Preview
BIG BABY
DOWN THE MAIN DRAG
Alberta Theatre Projects
Both shows run until March 6
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
One is a grizzled veteran of playRites and playwriting. The other is a fresh-faced newcomer just making his mark on the Canadian theatre scene. But both Frank Moher and Steve Laplante share the same modus operandi – using comedy to deal with difficult subjects that many people like to avoid.
Moher has written many kinds of plays in his over-two-decade career, from dramas about social issues to works about Tolstoy, Marshall McLuhan and The Supremes, but his new one, Big Baby, premièring at playRites this year, is among his riskiest. It takes the deceptive shape of a nutty sitcom, in which a friendly young man shows up on the doorstep of Liz, a middle-aged woman, claiming to be her son and wanting to move in. The thing is, Liz never had a son – she chose not to give birth to the child she was carrying back when she was a single university student 30 years ago.
"I’m interested in plays that look normal on the surface but are pretty weird underneath," says Moher, a former Calgarian now living on B.C.’s Gabriola Island. "This play is audience-friendly insofar as it’s a comedy with likable characters. The premise, however, will probably be difficult for some people to swallow and the play’s point of view is transgressive, in that it’s not the viewpoint you’d expect to come out of a sophisticated, left-leaning theatre community."
In Big Baby, Moher dares to raise the issue of abortion and question the standard liberal attitude towards it. When we sat down for an interview, he had just attended the first preview performance of the play, which officially opens on Friday, February 13, and had a chance to gauge an audience’s reaction.
"It pleased a lot of people and it made a significant number of people angry," he reports. "It seems to have the potential to make people laugh a lot and also really piss some of them off, which is more or less what it was calculated to do. But if people remain to the end, they’ll see it’s attempting to find a middle ground."
Moher, who has a background in journalism, feels theatre has an obligation to be provocative and wrestle with tough subjects. "Abortion is an important human, moral issue that should be talked about," he says. And treating it in a comic manner simply makes it easier for audiences to consider.
"It also probably has something to do with my Irish heritage," he adds with a smile. "The Irish tend to like to turn dark things into comedy."
Whether or not that’s also a French-Canadian propensity, Laplante takes a similar black-comic approach in his play, Down the Main Drag, which deals with the death of a parent. Using symbolic small-town characters and a whimsical, lighthearted style, he has us follow the experiences of a young man named Him as he tries to wrap his head around the absurdity of his father’s sudden death and the funeral rituals that ensue.
Laplante is a young Québécois actor and playwright who is making both his playRites and his English-language debut with this comedy. His translator, Crystal Beliveau, is also a newbie and Down the Main Drag, which opens Thursday, February 12, is the first play she has translated.
For Beliveau, the task has been a labour of love. A creative writing student, she was working for Le Centre des auteurs dramatiques in Montreal when she attended Laplante’s play – Le long de la principale in French – at Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui and was instantly entranced.
"It was such a surprise," she recalls. "It spoke to me on such a personal level. The idea of translating was already simmering in my mind, but seeing his play really nailed it for me." So she contacted Laplante, whom she’d never met, and offered to translate it.
"There was a weird synchronicity to it," she says. "When we got together, we realized our lives were quite similar in a lot of ways. We both come from small towns. We both lost our fathers within eight or 10 months of each other. There were these very odd coincidences."
Beliveau (yes, she’s related to hockey great Jean Beliveau) grew up in the tiny prairie burg of Wolseley, Saskatchewan, and loves Laplante’s archetypal small-town characters, nosey neighbours who have descriptive names like Old Fart and Loverboy and are constantly intruding on the main character.
"Sometimes they’re totally annoying and sometimes they have a great charm," she says. "I really feel like it’s a world I’m familiar with."
But most of all, Beliveau admires the play’s candour and humour.
"Steve lifts the taboo on a subject that is highly censored in our lives," she says. "We’re so awkward discussing death. And when you’re living through something so sad and serious, it’s somewhat natural to come at it with a certain healthy irreverence and I think he does that beautifully."
Laplante and Moher may be irreverent, but their intentions are good. Moher could be speaking for both their plays when he claims the theatre has another responsibility beyond provocation.
"Theatre has an obligation to do some healing within its community, if it can," he says. "Or, at the very least, it should remind people that we are all human beings, doing our best." |
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