Out of these ruminations was born a concept for producing a genuinely populist form of theatre. It was important to us that this play could be accessible to anybody who lived in the city. We wanted to provide an accurate depiction of life in Kingston, without judging, and with the warts intact.

From previous experience my business partner and I both knew that the most important thing was to ensure the development of a good script. Although many people advocate a workshop type creative process where the actors improvise to create scenes from raw material, we both felt playwrights were required for this project. We approached two local men who happened to be established playwrights. One a professor at in the Queens University dram program and the other had just returned form a cultural exchange in Japan.

The means we had decided upon for the collection of information was to find a cross range of people who, as near as possible, reflected the diversity of Kingston’s population. We would ask each person to complete a simple questionnaire, and than write out their impressions of life in Kingston.

Once this material was gathered we gave copies of it to the actors and the playwrights. One of the things we realised that would be important was to try and find a story line that we could hang the images and impressions on. We didn’t just want to present a disjointed collection of scenes. Here we struck gold in the form of a lifer in Collins Bay Penitentiary.

Ironically he wasn’t from Kingston, and had yet to step foot in the city, but it was his recounting of his twelve years behind bars which provided the most complete story. With his wife, acting as intermediary (they had met at a co-ed university prison school, and were married when they were both still serving time by an inmate who had become an ordained minister during his sentence) one of the playwrights focused on scripting his information.

When we had the first rough script in shape, we invited the community participants to attend an initial staged reading to get their responses to the material. If they felt that their view was being misrepresented, or had been misunderstood, corrections would have to made. It was important to remember at all times that we were simply the vehicle that enabled their story to be told.

I’m sure I’ve made the process sound easy. In actuality, it was long and drawn out course of interviewing and re interviewing people. Rehearsals would go long into the night as we tried to figure out if we were superimposing ourselves over the information we had been given.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the recently published What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and online all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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