The big wheels of the Toronto theatre scene are watched as carefully as any Britney, Angelina, or Tom. The difference, in this hermetically-sealed world, is these folks tend to watch each other, and the whisperings, gossip, and schmoozing stays inside the box. The off-stage drama is often more interesting than what’s gracing the stage of your local teatro. Who better to interview each other than two insiders that have experienced the machinations of this sometimes mystifying industry, participants in the much-coveted Playwright’s Unit, who still manage to have a laugh over the whole thing? The Varsity set up a not-so-blind date between two sassy playwrights as they push each other’s buttons over burgers and shakes at local chock’lit shoppe, Fran’s.
Brendan: So…what are you writing right now?
Daniel: I’m working on this play for the Tarragon Playwright’s Unit, and something for the CanStage Unit.
B: Two different plays?
D: Yeah. And what about you? What are you writing these days? Are you in rewrites now for…
B: Alias Godot.
D: Wait, what is this Alias Godot?
B: Alias Godot is a play I developed in the Tarragon Playwright’s Unit in 2006, and it’s been programmed this year as the last show of the season in the Mainspace. It’s an explanation, basically, an arguably cheeky explanation as to why Godot doesn’t show up—which is that he’s being held by crooked cops in New York City—
D: So, Godot is a character—
B: Godot’s a character in the play, and it’s an explanation for why he can’t get to Vladamir and Estragon with these two cops in post-9/11 New York.
D: When did you start writing for theatre?
B: I started writing my first play when I was on tour with Repercussion Theatre in 2001, touring through the States. And it was just a blur of minivans and highways and Super 8 Motels, and I had lots of time on my hands, and a crrrrazy show—
D: What show was it?
B: It was Twelfth Night, but it was this “circus spectacle” version of it, where we were all—well, like, I was playing Malvolio as a praying mantis with a German accent in Geisha makeup. The second piece I wrote was called Panhandled.
D: Neat.
B: And what are the shows that you’re working on? Do you always write more than one play at a time?
D: No. I don’t know. The show that’s on is about a young Canadian doctoral student in social and cultural anthropology who travels to a small village in Africa where everyone has forgotten his or her own name. The loss didn’t happen all at once. There’s been fighting and incipient civil war between the nameless and the named. And this young man has just arrived into this. It’s about names and naming things.
B: Right.
D: The other play is a one-act. A teenage boy comes to a crosswalk in his neighborhood every day to wait for his sister who disappeared seven years before, who told him to wait for her there. So he comes back every day as a ritual, and it’s about the relationship that develops between him and the crossing guard, who’s an older man.
B: How old is the boy?
D: Seventeen. That’s the one that will hopefully get mounted in Summerworks, like In Full Light was last summer.
B: Yes, which is the one I did with you.
D: Yes!
B: So where do you start from? With me, I often get an idea—like two guys in a room with no door. Do you have a similar process, or do you think in themes first?
D: I’d say a combination of those two—theme and idea. In Full Light came out of being far away from home, and feeling like I couldn’t trust anyone that I was meeting, and questioning the purity of the relationships that I was establishing.
B: Wait, while in Toronto?
D: No I was in Ghana and Burkina Faso. So it was about feeling like there was something corrupt and unsettling about the relationships I was having with people there, and then going, “Well, are the relationships I’m having with people back home so unproblematic?” It came from wondering how much you can trust someone—
B: Or should you—
D: Yes, it’s always a risk, and under what circumstances is that risk necessary? [A pause while they turn the tape over…]
B: I feel like as soon as we turn the tape recorder on, we stop making jokes.
D: We do! It’s less fun.
B: We were so charming before, and now we’re pretending to be university professors—
D: So serious—
B: I’ve never even been to university!
D: I think on this side of the tape we need to be really witty.
B: Yeah, this is the B-side. So let’s try another direction.
D: Let’s…Brendan?
B: Yes? This is a great way to start the unforced side. [Inordinate amounts of boyish giggling.]
D: Where do you want to be in five years?
B: Right here at this table with you. [More giggling.]
D: Arggh.
B: Drinking vanilla milkshakes with Bailey’s. [Editor’s note: these are listed on the menu as “adult shakes”]
D: Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about that.
B: Well, okay. Five years? I want to be making a living in “this business of entertainment.” I want to be writing and acting in theatre and film. And you?
D: Same thing. I find that when I do a lot of writing, all I can think about is acting. And when I’m acting, I’m like, “this is horrible—it’s so hard! Why can’t I just be in my room, writing?”
B: Absolutely. I have another question in the “interview-as-therapy” vein. Do you ever have trouble getting started as a writer?
D: I have a tendency toward being hyper-critical. I can stop myself in my tracks by tossing things out if they don’t catch fire immediately—which may be right.
B: With Alias Godot, it was like three years between the idea of “Hey, what if this?” and then I wrote 13 aborted pages somewhere in there, and didn’t touch it for another two years. Then the Playwrights Unit came and the first draft was written in less than two weeks.
D: For a variety of reasons, I sort of feel like I’m about to start another play. That will be the fourth play in the space of six months—
B: Which makes me want to punch you a little bit.
D: You should wait to see if the plays are any good before you do that. Sometimes I think that if you just kept writing, constantly, say you were to produce 12 plays—
B: Then I’d have to punch myself in the face.
D: —probably nine of those plays would be pretty good. If you are a good writer, and you have a sense of craft—maybe two of them would really suck, but one might be extraordinary. Why couldn’t one do that?
B: Because one is a mega-procrastinator. You know what? It’s January. I’m gonna do it.
D: Let’s both do it!
B: “A gentleman’s agreement to write 12 plays in just one year.” Let’s hash out some ideas.
D: So there’s this man, and he’s wearing a suit of mustard—
B: I see where you’re getting your ideas from.
D: I had another question. This question is going to rock your world— [Wary silence]
B: O-kay.
D: Do you ever think about house ownership?
B: Yes! I do. I feel very scared about not owning a house.
D: But you don’t have to own a house right now…
B: Are you asking or telling me?
D: Sort of both, because I don’t really know. Which leads me to—
B: The next mind-blower!
D: What do you think is the relationship between hard work and success in the arts? Should we be keeners or slackers?
B: I think we should err on the side of keener—
D: I agree.
B: But in the film acting industry, I think you need to be at least 25 per cent slacker, if not more, in order to succeed in auditions. I feel like I get the parts I don’t want, the ones I haven’t prepared for. Like the thing I’m doing now—I didn’t shave, I didn’t even put my contact lenses in—and now I’m on a TV show where I have a beard and glasses. But I think in theatre you’ve got to hustle. It’s that whole question again of “what are you writing next?”
D: Twelve plays a year.
B: That’s what I’m going to tell people now. “Twelve plays a year! But I don’t know what any of them are about…”
