Triplex Nervosa Trilogy

Works

Introduction:

Where do plays come from? Where do they go?

Triplex Nervosa was born of a frenzied mood, near the end of a two-month long Christmas holiday when my husband’s daughter and two sons were visiting from South Africa. In a whimsical moment, we’d decided to forgo Yuletide tradition in favour of a Greek theme: Eastern Orthodox music, three kinds of moussaka instead of turkey, whatever decorations the Delphi, our local dépanneur, had on offer. The spirit of reinvention spilled over to the elder son’s birthday in mid-January. He opted for a breakfast theme: cold pizza in the morning, cereal for lunch, followed by a spread of Eggs Benedict with trimmings for dinner. While the birthday boy stayed in his pyjamas all day, the rest of us went James Bond — suit and tie, fancy dress, OJ cocktails from martini glasses. After all, he was turning 25.

I relate these homey details only to explain the mood I was in as I fired up my laptop on the dining room table and started typing. Normally, creative concentration requires an empty space, silence and hours of meditation, but I was bursting to get at my New Year’s resolution, to write a fast-paced crime novel and join the lucrative world of bestselling authors. I’d already written the first chapter before Christmas. Hoping to enter the mind of the killer, I decided to start with dialogue. Out came a complete scene, more farcical than thrilling, a mockery of the genre I was intending to crack. The beginning of a play.

Night. A woman and a man, young, stand outside a three-storey apartment building on Jeanne Mance Street, Montreal. He speaks first, in a thick East European accent. The tone is conspiratorial.

So you want me to kill him. — No. — Hurt him. — Well. — Pain. — Inconvenience. — Damage. — Whatever it takes to get him out. — Damage he can feel and see. — No! — Invisible? — Yes. — Invisible damage is expensive.

Tass Nazor has abandoned a promising career as a cellist to buy a triplex. She’s in over her head, swamped by renovations, squeezed by tenants who won’t pay market rents: a womanizing Frenchman on the second floor, a morose producer grieving the death of his son on the third. The seller, Rebb Klein, Hassidic father of many daughters, won’t finish the repairs he agreed to make as part of the sale. Handyman Rakie means well, but he’s falling in love with Tass, an unreliable accomplice. Meanwhile, in the real world, the mortgage and stock market crisis of 2008 is whipping international capitalism into a tailspin. People like Tass could be wiped out in a flash. This precarious state of world affairs collided with my personal creative woes. While I typed, people around me made toast, drank tea, moaned about the weather.

Though I’ve never owned a triplex, I have experienced quite a few property-related adventures, bits of which were transformed and woven through the play. Several characters resemble people I’d met or observed on the streets of Mile End. With no plot in mind, I followed the logic of their situation, grabbing old Aristotelian stand-byes: reversal and revelation. Imagine the worst and make it happen. A minor miracle, the first draft was written over an extended long weekend. But I’d seen enough plays through production to know that a pile of pages with a beginning middle and end is only permission to begin the arduous journey to creating a producible script.

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Everything I know about play making has been learned on the job. At U of T, I studied theatre as literature (MA 1981) and saw hundreds of plays as a theatre critic, but when Clare Schapiro and I founded THEATRE 1774 in the late Eighties, my first-hand experience was thin. We had the consummate good fortune to snag a very young Robert Lepage to direct 1774’s inaugural production, Echo, inspired by Ann Diamond’s beautiful poetic novella, A Nun’s Diary.

Though it was early days of what would become a spectacular international career, Robert Lepage had already devised a unique way of working with actors, props and text to build a theatrical work from the ground up. He started with a group of some twenty actors and non-actors who met over several weeks for improv exercises, playing with images and lines of text. A smaller group — the eventual cast — participated in a further workshop, where lines, cues, and stage directions were noted. There was no formal script-writing process of adaptation. Though the ultimate storyline bore faint resemblance to the original work, Echo captured the spirit of the novella quite brilliantly. After working on the project for nearly two years, the first public performance at the Saidye Bronfman Centre was a hair-raising experience, with the director making changes until the very last minute.

The premiere of Echo in November of 1989 created quite an uproar. The francophone media was extremely hostile to Lepage for working with anglo and francophone artists at a company whose avowed mandate was to do bicultural, bilingual theatre. Anglo critics hated the idea of work-in-progress theatre, and judged harshly. Filmmaker Don Winkler captured the entire adventure in the documentary Breaking A Leg, produced by the National Film Board. As his in-your-face record ably demonstrates, it was a brutal start, which nevertheless established THEATRE 1774 on the scene.

As a theatre-goer and reader of plays, I had often found the well-made play predictable, artificial. Most stage stories seemed to rely on people shouting at each other, some dire situation bringing the house down. Watching Robert Lepage at work, his disregard for conventional dramatic structure, his ability to create life on stage without much conflict, his mastery of image and poetic momentum, had a lasting impact on my ideas of what a play could be. It also made me a fearless re-writer. The most ambitious play I wrote while at Theatre 1774, the multi-lingual L’Affaire Tartuffe, or the Garrison Officers Rehearse Molière had two quite different productions, with different directors and casts. It took several years to hone a huge historical pageant into a stage-worthy play that actually had a clear intention, in addition to a story.

