to each other? What are we telling an audience? What are we showing? What are they seeing? All tied back to, we’re supporting the work of the playwright.
The 2010 Theatre Calgary Production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Dale Wasserman. Based on the novel by Ken Kesey. Directed by Miles Potter.
JAMES
How did you end up getting involved in dramaturgy?
TREVOR
It was working with Sharon Pollock. It really was. It changed the notion of how I look at work and how I look at plays. And at that point, I had no idea what dramaturgy was, but she looks at work as a director, as a writer, as an actor, and with such a writer’s eye, and with such dramaturgical care for the work that it made me read differently.
Again, we were doing Death of a Salesman and in our first read through the actor, playing Willy Loman made a choice with a line delivery on about page eight or nine. And it was our first read-through and Sharon stopped there and went, “That’s a very interesting choice that you’re making. I just want to warn you, let’s not get trapped into that yet because while you do say that and that could be the emotional content of what you’re saying here – forty pages from now you say this.” And I thought – how is she on page eight, and on page forty at the same time, and it was because she had a concept or saw the whole. And it made me start to look at work differently. As an actor to look at work differently. As a director. And then realizing a few years later, oh, that’s dramaturgy. That’s dramaturgy – defending the work of the playwright and seeing the big idea within that world.
Directed by Trevor Rueger
JAMES
I find it takes a couple of reads to understand the connection between page eight and page forty because on a first read you don’t always see the connection between the two.
TREVOR
Absolutely. Though, as a dramaturg it’s not that I don’t give work multiple readings before actually crafting a response to a playwright but I generally make my notes on the first reading because for me – what the playwright has asked me to do as the dramaturge is to be their very first audience. And an audience is only going to see a work once. So, I approach it with that mindset. So, I will read it and make my big notes and observations. Then usually upon a second or third reading, I start to be able to see, “Oh, hang on, my bad. I misread that. Oh, I see, that connects to that.” Or, “Mmmm, it seems to be that the idea is shifting or has shifted or wants to shift.”
JAMES
This is why I think it’s very important not to share the work too soon. Because if you share it too soon you can never get that first reader back. Although to help make it fresh again one of the things I find useful is to put the work back into the drawer for six months.
TREVOR
Absolutely. So much of my practice, as a director has touched on that kind of notion. I feel that within the Canadian theatre system, we do not have enough time to rehearse nor do we have enough time to let the work germinate for the artists because of the commercial aspect of things, right, that you have to create a new product virtually monthly or bimonthly. Rehearsal periods are truncated and the work just gets rushed to the stage. So, for me as a director wherever possible I do five-hour days with my cast instead of an eight-hour rehearsal day. We’ll do eight hours for the first couple of days and then we’ll shift as soon as possible to a five-hour day.
JAMES
What do you find the shorter hours do for them?
TREVOR
They come back the next day fresh. They’re still working eight hours. They’re not doing eleven and twelve-hour days. So, they’re actually doing eight hours of work but you only have access to them for five. And that creates within the rehearsal hall a demand to be focused. People come in fresh and you can usually start those final days of rehearsal at noon. So it’s like 12 to 5. So, you come in fresh because you’ve had a morning. You’ve had an evening. You’ve had an opportunity to do some work. You’ve had an opportunity to think about the work. You’ve had an opportunity to reflect on notes. As opposed to coming home at the end of an eight hour day throwing some food in your face, trying to learn your lines, getting up the next morning and taking a look at the work you’re going to be doing the next day. It’s all so exhausting. It’s also exhausting for a director and a stage manager.
Jamie Matchullis as Jennifer, Chantelle Han as Lilly, Ben Wong as Charlie, and Kelsey Verzotti as Jade in the Lunchbox Theatre production of Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets by Dale Lee Kwong. Directed by Trevor Rueger – Photograph by Benjamin Laird
JAMES
So, tell me about APN.
TREVOR
The Alberta Playwrights Network is a membership-driven organization devoted to supporting, developing, and nurturing the work and the playwright through education, advocacy, outreach, and any other resource or technology that we can provide our membership.
JAMES
You’ve been running APN for eleven years. Where do you think you were as an organization when you started and where do you think you are now?
TREVOR
APN, as I’ve always known it, was a healthy, vibrant, energized organization. And the organization that I inherited, certainly was that. Strong membership base. Pretty interesting programming that people were taking advantage of. But over the last eleven years, the biggest thing that I’ve seen shift and change and alter is the theatrical landscape.
When I came into the organization Canada Council had just paid for a research paper to be written by Ben Henderson who was with Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre and Martin Kinch who was with Playwrights Theatre Center in Vancouver. Both organizations very much like APN. They wrote a paper called From Creation to Production that talked about the new play development model, as it existed in Canada, and as it existed in the UK and in some parts of the United States. And at that time, it was a pretty standard that a play gets selected for a workshop. A play gets developed. A play gets produced. Or a playwright gets developed and produced.
There were a lot of ideas in there that I looked at and I read. “Okay, is APN doing this? Yeah, we seem to be doing that. All right. That seems to be successful. We seem to be doing this. That seems okay. We don’t seem to be doing this. I don’t know if our organization could ever do this.”
So, I enacted a five-year plan at that point which focused on playwright advocacy and doing more work and providing greater agency for our members by getting their plays into the hands of people that might produce them. So, through that came a number of things including the catalogue which featured plays ready for production by our members. Fast forward ten years later, that paper, From Creation to Production, is completely out of date.
JAMES
It’s now a historic document.
TREVOR
Yeah, absolutely. And so that’s why APN with funding from the Canada Council is currently engaging in this national research project, to discover – who we are and where we are as a nation – and as producers and creators and playwrights and theatre companies – and trying to figure out what the landscape is as it pertains to new play development, new play creation, new play curation and to find out what we can do.
Mike Czuba, Kira Bradley, Melanie Murray Hunt, and Trevor Rueger workshopping new work with APN
JAMES
Well considering where we are right now can you talk a little bit about diversity and inclusion as an organization.
TREVOR
Three years ago, at a board retreat, one of our board members brought up as a point of discussion that we don’t seem to be doing a lot of work in the realm of diversity which lead to a really great conversation that we had never had as an organization. Because our organization has always been open, and available, to anyone and everyone.
JAMES
If you’re a playwright, call us.
TREVOR
If you’re a playwright, call us. We don’t discriminate based on age, race, country of origin, religious background, sexuality, or sexual identity. None of that has ever been a part of our membership process. And we’ve never asked those questions, nor did we ever care to. So that led us to the discovery that while that may be our internal belief that may not be our external perception.
And as we’ve done some surveys and spoken to diverse theatre creators about this what we discovered is not that the outside perception was necessarily wrong, but that the outside perception was different from our internal belief. We believed that we were an open door for everyone, but what we discovered is we have to take that door out to people and let them know that we exist and that we have this belief?
JAMES
It’s not enough to just have the door open.
TREVOR
Exactly. So, we’ve held a couple of meetings with diverse artists from across a number of disciplines both in Calgary and Edmonton. We’re also undergoing a process with the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres and there’s a number of Calgary theatre companies that have gotten together for two or three meetings to have frank and open discussions about equity, diversity, and inclusion that are chaired and convened by diverse artists which has been really eye-opening to us.
We just got some money from Calgary Arts Development, to dig into this work a little deeper. So, we’ve just hired what we’re calling a Community Outreach Ambassador, who for a period of time is going to go out and engage with diverse and underrepresented communities and just have frank and honest conversations with them about what our organization does. Here’s who we are. Do you have creators? Do you have writers? What can we offer you? Is there anything that we could provide that would assist you on your artistic journey?
By the end of this year we’ll probably be creating some value statements that we will publish on our website and those value statements around equity, diversity, and inclusion will trickle down and be at the forefront of thoughts regarding programming.
For ten years Trevor Rueger was the chair, writer, and producer of the Betty Mitchell Awards. The Betty Mitchell Awards recognize excellence in Calgary’s Professional Theatre Community. Photograph by Jasmine Han
JAMES
So, let’s talk about dramaturgy. How do you engage with the playwright? What works best?
TREVOR
For me, dramaturgy is a philosophy. And the philosophy is simply about helping the playwright find the ideas, both big and small in the world that they’re trying to create. I tend to start every dramaturgical session by asking the playwright, “Tell me about you and tell me about your work. And tell me about the creative process that you’ve been engaged in thus far and tell me what you want to say.” A lot of the questions and feedback that I tend to formulate, as I’m reading a work generally always come back to, “What are you trying to say? What do you want the play to say? What do you want the audience to think, feel, and be saying when they’re walking out of the theatre? What’s the experience you want to take them through?” So that’s always where I start a conversation. And that becomes a touchstone from which we can negotiate.
JAMES
Do you have any particular way of breaking down scripts?
TREVOR
There are three things that I really focus on. One is character. If I was to pick up this script as an actor or a director, based on what I’m seeing right now, would I be able to either give a performance, akin to what the playwright has written, or as a director get to a performance that’s akin to what the playwright has written. That’s usually where I have a lot of questions about the character and the character journey. To me, it starts with character, then it moves into structure. How is the world structured? How is your narrative structure? And then my third one is time. I think the notion of time is overlooked by emerging playwrights.
JAMES
What do you mean by time?
TREVOR
What I mean by time is how much time expires in the world of your play. Because time has a powerful effect within a narrative in terms of an emotional state. When I teach my introduction to playwriting, I use the epilogue at the end of Death of a Salesman as an example of time. Linda is standing at Willy’s grave and in the reality of the play he passed two or three days ago. She’s got this beautiful speech about, “I can’t cry Willy. I can’t cry. Every time I hear the screen door open, I expect it’s you. I can’t cry.” And I always ask playwrights in the course, “Okay, so that’s three days ago, but let’s imagine she’s standing at the grave a year later and says those exact same words.”
JAMES
It totally changes everything.
TREVOR
It totally changes everything, right? The audience now is getting a completely different story. And all you’ve done is change the element of time. The actor is going to play it differently. The director is going to approach it differently. So, that’s what I mean by the notion of time, and how time is important and sometimes we give a story too much time. It becomes too epic and the hero’s journey loses all of its stakes.
When you sit down as a playwright and you start to think about a character that’s going to inhabit your world, that’s a piece of coal. Until you put that piece of coal under pressure, you’re not going to reveal all of its facets. So, characters have to be put under pressure. And that’s where you as a writer, and your audience is going to discover all of the facets of that character. And you’re going to turn that piece of coal into a diamond. With facets that shine and shape and inform. It’s pressure. But the pressure can be lost if the writer gives it too much time.
L to R: Col Cseke, Kathryn Kerbes & Trevor Rueger in an APN workshop for Saviour by Maryanne Pope – January 2019
JAMES
I really like the fact that you’re talking character, structure, and time, because then it doesn’t matter whether it’s comedy – doesn’t matter whether it’s a tragedy – because those function in every story. And those things are the elements the story is built out of.
Okay, I have one final question. Speaking as a dramaturge you’re working with a new playwright. He’s written a new play called Hamlet. What are your dramaturgical notes on Hamlet because it’s a pretty good play?
TREVOR
Yeah, it’s pretty good. One question would be, “Do you feel that the Fortinbras plot is overwritten for what thematically you think it’s giving you?” Because that’s the plot that always gets cut. And I ask people when I’m teaching my introductory playwriting course, “In Hamlet, how long from the first scene on the parapets of Elsinore castle to the end of the play? How much time has expired in the real world?”
JAMES
You know, I’ve never thought about it, but it feels like it’s a lot of time. Well because he travels to England and comes back. I don’t know. A month. Two months?
TREVOR
Six months.
JAMES
Six months.
TREVOR
Six months in order to travel by boat to and from England. And there is a reference to six or seven months actually later in the text. But if Hamlet was to be that slow and wishy-washy for seven months…
JAMES
…he wouldn’t have our sympathy. We’d be frustrated with him.
TREVOR
Yeah, we’d want to punch him in the face. So, our mind shortens it to an acceptable amount of time. Yeah, I could see how he would have difficulty making a choice in two months. But you know, if I’m really thinking about the fact that it’s taking him six to seven months to make a decision, I’m starting to turn off the character. Yeah, so maybe you want to take a look at time.
I did a speech for a seniors group at Theatre Calgary many years ago about dramaturgy and I created a fictional case study on if I was to dramaturg Hamlet, but it was like, draft one, right? So, Shakespeare comes to me and he goes, “Okay, I got this great idea for a play. Here’s what’s going to happen. Kid comes back from college because his dad’s died. And then his mom is sleeping with his uncle and his uncle killed his dad.”
