Jul. 21, 2010 - Issue #770: Draw It Yourself

Prevue

The perils of high school

Saint Aggie's '84 blends adolescent apocalypticism and the Bard

High school is a time when a lot of people think their world is about to end, but for Chris Wynters, his experience at a boarding school in the mid-1980s was overshadowed by the very real possibility that the entire world might soon be over. Smack in the middle of Reagan-era fears of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, he recalls a time when nearly all of his friends very truly believed they weren't going to live to reminisce about those good ol' days.

"A lot of the kids I hung out with in the punk scene in Vancouver, we all just thought the world was only going to be around another year or two," Wynters explains. "In the fall of 1983, there was a movie that ABC aired called The Day After. While it wasn't really a great movie or anything, it was a really graphic depiction of a nuclear war happening. And it had a drastic effect on North America: a lot of people even believe that Reagan changed his foreign policy based on seeing that."

Wynters has distilled his memories of that era—the fear, the music, the usual romantic preoccupations of pubescence—and mixed them with a bit of Shakespearian comedy to come up with the cocktail that is Saint Aggie's '84, his newest musical. Borrowing the story from Love's Labours Lost, Saint Aggie's follows Hattie, the head girl at prestigious St Agatha's on Vancouver Island, and the vow she takes with her friends and fellow school captains to abstain from the opposite sex in favour of their studies. Beset both by her nervousness about the impending nuclear holocaust and the first-time arrival of boys at St Aggie's, Hattie isn't quite sure she'll make it through the school year.

This isn't the first time Wynters has borrowed from Shakespeare, as his work on the celebrated The Winter's Tale Project can attest. And while he freely admits his admiration for the man, he also points out that he's hoping the freewheeling spirit of a Shakespearian comedy can help lighten the mood of the show's darker qualities.

"It was a palpable fear, and that was the story I really wanted to tell," he says. "But I didn't just want to talk about my experience in high school, and I also didn't want it to be this heavy thing. I think juxtaposing that with a kind of fun, romantic comedy really makes it a more substantial evening in the theatre."

That will no doubt come in handy when Saint Aggie's finishes its short run as part of Arts on the Ave's Caught in the Act theatre series and takes off to its final destination (for now, at least), the Edinburgh Fringe. Though Wynters was commissioned to write the musical for that very venue by Strathcona High School, he still admits to a little nervousness about getting it up on the big stage.

"I checked our venue a little while ago, and I think we're in number 111, or something like that," he points out. "It's huge, but I'm hoping that this will have some life beyond that, of course." V

Wed, Jul 28 – Sat, Jul 31 (7:30 pm)
Saint Aggie's '84
Directed by Linette Smith, Stephen Delano
Music, book and lyrics by Chris
Wynters
Old Cycle Building (9141 - 118 Ave), $15  vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus