>>PREVIEW
WHILE MY MOTHER LAY DREAMING
Opens February 1
Ghost River Theatre and Shadow Theatre
Calgary Opera Centre
Calgary isn’t a city without a history but it does seem to be one with a short memory. Twenty years ago, bumper stickers pleaded: "Please Lord, let there be another boom and I promise not to piss it away." Today, nobody wants to put a bumper sticker on a brand new car.
"It’s the money, it’s the standard of life, the increase in the lifestyle, it’s having toys, it’s buying a future for your children," says Ghost River founder and artistic director Doug Curtis. "We keep burning up this precious commodity and there aren’t enough people stopping to say maybe we should slow down here."
Set in 1980, Curtis’s While My Mother Lay Dreaming begins during a brown, Chinook January at the height of Calgary’s last boom. In its opening lines, the play’s young protagonist, Bill, muses on chinooks, imagining the warming breezes as a kind of full moon that upsets everything from its natural order. His own group of friends, including a gentle giant named Harold and an irritable kid from Ajax named Darcy, have been brought together by a city attracting hundreds of new workers a day.
There is a palpable sense of imbalance in the sudden influx of new people coupled with the increasing affluence around native residents. Bill’s father, Victor, struggles to achieve the wealth he sees around him, while his wife, Peggy, tries to come to terms with her best friend’s suicide. There, in the familiar cityscape of chinook-melted snow, Bill and his friends seek out the usual staples of teenaged life – weed, beer and records – as they try to manage their own way through Calgary’s boom.
"I like to give characters acne, eye patches. People live with those things," says Curtis. "They live with cancer, neurological diseases, divorce, suicide and racism. Big, unfriendly things, and people manage. But there’s an enormous field to storytelling in just managing."
Born in Edmonton, Curtis grew up in Calgary’s Chinook Park and vividly remembers a snowless Christmas in 1980, playing touch football outside. Using the image, Curtis began work on While My Mother Lay Dreaming five years ago, completing it at the insistence of director John Hudson for the 2006-07 season and its Edmonton premiere in October.
Curtis originally left Calgary as an actor for Toronto, but returned after experiencing "what I thought would be the worst theatrical job I would ever get," opting to found his own theatre company. This season will mark Ghost River’s 10th anniversary, making its staging of a uniquely Calgarian play with a historical bent especially appropriate. With the theatre scene booming along with the rest of the city, for better or worse, Curtis doesn’t regret the decision to return.
"Calgary’s been really good to me," he says. "I made the decision to come back because I knew I could start a theatre company here and it seemed right. The city really was about possibilities."
Those possibilities are what both define and frustrate the characters of While My Mother Lay Dreaming. More than simply the catalyst that brings them all together, the boom is a force that fundamentally affects each character.
"The boom has definitely changed them," he says of his characters. "The boom is all about possibility. When you get right down to it people will get tired if they feel overworked, but they’re wide awake when they’re dreaming about the possibilities."
Now, as the oil sands provide the same boundless optimism, opportunities for change seem to be everywhere. Asked if the intervening 27 years have changed Calgary, however, Curtis offers a definitive "no."
"Just the music and the drugs," he adds. |
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