>>PREVIEW
CONFESSIONS OF A PAPERBOY
Opens March 20
Ghost River Theatre
Vertigo Studio Theatre (Tower Centre)
Before The Calgary Albertan became the more familiar Calgary Sun, Doug Curtis was already an aspiring businessman with a canvas sack and a paper route.
"I was a 10-year-old entrepreneur," says Curtis. Of founding his own theatre company, Ghost River Theatre, he says, "the die was cast then."
Almost 30 years later, Curtis and Ghost River are following up the semi-autobiographical As My Mother Lay Dreaming, a bittersweet look back on Calgary’s ’80s boom, with another look back on Calgary’s bygone days, this time over the handlebars of a bicycle.
Confessions of a Paperboy is a one-boy show about the travails of a 10-year-old paperboy navigating a surreal suburban world of distinctive household smells and supernatural events. From an improbable early morning resurrection to the persistent voice of God in his young head, Christopher (Jennie Esdale) negotiates an evolving sense of self with a supernatural twist, alongside parents, customers and the Devil himself.
While Curtis’s childhood in Calgary is the basis for the Confessions, it was a vacation in Mexico that started the creative wheels turning. Hoping to write a one-person play, Curtis instead found himself dealing with a manuscript that burgeoned to 176 pages over the course of two weeks, more a novel than a script. Curtis was actually inspired by the similarities between his early risings in Mexico and those from his time as a paperboy.
"I remember being in Mexico, every morning those phenomenal sunrises across the Caribbean," he recalls. "That invoked in me the memory. I was amazed at the things that I was pulling out of thin air."
In fact, says Curtis, looking back on his own life has become the theme of this year’s season for Ghost River. It’s a focus due in no small part to its founder’s battle with early-onset Parkinson’s that served as the inspiration for last year’s musical, The Alan Parkinson’s Project.
"I need to know that I nailed something with my growing up, I need to know that I was able to capture that moment exactly as it was," says Curtis. "I don’t think it’s uncommon for writers to go back to their communities and write about them."
Directed by former Workshop West artistic director Ron Jenkins and featuring an original soundscape by David Rhymer, the production is still in the process of its own adaptation, paring down Curtis’s original 176-page novella into a workable 75-minute one-person show. Along with stage manager Rikki Schlosser, Esdale and Jenkins have been trying to re-work the original text after an early cut by Curtis motivated more by a desire for succinctness than a holistic edit.
"Doug had taken the play and he goes ‘chunk!’ and he had cut it to 100 pages, and my fear coming into the project was that Doug will cut the heart out of the thing," says Jenkins. "So we went back to the 176-page version, and what we’re doing is taking the stuff Doug and I have talked about from the get-go. It’s about getting to the heart of the thing and that’s what we’ve been doing."
"I felt like I was doing more of a magic act than writing a play," admits Curtis. "‘Watch me pull this out, see it fall down.’"
The result will premiere in the intimate space of Vertigo’s Studio Theatre, building its world as gradually as the process of the adaptation itself. In contrast to Christopher’s youthful role in the greater world, Jenkins describes the play’s setting in terms of a larger-than-life figure.
"We’re going to build (Christopher’s) community," says Jenkins. "Shoeboxes that are beautifully put together, show the houses, try to build the paperboy’s suburbs and his community, so you’re going to see a scale model of where he goes and whose house is what so he can give the audience reference points of who lives where – build the community so that he’s kind of Godzilla in it."
Christopher’s colossal status in his own community notwithstanding, both Curtis and Jenkins remain committed to the changing nature of the play’s central character, a child still finding his place in the world. While Esdale may construct his neighbourhood in a literal sense, the paperboy’s world still offers potential.
"It’s about that innocence, about anything being possible," says Jenkins. |
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