Kingston Life

Description

The lights go down. The audience quiets. The curtains open, revealing a magically awakened stage, and suddenly you are transported to another world "” a living, breathing theatrical universe you can touch, smell and hear. Every gasp, every tear, every belly laugh was first born in the imagination of a playwright "” one of those artists who examine the human soul, wrestle with what they see and then weave radiance and deep shadows into a play. Kingston is fortunate to be home to some of the best professional playwrights in the country. Their stories follow. JOHN LAZARUS Even after 40 years, multi-award-winning playwright John Lazarus can still say that he absolutely loves his work. "One of the great joys of this art form is that you start working in solitude. You are writing stuff and you have a secret you eventually will expose to the world. But then the circle widens. You move into rehearsal, and finally you add the audience." Audiences across the country, as well as in New York, London, Berlin and Tokyo, have now been added to his plays. For many years, his early play Babel Rap was the most frequently produced play written in Canada. As he grew up in Montreal, one of Lazarus' early inspirations was cartoonist Walt Kelly, who created Pogo. "He was a huge influence because he drew beautifully and had a real sense of dialogue and character. My father and brother and I would quote Pogo to each other over the breakfast table." Along the way, Lazarus also learned the art of eavesdropping. "I have a habit of listening to people at a party, picturing the conversation and seeing it on the computer screen. Of course, sometimes they turn to me and I don't know what they are talking about because I am focusing on their sentence structure." An associate professor at the Queen's University Drama Department, Lazarus still starts the whole process with an idea gleaned from a moment, a newspaper clipping or a thought. He plants himself in front of the computer and rough drafts tumble out. With Trouble on Dibble Street, his new comedy produced at the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival last summer, he arrived at rehearsal after writing seven drafts of his new play. Then the director and actors took his work even further. "Just hearing your play out loud is a revelation. Actors go deep into your work and look out at it through the eyes of one of your characters, and then come out to report on what they found there." As his mother, a painter, once told him, "You always need two eyes to perceive depth." The quick-witted Lazarus points out that each new play has to be read and read again, cut and rewritten many times. "Ultimately playwrights are wrights, and essentially this is a construction job. Each cut is a gift to the audience. You finally know it works when you feel an emotional response or connection to it." Lazarus' next play, Old Enough to Kill, will be produced by Kingston's Gnu Ground next spring. And as winter approaches, you will find Lazarus in his office with his latest, and this time autobiographical, play, Sex with Feminists. More secrets are unfolding and his audience awaits.

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