“Oh, that sounds really great.”
“Yeah. And then he enacts revenge.”
“Okay, great. Question. Did he witness the murder?”
“No, he did not witness the murder.”
“Did somebody witness the murder?”
“No, no, no. This is how the uncle is getting away with it. Nobody witnessed the murder.”
“So how does Hamlet know that his uncle did it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you said he exacts revenge on his uncle for the murder of his father?”
“Yeah?”
“So how does he know his uncle killed his father?”
“Ah, yeah, I see what you’re saying. (Pause) Ghost of his dad?”
“Ghost of his dad! Good idea. Let’s have him show up.”
Alberta Playwrights’ Network is a not-for-profit provincial organization of emerging and established playwrights, dramaturgs, and supporters of playwriting. Our members come from across the province in both rural and urban communities, with the largest portion of our membership residing in Calgary and Edmonton. We strive to be a truly province-wide organization, with representation from all corners of the province. Alberta Playwrights’ Network exists to nurture Albertan playwrights and provide support for the development of their plays. APN promotes the province’s playwrights and plays to the theatre community while building and fostering a network of playwrights through education, advocacy, and outreach.
How many kinds of stories are there? I think there are three types of story and that every story written, filmed, or told can fit these three cateogries.
* * *
I spend a lot of my time thinking about story and what story means and how stories should be told. I’ve read Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee, Making Movies by Sidney Lumet, The Playwright’s Guidebookby Stuart Spenser, and The Hidden Tools of Comedyby Steve Kaplan among others and you can learn something from all of them. In fact, I’m starting to reread some of these books because most of them I read seven or eight years ago. I’ve listed these books along with a dozen others at the end of this blog post that you can check out.
Plus if you’re looking for some submission opportunities have a look at my Submission Opportunities for Playwrights page. I’ve listed several opportunities and provided a short description of each as well as a link to each opportunities website for further information. This is a list I no longer update but many of the opportunities are still active and you can check them out directly if you want.
When it comes to writing you’re always learning – always seeking knowledge – always on a quest to improve your ability to tell a good story. Which brings us to the subject of this blog. What do you say when somebody asks you about your story? Do you have a one-line description? Do you dive into a quick summary of the plot? Do you even know where to begin? It can be a challenging question to answer because it depends on how you define your story.
Do you define it by genre?
Do you describe your story based on its three-act structure?
Do you describe your story based on a classification system such as the one described in the book Save the Cat by Blake Snider where he identifies ten different types of movies including Monster in the House, Dude with a Problem, and Superhero? Each type of movie Snider discusses has particular storytelling elements. For example, in Monster in the House, the protagonist is trying to survive a monster. The house must be a confined space and some sort of sin is committed that unleashes the monster. So, in the film Fatal Attraction the Monster is Alex Forrest played by Glenn Close and the sin is the affair. These are primal films.
That’s one book. Another book is 20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias and his categories include Master Plot Classifications such as Quest, Escape, Underdog, Metamorphosis, Forbidden Love, and Revenge. Again, each Master Plot has specific elements and in the Quest plot, for example, your protagonist is motivated to find a person, place, or thing. The protagonist should have one or more companions on his journey and in the end what the protagonist discovers is different than what he thought he’d find.
And just this week I stumbled upon another book called The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. This is a hefty volume with the paperback edition coming in at 738 pages compared to 278 pages for 20 Master Plots and 195 pages for Save the Cat. This is a much more academic book and his classification system includes The Quest, Rags to Riches, and Comedy. Yes, comedy is a stand-alone category. So, too, is tragedy.
So, which of these classifications is the right one? The answer is they’re all right and you can use whatever one works for you. I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important thing is whether or not it helps you with your writing. Can you use it to understand your story and does it give you a way to talk about your story with others?
So, I’ve been thinking do any of these classification systems work for me? And I like a lot of the things they say and the story elements they discuss, but I think they’re too complicated. So, after some thought here is my unscientific story classification system including thirteen examples of each.
I think there are only three types of stories. There’s the survival story, the love story, and the quest story. That’s it. And each story can be told as either a comedy or a drama with extreme comedy being satire and extreme drama being tragedy. As far as genres go each type of story can have multiple types of genres so, for example, you can have a science fiction or fantasy story that is about survival, or you can have a historical fiction or a vampire story that is about love.
THREE TYPES OF STORY – SURVIVAL STORIES
SURVIVAL STORIES
TYPE
GENRE
ENDING
Ready or Not
Satire
Horror
Happy
Marathon Man
Drama
Suspense
Happy
A Quiet Place
Drama
Science Fiction
Happy
Misery
Drama
Suspense
Happy
Sleuth
Tragedy
Mystery
Unhappy
Shawshank Redemption
Drama
Epic
Happy
Parasite
Tragedy
Suspense
Unhappy
Star Wars
Drama
Science Fiction
Happy
Zombieland
Satire
Horror
Happy
Harry Potter
Drama
Fantasy
Happy
Death Wish
Drama
Revenge
Happy
The Incredibles
Comedy
Superhero
Happy
The Poseidon Adventure
Drama
Disaster
Unhappy
Survival stories are pretty easy to define. The main character is trying to survive. The threat could be a supernatural force or a real threat like a shark or an aspect of society such as an oppressive prison system. It’s also a category that doesn’t have a lot of comedy but the comedy it has tends to be satire and that’s probably because most of the time we’re dealing with life and death here.
In terms of endings, it seems most of the time the protagonist survives the ordeal but often at a terrific cost. And if he doesn’t survive it’s often because the protagonist sacrifices his life for the greater good or for a particular person or cause.
THREE TYPES OF STORY – LOVE STORIES
LOVE STORIES
TYPE
GENRE
ENDING
The English Patient
Tragedy
War
Unhappy
While You Were Sleeping
Comedy
Romantic Comedy
Happy
The Princess Bride
Comedy
Fantasy
Happy
Airplane
Satire
Romantic Comedy
Happy
Up In the Air
Tragedy
Dramedy
Unhappy
Moulin Rouge!
Drama
Musical
Unhappy
Sleepless in Seattle
Comedy
Romantic Comedy
Happy
Die Hard
Drama
Action
Happy
Doctor Zhivago
Tragedy
Epic
Unhappy
Christmas in Connecticut
Comedy
Romantic Comedy
Happy
Some Like It Hot
Comedy
Crime
Happy
Her
Comedy
Science Fiction
Unhappy
Marriage Story
Drama
Family Drama
Unhappy
So, our second great human urge is love. This was an interesting category. A lot of the films make sense. The Princess Bride and While You Were Sleeping are obviously films about love but Die Hard? How is that a film about love? Well, the first Die Hard is about John McClane trying to save his wife and prove himself worthy of his family’s love. The later Die Hard films I’d classify as survival stories because the primary goal is simply survival and beating the bad guy since there is no longer the tie-in to love as a motivating force. The thing that defines a love story is that the main motivation which moves the story forward is the pursuit of the person who is loved. In the end, the protagonist either finds love or doesn’t find love, but either way he or she grows in some way as a person.
THREE TYPES OF STORY – QUEST STORIES
QUEST STORIES
TYPE
GENRE
ENDING
Chinatown
Tragedy
Detective
Unhappy
Lord of the Rings
Drama
Fantasy
Happy
Stand by Me
Comedy
Coming of Age
Happy
2001: A Space Odyssey
Drama
Science Fiction
Happy
Wizard of OZ
Drama
Musical Fantasy
Happy
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Satire
Myth
Unhappy
Moana
Comedy
Myth
Happy
Pirates of the Caribbean
Comedy
Action Adventure
Happy
The Hangover
Satire
Buddy Movie
Happy
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Drama
Action Adventure
Unhappy
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Comedy
Buddy Movie
Happy
Jumanji
Comedy
Fantasy Adventure
Happy
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Drama
Western
Happy
Quest stories are those stories where the main character is on a quest to gain knowledge or solve a problem or get home. It’s often a story of transformation as the person who starts the journey isn’t the same as the person who ends the journey. For example, the first Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark is different than any of the other Indiana Jones films because Indy isn’t a believer in the supernatural. It isn’t until his encounter with the supernatural forces unleashed at the end of Raiders that he realizes there might be more to this world than he thought.
There’s one type of quest story where the protagonist doesn’t really change and that’s the traditional detective story. Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, Columbo – none of these characters go on a personal journey. Instead, they solve a crime. Do we really want our detective to be going through a personal journey? No. We want our detective to outsmart the killer.
CLEAR OUTCOME
So, each of these categories has a clear outcome. In the survival story, the protagonist either defeats the enemy or is defeated. In the love story, the protagonist either wins the love of the person they want to be with or they don’t. In the quest story, the protagonist either completes the quest and wins or doesn’t complete the quest and fails.
If you look at something as complicated as Game of Thrones it becomes clear that the story at its very basic level is a quest for the Crown. And of course, what we learn is that anyone who goes after the throne is eventually destroyed.
So, what am I going to do with this? I think it’s a good way for me to keep my stories focused when I start working on a new project. That means I need to figure out which category my story fits into and then I need to make sure that what drives my story is either survival, love, or a quest. The specific elements of the story are based on the genre. And that’s something I’ll need to think about on a deeper level because there are all kinds of genres out there. The good thing is I don’t think you need to understand every genre you only need to understand the genres you write about.
STORY PLANNER
So, I’m going to incorporate some of these ideas into my story planner and that means one of the first things to decide when I start writing something new is what type of story is it? Is it a story about survival like my comedy 500 bucks and a pack of smokes, or is it a story about love like my comedy, Under the Mistletoe, or is it a story about a quest like my detective story Heart of Stone: A Jessica Quinn Mystery? And then I’ll evaluate whether or not this is a helpful exercise.
In the meantime, I have some reading to do. The Secret Life of the American Musicalby Jack Viertel beckons. Plus, I’ve recently finished a new blog post called The Four Rules of Comedy. In the meantime, check out some books on writing and submission opportunities for playwrights by following the link at the bottom of the page.
BOOKS ON WRITING
I thought I’d add a section to this blog post and list some of my favourite books on my bookshelf related to writing so you can check them out for yourself.
Stephen King – On Writing
A Memoir of the Craft
“Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, Stephen King’s critically lauded, classic bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work. “Long live the King” hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King’s advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999–and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it–fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.” (Description from Thrift Books.)
With insight, humor, and practicality, Natalie Goldberg inspires writers and would-be writers to take the leap into writing skillfully and creatively. She offers suggestions, encouragement, and solid advice on many aspects of the writer’s craft: on writing from “first thoughts” (keep your hand moving, don’t cross out, just get it on paper), on listening (writing is ninety percent listening; the deeper you listen, the better you write), on using verbs (verbs provide the energy of the sentence), on overcoming doubts (doubt is torture; don’t listen to it)—even on choosing a restaurant in which to write. Goldberg sees writing as a practice that helps writers comprehend the value of their lives. The advice in her book, provided in short, easy-to-read chapters with titles that reflect the author’s witty approach (“Writing Is Not a McDonald’s Hamburger,” “Man Eats Car,” “Be an Animal”), will inspire anyone who writes—or who longs to. (Description from Authors Website)
“This description may be from another edition of this product. Learn the basic techniques every successful playwright knows Among the many “how-to” playwriting books that have appeared over the years, there have been few that attempt to analyze the mysteries of play construction. Lajos Egri’s classic, The Art of Dramatic Writing, does just that, with instruction that can be applied equally well to a short story, novel, or screenplay. Examining a play from the inside out, Egri starts with the heart of any drama: its characters. All good dramatic writing hinges on people and their relationships, which serve to move the story forward and give it life, as well as an understanding of human motives — why people act the way that they do. Using examples from everything from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Egri shows how it is essential for the author to have a basic premise — a thesis, demonstrated in terms of human behavior — and to develop the dramatic conflict on the basis of that behavior. Using Egri’s ABCs of premise, character, and conflict, The Art of Dramatic Writing is a direct, jargon-free approach to the problem of achieving truth in writing.” (Description from Thrift Books.)
The Hidden Tools of Comedy by Steve Kaplan, On Writing by Stephen King, and Save the Cat by Blake Snider. Great books on writing – Three Types of Stories
Save The Cat! by Blake Snyder
The Last Book On Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need
Here’s what started the phenomenon: the best seller, for over 15 years, that’s been used by screenwriters around the world Blake Snyder tells all in this fast, funny and candid look inside the movie business. “Save the Cat” is just one of many ironclad rules for making your ideas more marketable and your script more satisfying, including: The four elements of every winning logline The seven immutable laws of screenplay physics The 10 genres that every movie ever made can be categorized by — and why they’re important to your script Why your Hero must serve your Idea Mastering the 15 Beats Creating the “Perfect Beast” by using The Board to map 40 scenes with conflict and emotional change How to get back on track with proven rules for script repair This ultimate insider’s guide reveals the secrets that none dare admit, told by a showbiz veteran who’s proven that you can sell your script if you can save the cat. (Description from Thrift Books.)
