One of the highlights of the theatre season in Calgary is Alberta Theatre Project’s Enbridge playRites festival of new plays. These unique works are being performed for the first time ever, a unique experience for actor, playwright and audience alike. One of the shows this year, The Good Egg deals with something that many in the LGBT community now contend with: sperm donation.
Brodie and Robin are desperate to start a family, but complications lead them to alternative treatments. They encounter a young man named Wade who is yearning to make a connection.
“The script was originally commissioned for a theatre company in Toronto called Canadian Stage,” playwright Michael Lewis MacLennan told GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine. “It was inspired by my own experience in the whole fertility world. I went through the process of being a donor for one couple, and for negotiating another situation with another couple. They were both very different experiences, and not easy ones. The play was a way for me to work out that world a bit and do it with a lot of humor and theatrical audacity. It is not based on my experiences, but the story came to me very quickly; how it would work and what it would be saying. There had been a change of guard at Canadian Stage and it was no longer an option for me. I read it again and thought it was strong so I sent it off to Bob White and we got a call back. We did a workshop in Calgary and the response was phenomenal, I was blown away. So many people came up to me and talked about their experiences within the fertility world. A couple of weeks after that, they decided to program it into the festival.”
MacLennan, who has written for TV shows such as Queer as Folk, said his TV experience has taught him a lot about writing plays.
“This play is really formed by my television work in that a lot happens. It really got a sense on how to tell a good story. In a lot of plays, act 1 is getting people to make one decision and act 2 is the fallout of that decision. Things are much more gentle in their approach to plotting. One of the things my work in TV has done is bring out a much more audacious approach to storytelling. I really loved and missed the theatre and wanted the play to revel in its theatricality. It is like a ride, amazing outrageous things happen in each scene. It is celebrating the capacity for theatre and these characters to get themselves into seemingly insurmountable trouble, in a way you can only do in theatre. It celebrates the power of theatre but does it in the ways that are more akin to a movie. New things are constantly happening in front of the audience.”
While the characters are straight, the LGBT community will identify with its story of trying to define family.
“My own experiences with sperm donation were with lesbian couples. It is kind of connected to the gay marriage debate. The play doesn’t touch on it at all, this is kind of an aside. One of the things - the most exciting thing I think – the gay community is doing right now is shifting the lens of what a family is. The play is really looking to do that.”
Although this is MacLennan’s first show with no gay characters in it, there are definite undertones.
“I would say there is a homo-erotic relationship between the two men, and by erotic I don’t mean sexual. Brodie, the older of the two men, sees himself in Wade. Wade is his stand in and will be him biologically. Brodie is a total alpha male, he builds bridges for a living and has it all and yet he doesn’t make sperm - what does that say about his sense of masculinity? There is a real sly, playful examination of the relationship between straight older and younger men. The young man is extremely gorgeous. It isn’t like Brodie wants to tear his clothes off and suck his dick or anything, but that ‘In a way I desire you, for biological reasons, to in some way connect with my wife.’”
Betty Mitchell award winner Tyrell Crews, who plays Wade, says that from an actor’s point of view, that aspect of the show stood out.
“It is there for sure. Wade idolizes Brodie but for him to allow someone to know him on a personal level is very dangerous for him. So it is a really strange love/hate relationship. He sees himself in Brodie, as well as a father figure, an uncle, cousin, brother. For that to come out as pure love, it can definitely go to that homoerotic place. That is what is so interesting about it. Michael has succeeded in penning three incredibly complex dynamic characters. There is so much in the text that you can draw from. So I think this play will have a very long shelf life because of that. Another director may have a completely different vision than Gina Wilkinson’s production here.”
“These three people get in way over their head and fail to ask the good questions up front and get into trouble. The solution is to reconceive what it means to raise a child and be a family,” continued MacLennan. “As gay people we are particularly good at that, whether it is by being abandoned by our birth families and reconstructing chosen families to what is going on now, the idea of these unusual assortments of people coming together with the same goal, to create life and love it. That is one of the most sacred things we can be doing as a species and I think gay people, we are the cutting edge of showing ourselves how we might go about doing that. A gay person is going to see so many coded things in this play but I am doing it in a way that is still palatable for straights.”
When Crews was last on the ATP stage, for Unity 1918 his face was covered in bandages. The current show is the total opposite – the character is one of male perfection. It’s a role the handsome but humble Crews has had to adjust to.
“I am a sperm donor, so I am actually the ’perfect specimen‘ I guess. I am also a model, so the actual chemical make up and build, fine genetic material at its best. It makes me feel pretty good to be considered for a role like that. At the same time it gets me thinking too. The character has all these great physical traits going on. But when you get deeper he is not a happy man. It is funny that in Western Society body image runs rampant in the media, and it makes you wonder if all these gorgeous people are really happy. It was really interesting to dive into that, because it is one thing to have great pecs and another to have a dark place in your heart.”
In speaking with MacLennan, it is evident that this play is something he is very proud of. His and Cruise’s enthusiasm is infectious and I can’t wait to see this show.
“I wanted it to be fun for the audience, the actors, I just wanted a good time at the theatre. I am generally known for my humor but this is the funniest thing I have ever written. It really came out of a place of pain with the storyline, but…you would never know it. It is this kind of farcical romp. The first act is a non-stop comic romp that begins to gain a little bit more as things turn, and you learn more about things that go on.”
“The primary goal of a writer is to entertain. You have 365 nights of your year to do something and most of them we stay at home. When you are asking someone to get out in that cold Calgary night and go and see a play, you really have to make it the best experience you know how to do for them. Ultimately you have to have fun and that was my primary goal in writing this play.”
