Based on a true story — sort of
Greg MacArthur writes about whisky-fuelled hours spent with SideMart Theatrical Grocery
The key to Greg MacArthur’s writing isn’t to write what he knows; it’s to write who he knows. Kind of. Opening this week, MacArthur’s play A City, presented by Necessary Angel Theatre Company, will get its first full-scale production since he started work on it in the late 2000s, while he was living in Montreal.
Anyone familiar with Montreal and its arts scene at that time may recognize the names in MacArthur’s play, since it’s based on a whisky-fuelled, hours-spanning, all-encompassing conversation MacArthur held with the founders of the popular theatre company SideMart Theatrical Grocery: Andrew Shaver, Patrick Costello, Graham Cuthbertson, Trent Pardy and Sarah Yaffe. Or as MacArthur puts it, “the superstars in English theatre in Montreal.”
“When I moved there from Toronto I really fell in love with the city, it was really life changing. It was fantastic for about five years. So when I knew my time there was coming to an end, I felt this beautiful world kind of crumbling around me,” MacArthur says of the period that inspired the play that became A City. “They were such a tight unit. The idea of the play wasn’t to write about SideMart, it was to choose people that would represent Montreal to me at that time.”
As MacArthur began to take information from that conversation (captured in a six-and-a-half-hour audio recording), he began to blend the truth of SideMart’s story with his own personal references, stories from other artists he knew and completely fabricated elements.
To explore the idea of a “golden age” on the verge of disappearing, MacArthur was inspired by the fall of Rome and Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. He invented a fictional friend whose death brings A City’s four characters together to examine their past by telling the story to the audience.
Both the characters and the audience learn where fact and fiction blend.
“We have this drive toward authenticity; you know everything is based on a true story now,” MacArthur says. “Especially in theatre these days, with the move toward autobiographical theatre and the use of non-professional, the amateur in theatre, I was interested in playing with the idea of authenticity.”
A City, which was workshopped in Montreal, was the first in a trilogy of plays by MacArthur that are inspired by, and are often performed by, members of the Canadian arts community.
The second, A Man Vanishes, was performed at the now defunct Videofag in Toronto last year and starred that space’s co-founders, William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill, as themselves in a blend of a true story from Videofag and the 1967
“What audiences are craving now are authentic experiences. Not a necessarily authentic representation of life.” GREG MACARTHUR PLAYWRIGHT
film A Man Vanishes by Shohei Imamura.
The third play will also take place in Toronto and will focus on two visual artists. It’s inspired by the suicide deaths of New York City artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. MacArthur points to the success of shows like Sea Sick at the Theatre Centre, performed by journalist and scientist Alanna Mitchell, and A Brimful of Asha performed by Ravi Jain and his mother Asha, as evidence of the rise of theatre that seeks to be self-aware and truthful.
“What audiences are craving now are authentic experiences. Not a necessarily authentic representation of life, but an authentic experience and an acknowledgement of, yep, we’re all in this space for 75 minutes and we’re all going to experience this together,” he says. “We’re not trying to fool anybody, you’re not trying to hide behind artifice.”
Though A City and the rest of his trilogy intentionally play with what the audience believes to be real or fake, he strives to keep the relationship between performers and audience unquestionably true.
“In A City, there’s an element of needing people there. The characters need the audience there to witness them and they ask them, ‘What do you see?’ We’re all in this struggle together. There’s no reason we should be on opposite ends.”
With five years back in Toronto under his belt, a new director in Jennifer Tarver and a young, local cast, MacArthur says A City has become more of a meditation on letting go of your “golden years” and less of an inside-baseball performance experiment.
The original characters have scattered, grown up, changed jobs and started families, and SideMart itself is now based in Toronto, under artistic director Andrew Shaver.
“Life started to mirror the play,” MacArthur says. “Maybe in some ways it’s better. Because I’ve hardly been back to Montreal since I left and in some ways it’s hard to go back there. It’s almost kind of scary to go back, because it doesn’t exist as it does in my brain.”
At least Torontonians can visit the version of Montreal in MacArthur’s mind, with all its complexities and inaccuracies, even if he can’t. A City is at Artscape Sandbox, 301 Adelaide St. W., until April 2. See necessaryangel.com or call 416-662-8158. Carly Maga is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with critic Karen Fricker.