Some Notes on While We're Young

1. The Evolution of a Commission

2. Playwright’s Note to Published Text

1. The Evolution of While We’re Young

In 2006 and 2007 I was the inaugural Lee Playwright in Residence at the University of Alberta. A very significant part of the job was a commission to write a play for the acting students who were starting their three year program the year that I started my residency. I’d be in Edmonton working on the play for two years. On the third – their graduation  year – I’d come back for rehearsals.

There were twelve students in this class. So the challenge was to write a play for a large cast; all the actors were between the ages of 19 and 24.

Drama department need plays with large casts, and the purpose of the Lee commission is to have future playwrights in residence produce a series of them.

I made the decision that I wanted all of my actors to be playing their own ages. One of the things that’s frustrating for me watching student work is that they are often cast in parts that they would never be cast in in the theatre. I don’t care how brilliant a young actor you are, that last thing I want to see is a 24 year old King Lear, or a 19 year old Friar Lawrence. I wanted to write a play that will allow the actors to play to their strengths. Actors aren’t 20 forever; it made sense that they should be playing that age while they could. The other thing I wanted was good parts for all of them. I didn’t want any of the twelve to have spear carrier roles. So there wouldn’t be a central character, it would be an ensemble piece. The story, the structure - everything else - evolved from there.

In 2006, I was in my fifties. At the same time I was completing work Ragged Island – a novel where the protagonist is 85 years old. I was thinking a lot about age and about time.I made the decision that this would be a play with – at least – twelve characters between the ages of 19 and 24. And so, on some level, it becomes a play about being young by default. Also, this was not going to be a young person’s play about being young. It was going to be a middle aged person’s play about being young. I was looking back at my own youth when I wrote it.

I had to figure out what I – mid fifties, gay, from the east coast (where a lot of my work is set) – might have to offer to a bunch of gay and straight young people living in Edmonton. What did I know about being young in 2006? Not enough to tell 12 different stories about it.

And so I sat in on their classes. Saw them on stage. Attended their movement classes, clown workshops, fencing classes, scene study. I watched them grow and evolve as actors. I thought a lot about how beautiful we are when we’re young. And these were really talented kids. They could act, they could sing, they could walk on their hands.

So I started trying to figure out play that was to become While We’re Young.

They were away from home for the first time, many of them. They were falling in love, they were having significant physical relationships. Many of them were in complicated relationships with their families. For many young people, friends start to replace families.

I thought it would interesting to revisit my own youth in the 1960s and 70s and see what parallels there might be. Were there parallels between the way that Viet Nam loomed in our minds and the way that 9/11 affected these kids? I started thinking about my generation and Viet Nam and my parents and grandparents generations and World Wars One and Two.

And then I realized that many of these kids had friends who were serving or had served or were about to serve in Afghanistan. So I thought, War, that’s something else that really affects young people. Because who gets sent into battle, no matter what era we’re in? Not the 55 year olds. I was writing a play while Canada was at war.

When I moved to Edmonton I met a wonderful woman named Margaret MacPherson, a writer, who offered me a house. “We’re going to tear it down,” she said, “So it’s empty now. But our plans have been postponed and if you cover the mortgage, it’s yours.” I had little furniture, but on the plus side, because the house was doomed, I could draw directly on the walls with markers, and stick tacks in them, which I did. I drew the play’s structure in my dining room, mapping out a series of generations, dates, names, events. The dining room wall was soon filled. I had a structure that moved backwards and forwards though six generations, with scenes spanning a hundred and forty years.

The play would look at the ways that similar situations – love, pregnancy, betrayal, etc. -were dealt with in different times. I thought that if the scenes were six to ten minutes long, I could have six scenes in the first act, one for each of my six generations. I decided to write compact scenes that could be used in scene study classes with students. So that in addition to this being a play for young actors, it could also be something useful in teaching acting. The second act would start where the first one had ended, in the 1870s, and move ahead, generation by generation, towards 2006. The first act is driven thematically by themes of love and war, pregnancy, family. The second act was driven by plot as the audience began to realize how these generations fit together. The play also became a play about the settlement of a country – starting in the east and moving west.

2. Playwright’s Note to Published Text

While We’re Young was written for a talented class of acting students at the University of Alberta’s drama department. I was the Lee Playwright-in-Residence there from January 2006 to May 2007, and the play opened early in 2008, their graduating year. When I first arrived in Edmonton, I knew only two things about the proposed play: that it should be an ensemble piece with good parts for all, and that I wanted the characters to be the same age as the actors. The story, the structure  - everything else - evolved from there.

We were smart enough to have the actors read While We’re Young at various stages of its development; each time Kim McCaw and I recast so that no actor read the same role twice. This meant that I heard a variety of voices for each character, and it also meant that the actors grew to have a sense of ownership, not of individual parts, but of the piece as a whole. They knew that this play belonged to them. In the past, playwrights wrote for acting companies; writing While We’re Young made me wish that this were still and always the case. In the best of all possible worlds, every playwright could be writing for a company as talented and committed as mine. (As you can see, I grew to have a sense of ownership, too.) Working on While We’re Young became the happiest playwriting experience I’d had in a very long while.

I want especially to acknowledge one person, my great friend Dayne Ogilvie. Like Mac and Paul in the play, Dayne and I went way back - in our case, to the sixties, to King George School in Moncton, N.B. We hung out together in Toronto for over twenty-five years. While he was the editor of Xtra, he gave me work as a reviewer, and he and his partner Gary Akenhead generously loaned me their little house in Nova Scotia as a place I could go and write. No one has encouraged and supported me more.

Dayne left Moncton in the late sixties and came to study acting at the U of A; he had fallen in love with Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett, and that’s where they led him. More than three decades later, I was playwright-in-residence in his old department. At the end of my first year in Edmonton, he came back to visit me. We had a lovely celebratory dinner - our birthdays being close together - and then walked about in Garneau because he wanted to show me a house where he had lived when he was young. When he couldn’t find it, he became quite silly - ditsy queens were a specialty of his - and we laughed about growing middle-aged and forgetful. Finally he shrugged and had to admit that the house of his student days was probably gone.

Four months later, suddenly, terribly, out of the blue, he was gone as well. With Dayne’s death, I felt so far away from my life back east, from my partner and friends. What sustained me was this project, and the talent and commitment of this company. This play, which jumps about in time and is set in a world filled with generations of young people, is for my friend who was, when he was young, a member of a company much like the one I was lucky enough to call mine. I cherish that connection.

Don Hannah with cast of While We're Young in Edmonton. Production directed by Kim McCaw. Set, Guido Tondino, costumes, Robert Shannon, and lights, Lee Livingston.

L to R: Ava Jane Markus, Kirsten Rasmussen and Adam MacMahon, Jenny McKillop, Richard Lee and Stacy Berg, Don Hannah, Jennifer Fader and Scott Shpeley, Elena Porter and Ryan Parker, Cole Humney, Garett Spelliscy

Photo, Ed Ellis