James McClure
James McClure is an award-winning writer, journalist, scholar and undergraduate instructor. In 2018, James’ newest play, Glass Closets, was chosen to be workshopped at Mount Allison University as part of the 2018 Playwrights’ Colony hosted by the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre. ‘Glass Closets’ is his second Fundy Fringe Festival production. In 2017, he wrote and directed ‘Faking It,’ a coming-of-age comedy that was also one of three winners in the Saint John Theatre Company’s playwrighting competition ‘Script Happens.’
James also writes poems, short stories and novels. In 2018, his unpublished YA novel Playing like a Girl was the first runner-up for the David Adams Richards Prize awarded by the Writers Federation of New Brunswick. Judge Michelle Butler Hallett praised the manuscript as “polished YA fiction” and noted that “the first-person narration is especially skillful.”
James currently works as the editor of Civilized.life – a cannabis culture and lifestyle website. Previously, he pursued a doctoral degree in English at the University of Ottawa, specializing in Shakespearean drama.
Glass Closets on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/212114789478703/
Transcript
Welcome to episode 143 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre, featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.
As I mentioned in my last episode, I’m in Saint John, New Brunswick, for the Fundy Fringe. I start performances of my play, The Commandment, on Tuesday, August 21st, and I’m super excited to perform this play at a new fringe. As I travel, Saint John now, Halifax next week, I’ll be talking to people at the fringe festivals I’m at, so I look forward to hearing those interviews.
Also, on the Saturdays, watch for the fringe roundups from both the Fundy and Halifax fringe festivals. If you want to drop me a line, you can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at stageworthypod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. If you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at philrickaby, and my website is philrickaby.com. My guest is James McClure. His play, Glass Closets, premieres at the Fundy Fringe Festival starting August 21st.
I’m just gonna jump right in. So, for the Fundy Fringe, you were doing a show that you wrote called Glass Closets. Can you tell me a little bit about that show? Yeah, so Glass Closets is a play about a couple.
One is from the city, one is from a small town in Ontario. One is out of the closet, the other one is closeted. So Lance is trying to get his closeted boyfriend Morgan to finally come out and tell his family who he is, but Morgan keeps refusing to do so, and his explanations get more and more elaborate and ridiculous until we finally find out the real reason, and that’s something I want to tease out.
Oh, of course, of course. The real reason, yeah, and they’re both hiding something is the idea. That’s why it’s Glass Closets as opposed to Glass Closet, yeah.
I’d not heard the term Glass Closet before. Is that a common term? I don’t think it’s too, too common. I definitely didn’t invent it.
I stumbled upon it when I was researching gay culture and looking at slang commonly used in the subculture, and I saw Glass Closet, and it’s a term for anyone who is still in the closet, but it’s just so blatantly obvious that they’re not really hiding anything, and yeah, exactly. I thought it was a beautiful term. It’s a great metaphor, not just for that, but for anything, because the more I think about this play, the more I think, you know, a lot of us, I don’t want to say all of us, but a lot of us are hiding stuff in plain sight, and we think we’re okay with it, and we’re not.
I remember when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, I used to smoke, and I smoked behind my mom’s back, and she once caught me with cigarette wrappers in my pocket. She was like, what’s this? And I said, oh, my friends were going to litter, so I put them in my pocket, and she bought it, and I think it’s one of those things where, you know, I want her to believe the lie, she wants to believe the lie, so we just kind of go along with it. Yeah, I mean, as a former smoker, I know that most people who you think don’t know, know, because you don’t know how easy it is to smell it, so your mom probably knew and just didn’t want to know.
Exactly, yeah, there’s so many things you don’t want to know, so that’s Morgan’s case. Morgan’s family very much should know, and not like any stereotypical sense, but he keeps inviting this guy Lance to family functions like Easter dinner, marriages, that kind of stuff, weddings, and there’s so many giveaways in terms of his life and his story and the stuff that he’s going through. There’s so many tells that they should be picking up on, but they don’t, and so Lance is convinced that they’re just, you know, like my mom with the cigarette packages, they don’t want to believe it, even though it’s blatantly obvious.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where did the inspiration for this show come from? The inspiration’s actually terrible. Actually, before you guys start, I think that sometimes that’s the best inspiration, is something that’s really terrible.
