An early birthday gift from the Canadian government
// April 24th, 2007 // Blog, Kris's Soapbox
Our director and a fine young actor (serving as Pat’s less hairy proxy) met with me this afternoon to read through and talk about our Fringe play, The Churchill Protocol. I baked fresh bread and made chicken chili. The fine young actor brought along a small pizza topped with an oddly incredible combination of broccoli, pineapple, and assorted meats.
I hadn’t really read through our latest draft since it was finished at the end of last month, so I was eager to take another look at it. I was also really excited to hear the text out loud, since we usually only get to see it on paper. Plays are funny things in that how they appear on the page may have absolutely no relation to how they appear in a theatre. Sometimes a play that seems perfect on paper will fall flat on the boards; I think The Churchill Protocol is a play that doesn’t read well, which either means that it sucks or that it has been written with performance in mind. I hope it’s the latter.
I’m very happy with how the reading turned out. The script is not without its problems (no script is perfect, anyway), but most of the criticisms are minor and, on the whole, we think that what we need to do is get the play up and running in rehearsal in order to smooth out the rough spots. It is at times quite funny, but it also has some great meat on the bone: it’s just about everything we set out to create, although the script we have now looks nothing at all like the one we started with last year.
All of this is bolstered by some more good news that propels us forward. We found out on Friday that ours is one of eight projects that has been selected to pitch to a panel of artistic directors, producers, and festival curators during the Magnetic North Theatre Festival Industry Series. This means that we have a chance to present the piece as a product that, after a summer of evolution on the Canadian Fringe circuit, will be ready to tour or be presented as part of other theatrical programming (likely domestic, but possibly even international).
On my way to the gym tonight, already beaming after a productive day of script review and brainstorming on pitch angles and promotional ideas, I tuned the car radio into the top story on CBC World Report, and my grin widened to the point where it ate my face.
You see, the bizarre events portrayed in The Churchill Protocol are catalyzed by a brash reporter who has caught wind of secret flights, coming from Afghanistan, that have been landing in the middle of the night near Churchill, Manitoba. The “cargo” on those flights is live, and the reporter has every reason to believe that the Canadian Forces are smuggling Afghan prisoners into Manitoba for secret detention on our own soil. We came up with this conceit during our last workshop, in December; while it proves to be an interesting setup for the play, it doesn’t have much grounding in reality. It’s believable, and there is past precedent for secret detainment in the Canadian history books, but it’s not likely to be happening now.
Or so we thought.
Tonight’s lead story in the Canadian media is like a hunk of gold, studded with diamonds and fringed with platinum, that has landed in our laps. Canadian authorities have apparently been turning Afghan detainees over to Afghan authorities, where those detainees are being horribly tortured. The Canadian government is being accused of willful blindness, which technically makes Canada guilty of war crimes. There are even unconfirmed reports of Canadian authorities committing some acts of torture themselves. Now, the Canadian government doesn’t seem to want to get into the business of running a prison in Afghanistan, but they can’t knowingly turn prisoners over to people who commit torture… so what can they do? At one point during discourse in the House of Commons today, Stephane Dion suggested that Canada might want to bring the detainees to Canada so that they can be held safely; Prime Minister Stephen Harper said “I’m not sure what the leader of the opposition is suggesting. We’re not going to bring Taliban prisoners to Canada.”
To be clear, then: the leader of the official opposition actually suggested (though he later backed down) that we openly do exactly what the reporter in our play thinks the government is doing.
I simply can’t ignore it. For the purposes of The Churchill Protocol — and because it is suddenly the biggest story in the country — our brash young reporter is going to riff on the “what-if” idea that Harper’s flat denial of prisoner importation is a lie.
Thank you, universe. I will remember this the next time I’m angry at you!
