Stephen Massicotte strikes back
Playwright returns to the Jedis as his career takes off
Preview
THE JEDI TRILOGY
Ground Zero Theatre
Runs until September 21
Reeve Theatre (U of C)
The Force is with Stephen Massicotte.
His play Mary's Wedding was one of the big hits of last season’s PlayRites Festival and earned him a Betty Mitchell Award for outstanding new play. Massicotte will be one of the most produced playwrights in Canada this year with productions of Mary's Wedding scheduled this season in Ottawa, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vancouver. He’s working on new plays commissioned by the National Arts Centre and Theatre Calgary, and to cap it off, Ground Zero Theatre is about to stage three of his one-act comedies, known collectively as The Jedi Trilogy.
The Boy's Own Jedi Handbook, The Girls Strike Back and The Return of the Jedi Handbook are based on the Star Wars movies and celebrate Massicotte’s life-long love affair with George Lucas’s sci-fi world. They parallel his own experiences growing up with the adventures of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.
"It’s a play about a kid and his friend James," says Massicotte. "And they love Star Wars so much that their growing-up adventures – their trials and tribulations as they face them – they see them through Star Wars because it’s the only way they have to interpret the world. So their teacher says things remarkably like Darth Vader. When they face girls for the first time, they try to use the Force to get through it.
"It is a very Star Wars play, but when people see it they usually think it’s more about growing up and friendship and all the stuff you do when you’re kid but you forgot about. It’s about using your imagination to try to cope with the world. It’s fun."
Massicotte wrote The Boy's Own Jedi Handbook five years ago when he was still studying to be an actor at the University of Calgary, and he originally saw it as a one-man show for himself. When his friend Ian Kelly heard about the play, he asked if he could produce it as his final directing project. The show was such a success that it actually changed the direction of Massicotte's career.
"It went over so well that instantly I was a playwright. The next day people were asking me, so when’s your next play coming out?"
Massicotte and friends took the play on the fringe fest circuit, where it played to sold-out houses in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Victoria and Vancouver. The response was surprising.
"It was very a personal story when I wrote it," explains Massicotte. "I thought, 'Who’s going to want to watch a play about a Star Wars freak?' It’s about me. But so many people say to me, ‘That’s exactly my life’ or ‘You just caught my brother to a T’ or ‘That’s just what my husband is like.'"
Encouraged to write another play, he came up with The Girls Strike Back, the adolescent discovery of girls by the characters from his first play. From there, the next logical step was to complete the trilogy with a new play.
"The first two parts are light and funny," says Massicotte. "The trials they face are serious but still kind of fluffy. For the third part, it’s still very funny but it got a little darker."
Since he hadn't yet focused on the end of the friendship, Massicotte decided that he should finally chronicle this part of the relationship in this play. Familiar faces Christian Goutsis and Adam Leigh will play the lead roles of the Kid and James, and Lunchbox Theatre’s Johanne Deleeuw will direct.
History leads Massicotte to Lawrence of Arabia
In addition to finishing The Return of the Jedi Handbook, Stephen Massicotte has been very busy this year working on several new projects. The award-winning Mary's Wedding encouraged him to pursue his interest in history, leading to a new play about the Holocaust called The Emperor of Atlantis.
Massicotte wrote the first draft, a 64-page script, in the 24 Hour Playwriting Competition at Alberta Theatre Projects two years ago.
This summer he went to England to do research on the life of T.E. Lawrence for a new play commissioned by the National Arts Centre. He saw all of the important sites, including Lawrence's grave and his house, and he talked his way into museums to see period artifacts like Lawrence’s rifle and desert robes.
He has also completed a screenplay called A Perfect Beast about a crime that took place in Manitoba in 1935, and he is now adapting it for the stage.
"With these, I’m trying to what I did with Mary's Wedding – make it extremely entertaining and accessible to a modern audience but placed in a historical framework. Whereas Mary's Wedding was mostly fictional – based on historical events – the Lawrence play and The Emperor of Atlantis are based on real people, and Lawrence is a character in the play so it takes a lot more research.
"I’d like to continue that kind of writing. Writing things about myself and pop culture and how life is to us. But then I’m such a history buff and a biography buff, I keep finding stories about real people. It’s great drama and I just have to tell them." |
