Frank Moher in Boy Player at Western Edge Theatre, and the season-opener at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo from website.
By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca
Gather round; here’s a real-life theatre story, It starts in tragedy, and crosses borders. Its intertwined motifs are an unlikely knot of loss and love … and show tunes. Its seeds are prairie, yes, but ultra-cosmopolitan, too, planted on dry land but involving an island, one of the world’s great theatre capitals, and on- and backstage life in little theatres you know in this theatre town of ours.
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And here’s the thing: in Boy Player, the Frank Moher play “in which music plays a big part,” launching the Workshop West season Thursday at the Gateway, the man himself, one of the country’s premier playwrights, is onstage, a long-delayed return to acting. He’s there to present a true story, his own, that comes complete with a love story that’s too improbable for fiction.
Boy Player represents a bona fide homecoming for Edmonton-born Moher who launched his highly unusual multi-sided career — playwright, actor, director, journalist — here, as you’ll discover in the course of the play. It’s where Odd Jobs, Moher’s ‘big break’ and most popular play, premiered in 1985, and gathered international traction and productions after that. All this was long (and many adventures) after Moher was a little kid in a household with a tilt towards writing: his dad was the sports editor at the long-defunct Edmonton Bulletin, and “the Edmonton correspondent for the Calgary Albertan.” He laughs, “it was kinda commonplace in our house that you wrote for a paper!” And gigs writing for magazines like Alberta Report, The Georgia Straight, Saturday Night, and newspapers including the Globe and Mail, would follow. “Basically, I was imitating my dad,” he says modestly.
And Edmonton is where the Moher found his first foothold in theatre, at age 12, in a 40s-style musical (by two Canadians!) called Jackpot — “a Canadianized version of Oklahoma!” he says puckishly — at the Centennial Library Theatre downtown. A seminal moment in his history, it was “my coming-of-age as a musical theatre nerd,” says Moher, who has a wry dry sense of humour about such matters. OK, Boy Player is not a musical, “it’s a play in which music plays a big part,” he says decisively. “But there are some very catchy tunes in it from Jackpot that have been rattling around in my head for 57 years.” And now they can can rattle around in ours thanks to Boy Player.
“Really, the score was great,” he insists. He remembers being at the back of a bus, even its exact location (Jasper Ave and 102 St), opening the Journal, outraged to read a review by Barry Westgate with the headline “Jackpot is an Unmitigated Disaster!.”
The starting point for Moher’s most personal play is tragedy. “My parents died within six months of each other…. And I went to live in New York City with my older sister Patty and her family.” He was 12.
Eventually he and his reconfigured family moved just outside New York City, to New Canaan, “the second richest town in America at the time…. I liken it in the play to The Great Gatsby,” he says. “Not quite as posh as East Egg, but posh.”
“It was a totally unfamiliar world to me, alien but fascinating cultures,” he says.” The resilient prairie boy in the big city “was still shell-shocked. But I got on well.” He had friends he still keeps in touch with. “My best buddy Mike ended up designing costumes for Hadestown.” When a gigantic snow storm, a once-in-a-lifetime nor’easter, hit New York, “the whole city ground to a halt. But I thrived!.”
“And when the time came to leave New Canaan — again (like moving to New York in the first place), not my choice — I was quite sad.”
As Moher outlines the narrative, Boy Player “goes on from there, returns to Canada, “to work with a pioneer outré theatre company in Calgary in the ‘70s. Before Edmonton and the U of A.” And before Gabriola Island (hang on, that improbability is part of the story too).
Edmonton theatre in the ‘80s is how Moher met a young woman named Diana: “this is ultimately a love story!” And Diana had “a remarkably similar story…. She’d also been orphaned at an early age (her dad was “a prominent early CBC guy”) and been catapulted from Toronto to … Smoky Lake, Alberta. “She’s more Smoky Lake than Toronto if you know what I mean….” Moher assures, cheerfully, on the subject of abrupt re-locations.