20 Master Plots and How to Build Them by Ronald B. Tobias
“This book shows the reader how to take timeless storytelling structures and make them immediate, now, for fiction that’s universal in how it speaks to the reader’s heart and contemporary in detail and impact.Each chapter includes brief excerpts and descriptions of fiction from many times, many genres – myth and fairy tale, genre and mainstream fiction, film plots of all types, short story and novel.Find 20 fundamental plots that recur through all fiction – with analysis and examples – that outline benefits and warnings, for writers to adapt and elaborate in their own fiction.Ronald B. Tobias has spent his career as a writer moving from genre to genre, first as a short story writer, then as an author of fiction and nonfiction books and finally as a writer and producer of documentaries for public television. He is currently a professor in the Department of Media and Theatre Arts at Montana State University and the author of the Insider’s Guide to Writing for Screen and Television. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.”
The Complete Guide to Turning Story Concepts Into Movie and Television Deals by Michael Hauge
“No one is better than Michael Hauge at finding what is most authentic in every moment of a story.” –Will Smith “Michael Hauge is a story master, and this book is an absolute must have for anyone serious about telling great stories for the screen.” –DeVon Franklin, Vice-President of Production, Columbia Pictures Concise, authoritative, and comprehensive, Writing Screenplays that Sell is the most complete guide available on the art, craft, and business of screenwriting for movies and television. Renowned Hollywood story consultant Michael Hauge–considered “one of the most sought after lecturers and script consultants in the U.S.” by Scriptwriter magazine–covers every aspect from concept to deal: screenplay development, artistry versus commerciality, adaptations, copyright protection, living and working outside Los Angeles; finding an agent; and more. Reflecting the latest trends and scripts, Writing Screenplays that Sell includes insight and detailed information on: Finding and selecting commercial story concepts Guidelines for story structure, including: Opening scenes that immediately grab the reader – The five most common goals in Hollywood movies – Why most adaptations fail – The most effective use of flashbacks – Creating emotionally powerful endings Tips for marketing a script–script consultants, script competitions, pitch fests, virtual pitching, e-mail blasts, log-line listings, audio script readings, and Internet resources for screenwriters A complete, in depth analysis of the screenplay for Avatar, the biggest box office success of all time Whether you’re an aspiring artist looking to break into the business or a seasoned pro looking for tips to boost your skills, Writing Screenplays that Sell is the one essential guide you need. (Description from Thrift Books.)
Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield, Story by Robert McKee, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. Great books on writing – Three Types of Stories
The WAR of ART by Steven Pressfield
Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
A succinct, engaging, and practical guide for succeeding in any creative sphere, The War of Art is nothing less than Sun-Tzu for the soul. hat keeps so many of us from doing what we long to do? Why is there a naysayer within? How can we avoid the roadblocks of any creative endeavor-be it starting up a dream business venture, writing a novel, or painting a masterpiece? Bestselling novelist Steven Pressfield identifies the enemy that every one of us must face, outlines a battle plan to conquer this internal foe, then pinpoints just how to achieve the greatest success. The War of Art emphasizes the resolve needed to recognize and overcome the obstacles of ambition and then effectively shows how to reach the highest level of creative discipline. Think of it as tough love . . . for yourself. Whether an artist, writer or business person, this simple, personal, and no-nonsense book will inspire you to seize the potential of your life. (Description from Thrift Books.)
“Could you be getting in your way of producing great work? Have you started a project but never finished? Would you like to do work that matters, but don’t know where to start? The answer is Do the Work, a manifesto by bestselling author Steven Pressfield, that will show you that it’s not about better ideas, it’s about actually doing the work. Do the Work is a weapon against Resistance – a tool that will help you take action and successfully ship projects out the door.Picking up where The War of Art and Turning Pro left off, Do The Work takes the reader from the start to the finish of any long-form project–novel, screenplay, album, software piece, you name it.Do The Work identifies the predictable Resistance Points along the way and walks you through each of them. No, you are not crazy. No, you are not alone. No, you are not the first person to “hit the wall” in Act Two.Do The Work charts the territory. It’s the stage-by-stage road map for taking your project from Page One to THE END.” (Description from Thrift Books.)
Turning Pro is the follow-up work to Steven Pressfield’s classic, The War of Art. What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and to live out.
Substance, Structure, Style, and The Principles of Screenwriting
Robert McKee’s screenwriting workshops have earned him an international reputation for inspiring novices, refining works in progress and putting major screenwriting careers back on track. Quincy Jones, Diane Keaton, Gloria Steinem, Julia Roberts, John Cleese and David Bowie are just a few of his celebrity alumni. Writers, producers, development executives and agents all flock to his lecture series, praising it as a mesmerizing and intense learning experience. In Story, McKee expands on the concepts he teaches in his $450 seminars (considered a must by industry insiders), providing readers with the most comprehensive, integrated explanation of the craft of writing for the screen. No one better understands how all the elements of a screenplay fit together, and no one is better qualified to explain the “magic” of story construction and the relationship between structure and character than Robert McKee.(Description from Thrift Books.)
The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, The Playwright’s Guidebook by Stuart Spencer, Playwriting Seminars 2.0 by Richard Toscan. Great books on writing – Three Types of Stories
Thanks, But This Isn’t For Us by Jessica Page Morrell
A (Sort of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing Is Being Rejected
A fun, practical guide that reveals the essentials of good fiction and memoir writing by exposing the most common mistakes literary writers make. All great works of fiction and memoir are unique-but most bad novels, stories, and memoirs have a lot in common. From clunky dialogue to poorly sketched out characters, sagging pacing to exaggerated prose, these beginners’ mistakes drive any agent or editor to their stock rejection letter, telling the aspiring writer “Thanks, but this isn’t for us,” and leaving many to wonder what exactly it is that they’re doing wrong. Veteran writing coach, developmental editor, and writing instructor Jessica Page Morrell will fill in the gaps in every rejection letter you’ve ever received. In Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us, Morrell uses her years of experience to isolate the specific errors beginners make, including the pitfalls of unrealistic dialogue, failing to “show, not tell,” and over-the-top plot twists. These are just a few of the problems that keep writers from breaking through with their work. Sympathetic and humane, but pulling no punches, Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us shows writers precisely where they’ve gone wrong and how to get on the right track. In sixteen to-the-point chapters, with checklists, exercises, takeaway tips, and a glossary, Morrell helps readers transcend these mistakes so that they don’t have to learn the hard way: with another rejection letter. (Description from Thrift Books.)
While other books give you tips on how to “write funny,” The Hidden Tools of Comedy offers a paradigm shift in understanding the mechanics and art of comedy itself, and the proven, practical tools that help writers translate that understanding into successful, commercial scripts. Steve Kaplan unlocks the unique secrets and techniques of writing comedy, deconstructing sequences in popular films and television to show when comedy works, when it doesn’t, and why. (Description for Kaplan Comedy)
An insightful primer on the art of dramatic writing
An accessible, contemporary guide to the art of dramatic writing During the ten years that Stuart Spencer has taught playwriting, he has struggled to find an effective playwriting handbook for his courses. Although most of the currently popular handbooks have good ideas in them, they all suffer from the same problems: they’re poorly organized; are composed mostly of quirky, idiosyncratic advice on how specific playwrights have gone about writing their own work; and are full of abstract theorizing on the nature of art. As a result, they fail to offer any concrete information on how to construct a well-written play or any useful guidelines and exercises. Moreover, few of these books are actually written by working playwrights. Out of frustration, Spencer wrote his own book. The result, The Playwright’s Guidebook, is a clear, concise, and engaging handbook. Spencer addresses the important principles of structure, includes insightful writing exercises that build upon one another, explores the creative process, and troubleshoots recurrent problems that playwrights actually face. (Description from Thrift Books.)
Why does a director choose a particular script? What must they do in order to keep actors fresh and truthful through take after take of a single scene? How do you stage a shootout–involving more than one hundred extras and three colliding taxis–in the heart of New York’s diamond district? What does it take to keep the studio honchos happy? From the first rehearsal to the final screening, Making Movies is a master’s take, delivered with clarity, candor, and a wealth of anecdote. For in this book, Sidney Lumet, one of our most consistently acclaimed directors, gives us both a professional memoir and a definitive guide to the art, craft, and business of the motion picture. Drawing on forty years of experience on movies that range from Long Day’s Journey into Night to Network and The Verdict –and with such stars as Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino–Lumet explains how painstaking labor and inspired split-second decisions can result in two hours of screen magic. (Description from Thrift Books.)
If you have ambitions of pursuing a career as a screenwriter or television showrunner then I’d highly recommend you attend the Austin Film Festival. I attended the 2018 Austin Film Festival Writer’s Conference and found it to be a very rewarding and exciting opportunity to connect with industry professionals as well as up-and-coming writers. This interview with Matt Dy, the Director of Competitions about the Austin Film Festival will give you a comprehensive overview of what the festival is about and why you should enter the competition.
Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Austin Film Festival Barbara Morgan talks with the 2017 AFF Awardees: Walter Hill, Keenen Ivory Wayans, and Kenneth Lonergan.
We all have favourite stories – favourite films – favourite television shows and books and plays – because these stories somehow reach us. They make us laugh, or cry, or reflect more deeply about life, or simply give us a momentary escape from our troubles.
That’s why I’m really excited to announce that my play Masquerade is a finalist in the stage play competition at this years Austin Film Festival – which is a festival that’s dedicated to story. Masquerade is about an empty nest couple, Sarah and Glenn, that have drifted apart. They were talking divorce and selling the house until they discovered a book called: A Good Marriage is Just a Fantasy by Dr. Ravi Shasta. Basically, it’s a book about exploring your sexual fantasies with your partner. Unfortunately, sometimes what is real and what is fantasy can become blurred and what was intended to bring a couple closer together can sometimes drive them apart.
The Austin Film Festival is a celebration of film and television that focuses on story and the people who write the screenplays and teleplays. The festival features industry professionals as well as up and coming writers. I’ll be flying down to Austin to participate in the festival as well the staged reading of my play. I gave Matt Dy, the Director of Competitions for The Austin Film Festival, a call to talk to him about how the festival began and what participants can expect.
Gabbi Lindgren, Script Competitions Coordinator & Matt Dy, Director of Script Competitions – Austin Film Festival
JAMES HUTCHISON
The Austin Film Festival was founded in 1993 by Barbara Morgan, who still serves as Festival Director, for the purpose of furthering the art and craft and business of screenwriting and filmmaking. So, I’m curious over the last twenty-five-year history of the festival how have those founding goals been developed?
MATT DY
The Festival was also co-founded by Marsha Milam who is still involved in a limited capacity, but Barbara Morgan is sole Executive Director for the Festival now. The two of them started the festival because they felt there was a need for a community like this. There really wasn’t a writer’s festival let alone very many screenplay competitions at the time. There were maybe a handful and now there are hundreds of them in existence, but we’re one of the original ones which is a really nice thing to be able to say.
The thing that still remains intact over the twenty-five-year history of the festival is our goal and mission to champion the screenwriter. We’re now open to playwrights and eventually we may become more of a hub for all forms of story because we’re also expanding into fiction podcasting and we have a digital series component as well – content for the web – so there’s a lot of different formats that we’ve embraced over the years but the mission to champion the writer is still the same.
First Day of the Austin Film Festival in 2017 – a room full of storytellers.
JAMES
You know when I think of successful screenwriters they might have different success stories but I’m wondering if there might be a couple of qualities that sets the successful screenwriter apart and I’m thinking one of those qualities is having a dedication to the craft. In what way do you think a dedication to the craft benefits a writer’s career and development?
MATT
That is absolutely essential and it’s easier said than done. I’m a writer as well and I tend not to take my own advice – to write every day you know – you hear of people who have nine to five jobs and they’re married, and they have kids, and maybe they have a second job, and they still make time to write. So my thing is to not make excuses anymore and just do it. It is about dedication. It is about finding time to write because, as a writer, you want to treat the writing as if it’s going to be your job. You need to set deadlines and goals and that’s why competitions are a great thing for writers because you work towards a deadline to get your script in for the competition.
It’s also teaching you about persistence. You’re a finalist in our Stage Play Competition. You’re in the top three out of 655 plays that were submitted but a lot of people that didn’t make it as far as you have may actually have a really good play and we may have overlooked it because – it’s a little bit of the luck of the draw – trying to find a good match for the reader that might respond to it. It’s a human process, and it’s incredibly subjective, so you’re going to get different results from different competitions, and so it’s also about being persistent and moving on and entering the next competition
JAMES
Enter other ones or give it a rewrite and enter again.
MATT
Yeah, and you’ll find that exists in every creative field. And if you pick any popular film or stage play that has gotten produced – if you talk to those writers they will tell you consistently that they had so many doors closed on them – so many people told them this would never get produced or shouldn’t be produced and yet they still got it produced. And so the writer’s process is to write every day and stay persistent, stay focused, and write the story you want to tell.
Writer, director, actor Dennis Hopper at the Austin Film Festival in 1997.
JAMES
You said you’re a writer yourself so I’m just wondering from your own perspective – because you’re surrounded by writers – what does keep someone going? I mean those rejection letters are piling up and you work for years for little money…what is that keeps writers going? Why do they keep writing stories?
MATT
Passion. Love. A lot of playwrights are incredibly passionate – they love their work – they do it for the love of the art – and I think a lot of screenwriters feel the same way. It’s a dream and if you don’t have a dream it’s hard to find the motivation to get up each day and work on that passion project
JAMES
I wonder if part of it might be realizing that when you sit down at your desk to begin the research, the writing, the outlining or just diving into writing your script you might be starting a ten or fifteen or twenty-year journey in order to realize that project.
MATT
Absolutely. Everybody has their own process. There are some writers who end up having one project that they spend their entire lives working on, but there are other writers who work on many different projects all at the same time because they know their one pet project may not be the one that gets them discovered.
JAMES
The festival has a number of writing competitions. You’ve got the feature-length drama. You’ve got the comedy feature. Horror. Sci-fi. So you’ve got lots of different categories, but I’m wondering, regardless of the genre, do you notice anything that the winning scripts seem to possess? Something in them that makes this writing stand out.
MATT
I think if I had to pin it on one thing it would be stories that have that unique voice – that unique perspective. Those stories end up winning or advancing in the competition. It’s always their unique spin on a familiar story. A different perspective so that when you’re reading it you go, “Oh that’s brilliant. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Each writer is going to have their own perspective on the world and so their version of a story is going to be different than someone else’s version of the story, and you can tell when they’re writing something for themselves for the passion and for the love of their story rather than when they’re trying to write something for the masses that they think would sell.
Writer/Director Robert Altman – M.A.S.H., McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, and The Player talks with screenwriter and actor Buck Henry – The Graduate, Get Smart, and Catch 22 at the Austin Film Festival.
JAMES
You bring up an interesting point because I just watched Get Out which was a huge hit last year and so I’m wondering when you have a hit like that – a film that, you know, is well made, does well at the box office, gets awards – does the success of that film, in the marketplace, influence the types of scripts you see being entered into the festival?
MATT
Oh yeah, not just the marketplace but also the climate – and what’s happening politically and what’s been happening in the industry with movements for diversity. All these different ancillary things that are happening in the world obviously effect what people are writing and submitting to the competition. You can definitely feel that when you’re reading scripts, and you’ll find that there are many people who are commenting on the current President and many of the other things that are happening in the Zeitgeist because we write to talk about and make sense of the world we live in.
Of course, there are going to be people who are going to try and anticipate what is marketable and usually if they try to emulate what’s popular right now they’re too late because those projects were long in gestation and they’re striking a cord now. As a writer, you should just continue to write what you’re passionate about and then something might happen to make your script a timely subject. There was a playwright here from last year in the playwriting competition who happened to write a play about immigration on a border town in Texas. It was a play she had written a long time ago that never got produced but she pulled that back out of her drawer because she knew this is the time for it.
JAMES
Well, let’s talk a little bit about the festival. There are two components. There’s the film festival and there’s the conference and the conference is filled with industry professionals and established as well as up and coming writers. What’s the conference part of the festival about?
MATT
I like to call it summer camp for screenwriters except it’s only four days. It sort of has that Kumbaya feel when you first arrive. It’s palatable – at least for me. You know you can stereotype writers and say they’re all an isolated bunch who are very introverted who don’t like to converse or be communal, but I find that even the most introverted screenwriter, deep down, really wants to connect, and I think when they realize that wow, I’m not the only one who feels that way, and they come to a conference where it’s a bunch of introverts and a lot of thinkers and creative types who are just like them then the walls start to come down. And we try to make it easy for them to get to know each other and just converse and make friends. Usually without fail that’s what happens.
Samuel Weller, Allison Norlian, Sean Collins-Smith, and Emily McGregor at one of the many mix and mingle functions at the 2017 Austin Film Festival
MATT
I also think a lot of people come to the conference with the goal of getting their script sold and produced or getting an agent or manager but that rarely ever happens at the festival. I like to think of the festival as an incubator where things just take time to develop. Like you’re planting the seeds. You’re making connections with people you wouldn’t normally be able to meet. If you place in the competition you’re going through a special track of panels with people who are just like you – quality writers, talented people with great ideas, so you’re in a very talented room with people that you’re going to several events with and you never know you might find your next collaborator or somebody who would love to read your work and would introduce you to somebody that they know in the industry and so usually those are where most of the success stories come from.
JAMES
As a participant in the conference there are panels there are readings what kind of things are happening?
MATT
Everything that happens at the conference is about the creative and business sides of story, so if you want to learn about other people’s writing process and how you can apply that to your own writing you can do that, or if you’re really wanting to understand how it works in the TV writers room we usually have that covered. We have pitching opportunities, we have script reading workshops, we have an indie filmmaker track as well if you’re a filmmaker and want to learn more about microbudget filmmaking. We have a playwriting track. We have a panel that covers writing for webisodes. We have a script to screen series where writers will show a few clips from their film or show and show the process of what they wrote and how that translated to the screen. We have a conversation series with people who just talk about their career in general and usually, those are the bigger people and in particular our awardees like Tony Gilroy
Barbara Morgan co-founder and Executive Director of The Austin Film Festival hosts In Conversation with Kenneth Lonergan the writer/director of Manchester by the Sea.
JAMES
Why don’t we talk a little bit about that since you brought it up? As part of the festival, you honour screenwriters and filmmakers, and the very first person that was honoured at the festival was Horton Foote who wrote Tender Mercies and adapted To Kill a Mockingbird for the screen, and then last year you had Kenneth Lonergan at the festival who wrote and directed Manchester by the Sea. Who are you honouring this year and why?
MATT
I mentioned Tony Gilroy who is a screenwriter and filmmaker. He’s somebody that we’ve tried to get for a very long time. We try and find people that have a rich history of contributing to storytelling and also have an ability to be accessible to our audience because that’s something we also pride ourselves in is that you have an opportunity to meet Tony Gilroy and talk with him or meet somebody like Vince Gilligan the creator and showrunner for Breaking Bad who took the time to meet everybody when he was here for the festival.
Tony Gilroy is the writer/director of the Oscar Nominated thriller Michael Clayton starring George Clooney. He also wrote the first three Bourne films and co-wrote and directed the fourth film in the franchise. More recently he is the co-writer of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the writer/producer of the political thriller Beirut starring Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike.
MATT
Another awardee we have this year is Daniel Petrie, Jr. who we’re giving our Heart of Film Award and we invited him because he’s been involved with the festival for such a long time and he really loves our festival and he’s very giving and he comes almost every year and we even gave his production company a category the Enderby Entertainment award because his company produced a finalist script from I think 2008 or 9 from our competition and it premiered here at the festival, and they’ve worked with many writers that they’ve met here at the festival. And so usually we try to find in an awardee who has left a mark on the industry and is somebody who can share words of wisdom for the next generation of creators.
Daniel Petrie, Jr. will receive the Heart of Film Award for his many contributions to the film and television industry and his service to the screenwriting community. Dan’s screenwriting credits include the Oscar-nominated Beverly Hills Cop as well as The Big Easy, Shoot to Kill, and Turner and Hooch. Dan is also a two-term past president of the Writers Guild of America West and a long time panelist and supporter of the Austin Film Festival.
JAMES
And you’re also honouring Roger Corman. How many careers has he helped launch?
MATT
Yes, I know that’s another reason it was very clear why we chose him because when you find out all the careers he’s started you wonder why he hasn’t received more credit. It was clear for us that he needed to be an awardee.
Roger Corman has been credited with discovering such talent as Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Diane Ladd, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and James Cameron. He is the director of over 500 films including Little Shop of Horrors, Death Race 2000, and The Pit and the Pendulum. Corman’s company New World Pictures was also a distributor of foreign cinema including the work of Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini.
JAMES
And then you’ve got Larry Wilmore.
MATT
Yes, and he’s somebody else who has been so great as well. Somebody who has been great talking with our attendees and very giving and very accessible as well.
Emmy Award winning Larry Wilmore has been a television producer, actor, comedian and writer for more than 25 years. Wilmore created the Bernie Mac Show which ran for five seasons on FOX and recently helped launch ABC’s Black-ish. On camera, Wilmore was the “Senior Black Correspondent” on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and was the host of his own show The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore for two years on Comedy Central.
JAMES
So, my play Masquerade is a finalist in this year’s Stage Play Competition and I’m really excited to be attending the festival, but I was curious about why you decided to add a stage play category to the film festival?
MATT
It was our Executive Director who had the idea to do it because we work with many playwrights, and we find that many screenwriters and tv writers aren’t just screenwriters and tv writers they also have plays and a lot of these people have been asking us to start a playwriting competition. A lot of playwrights living in New York City, for example, find it hard to make any money as a playwright so a lot of them make their money in TV. The Americans, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black those writer’s rooms took place in New York and a lot of them consisted of playwrights. We started the screenplay competition in 1994 because there was a need for something like that and so we thought this would be a great way for playwrights who want to make that transition into film and television to utilize the resources that we already have in place. And also to give recognition to your own play because the placement and the exposure your play gets from the festival could help get it produced because every playwright still wants to have their play produced.
JAMES
Let’s talk about the other aspect of the festival – so you’ve got the conference part but it’s also a film festival and the film festival runs for an additional four or five days after the conference ends. What are some of the highlights coming up this year as far as films go?
Closing Night Film at the 2018 Austin Film Festival is The Front Runner starring Hugh Jackman. Based on the real-life story of politician Gary Hart whose 1988 run for the Democratic Presidential Nomination was sidelined by reports of an extramarital affair with Donna Rice.
MATT
What I love about our film festival is that our mission to honour the writer still exists. All the awards that are handed out for the different categories in the film competition are handed out to the writers of the film. Not the director or the producer. You know when you watch award shows or you’re at a film festival and they announce the best picture they usually hand out the awards to the director and the producing team. Unless it’s a writer/director but usually the writer isn’t involved with directing or producing they just wrote the script. But at our festival, the writer is the one who actually receives the award. We put a stronger emphasis on the quality of the writing than the marketability or the production values of the films that are chosen to be in the festival. So story really is the thing that we look for the most.
Greta Gerwig the writer and director of the Oscar-nominated film Lady Bird attends the 2017 Austin Film Festival screening of her film.
MATT
The thing that’s nice about our festival is that we’re after Toronto after Venice – after all the bigger film festivals that have those Oscar contenders – and so we have a lot of those big films that end up getting nominated for Oscars. Last year, I think, we might have had nine or ten of them. We had Lady Bird, Three Billboards, I Tonya, Mudbound, and Call Me By Your Name.
JAMES
That was quite the lineup.
MATT
And while a lot of people are going to be gravitating towards the bigger marquee films that we have this year like The Favourite or Boy Erased or Widows you don’t want to miss out on all the other films that are playing within the film festival competition because those are films that you might not be able to see anywhere else anytime soon.
JAMES
So, as I mentioned this is my first time going to the conference. What basic tips or advice can you tell me about coming to the festival that I should know and would help prep me or anybody else who is going?
MATT
Well, get familiar with our list of panelists that are attending the festival and the conference. Find out if your screenwriting heroes are going to be here because they’re going to be out during the festival. They’re going to be at the Driskill bar and they’re going to be at the partner parties and their badge is just going to say their name. It won’t tell you any of their credits or if they’re a panelist. So you never know who you’re going to be standing next to and if you recognize them you can respectfully introduce yourself like, “Hi I’m a finalist in the playwriting competition.” And there aren’t very many finalists. There’s about fifty of you and that’s a huge difference from the ten thousand five hundred scripts that were submitted this year. And your badge will say finalist and you should wear that badge proudly and introduce yourself, “I’m James, I’m a finalist in the playwriting competition.” And that is something that will hopefully open doors. “Oh, you’re a finalist. Okay, tell me about your play.” And of course what’s also going to happen next is, “Well what else are you working on?” And so be prepared to talk about other work that you’ve written and of course be ready to talk about your play.
2017 Panelists Amy Berg, Eric Heisserer, Megan Amram, and Raamla Mohamed attend the Writers Guild of America West Welcome Party
MATT
You’d be surprised how many writers come here and they have a fantastic piece of work but they don’t know how to talk about it to people. So, just be prepared for that elevator pitch but I wouldn’t necessarily call it pitching at the festival because nobody really likes to be pitched to. A lot of these agents and managers and producers who are here are here to have a good time and to meet writers and contribute to the festival. They don’t want to be treated as if the only reason you’re talking to them is so you can send them your script – there’s so many people that are after them that they just want to be treated like a human being.
JAMES
Well, treat them like you would want to be treated if you were in their position.
MATT
Yeah, exactly and as a manager, it’s all about the relationship and so if that’s how you’re going into it they’re probably going to think I’m not sure I want a relationship with this person. And don’t forget about your fellow writers that are sitting right next to you because you know everybody comes here wanting to try and meet the panelist or agents and managers but it’s a chance for you to meet other writers like yourself and develop your network and friendships and your professional relationships.
JAMES
I was thinking about the legacy of the festival. And I have to say I really like what you guys are doing with the Austin Film Festival – On Story. Tell me a little bit about how that started and what you guys are doing with that part of the festival.
MATT
So, Barb our Executive Director had always envisioned that we would have a TV show and so she had the foresight to record all of our panels during the festival and to keep a record of it so that we could utilize it in some way one day. And we also had a lot of people who attended our festival asking if we had any recordings so there was a demand for it. And so we went through our archives and created a quality product that PBS loved and picked up and our marketing team has gotten us in almost all the markets for PBS and now On Story has expanded into a book and a radio show on PRI and we have a podcast as well. So On Story has really become its own brand and people really love it.
JAMES
I watched a couple of them on YouTube and shared them through Facebook, and Twitter and Instagram. I watched Carl Reiner talking about the early days of working on the Dick Van Dyck Show and it was really interesting, and I watched Kenneth Lonergan who you had here last year and I thought it’s nice to have those things available.
Vince Gilligan creator of Breaking Bad & Better Call Saul at the 2013 Austin Film Festival
MATT
And we’re proud to say we’re an Emmy award winner as well. We won an Emmy for our episode featuring Vince Gilligan whom I had mentioned earlier and actually, we’re nominated this year for an Emmy for our episode featuring Eric Heisserer the writer for Arrival.
JAMES
I’ll have to hunt those down and watch them. Are there any legendary stories from the festival that you can share?
MATT
Oh God. Legendary stories. Well from the first year the winning script in our competition actually got optioned and produced rather quickly. It was called Excess Baggage and it was written by Max D. Adams. It had Alicia Silverstone and Benicio Del Toro in it.
I believe the first screenwriters’ conference for AFF happened at Willie Nelson’s old opera house, but it was run down, and it was rainy but somehow it brought people together, and you know we said magic happened there. I wasn’t around for it but this is what our director Barbara Morgan has said repeatedly over and over again – that magic happened there despite all the chaos because everybody was there because they believed in story and telling their stories. And a lot of big influential people from Columbia Pictures were there as well and they felt the magic too, and I think that helped encourage them to become more involved with us and to see us as a legitimate resource for writers, and they optioned that first script and produced it and that’s really what put us on the map.
Austin Film Festival 2017 Awards Lunch (L to R) Walter Hill, Extraordinary Contribution to Film, Keenen Ivory Wayans – Extraordinary Contribution to Television, Kenneth Lonergan, Distinguished Screenwriter
MATT
And you know what feels legendary for me each year is the Awards Luncheon and hopefully you’ll see that and feel that too when you’re here because the awards luncheon is where we celebrate the winners in the competition and win or lose it’s still a really great event because on that stage we are awarding up and coming writers from our competition and we’re also honouring the established writers like the Tony Gilroys, the Larry Wilmores, Roger Corman, Dan Petrie and so they’re all on the same stage together. And what’s so beautiful is that one of those awardees, almost without fail, will comment on what they’ve seen from the up and coming writers. They’re deeply moved by the time they get up on stage because they’re also not sure what to expect at our festival. So, when they see we’re really championing the writer and they’re hearing all the winner’s stories and we even have a young filmmakers award so they end up seeing young kids going up there and accepting awards too it makes an impact. And these kids are in awe of what they are seeing – you know these teenagers are seeing people from different backgrounds and ages winning our script competition and our film competition and then they’re seeing highly established people as well and so that’s really inspiring for the next generation of young people who are going to continue to create and write and tell stories. And for me, that feels legendary because everybody always comes away feeling so invigorated and inspired.
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The Austin Film Festival and Writers Conference runs from October 25th to November 1st. You can check out all the details regarding the Festival at their website online.
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AFF is pleased to announce the 2018 Script Competition Finalists and Winners. 51 scripts were chosen for the Final Round with one winner to be determined in each of the 13 categories. The winners were announced during this year’s Conference at the Awards Luncheon held on Saturday, October 27 at the Austin Club. (Winners in Bold.)
COMEDY FEATURE SCREENPLAY Presented by Sony Pictures Animation
Sex APPeal by Tate Elizabeth Hanyok Darryn the Bold and the Sword of Boldness by Justin Best Meet Cute by Noga Pnueli My Date Is Kate by Carlin Adelson Orientation by Eve Symington
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DRAMA FEATURE SCREENPLAY Presented by Writers Guild of America, East
Horsehead Girls by Wenonah Wilms The Death of Colm Canter by Revati Dhomse & Hector Lowe Dig Two Graves by Jared Schincariol The Huntress by Abdullah Alhendyani The Innocent and the Vicious by Dominique Genest & Nick Kreiss
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SCI-FI FEATURE SCREENPLAY Open to science fiction, fantasy, horror, surrealism, myth/legend and fantastical storytelling.
Our Own Devices by Paul Vance Darryn the Bold and the Sword of Boldness by Justin Best No Man’s Land by Jeffrey R. Field & Michelle Davidson
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HORROR FEATURE SCREENPLAY Open to thrillers, dark suspense, sci-fi, and macabre themes.
The Patience of Vultures by Greg Sisco Blood of Israel by Davey Morrison Shaky Shivers by Andrew McAllister & Aaron Strongoni
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ENDERBY ENTERTAINMENT AWARD For feature scripts in all genres with an original concept and distinctive voice that can be produced for under $10 million. The production company was founded by Rick Dugdale and Daniel Petrie, Jr.
Project Horizon by Charles Morris Grit N’ Glitter by Seth Michael Donsky The Patience of Vultures by Greg Sisco Put Your Hands In by Warner James Wood Surfmen by Christopher Rhoads
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AMC DRAMA TELEPLAY PILOT All Semifinalists will be reviewed exclusively by AMC who will determine the Finalists and eventual Winner.
Worth by Stuti Malhotra Double Time Dames by Davia Carter Liberty Falls by Robert Attenweiler Lifers Anonymous by Sean Collins-Smith Mindset by Ethan Solli & Ziba Sadeghinejad Ticker by Connie O’Donahue & Jeremy Nielsen
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COMEDY TELEPLAY PILOT
What Will Jessie Do? by KevinLuperchio Band of Mothers by Sabrina Brennan Bastards by Erin Muroski The Last Abortion Clinic in Kansas by Tammy Caplan Rice, Fish, and La Croix by Naomi Iwamoto
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DRAMA TELEPLAY SPEC
The Handmaid’s Tale: Rebels by Angela Jorgensen Billions: Trust by Amanda Parham The Handmaid’s Tale: The Abduction by Todd Goodlett
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COMEDY TELEPLAY SPEC
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Volunteers! by Maggie Gottlieb Better Things: Goy Vey by Robert Axelrod Master of None: Headspace by Honora Talbott
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SHORT SCREENPLAY
Ruby Throat by Sarah Polhaus Seat 23B by Eliott Behar A War on Terror by Peter Haig
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SCRIPTED DIGITAL SERIES Presented by Stage 13
Epizootic by Daniel Young Halcyon by Jonathan Marx hello, world\ by Michelle Sarkany
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STAGE PLAY
Particular Disposition by Benjamin Fulk Masquerade by James Hutchison Disposable Necessities by Neil McGowan
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FICTION PODCAST
The Rest Stop at the End of the Universe by Samuel Suksiri Alethea by Katrina Day & Phillip R. Polefrone Forces by Len Sousa Welles D-11 by Simon Nicholas
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JOSEPHSON ENTERTAINMENT SCREENWRITING FELLOWSHIP FINALISTS In addition to this year’s Script Competition Finalists, we are proud to announce the Finalists for the inaugural Josephson Entertainment Screenwriting Fellowship. This new opportunity will provide a one-on-one mentorship with producer Barry Josephson and his team in Los Angeles for the writers of one feature screenplay and one teleplay pilot.
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Feature Screenplays
The Death of Colm Canter by Revati Dhomse & Hector Lowe Darryn the Bold and the Sword of Boldness by Justin Best Meet Cute by Noga Pnueli The Patience of Vultures by Greg Sisco Sex APPeal by Tate Elizabeth Hanyok
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Teleplay Pilots
Lifers Anonymous by Sean Collins-Smith Band of Mothers by Sabrina Brennan Mindset by Ethan Solli & Ziba Sadeghinejad Ticker by Connie O’Donahue & Jeremy Nielsen Worth by Stuti Malhotra
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Revised on November 26, 2018.
Neil Fleming – Playwright, Designer, Television Writer/Producer
“There’s an artistic epiphany in my play John Doe Jack Rabbit. There’s a moment where the TV’s broken and they’re stuck in this cabin and they’re on the lam and this one guy Gordy is reading a book – it’s this trashy horrible romance novel called Ravaged at Rush Hour. But then he gets so sucked into this book – as if he’s never read a book before – and he has this moment where he’s like, the person who wrote this book wrote it down so I would know what it feels like to be Jessica in the cab or whatever it was, right? And that was one of those things. That’s what playwriting is about. What art is about. This is what it’s like to feel like I feel, and I put it into this painting for you to grasp that concept, or I put it in this play for you to go – wow that’s what’s going on in your head.”Neil Fleming
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Neil Fleming is a multi-talented, award winning Calgary designer, playwright and television producer. In our hour and a half chat last Friday Neil and I talked about all kinds of things including playwriting, depression, Chuck Wendig, poltergeists and ADHD. The purpose of our getting together was to talk about Neil’s playwriting and specifically his current play, Spare Parts, which is being workshopped at the Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at Lunchbox Theatre this week.
JAMES HUTCHISON
As a writer we spend long hours alone at the writing desk and sometimes we find ourselves facing internal or external resistance to a particular writing project or even our own writing career. Who in your life gives you the support and feedback you need that lets you continue on your journey?
NEIL FLEMING
Well my first sounding board has always been Jane, my wife. When I’m done a draft, I’ll be like, can you take a second to read this? And bless her, she’ll drop everything and go in the other room and I’ll sit there and listen to her while I’m trying to distract myself, but really I’m listening to her reading it and asking her what she’s laughing at if she’s laughing just to make sure she’s not laughing at an inside joke between the two of us that I intended for a larger group.
JAMES
Are you more nervous giving her the first draft to read, do you think, than when it’s ready for an audience?
NEIL
No, I don’t think so. I trust her. We have similar taste in story and content, but she likes things that are a bit darker than I do.
JAMES
And you’re pretty dark at times.
NEIL
I can be. But I think humour has always been a defense mechanism for me. It’s my way of not going to the dark place. More recently I’ve been trying to challenge myself to have something to say and not just be silly.
Karen Johnson-Diamond, Nicole Zylstra, Miles Ringsred, Tim Koetting in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Last Christmas by Neil Fleming – Photograph by Benjamin Laird
JAMES
But when you did Last Christmas that was dealing with someone dying of cancer. It was a comedy and a Christmas show.
NEIL
Sure. Pam Halstead at Lunchbox had commissioned me to write that. She wanted it to be a dysfunctional family at Christmas made up of people’s Christmas horror stories. So, there’s some Pam Halstead in it. The inflatable husband. One of her siblings bought her an inflatable husband one Christmas, and she opened it in front of everyone, and it was horrible and awful and fun but real, right?
I tried to come up with a family that didn’t resemble my own and didn’t resemble my wife’s where I could use details from real people but no one was able to accuse me of writing about my brother-in-law or whatever. They were fictional characters, but then so many people came up to me after the show because those characters resonated so strongly, and they’d say, “Oh that’s like my sister-in-law, and I can’t believe she’s in your play.”
JAMES
So, it touched on some universal characteristics.
NEIL
For sure. What I like to do is find little bits of truth and craft around those. Last Christmas started because one of my wife’s best friends worked at a dispensary in Vancouver, and her job was to teach old people how to roll a joint because they’d been given medicinal marijuana with a prescription, and they’d never smoked a joint before. And that’s just such an awesome image. So, I wanted the pot smoking grandpa. I just thought what a great start.
JAMES
And then there’s a lovely part of that play where the grandson and the grandfather have a bonding experience. Where they’re sharing the marijuana.
Tim Koetting and Miles Ringsred in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Last Christmas by Neil Fleming – Photography by Benjamin Laird
NEIL
I think that’s a favourite moment for the audience. It’s Christmas Eve, and the grandfather and the grandson are listening to Nat King Cole, and grandpa is experiencing being high for the first time. But they’re just having one of those philosophical conversations.
I love the absurdity of real things. One of my favourite things to do when I was looking for something fresh or new is I’d go to the news of the weird, and I have a play called Gnomes about garden gnomes and literally there was a news article about the Garden Gnome Liberation Front, I think, in Paris and they had broken into a garden show, and they stole all these antique gnomes, and then in the town square spelled out, Free the Gnomes with the gnomes.
And so, my concept for that play was there were three characters. Character one was a collector, and his parents had this massive collection of gnomes, and there was an incident where somebody came and smashed a bunch of them. And then here’s a woman from The Garden Gnome Liberation Society. I changed that. And then the last guy was from a group called DAMAGE which was defending all mankind against gnome evil, because he believed that gnomes were secretly evil, and that they come to life. And so, it became this argument between the three characters – were gnomes good, or evil, or ceramic?
JAMES
The new play you’re working on with Lunchbox Theatre is called Spare Parts and has three characters. There’s Martin a widower living alone in the haunted apartment his wife Sarah convinced him to buy, and on the anniversary of the accidental death of his wife and daughter Emily, Martin decides to take an overdose of anti-depressants.
Then there’s Eric, Martin’s upstairs neighbour, and a former human guinea pig for pharmaceutical companies, who is now developing and promoting a new Life Style System that focuses on exercise, recreation, and meditation through colouring as a pathway to an enjoyable life.
And finally, there’s Sarah, Martin’s dead wife. As Martin trips through his various symptoms, side-effects, and visions, we meet Sarah as a memory. In life, Sarah had a business taking people on tours of haunted buildings. She knew the story of Lester – who had been found dead in a heritage building – presumably payback for a romantic tryst. When she heard the apartment was coming on the market, she knew she had to convince Martin to buy it and move in. These three characters…
NEIL
Well, four if you count Lester.
JAMES
Four characters are caught up in a story about suicide, depression, guilt, religion, and the supernatural. First question, how much of that is based on personal experience?
NEIL
Well I didn’t know this at the time, but I did struggle with anxiety and depression. It was more anxiety, I think. Depression I didn’t know how to define. I didn’t know anything about mental health really. Depression to me was sadness, as a writer. As a clinical term it’s something else. What I was struggling with was my inability to focus and accomplish things and constantly feeling like I was getting lapped by younger writers or whatever. I was like why can’t I get anything done?
Recently I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD and it was such a relief to finally know what I’ve been struggling with my entire life really. But, before I was diagnosed I was buying a book by Peter Shankman called Crazy Publicity Stunts and Why Your Company Should Do Them because I was thinking of doing a street theatre project that was sort of a social media experiment. And beside that book, in the people who bought this book also bought section, was another book by Peter Shankman called, Faster Than Normal. How to hack your ADHD brain and unleash your super power. And I was like, I want to read that. I ordered both of them. And that book explained my entire life, my entire history, and I was like Oh, my God. That’s my childhood. This is high school. University. All of those things, and I could see how things went sideways
And when you’re a writer and you sit down to write something it’s work. The first draft is always fun, but fixing it and fine tuning it that’s work, and if nobody’s breathing down your neck waiting for a draft then it’s easy to just let that one sit there and start something new. So, I have a lot of different projects that haven’t seen the light of day because I haven’t been able to focus. I started Spare Parts years ago, and it was part of my mental health journey.
The other thing with ADHD is that when I need to focus I can hyper focus. That’s the H part. As an adult it’s not hyper activity it’s impulse control. And so, yesterday I was writing solid for five to six hours on the play because I have to give them something to read by Monday so we can start to work on it.
JAMES
Who are you working with.
NEIL
Col Cseke is the director. Graham Percy is playing Martin. Matt McKinny is Eric, and Julie Orton is Sarah. And some things have changed already from your introduction. I’ve cut the daughter. They rent the place they don’t buy it. I know I’ve made that note before about Eric being a Guinee pig so he knows what the prescription is and what it does, because I need somebody in there to help detail what’s going on for the audience because your brain is a complex machine. That’s what fascinated me about this idea in the first place, because when I was struggling with those anxiety issues I talked to my doctor about it – this was years ago – and she gave me a trial prescription of Escitalopram which is a serotonin inhibitor in a way. And when I got the pills they came with warnings.
JAMES
The side effects?
NEIL
It was a crazy.
JAMES
Scary list?
NEIL
It’s supposed to help you, but like how could it maybe do that to you.
JAMES
Do the exact opposite.
NEIL
Well if you have suicidal tendencies it could amplify that.
JAMES
That’s frightening.
NEIL
Yeah, and I’m like, do I want to take this, and so you know I decided at the time I don’t think this is for me. But I kept the information and that’s what started it.
JAMES
That’s what started this play six or seven years ago?
NEIL
More than that – I think, 2007 is what my hard drive tells me was a first draft. So, I’ve learned a lot in the last eight or nine years. Mostly in the last year. What’s always interested me as a writer are the odd outlying people. Spare Parts is kind of about that. It’s about people just on the outskirts of regular society. Like the neighbor, Eric’s character. He’s trying to rediscover his purpose by starting this sort of life style system.
JAMES
It’s kind of a religion he’s working on?
NEIL
It’s open to all religions, because in his theory religion is part of the problem because of people bickering over the differences between theirs, and yours, and whatever.
JAMES
So, his philosophy could be placed over any faith?
NEIL
Yeah, his philosophy of life is to find the things that make you feel good because you’re only here for a finite amount of time.
JAMES
What are you hoping to accomplish in next week’s workshop?
NEIL
What I love about playwriting is it’s all about questions. Dramaturgy is all about questions, hopefully. And I don’t mind suggestions, but questions are great because I will write them all down, because a question from anyone – whether it’s from an actor, or a stage manager, or an audience member, represents a certain percentage of that population. There’s a lot more people who will have that same question. I lost you for two or three lines because you were hung up on something, so I always feel like you have to address those with what’s the simplest way for me to make that question go away. If it’s that kind of question.
I was just reading this book, Damn Fine Story, by Chuck Wendig who’s a novelist and a writing blogger. Terrible Minds is his blog. In his book, which is about story telling more than anything else, he uses Die Hard as an example. And at the root of it he says stories are about characters. Stories are rooted in character, and so a character has a problem, and then how they try to solve that problem is the story.
JAMES
And they either solve it, or they don’t.
NEIL
But what he pointed out – Bruce Willis’s character’s problem, John McClain – I only know that because he keeps referring to him in this book, but his problem is that his wife left him for this job in LA, and he’s a New York City cop, so he’s flown out at Christmas time to convince her to come home to get his family back together. And coincidentally all of this stuff goes down with Alan Rickman, and terrorists, and the tower, and him not having his shoes on – those are all coincidental pieces of the puzzle of I’m just trying to get back together here with my wife.
JAMES
And that’s what makes it work – the human element. You mentioned something in a previous interview when you were asked, “What do you think art is?” You said, “I suppose art is an expression of human emotion.” Why do you think we have this need to examine our emotional connection and reaction to other people, the world, and ourselves?
NEIL
I think that there are so many unanswered questions that we have. You know I took first year philosophy when I was at University and it was all Plato’s Republic and you couldn’t make me read that book – it was like painful. If it had been a survey course of all the philosophers I think I would have really gotten into it with different perspectives and stuff.
JAMES
Maybe theatre is philosophy on stage?
NEIL
Yeah, kind of. It’s trying to explain what it means to be a person, because we don’t know what happens after we die. As artists I think we’re always trying to reflect back, and sometimes it’s a fun house mirror reflection, but you know it’s also a compulsion. And I think the ADD is part of it too. I just started doing collage work with my photography. A few years ago we were in Paris for my wife’s 50th birthday and I saw all these numbers every where, and I just started taking pictures of numbers – like address numbers and here and there, and I bought one of those big cheap print things for ten bucks form Homesense or whatever, and I pasted all of these photographs over top of it as a present for my wife, and here’s our entire Paris trip on one canvas, and you could see us in some of them, and some of the pictures were tiny, and I have no idea the compulsion that drove me to do that, but it felt like something I needed to do.
JAMES
It tells a story.
NEIL
Yeah, for sure and it’s something you can spend some time with it’s not just like, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that.” You can really sort of dive in and look at all those little details
JAMES
Do you think that’s what your plays are like? Like in terms of your process it reflects what you’re doing with your photography, because you’ve got all these different ideas, all these little bits, and now you’re putting them together, and the play itself when the audience comes to it is the experience of all these little pieces.
NEIL
Yes, and the takeaway will be different for everyone, you know, I think. Especially with this. There’s so much crazy content in this play. There’s an artistic epiphany in my play John Doe Jack Rabbit. There’s a moment where the TV’s broken and they’re stuck in this cabin they’re on the lam and this one guy Gordy is reading a book – it’s this trashy horrible romance novel called Ravaged at Rush Hour. But then he gets so sucked into this book – as if he’s never read a book before – and he has this moment where he’s like, the person who wrote this book wrote it down so I would know what it feels like to be Jessica in the cab or whatever it was, right? And that was one of those things. That’s what playwriting is about. What art is about. This is what it’s like to feel like I feel, and I put it into this painting for you to grasp that concept, or I put it in this play for you to go – wow that’s what’s going on in your head.
***
Spare Parts is one of eight new plays being developed through The Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at Lunchbox Theatre from May 25th to June 9th.
2018 Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work Free Reading Schedule
Spare Parts by Neil Fleming – Friday, May 25, 12:00PM The Happiness Equation by Peter Fenton & Scott White – Friday, May 25, 6:00 PM The Art of Kneading by Helen Knight – Saturday, May 26, 12:00 PM Paul’s Grace by Anna Cummer – Friday, June 1, 12:00 PM Candemic by Arun Lakra – Friday, June 1, 6:00 PM Wo De Ming Shi Zhang Xin En by Kris Vanessa Teo – Saturday, June 2, 12:00 PM Go for Gold, Audrey Pham by Camille Pavlenko – Friday, June 8, 12:00 PM Reprise by Mike Czuba – Saturday, June 9, 12:00 PM
This interview has been edited for length and condensed for clarity.
Wendy Froberg, Playwright & Actor: “Is life a search for truth? I think ideally it is. I think people that go off into the light happily – however you want to say it – those are the people that have somehow discovered the more profound fundamental truths about life. I always tease people and say, “No one is lying on their deathbed saying they wished they’d worked at the office more or wished they’d partied more.” You know generally what gives people a sense of peace and meaning – again because we’re talking about aging meaningfully – is that they made those profound human connections. They struggled, but they overcame. They had loss, but they healed from that. They were transformed. And I think the happiest people are the ones who live most truthfully.”
Wendy Froberg is an actor, playwright and psychologist and this month Calgary audiences will have a chance to catch her award-winning play, A Woman of a Certain Age, from May 13th to 19th at Knox United Church. The play won “Best of Fest” at the 2015 Calgary International Fringe Festival and since then has received strong reviews and successful runs at the Edmonton, Lethbridge, Regina and Winnipeg Fringe Festivals.
“… a stellar performance… hits a nerve…what a show!” Louis B. Hobson – Calgary Sun
“…expertly done…astute…warm, funny…you will enjoy the hour” Lisa Campbell – Winnipeg Jenny Revue
The play is an entertaining and insightful story about six women who are trying to cope with the demands of family and career as they struggle with the physical and emotional challenges of growing older in a culture obsessed with youth and beauty. I sat down with Wendy to talk with her about her play and how she got into playwriting.
JAMES HUTCHISON
Tell me a little bit about how you got involved in playwriting?
WENDY FROBERG
I was an actor in high school, and I did a little bit of directing, but my parents weren’t thrilled about me becoming someone in the arts, so I put theatre away for many years and pursued a career in psychology. But as an adult, I got back into acting, and I started auditioning, and I realizing there were limited opportunities for women. And since I had lots of stories I wanted to tell, and I’d always liked writing, I decided to try writing plays
JAMES
Well psychology isn’t totally different than writing and acting, because you’re looking at motivation and characteristics. Where do you see the connections between psychology and playwriting and acting?
WENDY
Well that’s absolutely right, as a psychologist, or as an actor, or as a writer you’re looking at human beings and their motivations. And when we talk about a character’s dramatic arc, for example, the idea that a character changes from the beginning of a play or movie to the end of it that’s certainly similar to what we do in psychotherapy. We want somebody to change from the beginning of the process to the end of the process. I was actually out of psychology for a number of years while I was pursuing playwriting, acting, and directing, but I’ve always felt like I was doing psychology because I was doing it through my art. I was digging into a character or creating a character in my writing.
JAMES
Can you tell me about the genesis of your play, A Woman of a Certain Age?
WENDY
As you know, as a playwright, often whether we intend to or not, parts of ourselves end up being in the play. Whether they’re done literally or whether they’re done from our emotional experience. As I became older and passed out of the ability to play the ingénue roles and got married and had children I began to realize that I was beginning to have a different currency in the world. I wasn’t looked upon the way that I was when I was younger. There are a lot of issues about growing older that have to do with the physical aspects of aging. It’s when you go from being someone who can turn a head when you walk into a room, to being someone that becomes somewhat invisible. And that’s actually a tagline I use when I’m promoting my play and talking about it. The women that I’m portraying are struggling to age with meaning and grace in a culture that’s obsessed with youth and beauty and wants to make them invisible.
JAMES
You’ve done some talkbacks with the play. What sort of conversations have you had with people after they’ve seen the play? When it’s the actor playwright sitting there – what are some of the themes that get discussed?
WENDY
It’s different things for different people. There’s a character in the show who’s a widow as well as an aging mother and she’s suffering from dementia and living in a care home and I get a lot of women who say, “I’m going through exactly that with my mother.” And often, they’re tearful and they say, “That’s exactly how she behaves.” And they’re grateful for the fact that somebody recognizes how difficult it is to watch your parent go through that.
I also have a theme that runs through the show about physical appearance and women often say, “Yeah I’m struggling with the concept of whether or not I should get Botox or should I get a facelift or should I have the courage to let my hair go gray and be natural and embrace the concept of aging because that’s a difficult thing to do, because if you acknowledge that you’re older then people will make assumptions about you and think you’re ready to go out to pasture.” And in the play I’m never judgmental about whether someone wants to do that or not. I think a good play poses questions. You never want your play to be preachy. You never want your play to simply be about your point of view that you’re forcing on your audience.
JAMES
Do you find people take away hope from the play after seeing it?
WENDY
I think they do. I always say that it’s sometimes humorous, that it’s sometimes poignant, but it’s always truthful because that’s what I want to go see. A show that’s truthful and genuine.
JAMES
You mentioned truthful. That’s an interesting idea – because when we see acting that is truthful and sincere it has impact. But what about life itself and theatre’s reflection of life – do you think that life is a search for truth?
WENDY
Is life a search for truth? I think ideally it is. I think people that go off into the light happily – however you want to say it – those are the people that have somehow discovered the more profound fundamental truths about life. I always tease people and say, “No one is lying on their death bed saying they wished they’d worked at the office more or wished they’d partied more.” You know generally what gives people a sense of peace and meaning – again because we’re talking about aging meaningfully – is that they made those profound human connections. They struggled, but they overcame. They had loss, but they healed from that. They were transformed. And I think the happiest people are the ones who live most truthfully.
JAMES
You’ve done the play at a number of fringe festivals. Tell me a little bit about that fringe experience and travelling across Canada. What was that like?
WENDY
Well in 2012 I had been touring as an actor with a fringe show that had gone to Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, and Edmonton. When I go to fringe festivals I work the lineups really hard. That’s how we get our shows promoted to a large extent. You work the lineups for other shows. And you hand out flyers and you tell people about your show and you get them to know a little bit about you as a performer and or as a writer. And I kept noticing the demographic. The demographic was me. They were middle-aged women. And there were a lot of the husbands and boyfriends with them but the women were the ones that typically decided which shows to see. And I had this play in my head because I recognized there’s an audience here so I think I’m going to write it. You know it’s like Field of Dreams. If you write it they will come – because we love to see ourselves portrayed truthfully and with a certain amount of dignity on stage.
JAMES
How much has the show changed from when it started?
WENDY
When I first presented the play it was at the Calgary One-Act Play Festival in 2013 where it won best script and I had a different director the first time around. My director wanted to try a lot of different things so we had projections and a lot of technical stuff and it ended up being quite cumbersome and crisis ensued with things not working the way they were supposed to.
JAMES
Projections didn’t go, the lighting cue was missed, the music lost.
WENDY
Yeah, things like that. When I ended up working with my next director Valerie Ann Pearson, who is a gem, I can’t speak highly enough about her…
JAMES
She was my junior high drama teacher.
WENDY
She is the loveliest person ever.
JAMES
And her husband, Pat, was my radio instructor at SAIT.
WENDY
I love Pat. He’s just a doll. I love them both. Anyway, I just approached her, out of the blue, because I didn’t really know her, but I’d seen her on stage – you always know those people on stage more than they know you. And she liked the story and I talked to her about what I felt – which was that the story got lost in all the bells and whistles – and she said absolutely. She said, “I think this needs to be told really really simply because it’s the story. If you have a strong story you don’t need all that other stuff.”
And since I was thinking of doing it for a fringe I was like absolutely, because another thing about the fringe is you get ten minutes to set up your show and five minutes to strike your show, because the next theatre group is coming in to perform. And so you better have a pretty lean mean machine working there, especially for a one-woman show where it’s just me or me and my son. So now when I write things, I always write things with that in mind. Would this work at a fringe festival? Could it be transportable and quick to set up?
And because the play is easy to set up I’ve also gone on to perform it privately. I’ve done it in people’s living rooms – I’ve done it in people’s guest houses – I’ve even done it in hotel ballrooms.
JAMES
Have play. Will travel.
WENDY
Have play. Will travel. That’s my name. I’m thinking next year, because I took this year off of fringing, I’d like to go beyond Winnipeg. This means I don’t think I’m going to drive, which means I’m probably going to have to rejig my show so it doesn’t even have a set – which happens a lot in fringe shows. Or, have something simple I can pick up locally.
JAMES
I like that for the title of something – Beyond Winnipeg.
WENDY
Beyond Winnipeg, I like that.
JAMES
Beyond Winnipeg, the life story of Wendy Froberg.
WENDY
Yeah, yeah I like that. Have Play. Will Travel. I like that one too.
This interview has been edited for length and condensed for clarity. Last updated August 29, 2019.
You learn by doing but you also learn by reading the work of others and by reading books about the craft. And if you’re a writer then a good book to read because it’s fun and it has some great advice about the writing process is On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft. by Stephen King.
I got this book out of the library and read it six years ago and then wanting my own copy I put it on my Christmas list in 2012. You know the year the world ended – yet again – according to some silly theory attached to the Mayan Calendar. As if a calendar has any power over events of the Universe. It’s nothing but a system of measurement. A system of measurement caught up in cultural myths. In our case a lot of Greek and Roman Gods. But that doesn’t give it any power…but what if it did? What if a calendar actually contained the power to influence events? Then what? Then you’ve got a story to tell.
Anyway, I’ve read On Writing several times. It’s a fun read because it’s not a text book. It’s more like sitting down with the man and having him talk to you about what he’s learned and what he thinks about his craft and a few insights about his life and the things that have shaped him as a writer.
Do you know how close Stephen King came to throwing away Carrie? Carrie – his first major success. Carrie – the book that made his life as a writer possible. Are you familiar with the tale?
King had been working on Carrie but had tossed it in the trash because it was about girls. And what did he know about girls? So he trashed it. Gave up. It was destined for the landfill.
Until…
And I love this.
Until his wife, Tabatha, found it in the trash – covered in cigarette ash – and read it and realized what a great story it was. She told him to finish it and any questions he had about girls she could help him with because – she was a girl.
And so he finished it with her help and it got published. And he got a big chunk of change when the paperback rights sold and the rest, as they say, is history.
I love that story.
Did the Universe conspire to help Stephen King have his first major success?
If you believe in the writings of Paulo Coelho the author of The Alchemist you do.
I’m not so sure.
Maybe it was a host of demon spirits conspiring to make sure King would become a success so that he could tell their stories?
Whatever you believe and whatever the truth there are weird and unexplainable things that lead us to success or failure. Who knows what forces are at work in our favour or against us – but one things for sure – success only comes if you do the work. And doing the work means learning your craft.
So if you’re a writer add On Writing to your Christmas list and if you have a writer in the family this is a great gift. And remember, as of today, there are only seven shopping days until Christmas. Better order now or better yet visit your local bookstore and grab a copy.
Olive Kitteridge is a hard woman to love, but she’s one of the most interesting and complex characters you’re ever going to see or read.
I stumbled across the mini-series Olive Kitteridge last year. I hadn’t heard about it. Apparently, I’ve been living under a rock. I mean it won a lot of Emmy’s and a whole sack full of other awards so it’s not like nobody knew about it. But in my defence, I don’t tend to watch award shows. Actually, the last awards show I sat down and watched – commercials and all – was the 1978 Oscars. I was disappointed Citizen Kane didn’t win Best Picture. I wonder if it will win this year? Probably not. I’m guessing it won’t even get nominated.
Olive Kitteridge is 25 years in the life of someone who makes other people’s lives miserable. And yet, this person is not a villain – they have a heart – they’ve felt pain – they’ve been hurt – and they do good and help others but are often blind to their own destructive behaviours and actions.
Francis McDormand is Brilliant
I watched Olive Kitteridge and from the opening credits and music, I was hooked. Frances McDormand is brilliant as Olive. There’s a profound sadness and anger and yet a glimmer of hope and love in her performance. This is a complex woman. I watched the first episode – took a break because there was a lot to absorb and then binged on the remaining three the following night. You know a series is good when you can’t stop watching.
Fantastic Novel
So, I got out the novel – from our fantastic Calgary Public Library – because I wanted to compare, Olive Kitteridge, the novel to the mini-series. The novel is different. The mini-series tends to focus more on Olive whereas, in addition to Olive, the novel gives us more stories about other characters in the town. I thought the novel was fantastic. Well worth reading.
Worth a Second Look
And after reading the novel I decided to watch the mini-series again – and I liked it even more. The acting, directing. and writing is brilliant – there’s no other word for it. A strong cast with Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, John Gallagher Jr., Zoe Kazan, Jesse Plemons, and Bill Murray just to name a few. But of course, you can’t have great performances without a great director and Lisa Cholodenko has done a marvellous job of creating moments of truth and revelation between her cast.
Terrific Adaptation
And what an incredible job of adaptation by Jane Alexander of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Elizabeth Strout. It’s not easy to adapt a novel for the screen but this adaptation is true to the book while using the strengths of visual storytelling to create an amazing mini-series.
I Loved It
Did I like? I loved it! And if you love a good drama, you’ll love it too. Just a word of warning – if you’re going to watch the mini-series or read the book stock up on doughnuts. Doughnuts play a central part in the story. Life is tough and sometimes we need that old-fashioned-sour-cream-glaze to get us through the day.
***
The Community Where Your Characters Live
One of the reason’s I was interested in Olive Kitteridge is because it’s about Olive but it’s also about the community where she lives, and I’ve been working on my own play about a place called Stories From Langford: Every town has its secrets. I think knowing the place where your characters live and exist is important.
Place can define character. It can shape character. A place has a huge impact on the dramatic structure of your play.
Do you remember the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The stage play takes place at the home of George and Martha but in the movie they move the action to a diner for a few scenes. On stage, they never move to a diner. The move to the diner was motivated by “film thinking” In other words, “We need to move the characters because the audience will get bored if we stay in one location for the entire film.”
When I watched the film that change of location feels completely unmotivated – it feels wrong. And, from what I’ve read, Edward Albee, the author of the play, thought the change of location was wrong as well.
Why is it wrong? Because the home of George and Martha is the battleground. The home is personal. The cafe isn’t. The cafe is a public space. Why would you set a family battle in a cafe? It makes much more sense to stage the action in the space that the characters call home.
It’s a small flaw in an otherwise brilliant film version of the play. A small flaw that can be forgiven considering the performances and the script. But when it comes to your own settings – when it comes to where you want to place your characters – as often as possible set the action someplace personal. Does that mean it always has to be in a home – no of course not. The play can be anywhere you want so long as there’s a personal connection to the characters. If it’s going to be in a restaurant for example then that restaurant should have a personal connection to the characters in your story. Otherwise, keep them home.
Survival Skills by Meredith Taylor-Parry won the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2013 and was produced Off Off Broadway by the 13 Street Repertory Company, in New York City in April 2014.
“You want to write the kind of play where people are going to go home and talk about it, and think about it, and talk about themselves a little bit. You know, my God, if it got people to think about their own mortality a little bit, how could that be a bad thing? We all run around scared to talk about it, but we’re fascinated by it at the same time. The idea that we’re mortal. Just to have that discussion opened up wouldn’t hurt.”
Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry – Photograph by James Hutchison
Her most recent work, Book Club was developed as part of the Suncor Stage One Festival at Lunchbox Theatre and will receive a world premiere at Lunchbox in February.
I sat down with Meredith, while her four-month-old Beagle Tucker, lay happily nearby chewing puppy toys, to talk with her about Survival Skills and Book Club, as well as her writing process.
***
JAMES HUTCHISON
When you go to a play what is it you go for? What is it you hope to get out of it?
MEREDITH TAYLOR-PARRY
I guess I want to be moved emotionally, always. I like Opera. I always write while I listen to Opera. I want to be moved. I like the tragic. I like stories where you watch people getting put through the wringer. Watching characters go through hell and then some. And I like stories and plays with some expression of hope at the end. That’s very important. It doesn’t need to be wrapped up perfectly, but just something.
JAMES
Tell me about the reason you wrote Survival Skills.
MEREDITH
Well, my Dad committed suicide in two thousand and two after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I always knew that I wanted to write about it. I never thought about writing a novel – I always thought it would be a play.
JAMES
How difficult was it to put that out into the world? Because that’s a very personal thing.
MEREDITH
It was difficult, but when an experience like that happens to you – or at least my experience is – you’re compelled to tell that story over and over and over again.
And I’ve heard some people say, yeah but some people never want to talk about it again – but that wasn’t me. I was compelled to tell that story to friends – to grief groups –I’m just compelled to share it. I don’t know how many times my mom and I would get on the phone after it happened and we’d end up retelling that day – the actual event – when we found the suicide note – when we called the police – when my brother went out to look at the body that afternoon.
And I originally thought the play was going to open with that scene, but then I went to a Playworks Ink Conference in 2011 and I signed up early and got into Daniel MacIvor’s workshop. And he started the workshop by reading the scene you’d submitted. And he’s a pretty fantastic actor and he did all the different parts. I had my sister there, my brother there, my mother in the scene, and the character that represented me. We were all there and he just read through that first scene from beginning to end and when he finished – it was silent and he said, “That’s a hell of a way to start a play. People discovering a suicide note.”
And I went, “Yeah, yeah I guess it is. I wasn’t really thinking about that.”
He said, “We’re going to end the scene right here where your brother hangs up the phone and I want you to write the next scene.”
And I wrote the next scene and that became the first scene of the play because I took his advice – that is a hell of a way to start a play. But I think I needed to write the suicide scene first because that was the hardest scene to write – bar none – and to go back and remember those moments in specific detail.
JAMES
How much do you credit that workshop with moving forward on the play?
MEREDITH
Huge. He looked at me and said, because I had some humour in there, “Meredith, any play that can bring levity to the topic of death needs to be written.” He said, “I myself am terrified of the medical system. I’m not afraid of dying – I’m terrified about becoming a patient of the medical system.”
And here’s this man who has written all these beautiful plays with all this fabulous experience and wisdom but at the same time he’s a really good teacher too. He really has the right touch. And I think he just knew the right thing to say to help keep me going. He also made us promise, before we left the workshop, to send him the first draft by a certain date. And I did, because it’s Daniel MacIvor, right. I wasn’t not going to do it. I was two weeks late, but it made me finish it.
JAMES
You worked on the play for a couple more years and then entered it into the New Plays of Merit Contest in 2013 and won. What was it like getting the phone call that the play had won?
MEREDITH
That’s what my dream was up to that point. That someone was going to phone me up and tell me that I was good enough to win a contest. And I felt really good about it because it was New York. Because to me that was the place where all the good playwrights go. So, that was a real shot in the arm – no question. I felt pretty good about that – but I was stunned.
JAMES
What was it like to go see your play on stage?
MEREDITH
I vowed that I wasn’t going to be critical of my work because I don’t know if this is ever going to happen to me again. The idea of going to New York to see your play – Off Off Broadway in a little old theatre with a little old 92 year old Broadway performer running it. I mean this theatre had a lot of history. Tennessee Williams’ plays were performed there. And I thought, don’t ruin it by sitting there thinking about all the things that are wrong with your play. It wasn’t perfect, and I still think there are things that can be improved about the play, but I just vowed I was going to go and enjoy it.
JAMES
It’s interesting to me because there’s a certain completion to the journey. From the experience of your father having committed suicide, to writing the script, to winning the contest, to getting it produced. How you would sum up the whole experience as you were watching the production with your family?
MEREDITH
Well the first word that popped into my mind was surreal, and the second thing was how much I enjoyed the performances, and how much the actors brought to it. I just vowed I was going to go and enjoy it and I wasn’t going to worry about my family as far as taking care of them or worry about their reactions to it either. But you know, I also worked through a lot of stuff with that play.
When dad was suspecting a bad diagnosis – this was three days before he completed suicide – I phoned his room at the Moncton Hospital from Calgary. And he said, “Oh they’re going to do some tests and things.” Because at first they thought it might be a bowel infection and a reaction to antibiotics. But there was a moment where he hesitated on the phone and in my mind I wondered what was he was going to say next. To me there was something that he meant to say and tell me. Like he opened his mouth to say it and it didn’t come out and I wondered if it was, “Listen if it’s a bad diagnoses this is what I’m going to do.” But he didn’t say anything, and I heard this kind of breath, or hesitation, and I wondered, and wondered, and wondered about that afterwards.
And then I thought, well what would you have done if he had said, you know, this is not going to go well…would I have suspected…because we knew his philosophical stance on end of life. He always said, “If I ever got a bad diagnosis that would be it.” But it’s a leap in your mind to hear those words and really imagine your father actually doing that.
So I thought, in my state of mind, what would I have done? I probably would have called mom and told her not to leave him for a minute. And then there’s a part of you that would have said, “Okay – whatever you need – I’ll do it – I’ll help you.”
And I did end up inadvertently helping him complete the act by flying to the Maritimes, because when my mother came to pick me up at the airport that’s when he completed. So I felt complicit in that, and that bothered me for a long time, even though it was inadvertent. It was a window of opportunity, and he took it, and I provided that. So, in a way I helped whether I wanted to or not.
I changed the play so that the character who plays me actually does make the decision to fly home to get her mother out of the house so that her father will have the window of opportunity very knowingly not inadvertently.
JAMES
Dramatically that’s a good choice.
MEREDITH
Dramatically it was a hell of a lot better choice than what really happened.
JAMES
Because then the character is active.
MEREDITH
Yes.
JAMES
What do you think your dad would think of this play?
MEREDITH
Wow. I just think he’d be horrified, because he was such a private person. I had to struggle past that a little bit because he’d be so horrified that I laid it all out. But you know what? Whatever form – and I do believe there is some kind of spiritual form that he takes now – I don’t think he has those same opinions any more.
And after he was gone, I pretty quickly said this is more about me than it is about him. This is more about us. And that’s how I was able to write it. I was lucky, because my family wasn’t upset. But dad would have been. I think for sure. But I wouldn’t have had to write it – you know what I mean – unless it had happened.
JAMES
Was it cathartic for your family in some ways?
MEREDITH
Maybe in some ways. I sat right beside my mom and my aunt and I could feel the seat shaking because they cried and cried and they laughed too, but there was a lot of tears you know. I know that my aunt and mom told me they sat up all night in the hotel room talking about it. My brother said, “Man it’s weird to see your life up on stage like that.” But it was probably not as cathartic for them as it was for me
JAMES
What are your hopes for the story?
MEREDITH
I would love to see it produced again, of course. Published and produced. Those are the things that I’m looking for with all my plays. I don’t really want them to just sit stagnant. You want to write the kind of play where people are going to go home and talk about it, and think about it, and talk about themselves a little bit. You know, my God, if it got people to think about their own mortality a little bit, how could that be a bad thing? We all run around scared to talk about it, but we’re fascinated by it at the same time. The idea that we’re mortal. Just to have that discussion opened up wouldn’t hurt.
Premiered at 13th Street Repertory – NYC April 3 – May 1, 2014, with the following cast and crew.
Directed by Leanora Lange
Cast
Kathleen – Aimee Thrasher
Annalise – Kristen Busalacchi
Eliza – Mary Ruth Baggott
Oscar – Jason Kirk
Len – Danny Sauls
Crew
Stage Manager – Alex Bishop
Properties Assistant – Aimee Thrasher
Dramatrug – Kurt Hollender
Producer – Sandra Nordgren
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Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry
Meredith Taylor-Parry is a playwright based in Calgary, Alberta. Her play Survival Skills won the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2013 and was produced Off Off Broadway by the 13th Street Repertory Company, NYC in April 2014. Her play Devices received a production in Week One of the New Ideas Festival at Alumnae Theatre in Toronto in March of 2015. Her most recent work, Book Club, was developed as part of the Suncor Energy Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary in 2014 and will receive a world premiere at Lunchbox in February 2016. Meredith is Co-Artistic Director of Bigs and Littles Theatre Society and also enjoys writing and performing for young audiences.
You can contact Meredith at LinkedIn by clicking the link above or by email at: mtaylorparry@gmail.com
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Survival Skills by Meredith Tyalor-Parry – Synopsis
“He saw a window of opportunity.”
A man diagnosed with terminal cancer commits suicide, leaving his family behind to struggle with the aftermath. Our journey begins 20 years later as Annalise and her sister sit at their dying mother’s bedside. The daughters are compelled to relive with the audience the horrible days following their father’s death when those closest to him came together to mourn and try to understand his choice. The play moves between past and present.
Their father’s decision is a controversial one. It was terribly painful for his wife and children to experience such a sudden, violent loss. But as we watch the sisters sit with their mother we begin to understand the motives behind his action. Is the choice to let death come in its prolonged and often agonizing way any less traumatic for those involved? Should we have the right to choose?
As in any time of family crises, personalities clash and sibling rivalries are revisited. Annalise’s frustration grows as her father is both accused of being a coward and applauded as hero. Finally she reveals an awful secret; her father needed her help. It is only by sifting through the memories that haunt her, that she will find forgiveness.
New Works of Merit is an international playwriting contest developed in 2003 to bring works of social significance to the general public.
13th Street Repertory Company
The 13th Street Repertory Company, founded in 1972 by Artistic Director Edith O’Hara, provides a place for actors, directors, playwrights, and technicians to develop their craft in a caring, nurturing, professional environment.
Welcome to my corner of the world where you can download my plays and read them for free. You can also read my interviews with other playwrights, actors, and directors about their work and creative process.
Way way back in the early days of community cable television myself and a group of friends used to produce a show called Profile. We did exactly what I do in this blog – talk with creative people about their work and process.
My very first guest on Profile was a guy named David Cassel. A quick Google search shows he’s been a busy guy over the last forty-plus years. He was a mime artist. Is a mime artist – as well as a designer, writer, producer, and director.
When I got back into theatre and started writing plays, I also wanted to include the occasional interview on my website with other creative people.
Check out some of my more recent interviews over the past few years with such wonderful and talented individuals as film and television director David Winning, playwright Caroline Russell-King, theatre photographer Tim Nguyen, Artistic Director of Lunchbox Theatre Bronwyn Steinberg, and playwright Kristen Da Silva.
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If you enjoy listening to great interviews with creative people then check out Q with Tom Power and this terrific interview with John Irving. Or this interview from the Dramatists Guild Foundation between playwrights Christopher Durang and David Lindsay-Abaire. Or this raw and uncensored interview from the Writers Guild Foundation with author and screenwriter William Goldman.