The bicultural-bilingual mandate affected the form and content of our work. But as important, it allowed us to operate under terms of the francophone Union des artiste contracts. Instead of cramming rehearsals into full days over two or three weeks (which is how the Canadian Actors’ Equity union works), we were able to stagger rehearsals over several months, working for a few hours each day. Each of 1774’s nine productions took at least a year of preparation. Actors gathered at every stage to read and comment on the text; workshops implicated set, costume, lighting, music and other production elements early in the process. By the time a show went public, core team members could barely remember another life. In my experience, this is by far the best way to develop new work.

For a decade, I enjoyed near ideal creative conditions during a formative period of my life as a writer. Making it all happen meant tending to every aspect of an incredibly complex process, including fundraising, publicity, money and people management, hunting down grants and coping with different playing spaces. After Clare left in 1993 to pursue other projects, I had to shoulder the full burden, which grew more quickly than resources. In 1995 and 1996 I directed two of my own plays — artistically satisfying but exhausting. By the end of the nineties, I was desperate to close the door on collaboration and just write prose. Guy Sprung had moved from Toronto to direct for 1774, and had turned out two excellent productions, L’Affaire Tartuffe (1992) and Sliding in All Directions (1995). He took over 1774’s $100,000 grant base, changed the name to Infinitheatre; I moved to the south of France and started writing novels: Jump (published in 2000), Matters of Hart (2005) and Piers’ Desire (2010).

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In 2004, I moved back to Montreal, refreshed. I had a $30,000 advance from my Toronto publisher to write a novel and no intention of getting into theatre again. In fact, I wouldn’t have returned to Montreal at all, but the man I met and married in France, Gwyn Campbell, had landed a job as prof in the history department of McGill University. We settled in Mile End, a new name given to an old neighbourhood around St. Laurent Boulevard, north of Mount Royal, south of Van Horne, streets mythologized by that incredible Baron Byng generation of Jewish immigrant writers, including Mordecai Richler, Ted Allen, Shalamis Yelin. Others have followed in their footsteps, Heather O’Neill, Sigal Samuel, Rana Bose, David Homel, Taras Grescoe, Rawi Hage, Leila Marshy, Magali Sauves, Michel Hellman, Suzanne Lantagne and many more.

After seven years in rural Provence, the storied streets of Mile End seemed downright boisterous. To walk around was to be confronted by a babble of languages, a plethora of small dramatic moments. Hassidic fathers pushing prams, barking into their phones. Tech types with their pant legs rolled up, walking their lattes, lining up to get artisanal ice cream. Guided groups of tourists stopping in front of Wilensky’s Light Lunch to hear the story. Multilingual-multi-ethnic, obviously, but as remarkable was the splay of generations, truly ancient people pushing their walkers through swarms of kids. I could no longer go outside and remain lost in thought. Before long, Mile End got to me. I began to think in dialogue, the Greek Christmas happened, and a play popped out. Triplex Nervosa.

How to re-enter the world of theatre as a civilian, a writer who did not have a producing company?

In the spring of 2009, I sent the script to Centaur Theatre artistic director Roy Surette, whom I’d met shortly after he arrived from Victoria BC in 2006. A year went by, I heard nothing. People told me Roy preferred to attend readings rather than read scripts. So I entered Infinitheatre’s Write-On-Q! new play competition, and got a public reading with professional actors in the fall of 2011. Galvanized by opportunity, I revised the text. The reading seemed to go well. Roy attended. As he rushed out the door afterwards, I caught his eye. He nodded, smiled. I took that as an invitation to pester.

At one of several subsequent meetings, I explained THEATRE 1774’s process, how I thought the prospect for a new play’s success was enhanced by the writer staying involved, being part of key decisions and able to polish the text around the vision of collaborators, even into rehearsals. I told him about an earlier experience I’d had at Centaur, when his predecessor Gord McCall had elected to put on my play Venus of Dublin, which I’d been working on with director Peter Hinton. McCall stipulated that he would be directing, or the play would not be produced. At the time (late 90s) I had just left 1774 and was anxious to prove (to myself) that I could write for a bigger stage. I wasn’t involved; it was a lacklustre production, and an experience I wasn’t eager to repeat. Roy made no comment, but Triplex was not on the following season’s schedule.

I’d pretty well given up on the Centaur when Roy called in early January of 2014 to say Triplex Nervosa would be part of the forthcoming season. Could I attend the launch a few weeks hence? Yes!

The promotional materials were beautiful. In bold letters, Roy Surette, announced as director. (Roy is a master of sidestepping conflict.) To be honest, I had little confidence my play could flourish under the Equity model. I’d