Yeah, I remember, so I worked on this with a dramaturg, and I told him where the idea came from, and I definitely got the sense that he was like, not impressed, doesn’t sound, it’s not a good origin story, so I’ll tell you why I decided to write it after I tell you the origin story, but the origin story is just, for my creative process, I just like to let my mind run, and then when something funny comes along, I’ll grab it and tease it out and see where it goes, so honestly, the idea for this play came when I was in my kitchen, I was eating some Cheetos, and I thought it would be really funny if someone got something, I’m just going to say something intimate, stuck in another person’s zipper, and that slapstick situation where they’re caught in someone else’s zipper, how do you handle that? And so I started to think, well, how would they get in that situation? What is a plausible scenario? And it all sort of came from that, so there’s a lot of, you know, humour in the play, it’s not completely slapstick, but it did start as that slapstick thing, so that’s the awful origin for it. The reason I developed it, though, is because I remember I was growing up in St. Thomas, Ontario, and I had a lot of friends who were gay, but they could never come out in St. Thomas, Ontario, because it was so conservative, vehemently heteronormative, that it just was not safe for them to come out, so they all came out when they went to London, Ontario, or they went to Toronto, you know, bigger cities, and that sort of thing, and I feel it’s still very much that way there, and I have a feeling that every province has at least a couple small towns, I think, where it’s still very not acceptable, so that’s why I developed the idea. The interesting thing is, and the people who came out when they went away, I mean, did they just come out to people they know, or did they, once they were moved away, did they come out to their families, or? Yeah, their families as well.
Some at least wanted to come out to his family beforehand, so it was kind of like the family, I think, said, you know, it’s probably in your best interest if we can kind of keep this low-key until you leave the community, because they know what it’s like there, and they don’t want to see anything bad happen, yeah, which is just, you know, so many layers of awful, you know, where we’re kind of complicit, but, you know, it’s with good intentions that they try to hide these secrets, and I don’t really know, I was, so they were friends of mine, they’re Facebook friends of mine, if I saw them on the street, we definitely recognized each other, but I wasn’t actually there for, like, their coming out or anything, so I don’t know if it was, like, a big thing where they kind of, like, told everyone, and this is before Facebook, when they, when they came out too, so they couldn’t make it that kind of event, but it was definitely one of those glass closet moments where it’s like, yeah, we all kind of figured, right, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, some people did, and the people who didn’t were mad, like, I remember one guy, and it was awkward, because, again, it’s another one of those types of friends, like, it’s not a real friend, but it’s someone I see in high school quite a bit, and it’s a small town, I remember one guy was just angry, just irrationally angry over this, and I thought, wow, what a weird thing to get angry about. Yeah, but in those small towns, I mean, that’s, in those places where it’s, it’s not an acceptable thing, I mean, anger is a thing that happens, not to excuse it, because it’s not excusable, but it’s like, that’s the reaction, and you know, it’s funny, because I think that that kind of anger often is based in misogyny, because the person who is feeling that anger is suddenly angry that somebody that they know might have looked at them in the way that they may look at somebody that they are interested in. Yeah, I hear that, yeah, yeah, I definitely think that’s common, and this one person in particular that I’m thinking of, he was a strange case, because it was at a party when he found out, and he said, I can’t believe that guy’s gay, when people used to pick on him, I stuck up for him, and told him, no, he’s not gay, and stuff like that, so he felt weirdly betrayed, that he, as far as he saw, went to bat for this guy, and then what he went to bat for turned out to be false, so he, you know, under false pretence, stuck up for him, so it’s another one of those sticky situations where it’s like, he did the right thing defending this guy, but he did it for all the wrong reasons.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that’s how messed up a small town can get, yeah. Well, yeah, so you told me about the quote-unquote horrible origin of this play Glass Closets, but what is it that stood out for you about this scenario that made it grow into something more than just a slapstick moment? It’s definitely like looking at the emotional development of the characters, so we go in, and we are told that one character is living a lie, but then we find out every character on stage is living a lie, and I like when you can have that kind of thematic unity, different shades of the same theme, and I think it’s a theme that resonates with people, because if we’re not living a lie to some extent, then we know people who are, people who are trying to fool us, or fool themselves, or fool everyone.
So I was really interested in that development, and then there’s another twist, so we find out what finally makes Morgan come out, but then there’s another twist with his boyfriend Lance, and his boyfriend Lance is hiding something that’s even more devastating than Morgan’s revelation, yeah. So that’s what I really liked, I like playing with that, and the fun thing about those sorts of themes is that you can’t just, you don’t want to be like M. Night Shyamalan, and just like have a huge twist at the end, you don’t see coming, so I had to tease it out, and that’s really, it’s fun, but it’s aggravating to tease it out just enough, so that the audience doesn’t throw up their hands and think, well you’ve just completely changed the characters, right? Well that’s the tricky thing, I mean that’s the, that’s the, the thing that you don’t want, is the M. Night Shyamalan, oh for fuck’s sake, you know? Exactly, yeah. Yeah.
