Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In 2002, a story of first love, a dreamscape looped against the horrific backdrop of World War I, changed the life of the graphic designer-turned-actor who’d “jumped into theatre cold.” as he puts it.

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Since its Calgary premiere two decades ago, Mary’s Wedding, Stephen Massicotte’s first full-length play has been on a mainstage odyssey across the country, the border, and the pond. In the elite pantheon of bona fide Canadian classics, it has a special place.

Stars On Her Shoulders, the new Massicotte play that opens the Workshop West season Friday (all tickets are pay-what-you-will!), returns the playwright to Canada (he’s lived in New York since 2007), to the World War I vault where Canadian history lies sleeping — and to the theatre where Mary’s Wedding began life as a Springboards staged reading.

It shares the World War I setting with Mary’s Wedding. But “it’s a totally different style,” says Massicotte of his new play, which he traces back to a first draft at Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects in 2016. If Mary’s Wedding is a lyrical, poetic wander through time and space, present and past, Stars On Her Shoulders reflects the brisker influence of Noel Coward, “and particularly Terence Rattigan,” he says of the English master of the traditional ‘well-formed play’. Especially “the feminist suffragette character” in Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy. “An articulate, smart, witty kind of woman of that period.”

The characters, five women in 1918 in the aftermath of a German bombing of a hospital in Doullens, France, are nurses. Two of them, “the heroes of the play,” work through the night rescuing survivors, saving patients’ lives, “putting fires out with their hands.” As Massicotte describes, “a lot of nurses came from prominent families, educated quite well. … I thought it’d be fun to have them (take on) an Oscar Wilde vibe, in the cleverness of their speech.” And he fashioned his play in that vein.

playwright Stephen Massicotte, Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

The old-school structure he’s chosen is, he thinks, a marked contrast to contemporary theatre practice of “many short, intense scenes in different locations,” a reflection of a generation tied to watching TV and movies, and quick small-screen interpolations. “Tennessee Williams, Chekhov … those guys all wrote like that, long scenes that don’t drop the tension by cutting to black-out.”

“It’s a lost art,” he says. “Setting: the drawing room, for a half-hour scene in that location, with people coming and going. Then, the next scene, ‘the drawing room later that day’ … changing from two-hander scenes to three, to four, back to three, in different configurations. It’s quite a feat, really. And it makes you go farther with a scene than you normally might.”

Canadian history provided Massicotte, a military history buff, with a controversy involving what sort of medal of bravery should be awarded the nurse heroes. “Canadian authorities pointed out to the British war office that, although they appreciated this honour, Canadian nursing sisters were officers,” and so should get the military cross. Elsewhere nurses were “regular soldiers,” eligible for a medal on a lower rung in the hierarchy of military distinctions.

He’d mined the incident for one of the “Canadian Heritage Minute” pieces he was enlisted to write. “Heritage Canada didn’t really want to get into the controversy, and focussed on the bravery.” But he’d seen the seeds of a play in it. Massicotte is amused by the fact that the costumes assembled and designed by Brian Bast include some from the Heritage Minutes as per their labels, an inadvertent testimonial to career continuity.

The seven-year arc to opening night, which includes the (alas) familiar COVIDian fits and starts, is, he says, “the longest period I’ve ever worked on a play…. What was good about it is that every time I thought it was ready, I re-wrote it some more. And now I’m pretty proud of it.” Originally Massicotte had planned to write only one more World War I play. Now he has a trilogy, that includes The Oxford Roofclimber’s Rebellion, encounters between war hero Lawrence of Arabia and the poet Robert Graves.

“I’m pretty stoked,” says the genial Massicotte, not least because “this is all women…. It’s a fact that over the years, less roles have gone to women. So anything woman in acting has to be that much better prepared, that much better skilled, that much better talented. Whereas with men, there are great actors out there of course. But sometimes a male actor can get by for a long time just by being OK, OK to work with, reliable.”

“I’ve never written a play with more females than male. And the place is crammed with talent. I’m so impressed,” Massicotte says of Heather Inglis’s production. “The whole cast is crackerjack, really on the ball. And they’re funny! This sounds like a heavy play, but it’s quite funny, I think, in places.”

Massicotte’s own storyline is an original, anything but predictable. “When people ask me where I’m from I don’t say Thunder Bay, where I grew up; I say Calgary,” Massicotte says. “It’s where I did my first plays; it’s where I had my first theatre success.” And he can claim Edmonton roots as well, since he took his earliest writing, The Boy’s Own Jedi Handbook plays, to the Fringe, and other one-acts to Nextfest here.

And, as a graphic design grad of Cambrian College in Sudbury he might never had ended up in theatre at all, if it weren’t for having a crush on a girl who happened to be a stage manager in the college theatre department. “I painted sets, built some set pieces, and thought to myself ‘I wonder if I could do that; I bet I could do that!’” He took improv classes at Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay; he got cast in an amateur production of Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations.

Why Calgary? “At the time I was an air cadet, and in summer I used to teach at the cadet camp in Penhold, and many any of my best friends at the time lived in Calgary.” So, theatre school at the University of Calgary, as an actor, followed, along with occasional thoughts like “What have I done?”

Todd Houseman and Tai Amy Grauman in Mary’s Wedding, a Métis version. Citadel Theatre. Photo by Arthur Mah.

In Calgary he did plays, TV, commercials, “whatever came along.” And then came Mary’s Wedding, “and everything exploded. Oh, I guess I’m a writer now!” And it’s a career that catapulted him to theatre stardom, without a single writing class. “I still write from an actor’s point of view,” he thinks. “What would be fun for actors to do? What would they really enjoy sinking their teeth into? And I try to make even the small roles exciting to play.”

In New York, where he’s been for 17 years, with an American partner (“she went to McGill; she’s Canada-qualified!” he laughs), he writes mostly screenplays for TV and film, especially of the horror stripe. He and his film collaborators have an indie horror film How We Ended ready to go, and they’re looking for distribution. And he’s been working on a youth-oriented fantasy novel. “Stars on Her Shoulders is my first new play in a long time,” he says.

Do his explorations of horror and war have a certain continuity? He muses on the question. “I suppose they’re similar in that people are facing an existential danger. In plays it’s a bit more subtle, of course: someone facing a loss of hope, a loss of the ability to carry on. And having to recover even the tiniest thread of something that can keep them going.”

That is “a something you can get from human interaction, love, friendship, that can help you survive,” even those moments when “nothing seems to matter but we’re all supposed to keep going…. Even when living one more day is an act of defiance in the face of oblivion, sorrow, grief. Hope is this precarious act of profound bravery.”

It applies to the nurse characters of his new play, up against war and the circumscribed rights of women. And “when you have enough plays to look at,” he says, “you realize how much you’re writing about yourself.”

PREVIEW

Stars On Her Shoulders

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Stephen Massicotte

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Dana Wylie

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Friday Nov. 1 to 17

Tickets: All tickets are pay-what-you-will this season at workshopwest.org.