When my full time academic career ended over a year ago, I began dreaming about what a renewed career as an independent Hamilton artist might look like.

A few months later, when the offer of a part in Whale Fall was made, I began to see a way forward, working with people I knew and respect deeply. Stephen and I had worked together bringing playwriting skills to students and Aaron Craig is a former student – now a director and dramaturg in his own right. I’d seen Stephanie in a beautiful production of Mary’s Wedding a few years ago. While I knew the people though, I hadn’t worked as a peer with them. I was intimidated and I still am, a little.

I wish I could say that being an actor again, after years of talking about it, has been sweet, and easy. It has been beautiful but it’s been hard too. The play demands honesty. It requires emotional presence. It requires love, and it draws me into risky territory. “Beautiful and daunting” is how Stephanie and I have characterized the play.

Whale Fall strikes me, primarily, as a father/daughter love story. It brings us into the joy and the playfulness of the relationship but it also asks us to experience their flaws. It asks whether love can transcend death and even if it can teach us about eternity. I think that Stephen has also suggested with the script that we need plays and ceremonies to grapple with the anxiety of our time – anxiety about the environment, about death and about eternity. It gives me hope, in a way that I hadn’t anticipated.

Finding hope and joy onstage, in so many beautiful risky moments, with an actor like Stephanie Hope Lawlor is truly one of the great experiences of my career. She’s the best. And so is Aaron. And Stephen. Great people, all.

Whale Fall premieres at the Hamilton Conservatory for the Arts as part of the Hamilton Fringe Festival and runs from July 21-31. Tickets can be purchases in advanced HERE.

I wanted to write a play about my daughter and her love of orcas

This was pretty much all I had in my mind almost five years ago when I sat in the Director’s Lounge of Theatre Aquarius as part of what was called the Junction. Assembled as a group of creators who weren’t sure what form their piece would take, the Junction was a space to cultivate and explore ideas and see where they lead. Prior to the Junction, I’d been part of the Aquarius Playwrights Unit and was used to coming in with some finished material. Not this time. All I knew was I wanted to explore ideas around family, the ocean and the ever increasing spectre of climate change and see if it would work onstage.

It started as a collection of monologues. Most were about whales and sharks and the ocean. Some of them were in my voice, as if I were telling a story. Some were in the voice of my daughter, as if she were older than the child she is right now. Some were even in the ‘voice’ of the orcas, themselves. Those monologues, as formative as they were to the version of Whale Fall which premieres next month at the Fringe, were really rough drafts. That’s why the Junction was such an ideal spot for them to be heard for the first time.

New play workshops are hard for playwrights. Some are enough to drive those level-headed of us back to our secluded home offices never to return. However, the magic offered by the Theatre Aquarius Junction was the safety of the space that it made for the creators and the work we introduced to one another week after week. Especially when the material was extremely hard. And this happened on many occasions, not just with Whale Fall but with the work of the other members, as well. There were tears and anxiety on all of our parts, I think, because many in the Junction were trying to express something that didn’t have a predetermined form.

With the past two years still pressing on our collective sense of trauma, it’s easy to forget about the time before. 2017 now feels like a strangely distant era, and looking back at my initial notes and writings for Whale Fall, it’s intriguing to see how much the piece has grown and found its voice, especially given how fraught the journey from then to now has been. The play now in rehearsals with Aaron, Stephanie and Ray owes a creative debt to the input and support from the members of Theatre Aquarius’ Junction and I was blessed to have them as my first audience.

In terms of the orcas, the Junction was the first pod that helped bring the voice of this play to surface so it could take its first breath. Koosh!

Special thanks to the members of the Theatre Aquarius Junction who supported the writing of Whale Fall: Vicktoria Adam, Luke Brown, Taryn Crankshaw, Crystal Dumitru, Krista Mcnaughton, Allison Hossack, Carlyn Rhamey, Annie Rosenberg, and Ryan Sero.

Pivot. It’s been the key word that pretty much every theatre maker I know has uttered at some point over the past year and a half.

Now, as much as fancy myself digitally literate, I’ve never been much of a multi-media guy. I made an honest try of it during my senior year of university which led me to write quite a bit on the merging of technology and theatre. Most notably, I wrote for a magazine called Cyber Stage back in the day. So, I was familiar in philosophy about how theatre and technology might complement each other and tell a compelling story to audiences. But the actual practice—the nuts and bolts of making it work on your computer—was never something I embraced easily.

Fast forward almost thirty years. Add in the stress of the pandemic. Plus the wholesale loss of work for an entire industry of live performance creators. And the importance of understanding how technology and theatre can come together to create something new returned to my practice. But these days, there’s a whole new range of tools that are easily available. Resources that just weren’t available back in the nineties.

