Theatre wank: the good kind

By Jeff Kubik

We’ve all been there, found ourselves stuck somewhere we never imagined ourselves being in. Driven by necessity or impulse, we’ve worked awful jobs, said awful things and made awful decisions. But we’ve never lost ourselves there, have we? Underneath it all, there’s still a caring human being, right? But, after all, aren’t those experiences the very ones that make us the people we are?

Ask Stephen Masicotte, he seems to understand. Before Mary’s Wedding made him an internationally recognized playwright and before he became an international screenwriter, he used to work in a pornography store.

“I was the late night guy for about a year, working in this porn shop,” explains Masicotte. “And, after a lot of the experiences I had there I thought, ‘This would be a good play.’ So, last year I started working on Pervert, a play about a video store clerk and his adventures and porn, his dark but funny adventures. I turned 30 in an adult video.”

Produced by Ground Zero Theatre and directed by Theatre Calgary’s Ian Prinsloo, Pervert is another in a series of collaborations between the two. In addition to productions of Masicotte’s The Boy’s Own Jedi Handbook, A Farewell to Kings and Looking After Eden, Masicotte and most of Ground Zero Theatre’s members are University of Calgary alumni.

“[Artistic Director] Ryan [Luhning] and I were just saying the other day that our first stage kiss was with the other,” recalls Masicotte.

Following the misadventures of a porn store clerk named Tim (Christian Goutsis) and the complex interplay between the denizens of his pornographic domain, Pervert is a play addressing the idea of pornography as perversion–the labels we apply to those who peddle and use it as well as the underlying humanity of it all. Accusations fly, questions are raised and, ultimately, comedy rises from the filth. However, Masicotte is quick to point out that, as Pervert shows, filth is very subjective.

“It’s definitely not meant to be an offensive play,” he assures. “Some people might find the subject rather tense but there’s no nudity in the play, you don’t see videos or pornography in the play. My goal was always to make it ‘whatever you think you see, you thought you saw.’ So, on stage, we’re trying to inspire people’s imaginations. You see some things as either dark or pleasant, depending on how you look at it.”

A play about pornography would be remiss, however, if it didn’t include at least a few jokes of a more crude bent. Fortunately, as a man who has lived the reality, the playwright understands the comic possibilities of the risque.

“All the standard porn jokes are in there,” says Masicotte. “Everyone asks you what it’s like to be porn clerk and you tell them jokes about the titles of the movies or the strange requests people have made. The worst one I’d ever seen was called Great Grandma Gets Her Cookies.”

For a playwright whose reputation has been built on stories of love, friendship and Star Wars, a dark comedy exploring the nature of pornography seems to be a serious departure. Fans of Mary’s Wedding and The Boy’s Own Jedi Handbook may have difficulty identifying the playwright with the pornographer. For Masicotte, however, his plays, while certainly different, share a common thread.

“Personally I think the plays are essentially about the same thing, which is that human beings search for love and friendship. It’s what all my plays seem to be about at heart,” he explains. “This is just another one; it’s just about people looking in the wrong places.

As Masictotte’s stint in the world of pornography shows, awful experiences are often required to create our stories as they are situations which define us as human beings. Without those dark experiences, a playwright or screenwriter is left with no raw material and doomed to write scripts about other scripts, stories about other stories. Sometimes, we need to find ourselves within those dark places in order to see the light.

“When I wrote Ginger Snaps 3, a werewolf movie, I didn’t know anything about what werewolves are like or what it’s like to be haunted by a werewolf, but I do know what it’s like to be scared or alone, or lonely,” says Masicotte. “You just feed that into the experience, you need them to create those feelings. If not, you end up writing stories that are derivative of other stories. I just write the truth of what it was for me, being a porn store clerk.”

With Mary’s Wedding touring internationally and the screenplay for a multi-million dollar supernatural thriller under his belt, Masicotte seems far removed from the struggling dramatist/porn clerk of Pervert’s inception. Nonetheless, he has not failed to learn at least one pragmatic lesson about the temptations of the flesh.

“Call the play Pervert, put naked people on the poster, sell a million tickets. Certain people may be offended by it, but it usually makes people want to see it. And, if people really like the play, then it’s going to make people want to go see it. It’s a win-win situation.”