So James, what is your theatre origin story? As a kid who grew up in St. Thomas, and now finds himself out east, what, what, what drew you to theatre? When I was a kid, we were always doing plays at school, I did plays at Beavers, my grandfather was very interested in drama, my grandma was interested in drama, I grew up with them, living in their house in Toronto for the first 10 years before moving to St. Thomas, so there’s always this kind of theatre around, and I remember some of my favourite field trips were when we would get to go out and see shows, so I was always very, very much immersed in theatre, and loved it, and liked doing acting at first, but then when I turned about 12 or 13, I started to get really interested in writing, and so that’s more of my thing now. Throughout high school, did community theatre and whatnot, but didn’t start writing plays until I was in undergrad at Western, and then started doing some one-act festivals, and building up a bit of a resume that way, went on to do a doctoral degree at uOttawa, studied Shakespeare, that sort of thing, so theater’s been kind of like a through line, I would say, you know, despite living in four different provinces and numerous different cities, theatre is one of those things that’s been consistent for me, so it’s very much a place that feels like home. Right.
What is it that drew you to writing? Ah, that’s a really good question. You know, I think it’s just having that wandering mind, you know, when I was young, I would just do really weird stuff without any idea of like why I was doing it or where it was going, so I remember when I was like, I think I was 11 or 12, and my sister found, she wanted to record something on a blank tape, so yeah, this is dating myself, but yeah, she was listening to radio, and she wanted to make a tape of something, and so I been doing radio shows for fun with fictional characters, and it was just something I did like for fun just in the off time, and then she started saying, well, you should like do something with that, you should write scripts or something, so I thought, oh yeah, that’d be fun, but I think if like if that had never happened or if no one had noticed me writing, I think I would just be like in a room somewhere writing just for myself, just because it’s kind of, it’s an obsession, you know, just cannot do it, I guess. Well, it’s interesting because I know, you know, for me as a writer, I think some of the earliest things that I wrote were plays, and like when I was a kid, and that sort of like led to my default when I’m having an idea is this is a play, and if it’s not, I find out a little later after I tried to make it into a play.
Do you, was writing like for theatre your thing, or did you write like short stories and other things like that? Oh, all kinds of stuff, yeah, all kinds of stuff. Started with short stories, actually, because when I was in the eighth grade, I got, you know, heavy into Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, that kind of stuff, so horror short stories were just great for that mindset back then. Didn’t write my first play until I was in a drama class.
Wrote lots of sketches before then, and did improv and stuff like that, but the idea of like having something long enough to be a play was really tough to figure out, and now looking back, it’s funny because I can kind of figure out where I think something should sit, so I still get lots of ideas, but like you said, you know, you have one idea, and you’re like, well, that’s, you know, that’s definitely a play, that’s a short story, that’s a novel, and my plays, they started off very much like long kind of sketches, so they were very farcical, very high concept, very silly, and then I took a break, actually, when I started doing the PhD, because that is very time-consuming, and when I came back, I just wanted more depth, so I stopped doing the farces and then started focusing more on plays that I find really funny. I hope other people find them very funny, but try to have a little bit more character development, have those arcs, have those, you know, moments of emotional, raw, emotional realization, and characters that are willing to really see themselves for a moment on stage, and that’s very consistent with this play, and the one that I did for Fundie Fringe last year, Faking It, yeah, where characters go through a ridiculous situation, but they come out of it realizing more about who they are and have a clearer sense of what they want from life and how they’re going to get it. I’m curious about your, you’re saying that you, you know, you wrote sketches initially, and then some of your longer plays were longer sketches.
What was your exposure to sketch? What was it that started you writing along the lines of sketch? Oh, watching way too much Saturday Night Live and Kids in the Hall, yeah, absolutely. My mom let me stay up late on Saturday so I could watch the latest SNL, and then watching Kids in the Hall back when it was still on. I can’t remember, I think it was earlier in the night, probably should have been later in the night because some of the stuff that the kids were doing was just… It probably should have been on later, but you know, the CBC is great for busting rules like that.
Exactly, yeah, so I would say, and then later on, because I would, you know, I kind of get obsessed. If anything I like, I have to know everything about it, you know, I got to read. So Wikipedia is great because it means I don’t have to, you know, spend as much time at the library trying to find out about these people, but I’d hear like people on SNL and Kids in the Hall talking about Monty Python, so I’d be like, oh, I gotta check that out, and you know, developing things based on that.
