PREVIEW
MARY’S WEDDING MIDLIFE
Alberta Theatre Projects
playRites 2002
Runs until March 3
Martha Cohen Theatre (CPA)
Between his appointment as playwright-in-residence at Theatre Calgary and his new mainstage production at Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites 2002, it’s been a big season for local playwright Stephen Massicotte. Maybe too big.
"It’s kind of like when you’re eight, waiting for Christmas," he says. "It’s almost too much excitement to bear. I mean, it’s fun, but it’s almost too much. You get that feeling of misplaced creativity. You want to do something, but your doing of something will just hinder things. So then you want to sit back, but then you get anxious and fidgety."
After honing his skills at fringe appearances and productions at Calgary’s Ground Zero Theatre (The Boy’s Own Jedi Handbook, A Farewell to Kings), Massicotte is seeing his work on a big stage for the first time.
"Part of the excitement has been going to the costume shop. They don’t just get a white shirt that looks like the right white shirt. They make a white shirt," he marvels. "There are people composing real music, instead of going through your whole soundtrack collection trying to find the right sound. There’s a bit of that feeling of being the little kid getting to play with the big kids."
On the other hand, ATP’s playwright-in-residence Eugene Stickland has had his fair share of premières, at ATP and all over North America. After Sitting on Paradise, A Guide to Mourning and Appetite, just to name a few of his recent hits, you’d think he’d be an old hand at it. Not so, he says. He’s not that far away from his own first time on the ATP stage.
"I was just thinking back to my first year, which was Some Assembly Required in 1994," he recalls. "I remember looking around the room at my cast, and thinking, ‘Oh my God, these people are from the Shaw Festival! Working on my play? There must be some mistake!'"
Years later, he still faces Midlife’s upcoming opening night with a bit of trepidation.
"I’m excited, and as I usually am, I’m scared," he admits. "I’ll have all my little rituals."
He says a pre-show glass of wine at the Auburn is only one of his opening night habits that is integral to the play’s success, and he seems perfectly sincere when he adds that the process makes him nervous.
"The first time you hit an audience, you don’t know what’s going to happen. And I think that’s healthy... I think that a fair amount of respect and slight fear about what the audience is going to think is a good thing for a playwright. It’s not really damaging, it’s just part of our psychological makeup."
Massicotte agrees that he’s susceptible to opening night jitters, too, even though Mary’s Wedding has been seen by a couple of audiences on smaller stages throughout the workshop process. Like Midlife, Massicotte’s play was featured during last year’s playRites festival as a platform play, where some in the audience were moved to tears by just a reading of the story of a pair of lovers torn apart by the First World War.
"It’s kind of a very sweet love story, a memory play, about how we remember our first loves," he says. "Sometimes you remember them the way you want to, sometimes you remember them the way they were, and sometimes you remember it much worse than it really was."
When it’s his turn to describe his play, about married a businessman who embarks on an affair with a much younger co-worker, Stickland pauses for reflection.
"Mine is the opposite of Steve’s play," he says with a laugh. "As (director) Bob White says, ‘It’s a cautionary tale.’ It’s very much like a piece of Greek theatre, in that once the protagonist understands the road he’s on, he knows he’s doomed to be on it, he knows he’s helpless to get off of it, and he can only keep rolling the rock up the side of the cliff, even though he knows that it’s going to roll back down again." |