Nonetheless, when it came time to pivot to digital presentations, I’ll admit I was at a loss. Creature was supposed to be presented live at a BYOV on Ottawa St; specifically, I was going to present the show on the stage at the Laidlaw Memorial United Church. A one-person monologue about my obsession with the Sasquatch phenomenon, a critical aspect was supposed to be the intimate atmosphere of a storytelling performance. That was out the window with the pandemic. And it really wouldn’t translate well as a YouTube video. So what to do?

Enter my friend Luke Brown. Luke has long been a champion of this quirky piece. He shepherded its development while I was in the Theatre Aquarius Junction and, actually, had more confidence in it during the early stages than I did. But he’s also been prolifically exploring the use of soundscapes as part of his practice of digital storytelling. That got me thinking of how a big part of Creature was sound. Not just the use of sound but also sound as a theme. So, that’s where I started to explore my options. Bringing Luke onboard was a no brainer, of course. And, using resources like GarageBand and Audacity, he started playing around with the use of evocative sounds to accompany what would eventually become a series of monologues spoken by me about Bigfoot.

But something was still missing. I knew the Fringe would be broadcasting much of their digital programming via a YouTube channel when people tuned in. And I wanted to make use of visuals that weren’t simply a Fringe logo. But I also don’t know the first thing about video recording and moviemaking. But then I discovered iMovie (yes, I know, I’m late to party). This program (which is included on the Apple operating system) allowed me to add still pictures over my recorded monologue to create a slideshow of sorts. But, really, the best part is how easy it was. Literally, it was drag and drop and plug and play.

And if there’s one thing I love, it’s nature photography. Seriously, I take more photos of the outdoors than I do of my kids. So, I had a lot of nature pics to choose from. The result of these photos, with Luke’s sounds, and my own monologue is the digital presentation of Creature premiering this week at the Hamilton Fringe.

I’ll be straight up here – I don’t know whether this will work. This digital pivot has all been an experiment. Last year, when Aaron and myself (re)did Conspiracy of Michael for the Fringe, it was a professionally shot 10 minute film. So, will a forty minute slideshow featuring my voice and a soundscape exploring the bizarre world of Sasquatch hook audiences?

Well, what do you believe?

What would you say if I told you there was a secret conspiracy all around you? What would you think if I was to reveal that supernatural creatures – the kind you only hear about in books or movies – are plotting in the shadows? How would you feel if I showed you these creatures influence humanity and direct affairs away from our prying eyes?

There is a secret story being told, I would say to you. A story that you can be a part of… if you dare.

The reason I know is I’m part of the story. I’m part of this vast conspiracy. You see, every Sunday, myself and few of my friends get together and LARP (Live Action Role Play). This essentially means for a few hours we dress-up like a vampires, werewolves, and wizards and pretend to take over the world.

Playing an evil wizard at a New Orleans LARP convention.

Live Action Role Play is a strange hybrid of improvisational theatre and Dungeons & Dragons. Building off the tradition of murder mystery theatre, LARP came into vogue in the early 90s when game designers decided there might be something compelling to making traditional table-top games interactive. This meant players could dress up like their characters and interact with other players in dramatic scenes just like in stage play.

I’ve been playing LARP for almost as long as I’ve been writing plays. In a way, I found my writing voice thanks to the storytelling I was a part of in my local role-playing troupe. When I started, I was playing in nightclubs along Queen West in Toronto. But as the hobby grew, and more players got involved, the venues also got bigger. Before long I was playing off of hundreds participants in hotel convention halls all over Canada and the States.

LARP is a unique hobby attracting a wide swath of people who play all sorts of character types. Some play kings and queens. Others are spies and sorcerers. Still others are heavy hitting thugs or deadly assassins. But all of them contribute to the mass creation of a collective story about a hidden society of supernatural power brokers vying for control of the night. Oh, the drama and the stakes!

Myself and Sara Weber from Test (2013) in the Hamilton Fringe.

I’ve written two plays about LARP. Shadow Court (produced in 2005) is the story of gamer group coming together to grieve for a friend. It was a very personal show drawn from my own experiences as a gamer. Test is no different. It’s a story about two people who get caught up in the game – both in and out of character – and how they try and negotiate their budding relationship.

Test was last seen in 2013 as part of the Hamilton Fringe Festival with myself and Sara Weber in the feature roles. Ever since that time, my director and colleague Aaron Joel Craig has been adamant about bringing it back to Hamilton. This month we’re finally getting the chance. And we’re fortunate to now have Rose Hopkins and Adam Lemieux onboard to perform in this new version of the play at the Staircase Theatre.

LARP is weird, no question. But in the words of Dana from the play: “weird is good.” And I’m looking forward to sharing the secrets of this weird hobby during the run!