Canadian actress/playwright Kirsten Van Ritzen looks back on all her day jobs

Arts Web Exclusive

Kirsten Van Ritzen has had no shortage of dead-end and offbeat jobs. Her play All My Day Jobs details, with a comedic twist, the experience of what it’s like to work the jobs that no one wants to.

“At least the first seven jobs in my play, I did while I was a student,” says Van Ritzen, who studied at the University of Winnipeg. “As an actor you always have that down time between jobs. So I got very good at finding little jobs that could fit in between.”

Van Ritzen is careful to point out that although the play is based on what she has done in life, it is not autobiographical.

“I don’t talk about my acting career,” she says. “I leave all of that out and I just kind of let the jobs tell the story.”

All My Day Jobs plays for one night only in Victoria (photo provided).
All My Day Jobs plays for one night only in Victoria (photo provided).

Van Ritzen says she did that so the play would be relatable to people, regardless of if they’ve spent time as a waitress, or worked in an office, or held any number of other jobs detailed in the play.

“I’ve had all the jobs,” says Van Ritzen, who says the question is, “How do I condense a two-year job into one little, funny, hopefully amusing scene?”

And acting itself is also a job with struggles: part of being an actor or actress in Canada, says Van Ritzen, is that some years are going to be less lucrative than others.

“In any economy, you’re lucky to be employed,” she says. “But even if you have a full-time job that you love, there are probably going to be moments where you feel under-appreciated or over-worked, or you just want to tell your boss to get lost.”

Van Ritzen says that when the play debuted in 2008 she was shocked to see how much the audience latched on to the day-to-day realities contained in the stories.

“People in the audience would come up to me afterwards,” she says. “They wanted to share their horrible jobs with me. So I thought ‘Okay, that’s really great.’ I kind of had support.”

Van Ritzen also put on the play in Victoria in 2011, but “didn’t get any attention for it at all,” because of a last-minute venue change. Since then, All My Day Jobs was selected to be in One for the Road: New Plays for One Actor, a book of one-person plays; the play was also produced by another company.

“That was really exciting for me as a writer,” says Van Ritzen, “because being published and being produced elsewhere, they weren’t basing it on having seen my performance. They were basing it on the actual words on the page.”

Van Ritzen says the most difficult part of her job is knowing where the writer in her ends and where the actress begins.

‘When I first wrote it in 2008, I would have to say, ‘Okay, I’m done with the writing. I’m not going to re-write it. I’m going to learn it word for word as an actor would learn any script and give that performance to an audience without changing it all the time. I just have to fire the writer,’” she says with a laugh.

And good news for Camosun students: the play has a special Camosun discount of two tickets for $15.

“That will leave you beer money,” she says. “We’ve got the bar open for the show.”

All My Day Jobs
Victoria Event Centre, 1415 Broad Street
8pm August 9
$15; Camosun student discount of two tickets for $15 (bring student ID)
broadtheatrics.com