Rex Deverell chats with Playwrights Guild of Canada about PGC’s 40th anniversary, the intimate connections between hope, redemption and theatre, how a script is only a blueprint, and the miraculous and agonizing process of playwriting.

1. You are a founding member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Can you talk about some of your memories of what it was like to work with other playwrights to create PGC and build an organization from scratch, striving to create community for playwrights across Canada? What prompted the creation of PGC by you and the founding members? How did PGC help you back when it was first created and how does PGC assist you now as a playwright?

Has it really been 40 years?

Carol Bolt and Tom Hendry and others put out a call to gather playwrights. We met at one of the Toronto libraries and then in a series of meetings in what was to be our first home above a garage on Dupont Street. 

We defined our purpose and created a constitution. It was all very exciting—for the first  time, a group of theatre writers could identify ourselves as CANADIAN PLAYWRIGHTS! We were going to distribute mimeographed copies of our members’ plays. We were going to negotiate with theatres and funding bodies. We were going to set fair standards, give a voice to writers and blaze a trail for a truly national theatre. In the collective spirit of the time we called ourselves a co-op, ‘The Playwrights Co-op.’

All of this had been precipitated by a feisty declaration—a manifesto—created by a handful of theatre professionals meeting under the auspices of the Canada Council in the Gaspé calling for subsidized Canadian theatres to increase their production of Canadian plays to at least half of their season. In the years that followed, some theatres were formed that devoted all of their seasons to Canadian plays. Others got by with an occasional and condescending nod.

At first, we shared scripts with one another to decide which ones were worthy of “publication,” but when several rude comments went out to chagrinned writers, we hired a dramaturge/editor who we hoped would be more diplomatic and constructive. He brought a mattress up to the back room where he could lie down and read scripts. (We assumed that’s what the mattress was for, anyway.)

Carol Bolt took home mimeographed stencils so she could type scripts.

We changed the name to ‘Playwrights Canada’ when we found out that we were in contravention of the legal definition of a co-op. Then we split the organization to become more effective as a bargaining force on the one hand, and a publishing and service organization on the other. Later, we brought the two units back together as PUC (Playwrights Union of Canada) and then re-jigged ourselves to become Playwrights Guild of Canada and Playwrights Canada Press. So there is the history of the organization in a nutshell.

2. Throughout your career, you’ve written acclaimed plays for young audiences and also for adults. Is your creative process the same when writing for both audiences, or does it vary depending on the audience? Do you know at the beginning of a project that you are working on a TYA play versus a play for adults, or does the nature of the audience become apparent at a later point in the writing process?

Since I usually work with a theatre, we have agreed beforehand on the target audience for a new piece. I always think I know the particular age group a script will play for, although I have been wrong sometimes. Often I have been able to workshop ideas with the appropriate age group and get a feel for their language and the dynamic of their relationships with each other.

I think most of us understand that writing involves posing questions and discovering new questions. I find that younger audiences are less forgiving than older ones. They make more demands on the craft and technique—if they get ahead of the storyline and have to wait for the characters to catch up, they let you know. They have built in B.S. detectors. And this can make life difficult for playwright and actor alike. The youngest spectators are also vulnerable—they get scared easily— and sad. But they love to laugh—oh, how they love to laugh.

When I get a chance to write for children, a kind of whimsical delight bubbles up from some childlike place inside. However, I start from the same place as I do with plays aimed for grown up audiences. There is usually some theme or question that I am concerned about. I am using the writing as a way of exploring that puzzle and I hope my audience will stay with me on the expedition. Perhaps the play on the mainstage will take longer and have more scope, but the play in a school gymnasium with kids sitting on the floor around the actors is a concentrated event and so it can be closer to poetry.

3. You’ve also written many plays with a rich foundation in history. Can you discuss how you work as a playwright on projects requiring historical research and how you balance finding facts with creating fiction? Where do you look for inspiration?

I was fortunate in my years as Resident Playwright at Saskatchewan’s Globe Theatre to be able to work on several documentary plays. The first one was a collective creation about the commerce of wheat growing and selling, called No. 1 Hard (both a type of wheat and a type of rye whiskey). I became fascinated with the rhetoric found in original documents—newspaper reports, archived speeches, advertising campaigns, etc. We tried to create a play using these texts not merely as source material, but as the actual script.

With later plays such as Black Powder and Medicare!, I researched the history in much the same way as we had done as a collective (only without the long group debates). With Medicare! (a play about the introduction of the first social medical care plan in North America and the doctor strike it caused), I used original texts, but also created characters that could represent the dialogue happening in that era. For the published edition of Medicare!, I wrote an introductory essay calling the play a “One Man Collective” and said I thought the play was “impersonal enough to be authoritative and personal enough to be insightful. It represents a struggle between my creative ego and the dramatic power of history.” This describes what I look for in my initial research—both the aesthetic shape of a story and the actual rhetoric produced by the historical event.

4. You are an associate artist at Mixed Company Theatre, which produces innovative, socially relevant drama as a tool for positive change. Can you talk a bit about Mixed Company Theatre and what your experience has been like being part of an artist-run collective, and what type of writing that experience has generated?

Artistic Director, Simon Malbogat, is the last member of the original collective and while he runs the theatre in a very consultative way, he is where the buck stops. Over the years, Mixed Company Theatre has become more reliant on the Forum Theatre techniques developed by the famous Brazilian director, Augusto Boal (Theatre of the Oppressed). Simon has added aspects of the Metis Medicine Society’s Sweet Medicine Teachings to the Boal techniques.

I first worked with the company on an inter-generational collective community play in the Parkdale area of Toronto. A few years later, Simon asked me if I would be part of a Forum project with street youth. We invited a group of street experienced young people to audition. They spent several days improvising their stories and gaining performance skills. Finally, I took the work home and in an (incredibly short) few days crafted a Forum play which they then rehearsed and performed in youth shelters and schools. Some of these plays I polished and rewrote for school tours with experienced actors the following year.

