Local playwright’s premiere has been years in the making
A young intelligent actor-comewriter looks older than his age, is wiser than his age and talented beyond his years.
Just watch Brandon Shalansky on stage as he slips into a role and wears it as confidently as a bespoke Italian suit.
I know this because I have watched him in various plays and musicals: Oliver, 39 Steps, Spamalot, Les Miserable, to name a handful off the top of my head — as well as acted alongside him in Mary Poppins (2016)
I sat down with Shalansky at my home to talk about his play Adrift, which he wrote and will have its Canadian premiere at Lake Country’s Creekside Theatre Thursday to Saturday.
Born in Vancouver and brought up in Kelowna, this graduate of Immaculata Regional High School started his arts training in the band room playing jazz on a tenor sax and in a drama class. Realizing slightly too late that he wanted to peruse his education in performance arts; he missed out on the college audition process, so he looked into and got accepted for the writing program at UBC Okanagan — crediting instructor Anne Fleming for sparking his interest further into the playwriting process.
He worked with Fleming to read as many plays as he could, write as much as he could and immerse himself, which resulted in a strong portfolio of original works to be present for his masters application.
Fleming’s reference letters and this body of work got him accepted to Edinburgh University in Scotland where he wrote Adrift.
The idea for this play sprouted through a local Kelowna friend and fellow actor, who suggested a juxtaposed scenario of a rich girl getting stuck in a small fishing boat lost at sea.
Shalansky kept that thought upon arriving in Scotland and decided just as a writing exercise to create a scene from that thought, from which the play began to take shape.
He found himself abandoning other plays and projects he was writing for his class, to continue on with Adrift.
“It was a lot of fun and it had a lot of different forms from when it was first workshopped in Edinburgh,” he said. “The play is about a bird and a fish and two humans who are completely different — a loner and a socialite realizing they both are alone and isolated for their own reason, one being shut away and one being so in the spotlight that there is no room to be yourself — and they are stuck in this boat together and forced to figure each other out.”
The original concept of fish and bird are important for the play. To keep them included for a stage production, they have become puppets.
Upon arriving back in Kelowna, he gave the script to director Rob Mason Brown, owner of Fred Skeleton Theatre Company for him to read and perhaps give comment, Mason Brown came back to him with an offer of directing his play and including it as part of the Fred Skeleton Theatre season.
Elated and slightly surprised, Shalansky accepted.
I asked Shalansky how he feels about giving away control and watching someone else interpret story. He cleverly replies that in playwriting, you are not writing something for others to just read, you are writing blueprints for directors to take on.
“My script is the first step into a collaborative process and because this is an original piece of work, when the director comes to me to say a small bit of the scene is not quite working, If I agree, I can rewrite it and boom it fits.”
Adrift is a 50 minute one-act play. Shalansky enjoys writing in a way that makes people feel one thing, usually beginning with laughter, then ripping that out from under them to change their feeling on a dime.
He states; “you have the most impact for emotion when you are hit in unexpected ways.”
“Adrift is also about isolation, loneliness, grief, but it’s funny.”
Adrift by Brandon Shalansky is presented by Fred Skeleton Theatre Company, directed by Rob Mason-Brown and stars Bonnie Esson and Zoe Sommerfield with Shannon Mason-Brown as the puppet master.
The play runs for three nights only, Thursday-Saturday at The Creekside Theatre in Lake Country at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 for adults and $15 for students through Kelownatickets.com, the box office number is: 250-862-2867.