But yeah, I would say those were the two first moments. I remember really clearly the first time I saw Saturday Night Live. I was in a, going to a wedding in Minden, Ontario, and it was this little crappy motel that we were staying at, and there was nothing but bugs in the TV.
So when crushing bugs got boring, I put on the TV, and there’s no parents around because they were all drunk at the wedding, and so I thought, well, I just don’t have to go to sleep, and they had David Hyde Pierce on SNL. It was one of the seasons where they had Mike Myers, and Chris Farley, and Chris Rock, and you know, all those greats, and it was just like, I can’t remember laughing harder up to that point in a single night. It just hurt, but it was great.
I was completely enthralled by it. In terms of, like you were saying that you lived in a number of cities, what took you from Ontario out to Saint John New Brunswick? Actually, there’s a step in between where I went to Calgary. Okay.
I went from Ottawa, Ontario to Calgary because my partner at the time got a job with Hockey Canada, which, you know, you just can’t pass up being a Hockey fan. That was fantastic. So she did that for a couple of years, and then she wanted to be a little bit closer to her family in the Maritimes, so the two of us pulled up stakes, moved out here, and then a few months after that, we broke up, and I got work out here, so now I’m happy, but it is funny because Saint John is very much a community about roots, like everyone who is from here has been from here for generations, so it’s weird not really having much of an anchor here, you know, kind of floating.
And I mean, how is that in Saint John? Being somebody who’s from Ontario in Saint John New Brunswick, the fact that you haven’t been there for generations, is that a problem at times, or is that just a way that you have to learn to navigate? It is definitely a way that you have to learn to navigate, and there’s weird little things that pop up. I remember the first time I went to Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up a prescription, the pharmacist said, oh, you’re that come-from-away, and that’s a term I’d never heard of before. So I was like, is it okay if I’m here? Is there a list of people who are considered transients, and I’m going to wake up one night and be thrown in a tramp chair or something like that? But no, no, no, I found joining the theatre community here was really a big deal because it’s such a supportive, warm, friendly community, and very outgoing.
And I think it’s true what they say about Maritimes being really friendly, but people have known each other here for so long that it can be really hard to break into an existing network of friends. It’s kind of like, you have people who are like, I have been friends with these people since before I could remember, so I don’t know if I have the space to squeeze you in. That’s how it felt like sometimes until I met the theatre community, and they were just fantastic, took me right in.
So it’s been great since then. So the theatre community was really opening and welcoming? Absolutely, yeah. Very warm, very welcoming, and that was about a year in here.
So the first year was pretty lonely at times, just because I didn’t know anyone, spend Christmas by myself, which is misery, at least from my perspective. Never spend Christmas by yourself. And yeah, I might have moved away and had a negative impression of the place if I hadn’t met up with some of the theatre people.
And then after that, working at Civilized has really helped me break in with more circles around the community. So they’re a fantastic bunch. They’re great people, but it can, from a newcomer perspective, it can be kind of hard to get out there and to break into some social circles.
Well, you said you were there for a year and not knowing anybody. So what is it that kept you there before you found the theatre? Honestly, it is so cheap to live out here. It really is.
You’re from Toronto, so when you come out here, you’re going to be blown away at what people pay for rent. I was living in Calgary in a basement, paying $14.25, basement of an old rectory, and it was miserable. And out here, I’ve got way more for my apartment than I did in Calgary.
And it’s, you know, I got a beautiful view. And all these amenities close by, it’s really walkable. I love the fog through the city.
I love the old architecture. It’s such a hidden gem, I would say, Saint John’s. There’s so many.
I’ve been there quite a few times. And it’s one of my favourite places to be. There are buildings that I just love.
I’ll walk around and sort of be like, there’s this building that I love, and there’s this building that I love, because they have a lot of character. I like to feel the age of things. And so I like to feel old things.
And there’s plenty of that. And the first time I went to Saint John uptown was, I think, a dead thing. This was a number of years ago.
And as I’ve been going back, because I have friends out there, as I’ve been going back, I’ve seen uptown Saint John sort of revitalizing itself. And it was back last May for a wedding. And it was almost a completely different place.
Sure, there were still a few buildings that were unoccupied, but there’s like all these great restaurants that are opening up and all this stuff going on. So it’s a completely different place than when I first saw it. And it’s like, I just came here.
That first year I was here was like the last year of uptown being very much dead. And then the year when I started going out and make more friends and that kind of thing is when we got all these new pubs, and we got the bar arcade, and all these new festivals coming in. And now looking back, it’s incredible to think how much a city can change from 2014, when it was fairly desolate, and the nightlife was, you know, it was dismal at times.
And now it’s just such a vibrant city, but still affordable, which is, you know, still very much key. Well, that is key. That is very, that is pretty awesome.
This is going to be my first Fringe out East. And as somebody who’s done the Fundie Fringe before, how would you, have you done other Fringe festivals or just the Fundie Fringe? Oh yeah, London Fringe Festival. I didn’t have a show in it, but I went to it quite a bit.
And then Ottawa Fringe Festival, again, didn’t have a show in it. Fundie Fringe was the first one that I put a show into. But yeah, I’m familiar with London Fringe and Ottawa Fringe.
How would you characterize the Fundie Fringe? What is your favourite thing about it? Favorite thing about Fundie Fringe is that everything is so central, right? So you don’t really have to, you don’t at all have to get into a car to drive. And some other Fringe festivals, things are a bit more spread out. And because of that, it’s harder to see all the shows, but it’s also harder to hang out.
And I remember, so this will be my third Fringe and every Fringe I’ve been to, it’s almost like when you see the Olympics and you see the Olympic Village, that’s what it feels like to hang out with the artist afterwards. So you’ve just finished your show, you all come together. There’s lots of night events that people are doing.
You kind of congregate and you share war stories and victories and defeats and that kind of thing. And it’s so chill because you rarely get that chance to just sit in a room with fellow theatre practitioners and just talk about fun stuff, crazy stuff, nightmares and dreams and all those things. So the bonding experience, I think, is unparalleled by the other Fringe festivals.
Yeah. Well, that’s really awesome because one of the things that I’ve often found different, I mean, every Fringe is different and I’ve been to a bunch of Fringes and been in a bunch of Fringes. So I know how different they can all be.
But at some of them, I find that there aren’t enough opportunities for just hanging out with other artists without the need to feel like you’re promoting your show. I’ve always felt like in the Toronto Fringe, for example, the Fringe tent or the postscript or whatever they’re going to call it next year is, although it’s supposed to be like the beer tent, a place to relax, everybody sort of feels like they’re on and talking about their show and talking up their show and that sort of thing. And I’ve never quite felt like it’s as much of a hangout place as it maybe should be.
No, I hear that. And that reminds me of one time in the first time I did Fundie Fringe, I was down on the street and I recognized one of the performers from a one-person show. So I went up and was like, hey, man, I really like your show.
He’s like, oh, cool. Hey, check out this button, man. Who do you think wore this button? He was just looking at this tray.
And this thrift store, all these different buttons. And we sat there and just wondered what these bygone events were and these weird group memberships and stuff like that. And that was super chill because neither one of us were trying to sell anything.
We were just having that moment. Yeah. So I get what you’re saying.
Yeah. As somebody who’s about to be doing the Fundie Fringe for the first time, I’m always curious about flyering at Fundie Fringe because at the Toronto Fringe, for example, one of the biggest and most important things to do is flyering lineups. And yet there are other fringes where people don’t really line up.
So you don’t really flyer the lineup. What do people do at Fundie? Are you flyering lineups? Are you going to the market and flyering? What are you doing? It’s really whatever you want to do. I got advice from someone who did a bunch of fringes across the country and she said it’s way better to just go around the community and try to strike up a conversation with someone.
And if you feel that rapport, then give them the flyer as opposed to doing the lineups and seeing people just chuck it in the garbage right afterward. So trying to go out there and actually sell the show by selling yourself and getting them interested in you as a person and as an artist and that sort of thing to build that rapport. So that’s what I do.
And then my play obviously has a very strong gay theme. So we’re going to be doing Pride this week, my cast getting out there. So finding those interested audiences.
But no, there’ll still be some people who, especially after the big tease, will be outside the door, kind of like a gauntlet of flyers and everyone getting out of the auditorium is going to get a, here you go, here you go, here you go, that sort of thing. I don’t know how they do, but if it works, it works. Yeah, I don’t know.
I probably will cast around and see what works for me. I mean, I’m sort of old school and the flyer in the lineup is a tried and true. And that’s worked in other places, except like in Montreal and Edmonton where nobody lines up.
But it’s always interesting to sort of see the culture of a fringe. There’s only one city in Canada where I’ve ever been told while flyering, oh, I’m not going to see your show. Really? Wow.
What rude place is this? That was actually the Calgary Fringe and people basically made their choices and would not be swayed. And I had people, I had somebody like hand back my flyer and say, oh, save the tree. And I was like, the tree’s already fucking dead.
It’s a flyer. You want to be like, listen, this transaction is much easier than you’re making it. All you have to do is accept the flyer that I’m giving you, hold it in your hand.
