PLAYWRIGHT ROWE RETURNS HOME WITH THE GOOD BRIDE
Northern Light opener offers a timely look at fundamentalist Christianity
The world is a strange and fascinating place, full of absurdities, obsessions and contradictions, where doubts and beliefs regularly collide at unmarked intersections. So you can never quite predict what will catch Rosemary Rowe’s eye.
In Rowe’s The Good Bride, premièring Friday to launch Northern Light Theatre’s 40th anniversary, a 15-year-old girl sits in her wedding dress nightly from 3 p.m. to midnight, waiting for a groom picked by Daddy to arrive and whisk her into a new life of marital bliss and non-virginity. It’s based on a true story.
“I’m intrigued — no, obsessed — with fundamentalist Christianity,” says Edmonton-born Rowe cheerfully, on the phone from the Vancouver home she shares with her wife Kate, a social media strategist.
“I’m fascinated by faith. Maybe because I have none …”
The immediate trigger was an article in Bitch Magazine, “the troubling rise of stay-at-home daughters, who wait every night, suitcases packed, for their dads to find them a young man …
“A lot of the young ladies (of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church) have blogs; they talk Jesus, baking cakes, making tea. … Years of fun right there: The cognitive dissonance of courtships and aprons, with iPhones. They’re blogging, they’re on Pinterest, but they have no real idea what exactly is going to happen on their wedding night.
“This is the culture influencing the Republican Party at the moment. … OMG, it’s my first topical play!” Rowe exclaims in mock horror.
Maranatha, offspring of an ultra-restrictive religious culture, is the latest in a line of Rowe characters triggered by a doubletake at the real world.
“It’s a story that many of us find grotesque and off-putting,” not least because, as Rowe puts it, “these are people who think gay people should go to some remote island and stay there.”
But “I didn’t want to be preachy, and I’d have been preaching to the converted anyway,” she says amiably. “We like to paint people as evil fearmongers. But they’re just people. With limited information. Under hard circumstances.”
Rowe’s comedies, and the playwright’s natural bemusement, have been inspired by everything from a bizarre Edwardian court case (Carlil v. the Carbolic Smokeball Company) to CALM, the acronym for “career and life management” classes endemic to modern education (Mrs. Dickerhoff Gets Up Close And Personal). And her signature sense of humour, wry and skeptical, has wrapped itself playfully around subjects such as hipness (Discourse on the Blood-Scented Glory of Coolness), activism (No One Showed Up For The Anarchist Rally), or literary wholesomeness (Anne and Diana Were Totally Doing It, a take on the tale of the Green Gables heroine).
It was teen angst that first drove Rowe into playwriting in the early ’90s. She quickly found she just wasn’t into it.
“I was really against it at the time. Not my thing.” There’s a crackle of bemused laughter on the line. Instead, Rowe, at 16 a Grade 11 theatre nerd at Harry Ainlay, turned her hand to comedy. “Everyone was suicidal and violent in teen plays. All Sturm und Drang. I mean, c’mon, we were happy, suburban children!” More laughter. “I wasn’t seeing the kind of show I liked.” Ah, except from the hand of Stewart Lemoine. Rowe was in Lemoine’s The Spanish Abbess of Pilsen at the Citadel’s Teen Fest. She played an evil nun. “That’s another one of my obsessions, evil nuns!”
The result of Rowe’s aversion to teen angst was Mrs. Dickerhoff Gets Up Close And Personal, a debut play with a delightful name and a literate sense of the absurd. It won the Teen Fest playwriting contest and got produced. “To see (my play) up on its feet hooked me forever. Magic!”
“The hubris of youth” drew Rowe to York University, a theatre school with an undergraduate directing program, followed by a stint as writer-in-residence at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times. Now she finds herself in Vancouver, working (with composer Cameron Northey) on a six-actor musical based on her play Alice Didn’t Have Those Mondo Ears, whose protagonist is a psychic 10-year-old boy whose sister committed suicide. “It sounds like a downer, but it isn’t really. It’s a black comedy with heart. … I have affection for my characters, even if they’re messed up.”
Rowe’s sense of comedy is “a little bit heartbreaking and a lot funny. Funny but kicking you in the guts. After all, you go to the theatre to have some feelings.”