{"id":17944,"date":"2019-08-07T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T16:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=17944"},"modified":"2019-08-20T11:18:08","modified_gmt":"2019-08-20T18:18:08","slug":"victoria-fringe-fest-addresses-the-complexities-of-human-emotion-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2019\/08\/07\/victoria-fringe-fest-addresses-the-complexities-of-human-emotion-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Victoria Fringe Fest addresses the complexities of human emotion, life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most of us can remember a vacation that\u2019s gone horribly wrong. Flights get delayed, papers get lost\u2014whatever it is, it\u2019s the furthest thing from funny when it happens. In retrospect, however, the laughter often comes echoing through the cracks to make a good story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve compiled different stories to get that comic arc,\u201d says playwright Rod Macpherson regarding his play In Ireland We Rented a Car from Criminals<\/em>, which he is bringing to this year\u2019s Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the narrow, stone-walled streets of the Irish countryside to driving a standard with the wrong hand, all the things that tourists experience in another place, says Macpherson, can make for hilarious stories. But the play\u2019s main character, Mary, has more trying motives that at times make the play a dark endeavour as well, which, when it comes to Irish history, is no laughing matter.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOnce you get to the famine graveyards, then that\u2019s where you get sort of comic elements up against the very serious reality of what happened to people and how badly they were exploited,\u201d Macpherson says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
In Ireland We Rented a Car from Criminals<\/em> is going to performed at this year’s Fringe (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Comedy and drama often stem from the same things, both in the original Shakespearian sense\u2014where the only real difference between a comedy and a tragedy was the ending\u2014and in Macpherson\u2019s play. Illustrating the close relationship between comedy and drama, Macpherson draws on a story he heard of going out on the water to spread someone\u2019s ashes, a situation that is, typically, far from funny. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe example that somebody gave me,\u201d says Macpherson, \u201cthey were out on a boat in a lake and the wind blew the deceased\u2019s ashes back, covering everybody in the boat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Macpherson once decided to take a trip to Ireland after finding out he had ancestry there. But that connection was hard for him to feel, as the ancestry is so far back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat makes me ask,\u201d he says, \u201cwhat is the reality of that connection when you go back six generations? Is that valid?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Playwright and actor Ryan Scramstead says that he is okay with the audience members being slightly confused at the end of his play, as art is a collaborative process. In Scramstead\u2019s play Letters to Myself<\/em>\u2014which he calls \u201csemi-autobiographical\u201d and which is also going to be performed at this year\u2019s Fringe\u2014each voice in his head is a different character, and transparency is at the forefront of the performance, something that he says many people are afraid of. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo be so vulnerable that you are actually talking openly about \u2018I\u2019ve got one voice that says this,\u2019 I think we\u2019re almost afraid to come across as schizophrenic or like we don\u2019t have things figured out, and it\u2019s a very vulnerable thing to admit,\u201d says Scramstead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Letter to Myself<\/em> is another of this year’s Fringe plays (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

But things are always changing, so it\u2019s only natural to not always have things figured out, says Scramstead; a key in creating this play was for him to be comfortable with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe openness to have that discussion can produce such strength, especially in connecting and empathizing and sympathizing with other people,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contrary to Scramstead\u2019s philosophy, Macpherson says that he tries to keep his own experience out of the script.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause you\u2019re so invested in it personally, it never quite comes off as authentic if you use something really personal without sort of filtering it through the viewpoint of another person,\u201d says Macpherson. \u201cBut that\u2019s just my own way of working.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Macpherson strives to keep himself out of the material, which he realizes is counterintuitive to a lot of writing approaches.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople who say you\u2019ve got to write what you know\u2026 [That] leads to a lot of confessional writing and a lot of really solid first-person narratives,\u201d he says. \u201cIn a play, I\u2019d rather try and inhabit three completely different people.\u201d   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea for Scramstead\u2019s play came to him when he spent six months overseas in 2018 doing humanitarian work, during which time he wrote, as the play\u2019s title suggests, letters to himself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat our team leader got us to do was to write these time-capsule letters to ourselves,\u201d he says. \u201cWe wrote one at the beginning, we wrote one halfway through, and we wrote one at the end, and then we would receive them three months later as this time capsule.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Scramstead received all three, he realized some commonalities: he frequently used imagery to describe an unintentional arc\u2014wandering through tall grass to try to make sense of the voices, for example. So he started writing, using the letters as bookends for the script. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe letters are very much a reflection within the show,\u201d says Scramstead. \u201cThe pivotal moments are when these letters appear on stage, and in the show, I have no idea where they\u2019re coming from.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the voices in Scramstead\u2019s head are represented through pre-recorded audio that plays during the show, while other voices are given to other characters. Scramstead says that as an actor, it\u2019s important to have a community to help make sense of the many voices actors portray, but that at the end of the day, you are always playing an element of yourself.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve seen and heard stories of actors who have just stepped away from it because they didn\u2019t like different things they were exploring,\u201d he says, \u201cbut it\u2019s not a matter of \u2018I don\u2019t like this so I\u2019m gonna go hide it,\u2019 it\u2019s a matter of \u2018Okay, this is in me. But I think this is also in everyone.\u2019 It can be dangerous, but it\u2019s a matter of understanding that it\u2019s really things that we all deal with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival
Wednesday, August 21 until September 1
Various times, locations, and prices
intrepridtheatre.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of us can remember a vacation that\u2019s gone horribly wrong. Flights get delayed, papers get lost\u2014whatever it is, it\u2019s the furthest thing from funny when it happens. In retrospect, however, the laughter often comes echoing through the cracks to make a good story. \u201cI\u2019ve compiled different stories to get that comic arc,\u201d says playwright […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17945,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,234],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-august-7-2019"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17944"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17947,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17944\/revisions\/17947"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}