>>PREVIEWS
HARVEST
Runs until April 14
Lunchbox Theatre
(Bow Valley Square)
MY MOROCCO
Opens April 4
Ground Zero Theatre and One Yellow Rabbit
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
When playwright Ken Cameron found himself at an impasse, he began looking at his own family for inspiration. Between a marijuana grow operation and the death of his sister, the former executive director of the Alberta Playwrights’ Network found a pair of stories that are now being presented simultaneously on two Calgary stages, Lunchbox Theatre and Ground Zero Theatre’s Groundbreaker series.
"There was a kind of synchronicity at work," he says. "I was like, ‘Jeez, I really need an idea to land in my lap,’ and then it does in the most horrible way possible, in both cases."
Separated by a year, the two distinct incidents that provoked Cameron’s Harvest and My Morocco resulted in two equally distinct plays. The inspiration for Harvest, a two-hander with its actors playing multiple roles, came from his parents’ misfortune as the victims of a marijuana grow-op after renting out their former farmhouse, the home where Cameron grew up.
"That’s the tragic flaw," he says. "That (Allan and Charlotte, Harvest’s protagonists) rent the house out to the people who do the pot growing, because if they’d sold the whole (acreage) there wouldn’t be a problem. There’s a reluctance to move on, and that’s what got them in trouble."
Where Harvest sets its focus on Cameron’s parents, My Morocco, a one-person play that Cameron recently toured on the 2006 summer Fringe circuit, focuses more on Cameron himself. Based on the death of his sister while he and his fiancée were one week into a two-week vacation in Morocco, the Lunchbox-commissioned play is personal exploration set against the exoticism and occasional absurdity of an unfamiliar country.
In both plays, says Cameron, personal commitment has been an essential part of developing the works, a process that can often take several years.
"When you write about things that are from a personal place, you end up being committed to it differently," he observes. "The story matters a lot more, it’s a lot more truthful. When it’s from your own life, a lot of that distance that you might otherwise approach a work with disappears."
For Cameron, that same distance was also essential in approaching both events. While both Harvest and My Morocco include comic elements, the substance of their stories began as genuinely traumatic events. The process of bringing them to the stage, then, offered its own cathartic benefits, despite Cameron’s insistence that neither play is "drama therapy."
"The (events of Harvest) were not fun, they left my parents very upset and scared," says Cameron. "Similarly with My Morocco, be careful what you wish for. It’s unfortunate that the events turned out the way they did, but at the same time, now it’s about, ‘Do I simply curl up in a ball or do I try to process this information?’ Eventually I decided to share it with others in both instances.
"As a writer I tend to think as much in terms of words on the page as I do out loud," he adds. "I understand how I feel by writing it out, so the act of writing both of these plays helped me process the emotional trauma that I was going through. The act of writing them was how I processed the information, how I came to terms with the death of my sister and how I came to process a new way of looking at my parents."
In trying to find the distance that both subjects ironically defied, both plays enjoyed extensive workshops, Harvest as part of Lunchbox’s Petro-Canada Stage One series and My Morocco with Ghost River’s Doug Curtis and the production’s director, Andy Curtis. Even in My Morocco, whose events are essentially autobiographical, Cameron took liberties with particulars, calling the play’s protagonist, who shares his name, an essentially fictional persona. While both plays draw from extremely personal visions of the playwright’s life, neither are verbatim accounts. Even personal inspiration, notes Cameron, is no substitute for theatrical panache.
"In life there may have been three or four things that happened in three or four cities over a few days, but to have a dramatic impact you compress them into a single moment," says Cameron of My Morocco. "There were things that took several months to sink in (in Canada), but because it’s about Morocco, you need to sandwich that whole emotional journey into one week.
"There are a number of landmines in writing autobiographical plays. One of those is hanging on too tightly to the facts as they happened," he adds. "You have to be prepared to fictionalize while remaining true to the essence of what it was." |
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