And once I’m gone, I don’t care what you do with it. You could throw it out. You can use it as a bookmark, but you don’t have to look me in the eye and say, oh, I’m not going to see your show.
Wow. I’m so fixed on that. On the one hand, yeah.
I mean, dick move, so unnecessary. On the other hand, though, I’m intrigued by the fact that they were so passionately not seeing this play. Because I think most people are non-confrontational by default.
And that person was just like, I need to make this known that I will never see your play. Like, wow. I actually think that there are some people who don’t quite… And the thing is that at the time I was in Calgary, I don’t think it had been running very long because the Calgary fringe had folded several years earlier and then been restarted by a new group of people.
So it may have only been a couple of years old. And I think that there were a bunch of people who were unused to the transaction that occurs in the line and may have been just annoyed by the fact that people were talking to them in the line. Whereas at other fringes, people understand this is just the way it goes.
And you know what? If somebody comes up and says, can I tell you about your show and you’re not into it? You could say, ah, no. And they’ll just move on. But you don’t have to let them go through their pitch and tell them no.
Yeah. Or save the tree, which is like getting a roast beef sample from Costco and saying, could you glue this back on the cow? I don’t think it takes that. I know.
That was the strangest thing to be told was save the tree. I was just I don’t understand how you could. Yeah.
And I mean, what is the what is the hub like at at the fundie fringe? Because, you know, as a as somebody who comes from some other fringes in Toronto, the the the the the fringe tent or the beer tent can feel a bit like sometimes if you don’t have a show or you’re not in the in crowd that you’re not welcome. And so sometimes it can feel a bit like that or it’s for the artists. Some people feel.
And whereas in Edmonton, the beer tents are very much for the patrons. Artists don’t go there except a flyer. There’s a dive bar down the road called Steel Wheels and everybody goes there.
So what is the hub? You’re talking about how the the camaraderie and the artists. But are you hanging out with artists? Are you hanging out with patrons? What’s what’s happening? A little bit of a mix. If the patrons are already down with the theatre community, then they’ll definitely be there.
We don’t turn away the regular patrons who just see like one or two shows a week, but they’re probably less likely to come. I don’t know. Maybe they’ll think it’s awkward or something like that, but they would be more than welcome if they want to like hang out, check out the events, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, they would definitely welcome. But you’ll see a lot of people who aren’t doing shows because they’ve done main stage productions with Saint John Theatre Company or they’ve done some studio series or they’re with the KB Players. Lots of people who do theatre around here will definitely be hanging out.
Some of them will be volunteering and some of them will just be hanging out because their friends are also in shows or some of the local acts. So you’ll definitely, I guarantee you’ll see a lot of people who aren’t actually doing the fringe thing this year and they’re totally welcome. Same as the artists are more than welcome to mix and mingle with them as well.
So I would say there’s definitely that sense of integration. But I would definitely love to see more of the audience come out if the audience wants to come out for like the open mic or for the board games and stuff like that. If we put a hat out so they can chip in and there’s a bar so they can buy some stuff.
I’d love to see some more of the regular public come in so we can get their feedback and what they think of the fest, what they like, what they don’t like. Mind their brains basically. Yeah.
Find out what it is. Yeah, you got to mark it right. Absolutely.
Yeah. You’re talking about the people from other theaters. Is there a lot of support behind the fringe from the theatre community at large? Oh, for sure.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
At all different levels. Yeah. I see people from all the different theatre groups.
They come in. People from outside, it’s the Saint John Theatre community. So people from Fredericton, people from Moncton will come in.
People from Nova Scotia will come in. People who used to be part of the Saint John Theatre scene that have moved away will sometimes come back. That’s the great thing about maritimers, you know, like they never really leave.
They always are just kind of like away for a bit. And then, you know, like the tide, they’ll come flooding back in for special events like this. Nice.
Nice. What is, I mean, your play Glass Closets I see was developed at the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Center’s Playwright Colony. What is that about? So that is an annual event where they choose, I think it’s between like eight to 10 scripts.
So they get an ad out there, letting people know that they’re interested in, or that they’re calling for scripts for the colony. People will submit, I don’t know what the numbers are from year to year, but last year, I believe it was 25. So it was a really good representation.
From that list, they picked 10 that they wanted to work on. So those 10 artists were told that they’d been selected, and then they all got paired up with dramaturgs. So my dramaturg had two other people.
So the three of us were working with him on different shows over a two week period. So we’re staying. Were you staying out there? Yeah.
So it was out in Sackville, New Brunswick. You ever been to Sackville? No, I have not. It’s very small, and I like to walk around.
