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This will provide information on show times, our cross Canada tour, the music process, characters, and the cast and crew.

16 Days Till the Ottawa Fringe

16 days until the Ottawa Fringe festival and above and beyond the fear and dread of lines and blocking. I’ve find hope. My cast and crew are pulling together and bringing it full tilt. Everyone is doing an amazing job and we’ve pulled together as a team. We had a really messy stumble through that could have put us all in a bad mood but then we took a break. Sometimes you need to know when to stop. But when we came back from dinner break and added in our live music thanks to the brilliant Kenny Hayes everything clicked. It was like magic. The actors were in the zone. They worked really hard and hit the lines and characters full on. The show started to come together with lots of grace and beauty. It's becoming something magic that I know I feel special to be part of.

In the beginning I referred to this as my show but now each person who has worked on this project has owned a piece of it and has added a part of themselves to it. I wrote the script but my team made it a show worthy of the fringe and a darkly beautiful epic fit for enjoyment by any audience.

With the fringe approaching at a rapid pace and the frantic dash for posters, handouts, and the spread of word of mouth the madness sets in. But with much hard work everything starts gelling together and a solid product worthy of the fringe emerges like life out of some sort of prehistoric swamp.

We are rising to the occasion and ready for fringe. This has been four delicious months in the making.

Physics

Every fun play has something that allows it to transubstantiate the meta physics of our world. I purposely wrote in a lot of fluid reality. I personally enjoy magic realism as a literay style. After watching the memory of Water for the first time I desired soemthing that moved my play beyond the ordinary.

The background for the physics for my play came from watching TV one night. I was channel surfing and found a segment from the TV show Flashforward. Basically, it had the Australian guy from Lost talking about a physics thought problem called Schrödinger's cat. Simply, put it deals with probability and the uncertainty of an observing scientist as to what has happened in a closed experiament. I decided to use the many earths interpretation of the Cat paradox to move forward saying that both probabilities exist at the same time allowing for something to be both alive an dead until the reality is determined. This while not factually what the thought problem says creates an interesting place for the characters to speak from. For the play I considered each character as a seperate object moving on a set path until another object acted up them.But choice is also an option so fate and choice fight one another. This can be better described as Philip Warren Anderson's Symmetry breaking.

Auditions

First of all auditions started off with some fun. My Stage Manager had the idea to put out a call via Kajiji. Great idea. I created a number of posters that went out across town. We got a lot of different artists. SO I put posters up all over the theatre building on campus right before the end of winter break and when I get back the next day they've repainted the building and stripped most of the building of psoters. The 3rd floor was left intacted but overall I should have waited. Auditions were two days of paint feumes and waiting. We got a good turn out but there were some dry spells. With lots of tought decisions it became a two person show with the actors playing a variety of character types. I settled with two very powerful performers who had what I needed to take on the challenge that is my show.

The Script

So what do you do when you finish five months of script writing?

Well first you go out and get sloshed with a few friends but if you’re as crazy and impulsive as I am you apply to every fringe festival across Canada and see if you can get in. Really gutsy move and I got into four one in my home town Ottawa. The next step was to find actors and start wrangling a crew as crazy as I was.

But first a little about the script before I get all geeky with the process and my daring stories of convincing people to join my daring and dastardly project. So basically my script Love and hate in the Postmodern Age is a nonlinear look a depression, mental illness, suicide, date rape, and technological isolation. Basically, its a mixed bag. But the thing that makes it interesting is the first person style the characters take on. How these character speak for themselves and tell their own stories. It has a lot of fun linguistic devices written into the script. Course getting 50 people to give me feedback on this thing really should be noted here too. So thanks to all who helped with it.

The hook really is its nonlinear so the audience is playing catch up and having fun with the mystery of what’s going on right there before them. And it has a really gripping story line but no spoilers here I’ll let others do that with Fringe fest reviews come June. But there’s just this pervasive feeling of coldness that keeps creeping into the world as the character talks. The one thing that I was really passionate about in my writing was creating an environmental feeling having this pervasive feeling of both seasonal coldness found in winter and this emotional coldness coming from the characters. It’s a play about the protagonist suffering from depression and an emotional conditions go that feeling doesn’t generate a great deal of warmth.

One of the characters that sprang right out of my drafts early on was Eden. She's this super smart young woman who's jsut trying to figure out who she is. But she's gone though hell basically. And her journey as a person is really sad. And she's just kept going. She's a survivor and a fighter. And right now I think thats what people want to see. Someone who just keeps fighting no matter how bad things get.

So I got in for four cities across Canada Ottawa, Regina, Windsor, and Victoria. And I’m really happy. Really amazing festivals and I’m still really optimistic with the show.

Next post will describe auditions.