A playwright could hardly craft in fiction a more splendid 24 hours for themselves.
Who would believe a plot in which the protagonist writer stands backstage on opening night of a new professional production of his own play when he gets a call that he has won his province's top book prize for the same script?
That was the night Rick Chafe had last week, as he gathered yet more official accolades for his story The Secret Mask (it was a Governor General's Award finalist for top English-language drama last year and it is on now at Theatre North West).
On Sunday the Manitoba writer met with a group of theatre and literature enthusiasts for a reading from some of his more recent works, like Shakespeare's Dog (adapted from a Leon Rooke novel that was also once up for the Governor General's Award), Marriage: A Demolition In Two Acts, and others. He also bantered with some of the actors and crew from The Secret Mask and took questions from the floor.
Almost immediately he was asked about his relationship with his late father, since The Secret Mask was a play devoted to the dynamics between an adult son and his estranged dad.
Chafe explained that when his father had a stroke - the chief premise of the play - he and four siblings took turns flying to his bedside for a week at a time, since all lived in different towns. As a perpetual writer, he kept notes of his observations and what he heard from his siblings on their visits.
"And that is all rolled into one character in the play," he said, but admitted he struggled with the writer's morality to be true in the material and the son's morality to protect his father. "I kept feeling like it was exploitative, and I couldn't do that to my father. But I kept some notes anyway, just to have them later when I could think it over from a place of greater distance. The real problem was, dad and I didn't have a really complex relationship," whereas the father and son in the play were intensely hard on each other.
For that tension, he turned to a friend who was abandoned to the care of his single mother by his father at a young age. Chafe used the friend's experiences "as my distancing guide, so I could fictionalize a full story" out of the stroke scenario. "He would verify things for me, and gave me the authenticity I needed in the reactions and behaviours of the son in the play."
Eventually his friend and the friend's mother got to see the finished product - The Secret Mask has been produced by six theatre companies, counting this show at Theatre North West - but he is unsure if the friend's estranged father has seen it, or is even aware that an award-winning drama contains sparks of his own life.
Since the director of Theatre North West's version, Jack Grinhaus, had to spend so much time considering and mentally kneading the play, Grinhaus asked Chafe to talk about the tensions of the setting - the Canadian healthcare system.
"It was not an overt criticism of the people working in the system," said Chafe. "It's just a reflection of the way the system is. It's not supposed to be this way, but it is absolutely understood by all the players in the system that if you want your loved one in a nice place after a stroke, you absolutely must pay for that."
Actor David Warburton, in the role of The Secret Mask's father figure, joined Chafe on stage for a brief reading from another Chafe play still in formation. The two have worked together on past projects, and Chafe said he greatly values the contributions of actors to the roles he writes, because each work is almost always in a state of flux. Just because there is a glossy front and back cover doesn't mean he isn't constantly revising the script, based on what he sees when directors and actors bring his words to life.
"I rewrite like crazy," Chafe said. "What is suggested out of the acting process is almost always an improvement because they are embodying the character. Sometimes they'll give me feedback that goes against what the play needs to get through to the end with its authenticity intact, but very often it is much better their way, because they are living the words in ways I didn't in the writing process. Their collaborations I really hunger for."
Therefore the very first production of a play becomes the standard in his own mind, he said, so subsequent productions sometimes feel more awkward for him, since inevitably and necessarily, different actors and directors render the script differently every time.
"They move just a bit differently, their voices have a slightly different tone, than that record you have in your head," he said. "With Secret Mask I'm starting to get a wider sense of how these characters can be portrayed. As long as they are in the general groove of engagement with the themes of the play, I'm okay to watch it, and seeing it here, I knew it had guts because there was that tension I needed to feel between the father and the son. If you downplay that, it just becomes a charming story and misses the impact of the humanity inside it."
Chafe also praised the Theatre North West set for his play, since that is not an element he built into the script. He gave Grinhaus's backdrop his own standing ovation for interpreting the mental condition of the main character into the physical places this production uses to tell the story.
What he is not interested in doing, he said, was turning any of his plays into a novel. He is a playwright, he insisted, and lives to have his imaginings worked with and shaped by other creative people into a live portrayal. Novels are portrayed only by one reader at a time.
Even publishing his plays in book form is primarily a requirement of getting the script into the hands of theatre companies far and wide, in the hopes that more of them will feel the urge to give it a try.
And it gave him the chance to win this year's Manitoba Book Award, which he did while here watching Theatre North West, so he goes home to Winnipeg with the victory of another professional production at his back and another trophy waiting on his desk.
