>>PREVIEW
HIPPIES AND BOLSHEVIKS
Alberta Theatre Projects
playRites Festival
Written by Amiel Gladstone
Runs until March 5
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Amiel Gladstone was born in 1972, one year before the United States withdrew the last of its troops from Vietnam. Now, 36 years after the withdrawal, the Vancouver playwright is revisiting the Vietnam War era – disenfranchised commune comrades, draft dodgers and all – with Hippies and Bolsheviks, his new play receiving its professional première at Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites Festival.
"For me, (the play) was (about) looking back where I came from in terms of what my parents were going through at that age, and what young people were going through at the time of my birth," says Gladstone, who describes his parents as "the questioning type, looking for alternative ways of living."
"And there were obviously lots of parallels to what’s going on now," he adds.
Originally presented at the University of Victoria’s Spotlight on Alumni, Hippies and Bolsheviks is the quintessential British Columbia play, beginning with rainfall dripping from the poorly sealed roof of Star’s (Daniela Vlaskalic) Vancouver apartment as she enters with naïve draft-dodger Jeff (David Beazley).
As flawed as the apartment’s leaking roof, the play’s characters must each struggle with their own attempts to escape their lives and move meaningfully forward. Where Star finds herself torn between the memories of her former commune and her parents’ demands that she rejoin the world of the working, her erstwhile commune partner, Green Tree, now calling himself Allan (Shaker Paleja), has already resigned himself to work in his father’s company.
But while the play’s arc depends on the breakdown of the failed commune, which sends Star and Allen back into financial dependency on their parents and provides the catalyst for their development, Gladstone refuses to deprecate the social experiments of collective living that are now often ridiculed as escapes of the left and the lazy.
"I think we see now that the idea of intentional community happens in other ways," he says. "It isn’t necessarily about living together, but a lot of the other values are there – that a community can be about a shared group of friends or a people who are working in the same field," he says.
"There’s definitely an artistic community I feel a part of that provides all those things you would hope a community would provide," he continues, adding with a laugh, "but I don’t necessarily feel a strong desire to live with everybody."
Like the yuppified Allan, Gladstone says he feels the pressure of compromise regularly. As the artistic director of Theatre SKAM, a company he and three other artists co-founded in 1995, and as a playwright, Gladstone has found himself pursuing a career that, while deeply satisfying, is notoriously uncertain.
"I think it’s part of the human condition that, whatever the deal that you make, there’s always going to be compromise and your not being sure that the compromise is worth it," he says. "And through that all the human stuff kicks in. It would be nice to know where my next paycheque will come from next week and not feel like that’s a frivolous wish as an artist."
There has always been an uneasy relationship between wants and means, finding perhaps its most profound expression in the eventual collapse of the hippie subculture under the weight of mounting pressures to conform and succeed. Now, even as we tell children they can be whatever they want, we temper that optimism with the unspoken understanding that undiluted idealism rarely survives the journey to adulthood. It’s a bittersweet pragmatism that Gladstone faces with no small amount of ambivalence, both through his play and as he speaks on the phone from rain-soaked Vancouver.
"It’s more realistic," he says of that pragmatism. "But what I wonder about is if it’s possible to achieve real change with that kind of attitude." |
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