Vanessa Dunn as Kevin and Liz Peterson as Betty in Paper Laced with Gold
With their first stage collaboration, 2005’s The Rat King, Maggie MacDonald and Stephanie Markowitz wound ghostly sisters, abundant gore and legions of mutant rodents into a post-apocalyptic musical. Both early members of the Hidden Cameras, which surely fed any inclinations towards theatricality – MacDonald (the writer) has also been in the Barcelona Pavilion, Republic of Safety and now Betty Burke, while Markowitz (the director) went from the Phonemes to all-female cock rock cover band Vag Halen – they’re always adventurous in assembling a cast, coaxing together actors, artists and musicians alike. The melodies in their new musical Paper Laced with Gold were written by Stevie Jackson of Belle & Sebastian, and the setting, a transitory diner near the St. Lawrence Seaway, is far more quotidian, but The Rat King‘s political bent remains. The truck stop’s distant-eyed waitress and a troubled kid encounter each other amidst crushing economic decline. I met MacDonald (a friend, for disclosure’s sake) and Markowitz in a different maritime setting, their Harbourfront rehearsal space, to talk about camp, deindustrialization and onstage power dynamics.
What are your theatrical backgrounds like? I know that you developed The Rat King together, but did you have a pre-existing interest in musicals?
SM: Well, I went to an art school [in Unionville], and did drama, and I majored in theatre, so I actually did have a sort of formal educational background in drama. And then went away to university and directed a lot, at the King’s Theatrical Society in Halifax. That was what I was driven to do initially, direct. I wanted to direct theatre. I worked on a couple of Mirvish shows, assisted Daniel Brooks in The Drowsy Chaperone, which was a Mirvish production, worked on The Producers, did stuff like that, and then Maggie and I started working on The Rat King.
MM: C’est magique from then on. I did some high school drama and show choir stuff. I actually really love musicals, although I’ve almost never been to musicals in a theatre before. My parents took me to Cats when I was 11. It was one of the highlights of my youth. Um, you were gonna add something?
SM: Oh, just that I — it’s funny, because I did a lot of performing in musicals as a kid. So I actually feel I’m a bit obsessed with — Maggie and I have a joint obsession with certain Broadway musicals.
MM: Uh huh.
Like, Sondheim, or…?
SM: Like, which ones? Well, it’s a bit embarrassing.
MM: No shame in it.
SM: But…I mean, I grew up obsessed, obsessed with Les Miz. And then there’s the campier musicals like Rocky Horror–
MM: [sonic grimace]
[laughs] I was one of those kids, high school kids, who went to — at the Bloor, I guess…
MM: Me too! Were you dressed up like the characters in Rocky Horror, and you do the dance while they do it?
I didn’t always go that far. Sometimes I would wear…I think it was supposedly a skirt, but it ended up looking almost like a kilt?
SM: [laughs]
MM: Hot, Chris.
SM: Amazing.
MM: I dressed up as Rocky once, and at the scene where Rocky takes the bandages off and he’s — I wrapped myself in toilet paper and unwrapped myself in the theatre. “ROCKY!” [laughs]
I haven’t actually seen many of them — I saw The Lion King when I was a kid, I think not long after it started here. I’ve seen Cabaret–
MM: Oh, I love Cabaret.
But I can’t really think of any others. I’ve never been able to see Sondheim live [later realized this was technically untrue]. I’ve never seen any of the — Rodgers and Hammerstein or whatever.
MM: I’m more up on the camp.
SM: Yeah.
MM: Phantom. Lots of Phantom. “The music of the night,” you know? I did some drama at Hart House as well, when I was a U of T student, some drama club stuff. But it was really when I met Steph — Steph and I knew each other for a bit before we started collaborating, but it was when we started working together that things really…you know, I felt the dream could be real.
How did you guys meet and start collaborating in the first place?
MM: We met in a Wittgenstein class at U of T. Ian Hacking’s Wittgenstein class, in 2002. Then Steph started singing in the Hidden Cameras choir, and we got to hang out more, and realized we had a similar artistic and — we had a similar thing happening, we were on the same wavelength. And I realized that Steph is a get-shit-done kind of a person, a perfect person to do anything with.
Where did the initial germ of the story come from?
MM: Well, it’s interesting, because I was talking to Steph and Stevie kind of at the same time. Steph and I were talking about, like, it’s time we do another show, and we had this idea of doing a show — I think it was your idea to embed it in a restaurant. I won’t name the restaurant now, because maybe in the future we’ll try something wild there, but we were talking about this, and at the same time I was talking with Stevie about writing some music together, because it’s much easier for me to write the lyrics and book than to compose. It takes me forever to write a musical part, and we have a similar aesthetic. So I was like, “we should do this musical together, and I’m talking to my collaborator Steph, and I really want to do a show.” And I was talking about the vibe I wanted it to have: “I want it to be a truck stop, North Shore, Lake Superior,” but the plot hadn’t come to me yet, and so we started talking about movies we liked that would have that vibe. That was very early development stages. Then I took some time, did some dreaming, and then the real work began soon after.
SM: I also feel like a lot of the songs were performed by Betty Burke, right? Maggie’s band, Betty Burke. That’s where a lot of the musical development…started to develop. And the aesthetic of the show, I think, started to become clearer, it being in a truck stop and the style of the music, was starting to form at that time. So in a way that made the story, the setting, become a bit clearer.
MM: The story kind of grew out of those performances.
SM: And that was several years ago, right? Maggie’s been writing for a long time, I think, with these themes in mind, and maybe a bit obsessed with them in general, but — knowing that, we started to think about place, and the shape, and how we would do it.
What kind of films were you thinking of?
MM: Well, I don’t want to reveal all my cards [CR laughs], but, you know, the kind of vibe that you would have in The Last Picture Show. This small town, and there’s these characters, and it’s really rooted in these characters. I loved how in Last Picture Show you hear Hank Williams through the whole film, just kind of drifting around. It’s so perfect. And I thought of really blending the music with the show and embedding it. There’s some other films, too, but I won’t — initially, my first idea for the plot, when I was telling Stevie about it, he was like “you should check out this movie.” And the first thing in that movie — it’s from the ‘30s — the first thing in that movie was the first thing in the story I was writing. I was like, “this is too much!” [laughs]
Maggie, you grew up near the St. Lawrence River, in Cornwall, where the musical is set. And you were politically involved with the issues of economic decline and rampant pollution that shape its world — you organized punk shows, published a zine, ran for the provincial NDP. And you’re still an environmental–
MM: Professionally, yeah. That’s what I do during the day when I’m not making art with Stephanie over here, I work for an environmental NGO.
How did you go about drawing on those experiences and convictions, given that your characters may not be so knowledgeable or engaged?
MM: Well, I think that art and activism for me come from the same well of inspiration, and to do art or to do activism you have to take a similar leap of faith, because — if you’re going against the grain, whether you’re trying to politically change something that’s at work in the world or if you’re trying to create art, which is dreaming up a story out of the imagination, that’s to reflect the world, you have to do it with the knowledge that nothing might ever come of it. You know, when you’re doing something activist, the world might not change, but you have to take a leap of faith that I’ve gotta do this anyways. And if nothing happens, fine, and if something happens, great. But it’s this leap. And trying to bring art into the world is the same thing. You don’t know if it’s going to affect anyone, or communicate anything, but you hope that it will, and you hope that it will reach some people and resonate.
In this story, in terms of how the characters are — there’s a waitress, from a fairly working-class family in Cornwall, and then a young guy, who’s kind of a pathological liar. You don’t know what his true story is. But he’s from Cornwall, and she knows him. The characters know what they know. They know of their area, they have their impressions, they have a sense of the world around them, and they’re struggling to figure out what they can do within it, and what kind of future they can have, because the future is no longer laid out for them.
Any children of families that had union wages in factories, and had some security that way — you could, in the ‘80s, ‘90s, whatever, if your father was a CAW member working at an auto plant in Oshawa, then you could go to university, no problem. There was this generation that was liberated to make different choices than their parents, because of economic security that is no longer there. And with this whole austerity age, and these austerity measures — no one ever says “austerity measures” in the play, ever [all laugh], it’s not a Marxist diatribe, it’s meant to be art, and it’s meant to be songs that people can sing along with, but the feeling is there, that this is that generation and they’re trying to imagine what they can possibly do for work.
I like Marxist diatribes too.
MM: Oh, well, this won’t be one. This play is not one, so, FYI [laughs].
It’s not going to be like The Threepenny Opera?
MM: Well, actually, it’s really funny, because there’s some Brechtian lyrical or musical moments, but Stevie came up with that. I sent him the words and they came back Brecht style. So you can’t point a finger at me. And there’s one reference to Marshall Berman, after Marx, about all that’s solid melting into air. In the context of a love song [laughs].
Why did you decide to cast a mix of people — some known primarily for acting, alongside artists of other sorts — as the performers?
SM: I think it stems from — I mean, that process kinda started with The Rat King. We felt strongly about engaging interdisciplinary artists that we knew, that weren’t necessarily actors, like, at the time, Bob Wiseman and Magali Meagher and Jeremy Singer, people who are primarily indie rock people. Vanessa Dunn and Katie Ritchie, who I collaborate with on Vag Halen. Even Liz [Peterson], who, yeah, is primarily known as an actor, she kind of has a bit more of an eclectic performance-art grounding. She tends to do projects that are [atypical] in style…I think that’s a big part of our experimentation in the Hatch process of workshopping this show.
It’s exciting, and it brings up a certain rawness, a certain vulnerability, that doesn’t come with a typical boxed-in acting background. Which I think comes from our shared appreciation for the punk rock tradition, working in that DIY style. Also, I think it plays into the power dynamics of how we do our process. If you’re not a classical actor, and we’re not classical directors, then the roles of power and exchanges of how we collaborate are also inversed, so we can collaborate at the same level. It’s not like, “we’re up here and you guys down there, let’s Act!” I feel like there’s something really interesting about being in it all together, and experimenting with what comes up, with juxtaposing these things. Someone like Katie, for example — who has a small role, but — to say lines, act lines, but doesn’t have any background for that. How do we play with that?
I was going to ask how the power dynamics differ from when you’re working on a more traditional theatrical project, or even — you work in film as well, and I read that you’re adapting Zoe Whittall’s first novel?
SM: Yeah, Bottle Rocket Hearts.
So how is it different from that kind of process?
SM: Well, I — it is quite different in certain ways, mostly in monetary ways [all laugh]. But, that being said, I actually prefer, I feel more authentic working in that vein. I just finished shooting a Light Fires [music] video, and that was also a similar vein of process. We didn’t have any money, everyone was working on it together, it didn’t have a top-down structure of power play. But yeah, I think theatre has a more organic feeling, so having that process in a theatrical show inherently makes it different than a film set. There’s something about working with bodies in a different way. You don’t have a camera in between–
Yeah. I mean, I’ve never worked on — I’ve been around people who were working on films. Not exactly big-budget films, but if it’s costing you a pretty hefty amount of money just to run the camera, then you can’t experiment as much.
SM: Totally. Yeah, and there’s a lot of pressure around — there’s a lot more bodies that need to physically be there a lot of the time that you want to be mindful of, and so there’s a different stress level, whereas everyone that’s with us here, it’s like we’re all in it together, we’re all…I sound like such a hippie [laughs].
MM: I know, but that’s our vibe. It’s cool. Embrace that. We’re witchy.
SM: Yeah, we’re witchy.
MM: It’s like Stevie Nicks, theatre style.
Paper Laced with Gold premieres tomorrow night as part of Harbourfront Centre’s HATCH 2012 program.
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Chris Randle is the culture editor at Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @randlechris.
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