>>PREVIEW
SITTING ON PARADISE
Runs until May 5
Alberta Theatre Projects
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
"I don’t feel any older or wiser."
Time may go on, but when asked to compare himself to the Eugene Stickland of the early ’90s, who was then the new playwright-in-residence for Alberta Theatre Projects, one of Calgary’s most colourful playwrights feels no growing pains.
In fact, it has been almost 11 years since Stickland’s second play for ATP, Sitting on Paradise, premiered on the Martha Cohen stage in 1996. Now enjoying a second run as the final production of ATP’s mainstage season, the play is an established hit whose examination of the intersection of materialism and spirituality still resonates in Calgary.
In 2004, Stickland’s tenure at ATP ended with All Clear, his final production with playRites. In his 10 years as the company’s in-house playwright, he had regularly contributed to the company’s annual new works festival in addition to working with developing student playwrights in the Student Writers Group. While his first play for the company, the Governor General’s Award-nominated Christmas comedy Some Assembly Required, brought him rapid success, the second came with more difficulty.
"I had to realize that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing; I had never been taught in my MFA (at York University) to craft the well-made play," he recalls. "We were hucking volleyballs at each other to Latin music, that was my tradition."
At the time, Stickland and ATP’s artistic director, Bob White, were preoccupied with deaths in their own families – White’s mother and Stickland’s father – and assumed that the next play they would create together would be influenced by their mourning. In fact, the result would not be produced until 1998 with A Guide to Mourning.
The inspiration for Sitting on Paradise, the play that would cement Stickland’s status as ATP’s playwright-in-residence and, more broadly, his reputation as an Albertan playwright, came simply when Stickland and his wife at the time, Carrie Schiffler, were searching for a couch. As a fresh Calgary migrant, it was shopping, not mourning, that made him a Calgary staple.
"We ended up going to this bizarre situation where an oil executive and his wife showed us their couch in a well-appointed home and made more of it than you would expect for a simple transaction," recalls Stickland.
With White intrigued by the image of an affluent couple reluctantly relinquishing one of their treasured material possessions, Stickland set about building a play around that single notion. Adding the spiritual conceit of new age, machismo-laden asceticism, setting it against the resistance of the upwardly mobile and already wealthy, he premiered Sitting on Paradise as a staged reading in the 1995 playRites Festival.
Centring on a would-be naturalist named Roy (Stephen Hair) whose guru (Christopher Hunt) teaches a brand of outdoors testosterone worship that soon runs afoul of Roy’s materialistic wife, Dotty (Maureen Thomas), the play is essentially a bipolar brawl between the spiritual and material possessions. Eventually finding an uneasy compromise in the sale of one of the couple’s many couches, the battle between Roy’s new worldview and his wife’s unchanging one is joined by a young couple, Warren (Joel Smith) and Kelly (Adrienne Smook), who soon find themselves embroiled in the battle on opposite sides.
It’s a dualism that Stickland says accurately captured his own philosophical leanings long before he first realized their shape himself. Returning to his Christian faith in the intervening years, he says that his own exploration through the play was completely instinctive, driven more by the necessities of his characters than moralizing.
"I always worry about a young playwright talking about going to a library to research. That’s probably the wrong place to research," he says, adding, "Maybe I’m just lazy."
In fact, laziness is refreshingly absent from the play itself. Though its premise seems to set up a relatively simple morality tale about the pitfalls of materialism, the script is actually equally sensitive to (or harshly critical of) the motivations of both the spiritual and the material. In a city constantly in the throes of its ambivalence toward the oil money that funds it, the conflict couldn’t be more appropriate.
"On the one hand we love the rich folks who write a cheque and come to the openings, but on the other hand they’re not always generous in terms of understanding the world they live in and their difficulties," says Stickland. "And that goes back to F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are not a lot of writers who have written about the rich sympathetically."
Though Sitting on Paradise may be a look back for Stickland, his work continues to be produced across the country. This season brings a full-length production of his one-act Closer and Closer Apart to Edmonton’s Theatre Network, as well as the promise of a premiere during next year’s Ground Zero Theatre season with Writer’s Block. And while one of Calgary’s most famous playwrights may not take too well to the intervening decade, he concedes there’s at least one inevitability just the same.
"I am being ironic when I say I’m not any wiser," says Stickland. "I am, you can’t help it." |
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