Behind Frenemy Lines: Marcus Youssef and James Long
Winners and Losers is Woolly’s next play of the 36th season. You know how we always say that our thing is “new American plays?” Well, this time we’re making an exception.
Winners and Losers, as a matter of fact, has its origins in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was conceived by, and is performed by, two of Vancouver’s most highly-regarded artists — and although they’ve been friends for nearly 10 years, and know more about each other than almost any duo currently on stage anywhere, it is their first collaboration. Marcus and Jamie met as office mates, in a space shared by their respective theatre companies, in 2005. After collaborating together on a modern retelling of the “Everyman” story for a Vancouver theatre festival, it was very clear to both that their partnership needed to continue, in a big way.
And continue it did. James details the inspiration for Winners and Losers in an interview with The Charlebois Post:
LONG: I have a distinct memory of a friend of ours who had got himself wrapped up in a pyramid self-help, money making scheme. He had sent a massive e-mail to everyone he knew that was half his writing and half bullshit from a form letter. He wanted me to join in this thing; you’re going to feel better, you’re going to feel like a winner, just buy in for $200.00 and of course the pyramid thing was obvious. Marcus and I got into this conversation about, what is it to win? Was is it to lose? What is it about approaching middle age and going, “do I have my shit together”? Am I winning? Am I better then the next guy? We starting jamming on that, while smoking tasty cigarettes by the river. We came in with nothing, other than what does it mean to be a winner?
That, it turns out, was at least enough for a title, and the genesis of the creative exercise that would come to define the play (from the same interview):
YOUSSEF: Every morning we would do a warm up, the Winners and Losers game. Which was naming a person, place or thing and debating whether that thing was a winner or a loser. And putting ourselves into direct competition with each other, who’s the better, cook, father, lover, and so on.
LONG: We did all the improvs with Russian accents, which liberated us — it was like a clown nose — to say whatever we wanted to each other, and we did. We recorded them all and sent them off to be transcribed and then we read them out without accents. We immediately had something, these episodes, we starting juggling them, and finding an order.
The liberation was exhilarating — the freedom to be honest with a friend about the shortcomings you perceive in them, and the freedom to explore (if painfully) your own failures with them in turn. Through these exercises, Marcus and Jamie were working to access a raw, visceral truth, not just about each other, but about the nature of competition and the nature of friendship: we, as human beings, no matter what our relationships might be, are objects to each other and objects to ourselves, and comparison along imagined hierarchies of status are inevitable in late capitalist society. What would happen to us and our relationships if we had the courage to look these inevitable comparisons in the eye? To quote another famous entry in the Theatre of Reality canon, what happens when we stop being polite, and start getting real?
James Long is co-artistic director of Theatre Replacement, and Marcus Youssef is co-artistic director of Neworld Theatre. To quote The Globe and Mail, both companies are “left-leaning, sociopolitical provocateurs.” They make theatre that is meant to question, challenge, and speak truth to power.
It’s as a part of this theatrical tradition that Winners and Losers should be understood. On the surface, it’s a play about Marcus Youssef and James Long; two theatre artists, husbands, fathers, and men from Vancouver. At its core, it’s a play about people in modern society. It’s about the forces that bring us together, and the zero-sum games that render us, maybe eternally, alone. Its personal drama is its political drama, and in America, it really hits home.
— Justin McCarthy, Communications Coordinator
Get tickets to Winners and Losers, running October 27 — November 22:
