Bella King, I Meant What I Said, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In I Meant What I Said (formerly called Finally! A New Play By Stewart Lemoine), Stewart Lemoine’s first new full-length comedy in seven years — we meet Dinah, a proofreader and aspiring novelist who’s fast approaching the three-oh birthday milestone.

At the outset she’s thinking about … thinking, and the way “the thoughts you have are the cards you’re dealt.” And she’s having thoughts about the people who unexpectedly pop up in her life — and the way they seem to be getting to know each other, and themselves, and having adventures together, right there onstage, in scenes under Dinah’s personal supervision. “I’m just going to ahead and manifest another person,” she says. “I run a tight ship.”

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In an archive of more than 100 plays of every length I Meant What I Said, premiering Friday in the Teatro Live! season, isn’t the first time Lemoine has written about inspiration itself. Where does it come from? How can it be shaped into characters and stories? Ah, and who’s in charge anyhow?

As he points out, in a post-rehearsal chat last week, his last full-length comedy, A Likely Story in 2019 with its sly double-meaning title, has something in common with this new play premiering Friday in the Teatro Live! season. In A Likely Story, “a story telling itself,” as he describes, the characters are strangers, “travellers, people trying to decide where they are,” which they decide is a train station in Basel, Switzerland. “And when someone makes a decision the story advances….” They are, in effect, in charge of their own narrative fortunes.

Lemoine spent his “pandemic years” digitizing his archive of plays, dating back to the start of Teatro (Teatro La Quindicina) at the first Fringe. Many of them, like Swiss Pajamas and Fall Down Go Boom, existed only on paper. The latter, by the way, last seen 30 years ago, comes to the Varscona March 1 as a reading in the “Farren Presents” (devised by the new Teatro artistic director Farren Timoteo) series accompanying the Teatro season. Written in honour of Canada’s hosting of the World Figure Skating championship in 1996, it is certainly Lemoine’s “only sports comedy,” as billed.

He did write a new 2023 solo show for Rachel Bowron, Love Is For Poor People, a quixotic memoir of a romance- and event-filled life and career before they happen, to get jump on time. And Or You Can Do Nothing, the solo show he wrote specially for Ron Pederson’s talent for conjuring multiple characters (directed by Jackie Maxwell), has dates in Ontario and, he hopes, for Teatro in the future.

And now there’s a new full-length Lemoine, at the theatre whose own origin story is built on his comedies. “The real thing that made me want to do it was the cast of young people,” he says of the new generation of five Teatro stars in the show. Most he’s worked with in the last year, Bella King and Sam Free in the screwball comedy On The Banks of the Nut; Nida Vanderham and Eli Yaschuk in The Noon Witch. And they’re joined by Jayce McKenzie, who was in The Hothouse Prince. He wanted to write “something that would just be their own, not having to worry about how someone did it before them.”

playwright Stewart Lemoine. Photo supplied.

The Lemoine method has always been to create characters and plays with specific actors in mind. “You write to what you know that person can do,” he says. “Or what has that person never done … to surprise the actor a bit. They get the role and they start to feel they’re living life differently.”

Long before he came up with the title — much less the structure and the story, the play, and Dinah — were designed with the comic talents of the engaging Bella King in mind. “The voice of Dinah, her character, her voice, are pretty close to mine,” says Lemoine, “the way I write letters, the way I talk to people.” After a gap of seven years, though, he reports he started the play three separate times, uncharacteristically struggling with how to make the first-person narration work, how the characters and scenes would be introduced.

“It’s better if I don’t filter,” he says of the writing process and the creation of characters who are unusually articulate, a Lemoine signature.. “Because I tend to write in longer sentences for a characters like Dinah, I make sure I can do it in a single breath. Long phrasing is important to me,” as many a Teatro actor has confirmed. “I read it aloud a million times to make things go as they should.”

And having thought after thought doesn’t really count until they’re processed into writing or speech, Lemoine considers. Grad student Alex (Sam Free), who’s possibly Dinah’s boyfriend (he’s not sure if they broke up or not), is doing a PhD in reading, and does exactly that, aloud, from Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Why Milton? Lemoine got the idea via the Handel setting of the poems. Will Alex make it to Dinah’s final draft?

“Where does creativity come from?” Lemoine pauses to consider. “From real life, and imagining a character and projecting things on them, inventing futures for them….” He thinks of this new play as “showing you how a mind works, what it’s like to create plays. Not how to do it, but how I do it.” He points to works he admires in which the characters collaborate to take charge: the Rossini opera Journey to Rheims, in which a multi-national assortment of characters are just trying to get to a coronation despite every kind of obstacle, and the  Buñuel film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in which “friends are just trying to get together for a dinner party and it never quite works. But they just keep going.”

“Theatre allows us to travel, to go with the speed of thought — and a good lighting designer — and you’re suddenly somewhere else. ”

Speaking as we are about creativity and its sources in real life, here’s an intersection that amuses Lemoine. In I Meant What I Said, an undergrad in a film studies class suddenly arrives in Alex’s university office with her term paper ‘The Expression of Thought in the Cinema of Cocteau and Fellini’ and delivers a chunk of this weighty oeuvre as a monologue before she gets the hook from Dinah. “Two women both obsessed with thinking? No sir….  It’s from an actual I paper I wrote in 1983 in my university days,” he says, “with footnotes and a whole analysis. I got a 9,” he laughs. “When I started writing about thought, and had an undergrad character I thought ‘why pretend’?

“I could really use a lot of people (onstage),” says the playwright of the thought that resulted in multiple roles (and a lot of quick changes) for Vanderham. She plays The Oddball, who contains Stacy, a server, an usher … seven characters in all.

As in so many Lemoines, music figures prominently. In The Margin of the Sky, for example hearing Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder is a life-changer for an L.A. soap star; in Fever Land, it’s Schubert’s The Erlking. In I Meant What I Said, it’s a trip to the Philharmonic, on a weekday afternoon yet!, (the sign of a livable city according to Dinah). Hearing Saint-Saens’ Organ Symphony has a mesmerizing effect on Helen, a would-be divorcée. And the future Dinah had imagined for Helen changes big-time. When the organ rumbles and shakes the rafters in the symphony finale, as Lemoine points out, “it’s like being in a row boat and realizing a whale is swimming underneath.”

“Thought after thought,” says Lemoine of the experience of writing a comedy about inspiration and translating thinking into characters. “What would I do with that person? You invent a future…. What would be a happier outcome?”

PREVIEW

I Meant What I Said

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Bella King, Sam Free, Jayce McKenzie, Nida Vanderham, Eli Yaschuk

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Avenue

Running: Feb. 20 to March 8

Tickets: teatrolive.com