play

Bye Bye Birdie
Book by Michael Stewart; Music by Charles Strouse; Lyrics by Lee Adams
Director Shel Piercy
Music Director Kevin Michael Cripps; Choreographer Shelley Stewart-Hunt
Theatre Under the Stars,
Malkin Bowl, Stanley Park
Alternating nights July 12 to August 20th, 2010

Vancouver, BC: It is summertime in Vancouver - sort of - and Theatre Under The Stars is back for its 65th season.  After an early meal at Le Bistro de Paris, we were looking forward to the opening night of Bye Bye Birdie, which runs alternate evenings with one of my favorite musicals, Anything Goes, which is packed with songs  by the fabulous Cole Porter.

It's easy to see why Bye Bye Birdie is a favorite musical for high school and college shows. Inspired by the 1958 drafting of Elvis Presley into the US army,  the storyline centers around rock and roll idol Conrad Birdie (Erik Gow), who is about to go overseas to serve his time in the army. His agent Albert (Daniel White) worries that this is the end of his business. His girlfriend / secretary Rosie  (Lalainia Lindbjerg) who wants Albert to give up the music business, marry her and became an English teacher, has an idea for one last publicity stunt to make them rich. Conrad will record Albert's new song, One Last Kiss, and one lucky teenage fan, Kim (Amy Jean Mcelwain) from small-town Sweet Apple, Ohio, will be kissed by Conrad on the Ed Sullivan show. Of course nothing works out as planned but everything turns out happily in the end. 

The Creators: One-on-one with Emil Sher, author of Mourning Dove and Hana's Suitcase

Among the many excellent productions in Vancouver in 2008, Pacific Theatre’s staging of Emil Sher’s Mourning Dove touched my heart and mind most deeply. I loved the play and the restrained sensitivity with which the writer addressed the unfolding of a tragedy that no parent should ever have to experience. When I realized that Sher was also the author of Hana’s Suitcase, another very moving play that I had recently read, I was compelled to read more of his work. These experiences raised a whole lot of questions that I wanted to pose to the playwright. To my delight, Emil Sher generously agreed to be interviewed for “Creators and Communicators,” the section of  Theatre Seen that highlights the creative artists that “make theatre.”

One-on-one with Emil Sher

Emil, I note that your undergraduate degree from McGill was in English and that you taught English in Botswana before returning to do an MFA in Creative Writing at Concordia. Was it your experiences in Botswana that stimulated your desire to write or were you compelled to write from childhood?

Initially, I had contemplated becoming an actor, and focused on theatre as an undergraduate at McGill. But during my time there I became increasingly drawn to the written word, and wrote a fair bit for the McGill Daily, the school newspaper. And as much as I enjoyed journalism (I still find creative non-fiction very gratifying), there is something about the latitude of fiction that always appealed (and I use the word ‘fiction’ loosely to include work for stage and screen). I went to Botswana naively believing I would have time to write, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to write about (never a good start for a writer). I soon discovered that teaching is a craft like any other, and required substantial amount of time, energy and care if I was going to do it right. I knew the only way I would be able to write meaningfully was to immerse myself in an environment where I would have to write on a regular basis, and graduate school was the ideal opportunity to do just that. I focused on fiction (my thesis was a collection of short stories) and made a decision upon graduating that I would write in different genres, as the spirit moved me and as opportunities surfaced.

You have written plays for both radio and stage. Could you comment on how your approach differs between writing for radio - theatre of the mind - versus a play that is intended to be physically staged?

Every genre of writing comes with its own toolbox, and I’m still learning how to take advantage of the tools at my disposal. Indeed, I’ve come to see the writing life as a lifelong apprenticeship. What I love about radio is how the narrative is distilled to sound, or silence: a voice, a sound effect, or a moment when nothing is said, when nothing is heard, and yet it is a moment that speaks volumes. Radio has been called “theatre of the mind” for good reason, and it insists that the audience actively engage with the story. Engaging an audience or a reader is essential to how I write, regardless of the genre or the audience I am writing for (which is sometimes as young as pre-schoolers). It is this objective that dictates my approach to radio dramas and stage plays. With radio, I’m more conscious of how dialogue is the foundation upon which the story rests. There is nothing else to create the world of a radio play but for sound, human or otherwise. And so the challenge is to make sure each word and sound can be justified. The intimacy of the medium demands it. With a stage play, I feel the text is but one part of a larger narrative. The set, the lighting design, the very presence of an actor significantly alters our interpretation of the story being told. When I write a play I’m mindful of the varied elements that will ultimately shape it, and am inspired by the collective energies that fuel a stage work. And while it takes a team effort to create a radio play, the process feels more contained, compared to the open-ended development of a stage play, which is often defined – and enriched – by the detours that surface during roundtable, workshop discussions about the text, generating questions that challenge me to justify my creative choices, revisit them, or reject them.

Have you ever directed any of your own plays?

I’ve yet to direct one of my own plays, and feel more drawn to directing a film. I’m especially drawn to the editing process. I said as much to a talk I once gave to a group of theatre students, and one student remarked that editing is not unlike writing, in that it speaks to the importance of structure. It’s often said that writing is rewriting, and that’s not dissimilar to sitting in an editing suite, rearranging a narrative so that it’s a structurally sound as it can be.

As a working contemporary Canadian playwright do you always present a completed script or do you ever work with a director as a dramaturge to massage and shape the script on its feet?

When it comes to a new play, I offer directors a completed script insofar as it’s a draft we can build upon. Initially, the conversation is between myself and the director, who may or may not double as a dramaturge. In some instances, the three of us – playwright, director, dramaturge – have discussed a script in its formative stages. That process is further enriched through workshops, where the script is given a reading by actors who may have their own insights to offer. I see this process as very fluid: changes are made to the script that usually stem from questions posed by the director, an actor, or myself. Scenes are dropped, or rearranged or cut. It takes several drafts before I’m satisfied, and often there’s a substantial rewrite somewhere along the way. My guiding principle when developing a script with collective input can be distilled to a simple question: “Does it serve the story?” Not an actor’s ego or a director’s agenda, but the story.

Or from another perspective: When you hand over your work to a director do your scripts feel complete? Or do you find that as you watch them unfold, there are changes you want to make or other stories that grow out of what you see on stage?

Is a script ever complete, or completely finished? There comes a time when the creative process has run its course and it’s time to let go. There’s always the liability that a script can take too long to gestate, that it can be overwritten and overworkshopped. That said, I have made script changes from one production to the next for all my plays. There is always a word or a phrase that can be tweaked or parsed, and I find this aspect of playwriting very gratifying: the script isn’t static. It can become stronger with each successive staging, and thus become a different play each time.