So I walked every inch of Sackville. Very small, 5,000 people, very, very old, beautiful waterfowl park, like lots of fun stuff to do. But it’s perfect for writing because there’s only 5,000 people.
And during the codded season, like it’s in May, so I don’t know if they have it, they call it cod season out here, but people are away. So it’s a perfect place to print because you can walk around, you can see all this interesting scenery. It’s almost like being in a Bronte novel because it’s very cold and very wet.
And there’s very little distraction. So you can go and do your chores and stuff like that because you’re staying in a residence for two weeks. So you can go get your groceries and then come back and work, work, work, work, work.
So yeah, for a retreat, it’s a fantastic destination. What kind of stuff did you learn while you were at the retreat? Like what did you learn about that play? Oh, so much. It was grueling in some of the best ways, but yeah, it sucked a lot of the time just because of realizing things that were wrong that I hadn’t realized before.
So yeah, it was tough. There was a lot of tough love. When you said that things were wrong, what kind of things were wrong? Some things that were excruciatingly wrong were realizing that this joke is just inserted into the play as a joke.
There’s no sense of characters, it’s just inserted in there. So the dramaturge was like, if you want to keep it, that’s fine, but you got to recognize that there’s nothing to it. The only reason this bit of dialogue is in there is because you want to use this joke.
So I’m like, damn it. Yeah, he’s right. That is tough love.
And I mean, the thing is that when that sort of thing happens, often you really like the joke, you know? Oh yeah, and it works with the pacing and it was put in there to also kind of break up a little bit of a talking head situation, but it just doesn’t work. And that kind of goes back to a line that a dramaturge, Stephen Massacott, once told me, which is, you know, any writer can delete a bad line. It’s not really hard to go through your manuscript, to go through your play and see a line and go, oh, that doesn’t work.
Cut it. It’s way harder to cut a line that’s good, but it just doesn’t work. So that’s that kind of tough love where it’s like, I like this line, it’s a funny joke, but it’s got no place here.
Yeah, no, and that is one of the difficult things is that’s the whole kill your darlings thing that they tell you to do. And I’ve heard some people say, find your favourite phrase or your favourite sentence in your work and cut it. Just cut it.
Because if it’s your favourite, it probably doesn’t belong. You just like it because it’s a really good line or whatever, and just be brutal. And revision is when you have to get brutal, and sometimes that’s the hardest thing to do.
I don’t know about you, but I always find revision of a written work the hardest part. It’s not fun. It’s not sexy.
It’s just hard work. And often, you just want to get it done. You just want to get it done.
And that’s when you’re like, no, but I really like this line, so I’ll leave it in. Oh, no, absolutely. Yeah.
And that’s one of the pieces of advice that the dramaturge gave me. He said, rewriting is writing. And I was like, oh, okay.
So don’t look at it as revision. Look at it as writing. Because I want to get to the next thing.
And sometimes I get annoyed. I’m like, I just want to write again. But if I remind myself, no, this is writing.
This is the thing itself. Then I feel a little bit more comfortable, and it’s good to know that everyone else goes through it. But yeah.
Anytime I start a project, I’ve done that first draft. I always think, yeah, that was the first draft. I nailed it this time.
And then I go back, and I’m like, nope. I ought to start fixing things. So it’s disappointing in this process.
Yeah. But I think that it’s like, writers talking about writing is one of the most important things that we should do. Because we all go through basically the same shit.
But it comes down to if it… We all think that we’re alone in it. And so we’re all having the same problems with revision. We all think our first draft is brilliant, and then we look at it a couple of days later and go, oh, this is garbage.
And it was like, I used to stop in the middle because I would start to realize that it wasn’t great. And the most important thing I ever learned was that, no, that’s the job of the first draft. It’s not supposed… It doesn’t have to be good.
It just has to be done. Absolutely. Yeah.
Because you can revise a bad draft. You can’t revise nothing, right? So you got to get… That’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right.
And that was actually a hard lesson to learn. Because for some reason, I had it in my head many years ago that if it didn’t come out perfect, it just wasn’t worth working on. And that, I think, is somewhat fetishized in our culture.
You go back to the first folio of Shakespeare and you got Heminges and Condal, two people who were on basically the board of directors of Shakespeare’s Playing Company. And they write that he never blotted a word. Everything came perfect from his head.
You see the movie and the play Amadeus, and they talk about how Mozart’s sheet music has no corrections. So we kind of fetishize the idea. It’s very romantic in the words worthy and sense of the perfect art, pure art being just unfiltered right from the writer’s mind.
