DESPITE DIFFERENCES, WE’RE ALL THE SAME, PLAY SUGGESTS
When your surname is Christmas you’d best have a good sense of humour, a thick skin or both.
When Calgary actor Conner Christmas was studying theatre at the University of Lethbridge and classmates would ask what he was doing for the holidays, he would say he was spending them with Father Christmas and Mrs. Claus.
“When I’m introduced to someone, I half expect them to say something. I’ve heard it all my life,” says Christmas, who was born in Calgary but grew up in High River.
Christmas and Natasha Strickey are the stars of Birnton Theatricals production of Lauren Gunderson’s I and You, which will run in the Lunchbox Theatre space April 11-21.
Directed by Chris Stockton, I and You is the story of Caroline and Anthony, students who have been assigned to work on an English project together. Caroline has a medical condition and has just been confined to home so Anthony brings the assignment so they can work on it.
As young adults, Caroline and Anthony couldn’t be more different, but through this school project they begin to form a relationship that is, from the start, in jeopardy because of Caroline’s illness.
Through novels like The Fate in Our Stars; Everything, Everything; Me, Earl and the Dying Girl; and Midnight Sun, this scenario has become a staple of young adult literature.
Christmas says the major difference with I and You is that it “is so well written. It has such natural dialogue. From the moment I started reading it, I couldn’t help but think this really is how teenagers talk. It may be a classic story, but the way it is told is what makes it special.”
Christmas was most recently seen in Calgary in the touring production of The Curing Room and in Theatre Calgary’s Shakespeare by the Bow production of As You Like it last summer.
The Birnton Theatricals production at Lunchbox is a shared Canadian premiere of I and You as the Globe Theatre in Regina is opening its main stage production of I and You in conjunction with this Calgary production.
For the past three years, I and You has been the most produced American play by colleges, high schools and community groups, an honour shared by its author who is the most produced living American playwright.
Christmas says his character Anthony is "very popular at school. He is a star athlete and a straight-A student. Caroline is one of those alternative students. She doesn’t want or need to be popular. She lives by the beat of her own drum. It makes her a bit of an outsider, but she likes that.
"The thing I like about Anthony is that he doesn’t realize how popular he is because he’s not trying to be popular. He loves sports and is passionate about basketball. As far as his grades go it’s because his father is a university professor so there has always been pressure to succeed in his studies.
“All of the things that make him popular come naturally to him.”
Christmas says there was a bit of Anthony and Caroline in him when he was attending high school in High River.
“Initially, I was more of a jock than an alternative kid, but then I started taking drama classes so I kept hopping from one clique to another. That’s easier than it sounds because it was a small school in a small community.”
In her notes for the play, Gunderson states that the actors must be of different race, colour or heritage. Most often Anthony is played by a black actor, but in the Calgary production, Strickey’s Palestinian heritage allows Anthony to be played by a white actor.
“Gunderson says the races can be switched as long as there is a difference in ethnicity because one of the main themes is that, at the heart of our differences, we are really all the same.”
Though the characters in I and You are teenagers, Christmas insists "the play has as much to say to adults as it does to young people.
“We’ve all lived a version of this story so everyone can relate to Anthony and Caroline and this endangered relationship they’re entering.”
I and You will run April 11-21 at 7:30 p.m. and all tickets, $21, can be reserved at tickets.lunchboxtheatre.com or by phone 403-2654292 (extension 0).