The journey for Hapax Theatre’s upcoming production of The Boy in the Chrysalis, playing at this year’s Victoria Fringe Festival, has been several years in the making. The one-man, one-act play tells the story of a schoolteacher who is a drag queen by night, struggling to escape the reality of his recent break-up and life failures within the confines of his apartment.
Playwright Liam Monaghan concocted the story in July of 2015 as part of the Emerging Artist Program through the Queer Acts Theatre Festival in Halifax. Three years later, director and producer Heather Jarvie and Hapax Theatre co-founder Chad Laidlaw are showcasing The Boy in the Chrysalis here in Victoria. Monaghan, who has not been involved in the casting or rehearsal of the upcoming production, is excited to see what Jarvie and Laidlaw do with the piece.
“It’s cool that it’s taking on a new life that kind of has nothing to do with me, other than the fact that I wrote it,” says Monaghan.
Despite the distance (both metaphorically and physically—Monaghan is from Lethbridge, Alberta and is currently based out of Vancouver), Monaghan has been in touch with Jarvie and Laidlaw and hopes to get to sit in on a couple of rehearsals in the next month.
“It’s really exciting for me, because I’m going to go see it, and it will be a new version of something that I wrote but that I haven’t had a say in,” he says. “So that’s really cool.”
Monaghan says that he’s made peace with the process of putting so much of himself into the project and then releasing creative control of it.
“That’s kind of what’s great about writing for the theatre,” says Monaghan. “It’s so much a medium that’s open to interpretation by directors and actors. You can never control how people are going to perform it, or how audiences are going to receive it, as a writer. That’s what’s exciting about it to me. It’s so alive in that way.”
Monaghan has yet to have the negative experience of a production going sideways from his original vision. Even if that did happen, he chooses to embrace the freedom of others’ interpretation of his work.
“It’s totally fascinating to see what people do with what you had envisioned or imagined,” he says. “Sometimes it’s so spot-on what you expected, and sometimes it really diverges from that. I guess you just have to accept that it’s part of the medium. You can’t get too hung up on it being perfectly what you envisioned or imagined in your head because that’s not real. And that’s okay. It’s a good thing, I think, because oftentimes they make it better. Sometimes they do things you never thought of, and it’s better.”
Either way, he’s proud to tell a story with strong queer themes and a gay protagonist, something he hopes will speak to patrons of all ages.
“He’s a teacher, and one of the levels is about his relationship to his students that he cares about very much. So, in that sense, I think it could be really good for kids. And obviously for young, queer kids, I think it would be representation, which is always an encouraging thing for queer audiences to go to a theatre space,” says Monaghan. “Although, I will say, I don’t always show the positive light, because I think sometimes we can get complacent that way. It’s good to dig a little deeper and think about what are all the aspects, good and bad, of self-identifying this way, and how can we think about those in nuanced ways.”
The Boy in the Chrysalis (at Victoria Fringe Festival)
5:15 pm Friday, August 24 to Sunday, September 2
$9 student tickets, Langham Court Theatre
intrepidtheatre.com