What do you get when you allow a queer theatre artist to live in Fort McMurray for 3 weeks “researching, interviewing, and living life in that 21st Century boomtown?” You get Highway 63: The Fort Mac Show by Jonathan Seinen, Co-Artistic Director for the Emergency Architect Theatre.

“This piece was created last winter in Fort McMurray where we lived for 3 weeks… Working through collective creation, we impersonated the people we met and theatricalised the stories they told us” recalls Seinen. “The approach is collective creation, which is a ‘queer’ approach to theatre that works without the hierarchy of director/writer/actor, but rather uses theatre to tell stories otherwise not found in the theatre. The Laramie Project is a good example of this type of research/Verbatim theatre.”

Inspired by the “queer element” of Fort McMurray which Seinen describes as “notable in its (apparent) absence,” he tells of a cold and lonely town with, as he had heard, the fastest growing markets for Cruiseline. It is a town with a predominantly male populace. “Yeah, all the guys here are straight…TO BED!”

“I felt a homoerotic charge in Fort McMurray, and in this play I aim to express, in a small way, that which I could feel but could not see. The queer story is one of the many we encountered in Fort McMurray, one aspect of the complexity of this unique city that is given voice in our play. “

“Included in the play is the voice of a man using Craigslist to find sex with men at his remote worksite. I found the posting while we were in the northern and lonely city. The posting was a poetic cry for help in which the queer desire is palpable and irrepressible. It made me think of Jean Genet.”

Jean Genet was a controversial author, playwright and political activist for the early 20th Century. This past June, Seinen directed an all-queer collective production of Deathwatch, in which Genet authored on scrap pieces of brown paper while in prison in France for the Toronto Pride Festival. “A homosexual criminal poet who celebrated life in the gutter, Genet infused his theatre works with the tension between the performance of masculinity and the expression of homoerotic desire. In many previous translations of Deathwatch, the queer element had been buried. We unearthed, brought it to life and celebrated it.”

Definitely a show not to be missed, Highway 63: The Fort Mac Show is playing in both Edmonton and Calgary.