Lindsay Burns makes a fine statue. Next public art installation?

DETAILS

Pack of Lies presented by Ghost River Theatre
Pumphouse Theatre
Thursday, October 15 - Saturday, October 24

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Actor-playwright Lindsay Burns is something of an anomaly in Calgary, a city where new residents have swelled our population to over one million with startling speed. Born and raised in Cowtown, she was here for the crash of the early ’80s, the Bre-X gold rush and the Stock exchange’s Black Monday in 1987 —booms and busts that changed the city, if not enough to prevent their recurrence. Produced by Ghost River Theatre, her latest show, Pack of Lies, brings that continuity to bear on the current bust, blending images of the present with memories of the past.

“The city gets on a bit of a roll, thinking that this is never going to end, [that] there will always be a job across the street if you’re not happy with what we do now,” says Burns. “And on the way up we tell ourselves ‘It’s never going to end,’ and on the way down we say, ‘Our best days are behind us,’ and I don’t believe either.”

Instead, she says Pack of Lies is an attempt to point out important questions (like, “Are you comfortable with the documents that have your signature?”) about the way the boom affected Calgarians without wagging fingers.

Broken up by those questions, Pack of Lies takes the form of a city tour that alternates between Burns’ recollections of the bust in 1982, the year of her high school graduation and the fictionalized stories of the current boom and bust. As in Burns’s previous pieces, the play is told from several characters’ perspectives, including an anxious children’s tour guide and a Croatian immigrant. Awash in specific, local references — street names and establishments such as The Ranchman’s Club all make appearances — the play is specifically aimed at Calgary’s experience of booms and bust, both then and, more importantly, now.

“This time it’s my version of the 100-mile diet,” says Burns. “[It’s about] what’s going on right now, which I think is quite unique.”

“I think Calgary wants to believe that we’re on our way back and that it’s all going to be OK, but in some ways that doesn’t acknowledge the fact that we keep doing this to ourselves.”

For Ghost River co-artistic director David Van Belle, who is also directing and dramaturging the production, that immediacy is what defines the piece. Commissioned in 2007 before Van Belle and Eric Rose jointly took the reins of the company, the play has seen its share of revamps, including a change as recently as one week ago that saw four videotaped tour “stops” dropped in favour of live performance.

“The nice thing about performance creation is it’s not like we had a script two years ago and then we produced that script,” says Van Belle. “Elements are there and they continue to develop and be informed by events that go along.”

“You have to be brave in order to work on new work because you need to be open to change and willing to risk changing your work in order to meet the needs of your time and place.”

Despite the last-minute change, the play still includes multimedia components, including archival CBC news clips and still images from around the city. Drawing on a specific set of shared memories and a shared sense of our city, the intent is to create a familiar picture and not, says Van Belle, an indictment of a particular group of people. “I don’t think [Pack of Lies] is an indictment,” he says. “I think Lindsay’s strength is that she writes really human characters, [and] I think they’re struggling but it’s not a world of idiots. It’s not a satire on contemporary Calgary life.”

As in her previous shows, Dough: The Politics of Martha Stewart Story and The Vajayjay Monologues, Burns creates the world of bust-era Calgary entirely by herself. In fact, while she had originally intended to add a pair of additional performers for Pack of Lies, Burns found herself drawn back toward the form, drawing her characters from those around her. The desperate character of one former businessman, for example, came from Burns’ time working at the information desk of a Calgary Public Library.

“A man came up, he was in his mid-50s in a nice wool coat but looking a little dissheveled, looking for a copy of What Color is Your Parachute? [a job-hunting book],” recalls Burns. “And it was obvious that he’d lost his job in the last 12 hours and someone had given him that piece of advice and he was clinging to that book like it was going to be his life raft.”

In any look back on Calgary’s economic roller coaster, it seems that familiarity is the name of the game. And if the promises of past booms really were a pack of lies, points out a self-incriminating Burns, they were lies that nobody with a history in this city was entirely immune to.

“There’s going to be lots of people saying ‘I didn’t live large during the boom, I wasn’t driving the Maserati down the back roads outside of Calgary’,” she says. “But we all spent the $400 [Ralph Bucks] cheques and I bet most of us can’t remember what we spent them on.”