Ground Zero Theatre starts its 17th season with the help of some drugs crime humour and heart in High Life a Canadian play that has drawn comparisons to the works of Quentin Tarantino for its strong language violence and thematic content.
Playwright Lee MacDougall who is also an actor and director met the men who inspired High Life when he was in Halifax acting in a production at the city’s Neptune Theatre. It was the late 1980s and he was billeted in a house where three morphine addicts were also living. “They didn’t do much other than drink do drugs tell stories and laugh. They had wild stories of their rough lives” recalls MacDougall.
He found their world so “fascinating” that he decided to write a play about it. “It was their hilarious take on their lives that attracted me. They found the journey of their lives endlessly entertaining…. When we hear about people who are addicts — especially heroin and morphine — we think we know that world but it wasn’t at all what I expected. There was a great sense of love and honour between these men and humour. And I wanted to try to reflect that in the play.
“They were quite fatalistic and optimistic at the same time. They all had dreams they all believed they were going to get out of that world” he adds.
High Life marked MacDougall’s first foray into playwriting. After conducting extensive research on topics such as morphine addiction and post-prison life the play premièred in Toronto in 1996 followed by a cross-Canada tour and productions off-Broadway and in London Tokyo and South Korea. Toronto’s acclaimed Soulpepper Theatre mounted a revival in 2012.
“It continues to be staged all over” says MacDougall adding that Ground Zero and Hit & Myth are offering Calgary’s first locally produced version of the show which Ron Jenkins directs. (A production came to Calgary in 1998 as part of One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo.)
In High Life audiences meet four “likable losers” — played by Haysam Kadri Ryan Luhning Joel Cochrane and Adam Klassen — who plot the “perfect” ATM heist. However as the foursome wait in a car outside a bank for the plan to unfold MacDougall says “things start to go to hell.”
“It’s not about the caper or about a moral of right and wrong. It ends up being a story about the bond the love between these guys” he adds.
High Life has also been made into a film for which MacDougall wrote the screenplay an exercise he describes as “an education in film writing.” He explains that one of the main differences between a script for the stage and one for the cinema is the need to make the film script more visual. As such in the movie there are multiple location changes a gunfight and a car chase as well as the foursome’s “further adventures.”
MacDougall says he considers the film’s extended storyline something of a sequel to High Life and he has no plans to write another play with the same characters despite requests to do so. “I try not to repeat myself” he says adding the plays he has written since High Life include such diverse genres as a romantic comedy and an adaptation of the W.O. Mitchell classic Who Has Seen the Wind?
MacDougall speculates that High Life has had a nearly 20-year production history because of the story’s “huge heart.” “In many cultures we are fascinated by the dark side of humanity and obviously are surprised at finding more heart in that world than we would expect.”
High Life runs from September 11 to 20 at Vertigo Theatre.
