Spanning all of time - Shawn Loughlin editorial
Earlier this week, I interviewed playwright Marie Beath Badian for the third consecutive year about the same project. In 2021, we spoke about her work on The Waltz, a sequel to her wildly successful Prairie Nurse, which premiered at the Blyth Festival in 2013. We talked about the project again in 2022, when it was set to be part of the Blyth Festival season. And now, in 2023, we spoke about it once more, as it will be part of this summer’s season, after its unfortunate cancellation last year due to various factors.
This year when we spoke, Badian identified that we had begun a bit of a tradition in which we were regularly checking in with one another. When we first spoke (I didn’t interview her in 2013), my daughter had just turned one and we were still in the high tide of the COVID-19 pandemic, unsure of the future and what it held, especially for the world of theatre. Furthermore, Badian and I spoke about growing up in the Scarborough area and some of the shared experiences we had.
Then, in 2022, she had experienced some professional growth. The Waltz had gone from not just a project she was happy to have written, but something that was being produced in Blyth, her home away from home.
Then, of course, there was the cancellation. The cast and creative team was struck with illness and they lost more than half of their preparation time and made the sad, yet smart call to cancel the show, wanting to ensure they put their best foot forward. So we spoke again briefly about that heartbreaking turn.
Then, this week we chatted again. I told her that I had another child, a boy, and that I was far too busy/tired to have watched Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy like I said I would by the next time we spoke.
I started thinking that we were living through what she was trying to capture on stage with her trilogy of plays. The “Before” trilogy - Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight - tells the story of the same couple over a period of nearly 20 years (using the same actors). This is apparently something that has captivated the mind of Linklater, as another of his films, Boyhood, was filmed over the course of more than 10 years with the same actors in the same roles.
Now, Badian and I haven’t been having these conversations for decades exactly, nor have we fallen in love with one another while strolling the streets of Vienna, but it feels like our lives have changed over the period of time during which we’ve been having these conversations.
Badian has watched her play grow, change and, eventually, leave the nest and make its way out into the world. I’ve seen a one-year-old girl turn into a three-year-old little woman and, while she hasn’t exactly left the nest yet, she is certainly more a person with her own little (yet growing every day) personality. And, of course, there’s Cooper, who wasn’t even a glimmer in my eye when Badian and I first chatted about The Waltz.
Time is a funny thing. It never ends, it’s never finished and it can never be reversed. It’s easy to see why people focus on it so much in their writing. It’s something we all have in common and we all understand it to the same degree (which is not at all, really).
So, as Badian strives to tell a story of a family over multiple generations, it feels like we’re playing out a similar story in our chats, each with news, a life-changing development or a story worth telling during every check-in. In a way, at least to me, that experience shows the importances of stories she wants to tell.