But in reality, it is a grueling, grueling, grueling process. Absolutely. I would actually say that every writer needs to read of any book, I think, that’s the most realistic or one of the most realistic is Stephen King’s On Writing.
Oh, yeah. Because he talks very frankly about the revision process and rewriting and drafts and things like that. And this from one of the most prolific novelists of our generation, a man who’s written more.
And to find out that, no, he goes through all of this too. And he talks very frankly about writer’s block and all that stuff. And so it’s sort of always good to hear if that guy goes through this stuff, I think we’re all okay.
Oh, yeah. That’s like that moment when it reminds me of the Greek tragedy where Heracles is dying and he’s like, well, or it might be the other way around. I think Achilles.
No, Heracles is dying and he’s like, well, even Achilles, the best soldier ever had to face death so I can do it too, right? There’s the same sort of thing that even in the great authors of, there’s no one, I don’t think anyone in the 20th century is more prolific than Stephen King. I think he might top the list. Yeah.
So if it’s hard for him, it’s hard for all of us. I love that being able to look at them as human beings. And I got to check that out.
I’ve seen like the buzz or the mental floss, like 10 great quotes from On Writing. I haven’t actually read the whole thing. I check that out sometimes.
It’s interesting because it is kind of a mix of biography or autobiography and sort of writing manual. It sort of covers both. And I know people who were like, they read it and they were like, oh, I kind of stopped.
They got to the biography stuff after the biography stuff was done because just the writing stuff was boring. I was like, no, the biography stuff was fine. But God, all the stuff he wrote about writing, that was the real niche.
Oh, yeah. Well, that’s what we want to know, right? Like what’s the secret? That’s what everyone wants to know. Anytime I’ve been to like a panel or something like that, first question is always, do you work for a living? Or is that the answer is you write for a living that we want to know what the secret is.
But there is no secret. There’s only advice, right? Any writer I’ve ever talked to who’s independently doing it has never been able to tell me what the secret is because you just you work it, you know, and it works out or it doesn’t work out. But they can give you lots of great advice.
So, yeah, I want to check that out for those gems, those things. Yeah, absolutely. If I didn’t have that dramaturge kind of told me that rewriting is writing.
If Clyde Ray, who’s a local poet in Saint John, he once told me that you have to follow the process that defines success. If you can find a way to love the process, you’ll be fine. And, you know, Steven Mascott telling me that you’ve got to, you know, a good writer can cut, make that tough decision of cutting a good line that just doesn’t belong.
If it weren’t for those gems, I might have, you know, either given up or just been self-indulgent, which in some ways is worse than giving up, right? Because you’re not improving. True, true. So, you know, Funding for Inj is just a couple weeks away as we record this.
And I’m curious, what is it that you are looking forward to learning when an audience first sees this? I’m really interested in some of the stuff that I disagreed with Don Hanna about. So Don Hanna was the dramaturge that I worked with. And the script is just so much better than when it came in.
So I’m indebted to him for that, for really helping me make it something that was just above and beyond what was on paper when I got there. But it wasn’t easy because I, you know, fight for everything that’s in it. And some things I did change because I got convinced that he was right.
So I was like, yeah, no, you’re totally right. That’s got to be different. That’s way different.
I think I changed 90% of the material. So I’m really wondering about that 10%. I got to go in there as impartially as possible and think based on this audience reaction, was it right? You know, should I get rid of that extra stuff? You know, should I look at this as something that’s close to being that finished product that I want to, you know, stage again and again, or is it still very much a preliminary draft? So it’ll be interesting.
That is interesting. Also, isn’t it great that there is a thing like fringe that lets you find that out? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Absolutely. Because I think writers, because we do think about things so damn much that sometimes you just need an audience in there who’d be like, oh, no, it’s fine. It’s fun.
You know, they don’t care. Well, you’ll never actually know until an audience reacts to it. Oh yeah.
Absolutely. No, absolutely. And it was funny when we were doing the colony, we, for the second week of the colony, we brought in actors.
So union actors came in and read our scripts. And I remember talking to one of them about my play. And I was like, I’ve cut a bunch of stuff and I’m a little bit worried about cutting more.
And he said, Hey, no audience has ever complained about a play being too short. That is an excellent point. Yeah.
No, one’s like, I really wanted to sit in that auditorium for an extra hour. No, that is so true. Well, James, I want to thank you for talking with me today.
It’s been a lot of fun. And I will see you in Saint John. Yeah.
Likewise. Yeah. Shoot me an email when you’re in town, man.
Love to go out, grab a beer with you, help you get situated. This has been a Homebody Productions production.
