In My Day is a play that tackles many hard subjects, such as the HIV crisis that swept throughout the world and what it means to watch those you love fall to an invisible, inconceivable foe.
Playwright Rick Waines, having lived through just such magnitudinous times, chooses to come at it with a certain sense of levity that many would be hard-pressed to find in those unimaginable depths.
In My Day is what’s known as a verbatim play, meaning that the dialogue and action is pulled directly from real life. In this case, that includes interviews from a project conducted at UVic studying the impact of the beginnings of the HIV pandemic.
“[The study includes] 120 interviews of people who were HIV positive and their caregivers who lived during those first 15 years of the virus,” says Waines. “Those first 15 years are, roughly speaking, 1981 to ’96, and the reason that period was chosen was ’81 is when the pandemic began to make itself known.”
Waines says that around that time is “when the proverbial shit hit the fan.” This story and timeline is a very personal one for him.
“I was one of those folks [interviewed for the study] because I was diagnosed with HIV in ’87,” he says.
Being involved with this project is what began Waines’ journey of creation toward what would ultimately become In My Day.
“I fell in love with the project and started transcribing interviews, and because I had written plays about my experiences with HIV in the past… I felt like it was going to be great source material for a piece of verbatim theatre,” he says. “I obviously couldn’t use it all, but what I do use, I use exactly as it has come out of someone’s mouth, with all the ‘um’s and ‘uh’s and the beguiling ways that we speak when we’re telling stories.”
And then Waines was left to the task of trying to form a narrative and compelling story arc out of all of this.
“There are 90 characters and 40 locations… it’s all very kaleidoscopic, the verbatim material, and I felt like it would be a good idea for the audience to have a narrative arc they could follow a little more throughout the show,” he says. “I think of those interviews that I’m using as I’ve always thought of them: as flowers, and I need to arrange them, and if I just dump them on the table, it’s not going to be that fascinating of a journey for our audience members.”
Therefore, Waines has modelled the main story arc here quite closely to reality, utilizing himself as protagonist, forming a framework for the verbatim interview material to fit into.
“There’s a character named Rick who stumbles across this archive and begins transcribing,” he says, “and is reminded of a friend from back in the day, calls them up, and realizes they are in the beginning stages of dementia. This frightens Rick, in that all of these stories will be lost when we are gone, so he wonders how to preserve these stories without just, you know, putting them on a shelf somewhere never to be encountered… So he endeavours to imagine and write this show with the help of some folks from the past.”
Waines says that it’s not easy material but says that everyone involved has balanced it with a lot of fun and love.
“All of the dancing and the victories and the humour and the resiliency that I could muster,” he says.
In My Day
Various times and days, Thursday, March 12 to Saturday, March 21
$20 student rush tickets 30 minutes before show,
Phoenix Theatre, UVic
phoenixtheatres.ca