The playwright and his list…
Marcus reviews one of his to-do lists.
After two weeks at the McLoughlin Gardens, Marcus sent in his first report. This is a rare glimpse of a playwright at work, juggling many projects at once, while also reflecting on the impact of current restrictions on actors, directors, and theatre companies. In a time when work, learning, and entertainment have mostly migrated to online platforms, what is being lost? What distinguishes live theatre from online performance?
Make yourself a cup of tea, or pour a glass of lemonade and enjoy reading this report from the McLoughlin Gardens’ first playwright-in-residence…
Marcus Youssef writes:
Week One
I had a few short-term deadlines that I wanted to get out of the way. In addition to the full-length pieces I’m writing I almost always have a few shorter commissions/articles on the go. Two were due at the end of the first week.
The first was a short, ten minute commission for an on-line festival the Arts Club Theatre is presenting in August. They asked all recent recipients of their Sliver Commissions (for a full-length play) to write and record a short piece of any kind – a script if you want, or something more conversational, for their Dialled Up Festival. I’ve been thinking a lot about theatre’s recent, somewhat panicked attempt to migrate online in the face of Covid’s shutdown of live performance venues. I have done some online work too, and not liked much of what I’ve done or seen. This is, in fact, what my piece is about – a kind of spoken essay about this moment, and what it means to be an artist whose practice depends on being in the room, in close proximity with others, both artists and audiences. For me it’s not only something we depend on. It’s actually at the heart of what I care about in the form: physical contact with others, and the cellular, unconscious information that is exchanged by humans (and all living creatures) when they are literally, physically, actually together. You can see the piece via this link: https://digital.artsclub.com/dialled-up
A writing studio with a view
Self-portrait of the writer at work in the shed at the McLoughlin Gardens…
The second piece I finished in Week One was also an on-line commission (there’s a lot of that these days), for Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, where I’m a playwright-in-residence. In the early Covid days they, like the Arts Club, commissioned short pieces from their resident playwrights. These were explicitly designed to be performed now, online, and a year from now, hopefully in person, at the Tarragon, in the Dupont area of Toronto – though who knows. After those were broadcast, the amazing U of T scholar Kathleen Gallagher approached the Tarragon and worked with them to commission the writers to write and record a 20 minute reflection/analysis about their pieces – what their process was, the thinking that went into it, how it unfolded. This will be used by Kathleen and other profs in their theatre classes, as a way of exploring how artists are responding the Covid moment, in their practice. I have thoroughly enjoyed doing this – we don’t often get the chance to reflect on something we’ve written in that way, and I find it helps clarify things for me, about process, about how I figure out what I care enough to write about.
Week One was also the last of an exciting series of online conversations I’ve been honoured to moderate with Canadian and Argentinian theatre artists. The series was produced by CAPACOA (the Canadian Arts Presenters umbrella organization), FIBA, the Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires (Argentina’s largest performing arts festival) and the Canadian embassy in Buenos Aires. Hosted by myself and the Artistic Director of FIBA, Federico Irazábal, and co-curated with the artistic director of Canadian Stage in Toronto, Brendan Healey, each conversation had a focus in relationship to theatre in the Covid era. The focus of this final conversation was “Defiance” and was between four artists, two Canadian, two Argentinian, for whom challenging the status quo has been central to their work for a long time. Very cool to do this from here, and get to show folks from around the world this remarkable residency space.
The English version hasn’t been released yet, but here’s a link to the Spanish version … Defiance.
Marcus continues:
I also completed rewrites for my most commercial (!) play, The Christmas Unicorn (a family holiday show!), which premiered at the Arts Club in Vancouver last December. The Centaur Theatre will produce it in Montreal next. It was originally scheduled for this holiday season but will instead (pandemic willing) happen there in 2021. We had done an online workshop the week before we left Vancouver and I implemented the rewrites from that. One of the great joys of having my plays produced more and more after the first production is it means I get a chance to implement what I have learned from the first production in subsequent, post-premiere drafts. It’s frankly impossible to truly know how a script for live performance does or doesn’t work before you get to experience it with a variety of audiences. Second and subsequent productions allow the playwright to employ the information that comes from that experience.
I also negotiated the rights for the latest production of my play for teenagers, Jabber in Germany. It’s having a remarkable life there. The German premiere by Berlin’s GRIPS Theatre in 2019 won the Ikarus prize, for outstanding production for young audiences in Berlin. It is now part of GRIPS’ repertoire and is produced there every year. In addition there are half a dozen other German productions, at state theatres across the country, from Nuremberg to Hamburg to Munich. The most recent to be announced is in the Frankfurt state theatre, as well as Vienna’s storied Burgtheater.
Week Two
This was almost entirely devoted to one project: the screenplay adaptation of my play (both co-written with my long-time collaborator James Long) Winners and Losers. Winners and Losers is a show Jamie and I both performed in and we toured for five years, to more than 20 cities across 12 countries in Europe and North America, including a five-week off-Broadway run at Soho Rep in New York City. Vancouver filmmaker Mina Shum optioned the rights and we have been writing a film adaptation with her for the last year or so. We spent all week working on the second draft, which we hoped to finish, but (sadly) we don’t think we have yet (sigh). We’ve added another day on Monday, but then I really need to turn my attention to the work that I am supposed to be doing while here. This is principally a first draft of the play I was calling Our Refugees but now I think might be called, Otherwise Occupied. This involves reviewing a pile of documentary research and then getting to work on the draft, which will take several weeks of mostly full-time work.
The other thing of note I did in Week Two was the first meeting with a bunch of students from the University of Windsor and Toronto-based director Mitchell Cushman. Mitchell’s company (Outside the March) and UW have commissioned me and three other writers to write short original zoom plays for their advanced acting students, to be entirely rehearsed and performed on zoom. I’m excited about this. It’s a chance to try to figure out how I can make intentional use of online platforms. It’s an opportunity to write specifically for actors. They are now busy making videos in response to a series of questions that Mitchell and I posed to them, about their Covid lives, about the reckoning around race that’s occurring across society, and their hopes and dreams for a very uncertain future.
Phew! A lot.
Xox, and in deep appreciation
Marcus