Actor/playwright Jezec Sanders, whose play Where Foxes Lie is at Nextfest 2024. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s a very Nextfest sort of question: “What is something I have yet to try my hand at?”

Jezec Sanders, who evidently has never seen a comfort zone he didn’t want to exit (stage left), has already written two hit plays that scored big-time with Fringe audiences, critics, and the all-powerful word-of-mouth grapevine. Both Hacking and Slashing (2022) and The Cabin On Bald Dune (2023) were built for two actors on intricate infrastructures of mystery. The latter, an adroit psychological thriller, was expertly propelled through its black comedy set-up by Sanders’ witty dialogue.

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Where Foxes Lie, the Sanders play that premieres Thursday at Nextfest in a ReadyGo Theatre production is something very different for a playwright who says “I feel like I flourish when I’m writing dialogue for two people.… I love writing dialogue!”

Sanders’s new play, by contrast it’s “a one-person direct-address show. And those two things are very scary to me” (not least because the actor-turned-playwright himself is that ‘one person’, onstage directly addressing us). “Which is probably a sign I should do it,” says Sanders, an engagingly quick-witted and thoughtful sort in conversation. “I feel like every show I want to be doing new things and pushing myself in new ways.”

Sanders, who comes from a notable ‘showbiz family’ of actors, directors musicians, improvisers, filmmakers, has theatre on his mind: how it’s constructed, how it can engage its audiences, how stories can get told onstage without overt authorial intervention. “What would the characters say to each other through the course of natural conversation? The audience is smart: they can can tell when a line only exists because they’re supposed to know it exists. Why does the character need to know?”

Sanders pursues the thought: “it is completely in my control how much the audience does or doesn’t know at any given time. And there’s really no rule about when and how to deliver information.” Except perhaps this thought: “If you want to add mysteries you also want them to pay off in the end.”

The idea that launched The Cabin on Bald Dune, he says, came to him on a trip to Nice in France, and a stay in an Airbnb overlooking a building that seemed to be completely vacant. “But the lights would turn on and off indiscriminately, randomly. And my brother and I became obsessed with how creepy that was….”

I wanted to keep (that play) in an Airbnb; I wanted to keep it isolated … so, an island,” where, crucially, the characters can be pried away from cellphone service. “And I also wanted to keep it in Canada. So, OK, that really narrowed it down.” Setting is a catalyst for Sanders; “it informs a lot of choices about the plot.”

Where Foxes Lie by Jezec Sanders, Nextfest 2024. Graphic supplied.

Sanders went Canadian, and specifically the very small town of Killam, Alberta, for the setting of Where Foxes Lie. With this new play,“I was really inspired,” he says, “by movies like the psychological thriller The Gift … about how a rumour can spread and supplant the truth and possibly ruin someone’s life.”

In one-person shows, “the audience automatically gets locked into sympathizing with the character they see onstage…. They have no choice really, there’s no one else up there. And I wanted to take advantage of that.”

At first we don’t know if the person we see onstage, Koen, is the victim of a rumour, or the perpetrator. But we find out pretty fast, says Sanders, that Koen is the latter. “It isn’t supposed to be a plot twist; it isn’t a secret, more of a slow unravelling….”

“I wanted to write about how gossip spreads in a little community, the trajectory of how ideas about people take over … how something as seemingly innocent as telling a white lie about someone changes and changes, person to person to person. Like a really messed up game of telephone.”

In communities that are insulated, where people don’t come and go to dilute the spread, a rumour leaves an indelible stain. “Something happens that gets misconstrued, or people already have (fixed) ideas of someone, and they’re predisposed to believe a story they hear. It’s really hard to shake a reputation…. And the results can be devastating.”

“This show is by no means designed to take on Killam; it could have been any small town. It happens everywhere.”

The play’s spins on the double axis of two characters: Koen, “popular, star hockey player, goes to church, does everything that’s expected of him,” and Albert, “who doesn’t fit that mould.” He’s different, an outlier. And because he’s already “the designated outsider in the town,” people are ready and willing to believe the story Koen makes up about him.

Sanders cites the plays of Hannah Moscovitch, East of Berlin among them, in which the protagonist anticipates audience antagonism. In Where Foxes Lie, “Koen is standing trial, trying to plead his case, justify himself.” Sanders laughs. “Writing 101 — everyone thinks they’re the hero of their own story.”

“My relationship with theatre has always been as an actor for most of my life,” says Sanders, who majored in philosophy and creative writing at the U of A. “Then COVID happened and I needed something to do to not lose my mind. So I tried my hand at playwriting. And his friends persuaded him to submit Hacking and Slashing to the U of A’s New Works Festival.

“It’s a great space for developments very supportive , very gentle. As it should be,” he says of that experience. The Fringe was “my first time putting my work in front of people who had no attachment to me, or the works…. I felt a lot of positive affirmation,” he says of the enthusiastic response. “It really showed me I was on to something….”

And now, at Nextfest ReadyGo Theatre is back, a collective of multi-taskers that includes director Erik Richards and producer/dramaturg Ryan Blair. “It was really important for us to all go off and try our hands at different projects. And we’re coming back together with a lot more knowledge.”

They still operate in guerrilla mode. “We haven’t quite lost that fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants style of producing theatre.” They’re gathering props from stuff they have at home; they’re shameless scroungers.

“We’re all young artists,” Sanders says cheerfully. “But between us we have a lot of experience!”

Check out 12thnight’s survey of theatre at Nextfest, a preview with festival director Ellen Chorley. Plus interviews with Nextfest playwrights Tori Kibblewhite and Jameela McNeil.  

Where Foxes Lie plays the Nextfest mainstage Thursday 8 p.m., Friday 4:30 p.m. and Saturday 5 p.m. Tickets and further details: nextfest.ca.

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