“This is a lot of stuff,” says Linda Griffiths halfway through our conversation. “Are you overwhelmed?” In a way, I am. She looks and acts perpetually excited, flying into sentences, pausing to catch the right word, then charging to the end of her thoughts before turning off into tangents. She is always a playwright, she is often an actor, and now she is teaching drama at University College. Despite all the projects she has to keep her going from day to day, Griffiths is preoccupied with one idea now, something she says — with weighty, enthusiastic emphasis — will be a “major work.”
Anatomy of a House Fire is about “two teenage boys in a basement, one 15, one 16, both into videogames.” The teenagers play a game in which moral choices are rewarded randomly: “You can abandon the mission to save your comrade-in-arms, and you can get rewarded or not.” She adds that “there’s a lot of 2012 hanging over it” and a heavy concern over the use of technology. “It’s not the enemy, but you just see how all the levels work to create a situation which is really dangerous and in which no one is communicating.”
Her research into the male-dominated world of gaming is a deliberate shift away from historical pieces anchored around women. “I really wanted to talk about boys,” she muses, “I don’t want to be characterized as the costume drama person.” Age of Arousal (2007) was a battleground of female passion and official decorum in Victorian England; 1998’s The Duchess placed the hard-living Wallis Simpson in the magical fairyland of the British nobility.
The former is punctuated by “thought speak,” Griffiths’ technique to reveal a character’s repressed urges. In her breakout hit Maggie & Pierre, Trudeau shouts, “I want somebody to fuck me silly!” halfway through a conversation with a journalist. In Age of Arousal Griffiths knocked the air out of the period piece, blowing fresh air into a stale genre. Mary and Rhoda are lovers and partners in a school for secretaries. They take in three sisters as students, each with a different attitude towards feminism, propriety, and sex.
“There’s such a lid on what they are saying,” she says of the characters. “That lid was very interesting when you opened it up.” The erotically charged result is the anti-Merchant-Ivory, careening between public virtue and private fantasy. In Anatomy of a House Fire, what’s left unsaid is expressed in combat simulations. Ironically, the boys’ real-life bond is explicit, in a fabricated (and violent) world. For Griffiths, seeing life through different planes of reality is a sensibility.
“I’ll say it because no one’s said it,” she says with slight exasperation. “All of my work has a surreal, either spiritual or magical element to it, in which I live all too comfortably.” The political and the personal is transcended to an “über level” that makes Maggie & Pierre and The Duchess more than bioplays.
“It seems to be a big red herring in my work: ‘Oh, she does famous people’. No; I will sometimes spring from a specific set of circumstances and then I go away from it.” She calls this approach collective creation, part of her training in early ‘70s Saskatoon with long-time collaborator Paul Thompson. One starts with the headlines, and then one go goes deeper. “Maggie & Pierre is passion over reason, it’s not about Margaret and Pierre Trudeau.”
And Arousal is not simply about the 19th century suffragette movement: “It’s everything I know or don’t know about being a woman. It is all the contradictions and confusions about being a woman. That’s why I’m so happy to be writing about guys now.”
Before diving into the mind of the adolescent male, Griffiths went into her own past for the one-woman The Last Dog of War which wrapped up at the Alberta Theatre Projects last November. The extended monologue explores her trip to the U.K. with her father, who reunited with his RAF comrades of Bomber Command. “The political issue is war, the personal is father-daughter, and the imagined is me on a bomber going to Berlin in the Second World War.”
She never expected a trip with her father to turn into anything more than a chance to exploit some war stories. “I [went] in totally self-interested. ‘Gimme your stories, you ol’ bastard!’ But it’s something to come out and say here I am, this is my family, this is what I’m like around family.” She is working on a film adaptation with playwright Layne Coleman.
As if that were not enough, Griffiths is revisiting a collection of stories called The Paradise Play. “It’s my own very romantic view on a certain period of time putting together a play that is called O.D. in Paradise [1983].” The Toronto scene Griffiths lived and breathed in the ‘80s was different, “looser with the rules, so much less corporate. There was money around. [Now] you live in a time when students go back to live with their parents because they can’t afford to live on their own. We could. You lived poor, but you could live.”
And now, more than 20 years later? “I’m inspired by my circle of friends — nobody’s looking back, you know, and people are just moving, and bringing out new stuff and thinking of new things. If you’re lucky enough to have lived this long — and lots of people in this theatre community have died this last year — there’s another breath that you take going into this stage of your life which is like ‘I must have learnt something by now.’”
No mid-life crisis? “Oh, fuck no. That’s over. Every new work, every new play I think I know nothing, I’ve no idea how this goes. But I figure if I work on it something will…come out. There’s a certain amount of smiling by the muses, which you really have to accept is part of it. That’s something to be able to say to yourself, even though you doubt every day. It is…it is a good time.”
