FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Theatre by Lori Montgomery Finders Keepers Calgary Fringe Festival September 1 - 4 Crump Manor When Larry Smith began work on Finders Keepers he didn’t realize it would turn out to be quite such an acting challenge. "When I first started writing it, it was a series of monologues, and I thought this would be a good one-man show," he recalls. Then his characters began interacting and suddenly there were scenes that involved more than one of them taking the stage at once. Not so easy anymore, but the playwright-actor-director decided to give it a go anyway. "In part because I’m really stubborn, and I thought, ‘I’m going to make this work as a one-man show if it kills me.’ And it almost has.... It became a challenge for me," Smith laughs. The process of bringing the disparate characters to life, while difficult, was gratifying, too, he says. "It’s really hard, I’ll tell you. As an actor, I tend to rely a lot on the other actor, as something to react to – acting is reacting, right? But somewhere in my head, I’m starting to make the connections between one character and another. It’s fun when that starts to happen." The five characters in the play, which opens at the Calgary International Fringe Festival on September 1, are a study in contrasts: Evans, a native street hustler; the fundamentalist Christian minister who tries to rescue him from the street; Claire, the minister’s assistant, who has visions; Chris, the social worker who may or may not be a stalker; and Julian, the gay performance artist who takes Evans under his wing. "I put them together and just thought, ‘What would happen if all these people happened to meet each other? What are the possibilities?’" Smith says. The characters are in some ways a reflection of himself, as well as drawn in part from real life. "The minister wasn’t a Christian minister – he was this weird, older man that I met when I was living in Toronto when I was about 20," the writer says. "He was a really odd guy. He was into some kind of esoteric religion... about finding your higher power. I changed it to a fundamentalist Christian because I’m familiar with that.... I thought it was a stronger statement, because everyone for the most part has some kind of background in a Christian-based philosophy." Smith, a former schoolteacher and current university instructor, once taught in Alert Bay, on northeastern Vancouver Island. "I was having a really rough time with this class. I’d done a practicum in kindergarten, and I ended up teaching Grade 7. They were pretty hard to handle, a really rough class," Smith recalls. One of those difficult students would later find his way into Smith’s writing as Evans. "He’s always kind of haunted me. He came to me for help because his mother was beating him, and I got him help.... He was somebody I’ve been wanting to write about for a while." When Smith speaks of Finders Keepers, he stresses the element of storytelling that he hopes to preserve in the piece – the main impetus behind its creation. But he realizes, as he works on the production as actor rather than writer, that there is an element of the political in his work as well. "It suddenly hit me, the statement I’m making," he reflects. "It ends up that the gay performance artist is the only one who really respects Evans and gives him space, and doesn’t violate his boundaries. It suddenly hit me that everyone else pretends that they’re doing something good for this kid, but they’re the ones that end up doing him harm."

| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |