‘It’s such an important story’
PLAYWRIGHT HELPING CAST get the right tone for Centaur production of Lost Innocence: A Play About Steven Truscott
In 1959, the Canadian justice system nearly killed an innocent 14-year-old boy. The fact that Steven Truscott was wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper that year, and sentenced to hang, now seems surreal. All the more so since he’s alive and well and living quietly with his family after 10 years of unjust incarceration — and many more years as an obscure factory worker, father and grandfather, after suffering the consequences of a destroyed reputation.
Next week, Innocence Lost, A Play About Steven Truscott, by Beverley Cooper, opens at Centaur Theatre.
Officially, this drama of injustice was resolved on Aug. 28, 2007, when Truscott was finally, formally acquitted by a panel of five judges. One year later, on July 8, 2008, Truscott was awarded $6.5 million in compensation from the Ontario government.
But the cautionary tale lives on, as does its judiciary influence. In Canada, the death penalty was almost entirely abolished in 1976, with the final touches added in 1998.
In 2001, author and journalist Julian Sher published a non-fiction book on the case, Until You Are Dead, following his work as a producer on the groundbreaking CBC fifth estate documentary on the Truscott case, first aired on March 29, 2000. (Centaur has set up a free Thursday Evening Chat-up talk with Sher, hosted by Gazette communities editor David Johnston, on Feb. 14 at 7 p.m.)
And Ann-Marie McDonald’s bestselling novel inspired by the Truscott story, The Way the Crow Flies, revived the story internationally in 2003.
But it was the 1966 book, The Trial of Steven Truscott, written by Isabelle LeBourdais, that really set the wheels in motion on Truscott’s path to clear his name.
LeBourdais, who died in 2003, will appear as a character in Cooper’s play, which premièred at the Blyth Festival in 2008 and was subsequently nominated for a Governor General’s Award. (Noted Canadian actor Fiona Reid plays the LeBourdais role.)
Cooper, who is based in Toronto, has spent a generous amount of time in Montreal with the Centaur cast, “because it’s such an important story,” she said, in a recent interview. “And it’s important that we get the tone of it right. Even though I’ve written it, it’s a story that’s way beyond me, with real people involved.”
Why did Cooper choose to write a play about Truscott? Because she was asked to, she said, by Eric Coates, artistic director of the Blyth Festival. She had written one play for him, The Eyes of Heaven, which turned out to be a hit at Blyth in 2007. So, he immediately requested another. Only this time, he suggested the topic: the Steven Truscott case.
At first, she was hesitant. She consulted Ann-Marie MacDonald, a longtime friend, and received encouragement, as well as an offer to share research materials. She and MacDonald had once cowritten a play, inspired by the Nancy Drew detective series, called Clue in the Fast Lane.
When Cooper finally consented to write the Truscott play, she warned Coates it would take at least a year to complete because of her prior commitments. (She was producing a CBC Radio drama, Afghanada, at the time.) He told her that he couldn’t wait that long because the acquittal was coming down. He wanted the play for his 2008 Blyth summer season.
Given that the scene of the murder was the town of Clin- ton, located about 20 minutes away from Blyth, Coates knew that the level of local interest would be intense. Perhaps even dangerous.
A previous Blyth artistic director who had wanted to do a Truscott play had received threats and dropped the subject.
Cooper made it clear that she couldn’t even begin writing before January 2008.
The amount of research required (reading court transcripts, previous books, autopsy reports, newspaper accounts) was daunting. Still, she avoided panic — until the day (in January 2008) when she received a phone call from a Guelph newspaper reporter.
He inquired about the Truscott play she’d supposedly already written. She replied that she really didn’t like to talk about her projects when she was still working on them and hung up.
“Then I lay on the floor and just had an absolute panic attack,” she recalled. But she did manage to pull it all together.
One thing that helped her past writer’s block was taking an interest in the young people who had shared classrooms with Truscott and Harper: “I thought how awful if must have been to have a classmate raped and murdered and the young man they looked up to so much to be sentenced to be hanged.”
Her decision to create a fictional character to represent the other students freed up her creative process. In much of the play she allows characters based on real people to speak their own words, in order to stay true to their intentions.
“A lot is verbatim f rom transcripts,” Cooper said. “And I tried to show all sides of the story.”
One thing she didn’t do was interview Truscott himself.
“I didn’t want to bother him,” she said. “And I also wanted to keep a little bit of distance.”
But she did meet him when he attended the play, along with his wife, Marlene.
“He was incredibly gracious,” she said.
Cooper was raised in Toronto and theatre-trained at Studio 58 in Vancouver, alongside Roy Surette, who has directed Innocence Lost.
She is married to actor John Jarvis. They have two sons, ages 14 and 19. The fact that her eldest son was 14 at the time she wrote the play helped her empathize with the teen Truscott, she said. Her constant thought was “What if it had been him?”