Suicidal tendencies

>>Playwright Trevor Ferguson and friends
taunt the dark side in Zarathustra
Said Some Things, No?

DISSECTING SELF-DESTRUCTION:
Trevor Ferguson (background)
with Lina Roessler and Brett Watson

by NEIL BOYCE

Like all good stories, this one started in a bar.

A while back, acclaimed novelist and playwright Trevor Ferguson met with actor-friends Lina Roessler and Brett Watson to talk about writing a piece for the two that would become Ferguson’s newest play, Zarathustra Said Some Things, No?, a look at the fractured lives of two lovers in a suicide pact.

Over drinks with the pair, Ferguson put out the question of what makes a good two-hander as he sketched out ideas: “Usually, one character is pushing the other around for the entire play and at the very end it all gets turned in a different direction. But these characters are quite strange and alternate between who is dominant and who is submissive,” Ferguson recounts. “They are fighting for their lives.”

The play opened in 2006 at a small 54th Street theatre in Manhattan to ecstatic reviews. Following its American tryout, writer and cast are back home for the Montreal première at Théâtre la Chapelle, with Infinitheatre’s Guy Sprung directing.

Set in a rundown Paris hotel, the play dissects the couple’s failed attempts at self-destruction through a torrent of language and trickery. “The games they play are ways of getting at real things,” says Ferguson. “A way of communicating to each other with their nerve endings exposed.”

And of Watson and Roessler’s match-up, Ferguson is enthusiastic: “I knew that they were very good at pushing the extremities and their vulnerabilities.”

Ferguson’s diverse and long career is in a major renaissance now as he busily pens plays, novels, crime fiction (under the pseudonym John Farrow) and screenplays for film and TV. Deserved success for someone who started writing while travelling and working on railroad gangs, construction crews and driving a cab—the audience beginning at last to match the accolades for one of Canada’s great writers.

“The plays for me have been a different experience than my other work in that the initial writing comes fast and furious,” Ferguson explains. “And when I am doing a play, I feel a bit like a kid, frankly. I feel like I am 18 and doing something new.”

Forthcoming is The Timekeeper and City of Ice, two movies he’s adapted from his books, and a commission to outline a 13-part spy series based in Ottawa for television. Just another day in the life of a writer who is now seemingly everywhere at once.

Talking about his early life, Ferguson reflects, “You know, when I was living in railway camps or when I was a cabbie, people were telling me their stories.” Experiences, characters and voices piled up into a mountain of material from which he continues to draw. “It’s hard for me to say where everything comes from—all of it circles around and becomes one great big soup which I can call on. Maybe not specifically, but a lot of the flavour I try to get into my characters comes out of what I’ve felt from people.”

Zarathustra Said Some Things, No?
March 15–30 at Théâtre la Chapelle
(3700 St-Dominique) (514) 843-7738
or billetterie@lachapelle.org.
Infinitheatre hosts a 5 à 7
with Ferguson on March 19,
at Théâtre La Chapelle.
RSVP: (514) 987-1774, ext. 104 or
box-office@infinitheatre.com