Playing God
Coupland characters take to Vancouver stage
BY Carrie-May Siggins
Can a play about the optimistic bubble that was the early ’90s have relevance in our post-9/11 world? How does one adapt a story where nothing really happens into a full-length piece of theatre? These were just two of the questions the creative team turning Douglas Coupland’s Life After God into a play had to ask before embarking on the ambitious project.
Despite the popularity of his novels, Coupland’s books have been notoriously hard to adapt. While his non-fiction Souvenir of Canada became a documentary last year, Life After God is the first script based on the Vancouver author’s fiction to be fully produced, unless you count Coupland’s screenplay, Everything’s Gone Green.
Co-produced by the UBC Department of Theatre and Touchstone Theatre, and premiering in November at Vancouver’s Telus Studio Theatre, Life After God follows six friends as they anticipate their 15-year high school reunion.
In true Coupland fashion, characters adopt a detached, ironic take on the world. “The story has wonderful ideas,” says playwright Michael Lewis MacLennan. “It’s centred around what happens when we grow up privileged, never really lacking for anything, and never really developing the skills to have any spiritual practice.”
But a play requires more than just ideas, which is why MacLennan, an award-winning playwright who’s also worked in TV (Queer as Folk and Godiva’s), wrote in the high school reunion, a plot point absent in the original work.
“In the story, there’s no dramatic tension,” he says. “It’s extremely thematically sophisticated, but not narratively. Nothing is anticipated. By creating the high school reunion, it means something is going to happen.”
MacLennan had no qualms altering the story, however. “I worked extremely close with Coupland, in that I worked closely with his text,” says MacLennan. “I believe that when you’re working on the piece, you don’t need to be [the writer’s] best friend. You can just love their work.”