They met when Diana was stage-managing a Moher play Down For The Weekend for a U of A master’s degree production. And “her story, and how we came to be together and build a home from scratch” amplifies Moher’s own story in an uncanny way. “Maybe the most remarkable thing about it was how much we recognized each other’s experiences as kids,” he says. “My story was unusual (a Moher understatement that’s part of his naturally engaging style). But when Diana gave me permission to include hers as part of mine, then I thought ‘we really have a story worth telling!’ And that’s what Boy Player does. And it makes a story that other people can be amazed by and connect with….”
In the course of a long and happy marriage (there’s a spoiler built in, so no details from me), he’s often thought “it’s a very good thing our relationship is not really built around theatre.”
Frank Moher in Boy Player, Western Edge Theatre. Photo by Bill Pope and OV Arts Centre.
Boy Player moves from place to place, show to show, theatre to theatre, across borders — as does a distinguished canon of Moher plays that includes such signature Canadian hits as The Third Ascent, Supreme Dream, Prairie Report, Kidnapping The Bride, Sliding For Home — and even the odd musical (like McLuhan: The Musical in 1994). Moher plays are a defining, and high profile, part of the exciting period in the Edmonton of the ’80s and ”90s, of a startling proliferation of theatre and companies here. And his archive includes productions at every theatre in town, Workshop West, Theatre Network, Northern Light, Catalyst, Studio among them….
Boy Player is a picaresque, as orphan tales often are,” Moher thinks, citing an unspooling, episodic form in which the protagonist gathers eye-opening experiences in assorted places as he goes. “It’s a kind of emotional journey, a journey to restoring what was lost.”
Which brings us to the island, the one that isn’t Manhattan. Moher arrives back in his home town this season direct from Gabriola, across the water from Nanaimo, where Boy Player premiered at Western Edge Theatre, the company he founded in 2002. How could it come to pass that the “prairie boy,” who creates Western characters in Western locales at crucial intersections of the public and private, found himself living on a small Canadian island for four decades anyhow?
Moher remembers his boyhood self in a ferry sailing by Gabriola en route to a family holiday on Vancouver Island — a prairie boy who wondered “how do people live on an island? what would they do there?.” He and his wife Diana moved to Gabriola in 1986, for a year as they thought, lured by the promise of $50 a month rent by a friend. And they’ve been there ever since. The Edmonton of the mid-80s bust has something to do with it. “Our house had lost half its value, I was working three jobs. We’d had our first child, and another was coming. It was a case of wanting to dig out from under the bust. And it was only for a year, right?” A dinner at Yianni’s on Whyte and copious Ouzo have something to do with this decision, too, he concedes.
Mary Monks and Erik Kramer in Odd Jobs, Theatre Network/ Catalyst Theatre 1985. Photo online.
Odd Jobs took off, with productions and awards in the U.S. in addition to its Canuck cred (it was Paul Gross’s first big gig, in a Gerry Potter production). “And eventually (Gabriola) is your kids’ home. And you don’t move lightly….”
It’s been a while since Moher ventured onto the stage himself, which makes Boy Player a particularly special occasion for Edmonton theatre. He isn’t a U of A theatre school actor; in fact, acting ceded to playwriting pretty fast in his career, a decision accelerated by the success of Odd Jobs. “I’ve been thinking lately of doing a little rewrite,” he says (laughter). “A young American filmmaker wants to adapt it for film. And he added an element to the play that I thought ‘hey that’s quite good!’.”
Eventually Boy Player will be a book. Meanwhile, “I’m glad to be back in Edmonton and at Workshop West,” he says happily, on the phone from the Gateway Theatre green room (newly reno-ed). “And it’s already snowed. So I’m totally acclimated now!” He’s already had dinner at Royal Pizza on the South Side. “I realized I’m staying two blocks from the place where I had my first, and possibly my only real, job! Yup, 51 years ago I worked there as a dishwasher.”
Reunions don’t always come as poignant as that.
PREVIEW
Boy Player
Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre
Written by and starring: Frank Moher
Directed by: Jonathan Greenway
Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd
Running: Nov. 4 through 15
Tickets: workshopwest.org