Forum plays paint the worst-case scenario—in which authority victimizes the powerless. As a second act, some of the critical scenes are repeated, but now the audience can interrupt and stop the scene. At this point, members of the audience (“spect-actors”) role-play with the cast to achieve a better result. To tell the truth, the second act is usually much more exciting than my writing in the first act. It is wonderful to see an audience working out empowering and liberating solutions to solve problems they encounter every day.

Whether a community play, a professional tour, or a street collective, most of the Mixed Company Theatre plays begin with workshops of one sort or another. Swimming for Shore, a play about the communities along the lake west of Toronto proper (which are now part of the ‘Mega City’), began with two years of consultations and story gathering from the old and young—and what stories they were! Swimming for Shore opened a new arts centre in the area and Humber theatre students re-created the show in a wonderful new production last spring.

Diss, a hip-hop Forum play about youth gangs and gun violence, began with a summer workshop in one of the areas identified by police as a community particularly threatened by drug traffic and gang activity. It has had Dora Award Nominations and continues to be in demand for High School performances. 

These kinds of projects have up sides and down sides—a playwright becomes heavily involved with issues and communities he or she would not necessarily be exposed to otherwise. I have often felt that I was helping the voiceless find a voice and, well, joining in solidarity.

But Forum theatre is awfully depressing to write. The plays have to have a downward trajectory towards despair. And at heart, I’m a believer in hope and redemption—which is why I like the point in the performance best when the audience takes over and challenges the scenario.

5. What is the most valuable piece of advice you received as a beginning writer and/or what advice would you offer to emerging playwrights?

You know what? I didn’t get any mentoring. When I started to write plays, dramaturgy wasn’t the industry it has become. There weren’t that many senior playwrights in the country and the ones that did exist, were not authors that I knew. I learned by doing. I tried to write what felt like a real play. The most successful work was the work that came from some place deep down—from the dialogue I was having with myself.

I have heard great bits of advice since, like, “Write every day” or, “You are not a playwright until you have finished a play… And then you aren’t a playwright until you have finished the next one.” (Actually I made that one up, but it does seem to be my experience.)

I would add, “Be aware, be vulnerable, observe, listen, experience, and respond with every bit of emotion with your whole brain and your whole body. Then sign your name and share it with fellow theatre artists you admire and trust. The script is only a blueprint —the play will be a collaborative palace of wonder. But hang in there. Sometimes, the actors and the director or worst case, even the audience, will help you to see that you have left off the living room or designed an outhouse, rather than the castle you thought you had created.”

6. What have you been working on lately? Tell us a bit about the plays you are currently working on and if you have any upcoming projects planned.

Mixed Company Theatre has just done a tour of a French language version of a health and lifestyle play we toured last year, Projet Actif.

I’m also working on a play about my father—a central Ontario farm boy who went to war as a tank driver. He had two tanks blown up, one where he was the only survivor. I wrote a play modeled on my Barbadian mother several years ago called, Drift, and I want this to be a companion piece.

In addition, Mixed Company Theatre has asked me to draft a proposal for a War of 1812 theatre piece, so I’m in the throws of that.

Yvette Nolan started an e-mail discussion with Sarah Stanley, Mansel Robinson, Tara Beagan, and me on the topic of “Failure”, which is a subject close to the heart of any playwright. Yvette will be in touch with PGC when the results of this dialogue will be available for general consumption.

7. Many authors have a favourite inspirational quote above their desk or something inscribed in a cherished notebook to keep their muse flowing and to drive their positive energies forward. Please share one of the quotes that has kept you going as a writer:

Sorry, I don’t have anything like that hanging above my desk. However, I have a couple of verses from the Bible that seem particularly apt for playwrights:

“Pray without ceasing” and “Out of the depths I cry unto Thee, O Lord.”

The first reminds me that writing is a miraculous process full of joy and discovery. The second reminds me that writing can also be a laborious and agonizing journey.

+++

-To order Black Powder, Medicare!, Drift, Boiler Room Suite and any other of Rex Deverell’s copyscripts or published plays, visit www.playwrightsguild.ca or email orders@playwrightsguild.ca.

Rex Deverell was born in Toronto in 1941 and raised in Orillia, Ontario. He holds Arts and Theology degrees from McMaster University and Union Theological Seminary. In 1971, Rex began to write plays for the Globe Theatre school company and ultimately became the Globe Theatre’s first permanent Playwright-in-Residence. Deverell’s first work for the Globe Theatre mainstage was Boiler Room Suite. Since then, Boiler Room Suite has received international productions, including translations in French and Japanese. The Banff Centre toured an operatic version of the play in the U.K. (music by Quentin Doolittle). Deverell has mined Saskatchewan history for plays like Number 1 Hard, Medicare!, and Black Powder. In 1987, he wrote and directed, Prairie Wind, a romp through the history of the province’s legislature for a Royal Gala. Through the years, Deverell’s work has included many styles of theatre: cabaret, satire, docu-drama, personal, poetic work (Drift and Quartet for Three Actors), translations (Oresteia and The Servant of Two Masters), nor did he ever lose his interest in writing for young audiences. In 1990, he moved to Toronto. Deverell’s scripts have been commissioned by The Golden Horseshoe Players, the Banff Music Theatre programme, Canadian Artists Workshop Theatre, and Mixed Company Theatre. Recent work includes: Ellis Portal: The City at Night (with composer Andrew Ager) and Forum theatre pieces with Simon Malbogat (Mixed Company Theatre) and companies of street experienced youth.

Photo Credit: Ron Cohen