Whiskey Fugue revival ‘quite different this time’
1990s hit play from UVic grad tells tale using physical drama
When David MacPherson was approached by Theatre Inconnu about remounting his 1990s Fringe hit Whiskey Fugue and Requiem, he got a tad nervous.
“I wasn’t even sure I could find the script. I think I wrote it on one of those early IBMs,” said MacPherson, a Shawnigan Lake-based actor, playwright and artistic director of Story Theatre — an educational children’s theatre touring company.
“And when I did, reworking it was challenging because it’s such a collaborative physical piece,” MacPherson said at the Cornerstone Café beside the theatre. He wore a T-shirt with a quote from African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass: “It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men.”
MacPherson’s two-person play opens this week at the Fernwood theatre.
It tells the story of John (Cariboo) Cameron, a prolific gold miner in the 1860s who wanted to fulfil his wife’s dying wish of being buried in her home province of Ontario.
He carried her body in a whiskey-filled casket for 700 kilometres, with several funerals along the way.
MacPherson had just graduated from the Phoenix Theatre program at the University of Victoria and started a small theatre company with friends when he took to the library for inspiration for the historical play.
“At that time, the theatre scene in town was great. A lot of companies started up and people were coming to Victoria,” said MacPherson.
This was before the days of high-speed internet access for research and social-media promotion.
“It was all pretty much hardcopy stuff — when posters mattered, and flyers and sandwich boards.”
MacPherson used the experimental concept of physical movement and “poor theatre” developed by Polish director Jerzy Grotowski to develop the script for Whiskey Fugue and Requiem.
That meant creating a play using minimal text, without a fancy set or costumes.
The actors follow a concept, such as travel, and explore physical gestures in exercises called plastiques, interspersed with text.
An example: “Imagine the right side of your body doesn’t want to move, but the left side needs to get away,” MacPherson said.
“A gesture might come out of that and I’d have the actor pick at that more … the movement ends up being more scripted than the dialogue.”
He started reworking the play in early October with the two actors, Melissa Blank (his wife) and Alex Judd.
“Each actor brings their own element and the play is quite different this time,” MacPherson said. “Because the script is non-linear, we had to find our own throughline.”
There is one star from the original production making a reprise — one that has appeared in other local plays over the years, as well.
“We’re using the original coffin,” said MacPherson, who built it himself after consulting Sands Funeral Home many years ago.
He said in the old days, caskets came in a standard size.
If the funeral was opencasket, a tall person’s feet might be cut off.
If it was closed-casket, the head would be cut off and placed under their arm.
“That’s why they are wide in the middle,” he said. “We toured with it on the roof of our VW van and raised a lot of eyebrows — especially at the U.S. border.”
MacPherson said he’s happy to see his play come to life again and thankful for Theatre Inconnu’s support of experimental and diverse theatre.
“It allows talented people in Victoria to explore beyond what they’d get to do anywhere else,” he said.