Sometimes you fall in with a group of friends who change your life, and even change what you’re writing, in terms of genre. I was lucky to find this kind of group when I met Matthew Heiti, Sarah Gartshore, Liisa Kovala, and Lara Bradley. I’d known Lara since university, as a classmate, but never as a fellow writer. The other three, well, I met them in the Fall 2015 Playwrights’ Junction workshops at the Sudbury Theatre Centre. Then I ended up meeting Lisa O’Connell, through Matthew and Pat the Dog Theatre Creation.
It’s funny, as I get older, that I can see how I meet one person, and then a couple of years later, I meet another who is linked to the first one. Without one, I would never have met the other. It’s sort of magical, I think. A daisy chain of serendipitous meetings, and a close clutch of friends whom I’d do anything for…except being hit by an ore truck. My life has been like that for the last couple of years. Before that, not so much, but now I’m very much aware of the synchronicity that tends to weave itself through my world, and I’m forever grateful to the Universe for that. 🙂
This week, Pat the Dog Theatre Creation (under the direction of Lisa O’Connell and Matt Heiti) brought PlaySmelter to Sudbury. It’s PlaySmelter’s fifth anniversary, so they asked me to write a poem to celebrate. (You can read it on the Greater Sudbury Public Library website, on the poet laureate’s page, along with others I’ve written as commissioned pieces…if you’re into poetry.) I was more than honoured to write that poem, mostly because I have become a convert to the brilliance of Canadian plays and playwrights. I’ve only written plays over the last two years, but I have fallen in love with writing them, mostly because I love the magic of seeing actors on stage, embodying the words I’ve written. It’s a bit like having a magic wand and seeing something that was one dimensional blossom into the three dimensional. It’s all about how a playwright’s work moves from page to stage.
The first play I saw this week was Lara Bradley’s brilliant, “Blind Nickel Pig,” which is set in Sudbury in the early 1900s. It begins with two sisters, Annie and Frannie Flyberry, selling illegal alcohol in the guise of medicine. The newspaper man in town, William Mason, exposes the girls, as well as the presence of speakeasies (also known as “blind nickel pigs”) and their lives take a turn for the worse. There’s a bit of romance between the Ukrainian police officer and Annie, which is sweetly written, and seems realistic in its shadings. The thing that amazed me, as a playwright and as an audience member, was how Lara Bradley had written such vivid characters, all evocative of a previous time in Sudbury’s history. It’s a time in our city’s history that I didn’t know much about, so I enjoyed learning about what it was like, too.
Daniel Aubin’s Piano Man was, in my opinion, so bright and vibrant. His at times caustic narration, but still comforting jovial presence, along with the puppet shows that were scattered throughout the play, made for quick and witty comic relief. The other part of the play that was clever was Bradley having a variety of actors take on the role of Pickles, the drunk immigrant miner. The tell tale miner’s helmet and long coat served all of them well.
France Huot’s portrayal of Annie Flyberry was real enough to make me laugh out loud at times, and then get a bit teary at others. I love watching how France’s face transforms when she acts. (I should say I’m biased as she did a dramatic reading of one of the characters in my play, “Sparrows Over Slag,” last year at STC at ‘Last Stop.’) Greg Tremblay’s portrayal of a cerebral and quirky newspaper reporter, though, was one of my favourite performances, because it was in such sharp opposition to his richly textured and brooding rendering of a rather devious and sexually charged merchant who cheats on his wife. How Tremblay moves between two such radically different characters stumps me, but that’s probably because I’m not an actor. When I asked him about it, how he moves between the two, he said that it’s probably easier because the two characters are so different. I imagine it must be a bit like hearing two voices in your head, and the only thing I can compare it to, in my limited experience with theatre, is that–when you write a play or a novel or a short story–you let the words come through you, and your characters’ dialogue is distinct and clear in your mind, before it comes to the page, and then is re-written and revised at a later date.
I am constantly amazed by these actors, in awe of how they seem to just shift in and out of characters as if they are putting on a new spring coat. It puzzles me, and I wish I could understand how they can remember all of those lines. (I will never be a performance poet, for instance, because I have such a poor memory of the very lines I’ve written! A page poet…always.)
The next play I saw was Matt Heiti’s “Receiver of Wreck.” Oh, this one has had me thinking for two days straight. This play tells the story of Pez, a shoe salesman who lives on the West Coast, and Chase, an aesthetician who lives on the East Coast. Both have lost a foot in a horrible accident. Heiti based the play around the story of the Salish Sea foot mystery, out in British Columbia. You’ll remember the one: Since 2007, detached human feet have been found along the coasts of BC. Most are found in running shoes. Heiti’s riff on this is brilliant. Sitting in the audience during a matinee performance with my Grade 11 and 12 students, I kept thinking, “Oh…what’s he saying here about what’s lost and what’s found?”
The entire play makes you really consider what, about life, is worthwhile. It asks you to think about what’s wasted, and what waste is made up of, and what the notion of ruin is all about. One of my favourite lines, which I jotted down in the margin of the program, was “There is a hole in everything.” How true. People will say that they are whole, that there aren’t holes in their lives or identities, but I think they must be lying to make themselves look better for the benefit of others. Yes, we can strive to know ourselves, and we can be content as we are, fully realized for the moment we are living in, but we can also evolve over time, and sometimes, well, sometimes we are more full of holes than at other times in our lives. This is what makes us human, I think.
The story itself is achingly bittersweet. There is the sense that neither Pez (played by Heiti) nor Chase (played by Jenny Hazleton) is very content with their jobs, and they lose them, and are evicted from their respective homes, and so they decide to set off across Canada, each one headed to the opposite coast. It seems inevitable that they should meet. In fact, prior to their departure, they unwittingly end up chatting on an online dating site, finding that they have things in common. When they actually meet up in person, in the middle of the country, in a bus station, you get a sense that they were always meant to meet. It’s not a grand romantic meeting, but rather one that seems fated and destined. It reminds me of those stories of people who think they’ve known each other before, in other life times or incarnations. It’s the notion that there are things we can’t quite always explain, in terms of how we meet the few people who will be the most important in our lives. These two were meant to meet, were meant to feel calm with one another, were meant to feel that they had found their ‘home’ in their meeting. As the character of the Weather Man (played by Len Silvini) says, “Two strangers…exchanging chance for risk…or nothing is whole.” Sometimes, you need to risk being vulnerable to live fully. I loved that line and that notion. Either you pull in and turtle, or you try to live more fully. You risk, you grow; you hide, you stay the same…and how boring is that? 🙂
There is, too, I think, a real sense in “Receiver of Wreck,” that the idea of being alone can be terrifying. I’ve been alone for a long time, and it isn’t terrifying, but it can grate on you after a while. Sometimes you talk to yourself, or your dogs, or you sing and play music very loudly. One of Heiti’s lines is “Who will own ‘alone’?” and another is “Don’t go back to alone.” Both, for me, were powerful ones that made me lose my breath for a bit. Maybe, in some ways, they struck too close to my life. Not sure. Still need to think about that for a while.
You sometimes meet people who change your life, even if you only know them for a very short period of time. In my life, I can think of about three such people. Fewer than five, they are, but unforgettable…every single one. They may not stay with you, and perhaps they aren’t meant to stay. The point is, I think, that you can never ‘unmeet’ those very important souls who have made some sort of impact on your heart and mind. There is, and always will be, a ‘before’ and ‘after’ for your having met them. There’s a real beauty in that, even if it becomes bittersweet and they don’t stay in your life. The longing is hard, sometimes, because of the sense of loss, but the lessons learned may be all the richer because of that loss. I’m not sure on this, though, because I’m still working through a couple of them…and maybe, too, I’m learning, lately, that you’ll never be able to figure it all out, and maybe you aren’t supposed to, and maybe (just maybe) there’s something to be learned there, too.
That Heiti’s work is this thought provoking makes me happy inside. Yeah. I like to think. Probably too much. In any case, both Bradley’s “Blind Nickel Pig” and Heiti’s “Receiver of Wreck” are brilliant pieces of theatre. I hope people outside of the north get a chance to see them. I want to see them again. (But you don’t want to see your friends’ plays too often or they’ll think you’re a theatre stalker rather than just a simple supporter of local arts, and who wants that reputation?! 😉
peace,
k.
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