Last-Minute Success

No-fuss playwriting works for Marriage's Sean Reycraft

There are writers who worry over each comma and every last semicolon, endlessly rewriting their work over months and years. And then there's Sean Reycraft. The popular playwright won the Fringe 24-hour playwriting contest; he received the coveted Chalmers Canadian Play Award for Pop Song, which he wrote over a couple of days, and he got into the Canadian Film Centre on the strength of a script he wrote overnight.
"There's something to be said for your first instinct and the first word that goes on the page," Reycraft suggests: apparently an understatement in his case. What makes Reycraft's writing work? "I think my dialogue style," he offers. "I think I'm also like a pop culture junkie."
For instance? "The O.C. is a total guilty pleasure, The Lord of the Rings probably, and I love The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," he lists. "I love all things pop culture and so I think there's sort of a glib style that I get nailed for sometimes that's conversational, that's funny. I think the subjects that attract me are really dark, nightmarish situations, but I can come at them from the side and approach them in a funny way, a bit of a different perspective."
His current project, One Good Marriage, is no exception to this rule. "I had spent some time in L.A. and I returned really depressed; I really wanted to write something that we could do over the summer," he says. "As I've done with most things, I left it until the very last minute. When I started to write it, I had just got a job working on The Eleventh Hour [the Gemini-winning CTV drama series], so it was kind of written on the bus to Downsview. I have to say it really worked."
The script, which already proved popular at the 2002 SummerWorks Festival, is about a woman who is wrongfully accused of murdering her daughter. "The first lines of the play are 'Everybody's dead. Everybody died, but thanks for coming.' It's the couple talking to the audience," Reycraft explains.
"I've taken this couple and put them in this nightmarish situation, and they realize that they really didn't know each other all that well. But it's really funny. It's also a bit of mystery. They don't really come out and say what the events of that day were until the end," he says.
"Another trait in my writing is that I love details, so for these characters, as a mechanism of coping, they cling to details. When they're telling how they got the news they describe in intimate detail the beer that they were drinking, things students said to them, costumes that showed up on Hallowe'en."
In the end, says Reycraft, "The play works on sort of a black comedy level. It never is improbable. You never dismiss it as being so unlikely that it couldn't happen."
One Good Marriage runs from January 23 to February 15 at Theatre Passe Muraille. For tickets and information, call 416.504.7529.

Publication Date: 2004-01-18
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3551