Greg MacArthur walks the mysterious frontier between fact and fiction: My Testimonial at Workshop West, a preview

“Hi, I’m Greg MacArthur. And I’m going to tell you about something that happened to me a while ago….”

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That’s the conversational opener to My Testimonial. And what happens after that, in this latest from Greg MacArthur (yes, that would be the playwright himself onstage), is a boundary-smudging fusion of fact and fiction, life and art, staged reading and true-crime podcast.

“Slippery.” That’s the way MacArthur describes the play that brings him back to Edmonton — he was the U of A’s Lee Playwright In Residence a decade-plus ago and premiered The Missionary Position here. And it reunites him with director Heather Inglis, a theatre colleague of long standing, for the Workshop West premiere this week.

Is truth something that can be built? Rehearsed? Buffed up for performance?

These are disconcerting questions that sneak their way into My Testimonial. Greg MacArthur, the theatre artist onstage, who has indeed been teaching performance at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of Lethbridge — real life! — has been contracted to coach a witness in a high-profile criminal trial. “She’s not trustworthy, not credible, and I’ve been hired to train her to be more authentic, more authentically herself, to help her be more sympathetic to a jury.”

The other actor (Sophie May Healey) is presented as “someone I’ve hired just that day” to assist in telling the story by playing that witness. “What happens in the course of the piece is that the actor gains a kind of autonomy.” As MacArthur points out, “there is reality to it — the murder is sensational, and true — but there’s a fictional story put on top of that.” What is fact? What is fiction? “You don’t know; the boundary is erased.”“That’s the puzzle of it.… The goal is that the audience wonders ‘did this happen? what is truthful?’”

playwright Greg MacArthur. Photo supplied.

My Testimonial is the finale to a MacArthur trilogy steeped in those provocative mysteries. The playwright, whose work has been produced across the country, in Europe, South Africa, Korea, Mexico, and the U.S., points to the characters of A City, four theatre friends from the indie Side Mart Theatrical Grocery in Montreal.  “I took their experience (with the death of a fifth friend after a party) and conflated it with a completely fictional scenario presented as fact.”

A Man Vanishes was created specifically in 2016 for the VideoFag performance space in Toronto (it was the last show there). The seminal queer venue itself figures in the storytelling about a missing Montreal man who might have been murdered: he’d disappeared without a trace; he shows mysteriously months later at VideoFag,  becomes part of the lives of his friends there (artists Jordan Tannahill and William Ellis), and then vanishes again, forever.

With My Testimonial, he says, “I wanted to turn the lens on myself…. It’s kind of about myself and my life (as an artist). There’s reality to it, but a fictional story on top.”

“We take from people’s lives and then we fictionalize them, change them, manipulate them, sculpt them…. That’s what art does,” as MacArthur says. “There are ethical lines…. What does it mean to be using people’s tragedies for one’s art? What are your responsibilities? And yet, how do you make art if you don’t?”

“Artists manipulate people’s emotions…. As writers we take from the world around us. That’s what we do.”

As the witness is coached in acting techniques to make her more herself, as judged by her potential appeal to a jury, My Testimonial is not about the murder per se. “At the heart of it I’m thinking about the nature of artifice in performance of our lives, our selves,” says MacArthur. And in an age when truth is something to be created in social media, or fabricated by A.I. — “America has become a performance” — “what is an authentic performance of grief? You don’t want to be too hysterical; you don’t want to be too cold. We judge: why are you behaving like this if you’ve lost a child?”

MacArthur thinks about things like that. Onstage, being a playwright who teaches acting which is what he actually does, adds another layer to the mix of the “slippery” play. My Testimonial happens in Lethbridge, where MacArthur was writer-in-residence and near where the real crime took place. And it brings the Ontario-born playwright back to his entry point in theatre: he was a child actor who did a lot of television, his first degree was in acting, from Ryerson in Toronto. “For the first seven or eight years that’s what I wanted to be. I did small indie shows in Toronto in the ‘90s,” an era of collaborative creative creations. “Then I wrote my first independent play,” and a playwright was born. “I’m a much better writer than I am an actor,” he laughs. “The world isn’t missing me as an actor…. I’m too lazy to be an actor; I don’t like rehearsing that much.”

MacArthur tested out My Testimonial at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, for 20 people during COVID, then moved back to Montreal for a few years. “It keeps growing and changing,” he says. “A year ago, there was a small workshop reading in Edmonton. Inglis’s Workshop West production is its official premiere, “my first fully fleshed outing with it.” For the first time, it has a sound and lighting design (Dave Clarke and Ainsley Hillyard respectively). But theatricality is a delicate matter for a play that isn’t a play (“you don’t want to turn it into something it isn’t meant to be”).

“It’ll be an interesting experiment to see how people removed in geography, and from my life in Lethbridge, will respond to it,” says MacArthur. “What’s going on here? Who do we trust?” They’re questions he hopes the audience will be asking as they leave the theatre.

PREVIEW

My Testament

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Greg MacArthur

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Greg MacArthur and Sophie May Healey

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Feb. 11 to 15

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will).