Unanswerable: “Did You Write That Play?”

Typical review of Eat Poo Love

GOOD EVANING

Did you write the play Eat, Poo, Love, which received nothing but four-star reviews at the Toronto Fringe Festival last week?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

Asking me, [of Eat, Poo, Love] “Did you write that play?” is like asking a woman who has miscarried, “Did you have your baby?”

It was based on Paul’s blog, and conceptualized as theatre by my brother Dan. I wrote an incomplete first draft which I suggested we work on together to make a fully functioning first draft. But that fragmentary first draft was taken out of my hands and I didn’t see a script again until a few weeks before opening night. My input was no longer wanted. The moment I became aware that I was out of the writing loop, I knew I did not want to be involved in the show.

GOOD EVANING

Why didn’t you quit then?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

I knew it would be hard on me to remain in the show, but I thought it would be harder on Dan for me to make the hurtful move of “abandoning” him. He needed support from everywhere he could get it. Especially one of his brothers. The three of us are close. Just about anything any one of us does could be seen as a collective achievement.

But it was risky for me to stay in it. From the time I was excommunicated until about the fourth show, I was doing the Smeagol/Gollum routine: “Support the show”—“Sabotage it!” The acting challenge for me was showing up at rehearsals without speaking my mind. One performance, I screwed up my lines twice because as I waited for my cue I had been imaging addressing the audience with “This isn’t the way the script was supposed to go.”

GOOD EVANING

How was it hard for you to be in the show?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

Just about every rehearsal, I was reminded to know my place—an actor. Physical and social pains that Paul and I suffered were clowned and directed, and I was made to watch without comment. Lines I had written remained senselessly in scenes that someone else had reshaped, and I was given no opportunity to amend things.

GOOD EVANING

Why were you “dumped” from the writing team?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

My enthusiasm can be unsettling. I’m a loose canon. Imagine writing a play with Robin Williams back in his cocaine days.

GOOD EVANING

Did you like the final script?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

In my view, it was not ready for the stage. It was not ready to be shown to a director, for that matter. It has significant flaws structurally and thematically. (There is one line near the end that, as a patient, makes me shudder.) But it was put on stage for seven enthusiastic audiences. Can’t complain about that. Daniel accomplished what he wanted to do; that is a success. And I want my brother to have success in whatever way he seeks it.

GOOD EVANING

Has this done permanent harm to your relationship with your brother?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

No.

GOOD EVANING

Would you work with him again artistically?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

Probably.

GOOD EVANING

Aren’t you causing trouble by saying these things in this somewhat public way?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

If I can’t talk about my writing, I can’t be a writer. I have to be free to answer questions like, “What have you written lately?” Could I have left my brother out of this discussion? Not if he was my writing partner. (This blog post is probably a good example of why he hesitates to work with me.)

I have to say these words in this place at this moment so that I can stop repeating them in my head and to strangers at bus stops. After two months of not writing anything, this is what I need to do to I feel I have my writing back.

I’d say, “The last thing I want to do is hurt my brother.” But that shit ain’t the truth. The last thing I want to do is have a false peace with my brother.

A line from the beginning of the play—a line Dan wrote—says you can’t have perfection; the best you can hope for is harmony.

GOOD EVANING

So, do you love your brother?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

Oh, fuck off.

Evan as Dino Carcinoma; Dan as Patient Q

Marina Nemat’s Memoir “Prisoner of Tehran” Now on Stage

Just as Marina Nemat and director Maja Ardal had to be selective when adapting Nemat’s astonishing memoir Prisoner of Tehran for the stage, so did I have to be selective in adapting a half-hour interview with the author and human rights activist to a brief online Q&A format.

One point I wasn’t able to include was part of Nemat’s response to my question about how she can balance addressing the wrongs committed in Iran against the misconceptions and general negativity many North Americans may harbour about Iran. She said,

“The world is talking about Iran having a nuclear bomb? …The people of Iran have not been losing their children to the nuclear program; they have been losing their children to the terrible disregard for human rights in that country. …the problem of Iran is the struggle for human rights, and it is hurting the Iranian people more than it is hurting anybody.”

She also spoke about the role of the arts in addressing human rights issues. She spoke of how theatre, painting, and so on, shed light on the shades between black and white that are see in the media. “CNN and the news fail to introduce the human side of the story. And this play and [my] books and talks try to put a human face to this very difficult situation.”

Please read what did make it into the published interview here:

www.postcity.com/Eat-Shop-Do/Do/April-2012/Prisoner-of-Tehrans-Marina-Nemat-We-wanted-to-make-people-in-the-theatre-really-feel-uncomfortable/

Marina Nemat, human rights activist and author of Prisoner of Tehran

What Is Theatre?

World Theatre Day  was on March 27. (See Stratford Festival message.) In fact, it was the 50^th World Theatre Day (although John Malkovich’s brief message at UNESCO was trifling compared with Jessica A. Kaahwa’s 2011 message, A Case for Theatre in Service of Humanity).

Wait a minute, World Theatre Day? No one could challenge the validity of World Water Day, because water is a precious resource we all need and which is in a state of crisis and neglect. Who needs theatre. Wait, that is a question, and not a rhetorical one.

Who needs theatre?

I’ve heard it argued that the invention of photography made the art of painting obsolete. “Adios, Picasso; no use for you!” And some would say movies have made theatre obsolete. “Look at the size of that screen! So much bigger than life!” That is what theatre has that movies never will: life.

What is theatre?

Theatre is not just entertainment. Theatre is communication. A movie doesn’t respond to you, but a stage presentation does. Theatre responds to an audience and develops according to that response, over the course of an evening and over the course of the show’s run, and throughout the lifetime of the theatre company. Theatre is immediate and theatre changes. Theatre is change. A movie can get remade, but it will never be a living thing; its changes are static. Change in theatre is organic and interactive.

What I just saw.

I don’t go to see theatre often because, being an unknown playwright, I can’t afford to leave the apartment (in fact, I can’t afford the apartment). But at Word On The Street book festival last year, after agreeing to an exhibitor’s unexpected request that I read with her a scene from a script—out loud to passersby, who passed us by—I was rewarded with tickets to Tarragon Theatre, any show this season. I wanted to see their first show, Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or ‘the vibrator play’, which sounded good, and was nominated in 2010 for a Pulitzer and a Tony Award—but it was a busy month and I couldn’t make the dates.

Nicole Underhay and Rick Roberts in "The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs"
photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

Now a show is on which is expected to win awards (for whatever that’s worth). The English premiere of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, by Quebec playwright Carole Fréchette, inspired by the tale of Bluebeard, deserves any award it can get, as far as I’m concerned. Not that it was my favourite play, not that I was moved to tears, not that I would recommend it to everyone; but it “worked”, it entertained, and it made sense.

But what did it mean?

The full 200 seat audience was not stingy with applause, but there was no standing ovation or curtain call. Some gave each other puzzled looks as they put on their coats. On the way out I heard one person ask another “Not to your liking?”

It is easy to dismiss anything that is unfamiliar. And what was unfamiliar about this play was that it didn’t spell things out Hollywood-style. It was like a good poem. It said things in a way that requires a bit of cogitation. It might mean different things to different people, but it should not have been meaningless to a native English speaker. To me, the characters were not the disturbed oddballs that they seemed to be on the surface; they were entirely ordinary people and alarmingly familiar, like some specific people close to me. It helped me reflect on how I, my friends, my family members, may often seem to one another like disturbed oddballs. But that is just on the surface (in many cases).

“Who has time for that?”

Lots of people don’t have time for lots of things that are important. Most people don’t sleep enough, don’t chew their food enough, don’t communicate enough. Yawn, chew, “No time to talk,” chew, yawn. If I don’t make time to make sense of Shakespeare or my parents or siblings, that will be my loss. Theatre is communication. Like understanding family, it is not always easy, but making an effort to understand is time well spent.

Finishing a First Draft for Fringe Festival

Brrr! Is there a draft in here? Damn right there is! First draft of my Fringe Festival eFfort. Cool!

The title of this work is yet to be confirmed (but stay tuned!). It is a comedic drama (as in, “if you don’t laugh, you cry”), which must not exceed 60 minutes in length, to be premiered at the 2012 Toronto Fringe Festival from July 4^th to 15^th. It will be my* third play to be staged, (and my first not to be workshopped by Theatre New Brunswick with actors from Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal). *Unlike my previous plays, which were entirely my own ideas and developed with no outside contribution prior to rehearsal, this Fringe show is based on the writings of Paul Clement and conceived of as a stage show by Daniel Mackay. It is an adaptation and it is very much a collaborative effort. The three of us have met several times to experiment with different approaches to the material, and we will continue to do so now that this draft is finished.

Playwright Tavern, photo Tim Carter

It’s funny to use the word “finished”, though. Any first draft is more like a foundation to build on than a house to start filling with furniture. But this is even more the case with theatre than with other types of writing. A playwright is more of an architect than a painter. Write a piece of prose and you can get feedback, but no matter how many suggestions you heed, the changes are made by the writer. A script, on the other hand, gets filtered through actors and a director. (The exception would be a monodrama scripted and performed by a single creator. And even then, if such a solo artist engages a director or dramaturge, the work becomes a collaboration.)

So, “finished” is misleading. What is finished is the preparation. This stage is not quite the laying of the foundation but the sketching out of the blueprints. Now our creative triumvirate has something to compare notes on. Up to this point, what we had was a wild stallion of a concept which we corralled into a chicken coop of ideas. Now we have a crude block from which we can hew away the chunks that impair a clear view of a vision we hope to share. (Hmm, could I cram another metaphor into this paragraph?)

The significance of having a completed first draft is that we have something tangible to work on. This would be equally true if I were developing this script all on my own, but it is all the more urgent when there is a creative team waiting to get their hands dirty.

For writers who haven’t yet learned the hard way, take it from one who did: It is counterproductive to discuss a partially written draft. (I spent 12 years getting feedback on a partially written novel which I consequently kept re-inventing. Once I stopped discussing it, I finished the draft in six months.) If your baby is not yet able to stand on her own, you can’t ask her to dance for an audience of even one. If she still needs you to hold her up, the onlooker won’t see her dance but will just see her dangling there. You can discuss an idea, and you can discuss a first draft—which has a thread you can pull on and twist and tie in knots and still follow how one end connects to the other—but you can’t discuss a partial draft because it is as vulnerable as a half-born fetus.

Showing a half-written draft would be like showing a half-finished haircut, so hold off the unveiling until there are no more “and then a miracle happens” gaps that need filling in. Especially in a play, you need to be able to explain why this happens at this point and that happens at that point because, if not, even the most well-intentioned listener can crush your fetal idea by asking what your point is.

The draft has been presented. Will it be tackled by builders or the wrecking ball?