From Atomic to Zero Monday Magazine, p. 16, It sounds like a playwright’s dream: having two plays open in two different theatres in the same city in the same week. Of course, it complicates things a bit when you’re acting in one of them, and your father is directing the other. But sometimes dreams are just like that—especially when you’re Jacob Richmond. Richmond, best known locally as the co-founder of Atomic Vaudeville, is starring in a remount of his play The Qualities of Zero at the Belfry’s Festival 06 this week. |
Yet he’s also the co-writer (with Paul Ledoux) of Tyrants, the last play of the season for Phoenix Theatre, and the final entry in their annual FIND Festival. “It was just odd how it happened,” Richmond chuckles. “I had no idea they were going to open in the same week.” Honestly, it would be hard to find two more dissimilar plays. Richmond describes Zero—which has had two previous incarnations in Montreal and Toronto—as “a very fast-paced, very odd, surreal kind of sex farce,” while Tyrants is billed as “a historical, Civil War-period drama about the ‘Mad Booths of Maryland’.” (That’s Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, of course.) Not only does this theatrical pairing present the unique opportunity to see two works by the same person, but it also offers local audiences a chance to see the progress of a playwright. “I wrote Zero about five years ago, so it’s nice to revisit it,” Richmond says. “I’ve made quite a few changes to it, basically just honing a lot of the writing.” Not that it necessarily needed much work—after all, it did receive the Montreal Critics Award for outstanding new play and |
was nominated for a quartet of Dora Awards in Toronto. “I think I’ve clarified some of the loose thematic tangents,” he continues, “but the danger of rewriting the heck out of something is that it’s easy to lose the initial reason why you wanted to write it in the first place.” Tyrants, however, was quite a different process. Richmond says the project was first brought to him and Halifax co-writer Paul Ledoux (Fire) by his father, Phoenix honcho Brian Richmond. “I took a crack at it about eight years ago, but I was, like, 22 and just couldn’t do it,” he sighs. “It’s a historical drama and I certainly had no ability to write anything so ambitious at that point.” But it was when the father-son team were working together on Jacob’s play Small Returns in Toronto that they returned to the project. “The more I read about the Civil War,” he recalls, “the more I realized how much it has to say about the contemporary situation in America.” And what’s his preference — writing or acting? “It really depends on the project,” Richmond concludes. “If I’m doing a project I really believe in — or I’m working with a group of really great people — then yeah, I love acting. But I become totally neurotic when I’m writing.” |