FFWD Weekly
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| Theatre by Lori Montgomery Pigeon Among the Cats When playwrights from across Alberta gather in Calgary next week for the Alberta Playwrights Network conference, they will be treated to a quintessential example of their craft in action. Caroline Russell-King’s new play, Pigeon Among the Cats, has been through the APN’s new play development program, and a staged reading April 5 will bring it to a workshop audience. For a playwright best known for things like Mounting Sex in the Afternoon Zone at Lunchbox last season, this represents a radical change of pace. "It’s not a comedy," she says simply, by way of contrast. "It’s a conspiracy... from the whistleblower’s point of view. It’s about the truths and the myths surrounding the Western Heritage Front, which is one of Canada’s biggest, most successful right-wing neo-Nazi organizations." The story focuses on a young woman drawn into the neo-Nazi movement for political reasons, but repelled by its violence. She becomes a scapegoat for others in the group, and is the first woman charged under Canadian hate laws – but meanwhile, she has grown suspicious of another member of the group, a man who seems to have an unlimited supply of cash. "She finds out that he’s a spy for the Canadian government and that the Canadian government is actually giving him all the money that he’s funnelling into the organization," Russell-King explains. He is using the cash, however, to take a leading role in the organization, propelling it to further action. "She blows the whistle on him, but no one takes her seriously, because they think that it’s because she’s in trouble." The revelations result in the end of the stream of federal money into the Western Heritage Front, and the protection of the CSIS agent becomes top priority. "Everyone’s concerned that this spy needs immunity, so they give him a new name and they move him to Edmonton, and they give him a $191,000 house, and a car," the playwright says. "Meanwhile, no one cares if the little neo-Nazi girl is offed." A complicated plot description, Russell-King concedes, especially for one accustomed to comedy – however deceptively simply it may be. "A sex farce is a lot easier to explain," she laughs. "It’s a love triangle, funny things happen, underwear comes off. There you go." In this case, however, she felt passionately enough about the issues that she had to step out of her comfort zone. "When the first cross-burning happened in Caroline, a buddy and I got involved in anti-racist work," she recalls. "Lots of issues came up... Zundel, Keegstra, Somalia. But it seemed that when this issue came up, no one really paid much attention to it. It was really overshadowed by the Somalia affair. I kept waiting for someone else to write about it – and then I thought, I’ll write about it." While Russell-King laughingly characterizes the process of writing as an agonizing one at the best of times, she says that this experience was particularly uncomfortable due to the disturbing subject matter – but worth the effort. "I wanted to write a big play with big ideas," she says. "These are scary people and they really exist." |
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