Brother Rat: a punk rock play with music (and earplugs) opens the Fringe Theatre season

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

Some kids grow up listening to Itsy Bitsy Spider, and drifting off to sleep with The Cat Came Back. The soundtrack of Erik Richards’s childhood was NoMeansNo, SNFU, Minor Threats, Bad Brains.

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And that high-volume punk rock inspiration, courtesy of Richards’s dad, a “huge punk and heavy metal fan” who “didn’t turn it down,” has found its way into Brother Rat, the “play with music” that premieres Friday under the Fringe Theatre banner. It is, safe to say, the only show of the season that provides earplugs for the audience.

“In particular the song Brother Rat/ What Slayde Says (by the Canadian punk band NoMeansNo) always stuck with me,” says the multi-faceted Richards, a playwright/ director/ production manager/ sound designer who’s eloquent, and low-volume, in conversation. “In a weird way it’s always said theatre to me…. At 13 I did it as a monologue.”

playwright/director/sound designer/ production manager Erik Richards. Photo supplied

And originally, the nine-minute song, a sort of musical diptych with mysterious narrative possibilities, was “the prelude”  to the play, he says. What the song lyrics gave him, dramatically, was a trio of characters: the main character Robbie (named in honour of Rob Wright who plays in NoMeansNo; Slayde, “an auditory and visual hallucination … a toxic influence, a wormy, snaky character in the song.” And Slayde’s line “I murdered love” suggested the third character, Dianne.

In Brother Rat, the three characters are a band, Theresa Put Down That Knife; “the three actors — Jackson Card, Spenser Kells, Michelle Robb — are all musicians, on guitar, bass, drums. Set at a punk concert in Edmonton, it’s a play that gathered its music gradually, song by song. Richards, a U of A theatre grad, wrote the first draft for an adaptation class: “adapt anything you want into a play, and this was the first thing that sprang to mind.” It didn’t have music.

“When I pitched it to Murray (Fringe Theatre’s artistic director Murray Utas) a couple of years ago, it had two songs. Then it had four songs, then six.” And then, Richards and his musical collaborator Josh Meredith decided “we should just make it an album, so we added two more.”

playwright Erik Richards (centre) and the cast of Brother Rat, ReadyGo Theatre. Photo supplied

Since Brother Rat happens at a concert, the characters don’t ‘break into song’ in a musical theatre way, to move the story along. As Richards, who directs the ReadyGo Theatre production, describes, it isn’t like American Idiot or Rent or Hedwig and the Angry Inch, musicals that live variously on the rock-punk spectrum. “They just don’t sound like the bands I grew up with,” he says. “This is just way harder, way faster, way louder….”

“You have to have a live drum kit onstage, and as soon as you have that, as soon as you get a snare drum and play it as loud as you can (with the other instruments and the voices audio-mixed around that extreme volume), you have to wear earplugs.” Which is what the characters, the director, the designers, the technicians have been doing all day long, every day all through rehearsals. And it’s what we’ll be doing too during performances, taking our cue from the characters as to when we can take them out, and when we should put them back in.

The narrative, as Richards describes, “is about choosing to take care of yourself and the people you love…. It’s about getting up and choosing to keep going.” As he says, “mental illness, substance abuse, houselessness” figure prominently….

“Outside the world of the play the characters are struggling…. They all have experience with the mental wellness sector, and that’s not working for them. Or they’re damaged by the other side of things, choosing to ignore conditions and vices, going down the rocker rabbit hole of drugs and alcohol, and letting mental illness take control.”

“What’s really important for the play is that these aren’t characters with mental health conditions who have never tried getting better,” Richard thinks. “It’s more complicated than ‘their anti-depressants aren’t working’; it’s more complicated than ‘they’ve never tried going to counselling’; it’s more complicated than ‘their parents aren’t supportive’.”

“They’re people who are really angry, which comes out in the music and scenes. It’s not about people who are hopeless or have given up; they want want want to feel better!”

Richards, who wrote all the music with Meredith and is the lyricist, isn’t a punk musician himself, he says, “mostly a fan…. I learned to write music for the show!” They worked from their shared skill set: “Josh is an excellent musician; I like to write songs.” There is no Brother Rat sheet music. The pair taught the music to the cast “by showing them.” There is no pre-recorded sound: “it’s Josh’s idea that every single sound we make onstage is live.”

Richards, an experienced sound designer who has directed the premieres of such Jezec Sanders plays as The Cabin on Bald Dune, Hacking and Slashing, and Where Foxes Lie, has written plays before now, “often sound-based,” as he puts it. “Brother Rat is the first time anything I’ve written has been put onstage.”

“I didn’t discover punk music on my own. It wasn’t a phase,” he says with a smile. “I grew up listening to it; it was never weird, or harder than anything else. Most people grow up with Bowie, Prince, the Stones. This was what I grew up with; it’s just my life…. If the song hadn’t been a great story I wouldn’t have written a play with punk music.”

PREVIEW

Brother Rat

Theatre: ReadyGo Theatre

Written by: Erik Richards, music by Erik Richards and Josh Meredith, lyrics by Erik Richards, adapted from the song Brother Rat by NoMeansNo

Directed by: Erik Richards

Starring: Jackson Card, Spenser Kells, Michelle Robb

Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Nov. 29 through Dec. 7

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca