Issue #16: Fall 2006

Life After God

by John Vigna

A Douglas Coupland short story comes to life on a UBC stage

Scout lies naked in a warm pool holding hands in a circle with six of his closest friends. They are “pretending to be embryos” in a “life lived in paradise,” one without religion, love or politics. This poignant scene opens Douglas Coupland’s short story “1000 Years”in Life After God) and in that rare moment of intimacy and closenesss, a startling question is posed that seems to have emerged naturally from Coupland’s previous two books, Generation X and Shampoo Planet: Can we find meaning or connection in the madness of the modern world and in the absence of belief?

This conundrum will be taken off the page and brought to life on stage in the theatrical world premiere of Life After God, whichopened November 1st at UBC’s Telus Studio Theatre. Adapted by award-winning playwright, Michael Lewis MacLennan, Life After God is a joint production between UBC’s Theatre Department and Vancouver’s Touchstone Theatre, bringing together a collaborative wellspring of professional and student talent unprecedented in a university co-production.

Life After God offers a lively and penetrating look at a generation raised without religious belief. Centering on eccentric and sensitive Scout, the play tells the story of six friends who went to high school together and how their lives unravel fifteen years later. Facing the challenges and disillusionments of adulthood, the friends grapple with new-found emptiness in a culture stuck in fast-forward. At turns funny and moving, Life after God is a freewheeling, theatrically spectacular examination of our quest for transcendence. It also offers a vivid tour of the city of seismic shifts – Vancouver – and the adaptation takes some of its inspiration from another Coupland book on that subject, City of Glass.

“I’m a big fan of Douglas Coupland and I was really moved when I first read Life After God,” Katrina Dunn, Artistic Director of Touchstone Theatre, says. “When Dr. Robert Gardiner, head of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing, approached me to develop a Touchstone play in conjunction with UBC, I jumped at it because I had been thinking of doing a large scale project that addressed Vancouver’s culture for a long time.”

Dunn immediately sought out Michael Lewis MacLennan with whom she had previously collaborated and the two of them began their association with UBC by co-teaching and developing a new course in the Theatre department called, “New Modes in Play Creation.” While Michael and Katrina worked on the script, the students had the opportunity of contributing to a play in progress by writing and workshopping monologues for it, and they gained hands-on experience in various aspects of play production.

“I was really excited that UBC was a co-producer of the play because it provided us with more financial support and gave us more time to rehearse and workshop,” MacLennan says on the phone from Los Angeles, where he has recently closed two development deals.

“It also gave us the opportunity to work with Robert Gardiner, as well as offering the support of a longer first run than would normally be given.”

MacLennan has written more than 10 plays that have been produced across Canada since 1998, two of which, Last Romantics and The Shooting Stage, were Governor General Award finalists. Like Dunn, he’s a great admirer of Coupland, having read all of his books as they were published. “There’s no question that Douglas Coupland is one of Canada’s most important voices.” But adapting Life After God for the stage required thinking about the story in new ways while maintaining its emotional truth, particularly since other than informal discussions, Coupland was not involved in the collaboration.

“I had to look for ways to illuminate Doug’s themes,” MacLennan says. “I wanted to be faithful to the story, discovering what the movements of the characters were. But I also didn’t want to be too faithful to the original text, so I looked for dramatic moments, ones in which I could keep the heart of the story.”

One of the key challenges, Dunn says, was the idea of making Vancouver a character in the play – that is, creating a physical setting that informs the story as much as the human characters that inhabit it. Drawing inspiration from Coupland’s book, City of Glass, she and MacLennan worked together to create a dialogue within the play around what it means for Vancouverites to have a sense of cultural legacy. “Vancouverites need to stop referencing themselves out of Vancouver,” she says. “Vancouver is a hip city and the world is very interested in it. It’s my hope that we can export this and have the play tour.”

One of the changes MacLennan and Dunn made to the original story was to include a number of monologues that celebrated the city and revealed its character. There were specific Vancouver locations integral to the story, yet difficult to construct on stage. Consequently, MacLennan and Dunn had their students write monologues that tried to capture the character of a Vancouver neighbourhood. The monologues were workshopped and the five strongest, most representative were chosen for incorporation into the stage play.

Laurann Brown, ba’06, was one of the lucky students whose monologue was selected. She first encountered Coupland’s story Life After God ten years ago. “I thought it was the most depressing thing I had ever read,” she laughs. “I couldn’t grasp what was going on. But when I re-read it for the course, I got it. I could connect with the crisis of going into your thirties, how your relationships change along with your view of yourself.”

Brown had only been in Vancouver for four months when she got the assignment to write the monologue. She lived in a house near UBC overlooking the city, so she chose the view from there. “I identified with Julie’s sense of loneliness and wrote from that emotional place,” she says referring to one of the characters in Life After God. “Michael served as a mentor and encouraged me to get into the details, challenged us all to get into the emotional truth of the characters.”

Brown was originally interested in taking the “New Modes in Play Creation” course for the real-world opportunity of working side-by-side with professional theatre people like MacLennan and Dunn. Now that the course is over, she’s graduated with a writing credit, been named assistant director for the play and has established a pocket full of theatre contacts from working with professional actors, stage managers, playwrights and directors. “Being at UBC gave me a strong sense of what to expect later when I graduated,” says Brown, who is currently directing a play in the Fringe Festival called Supermarket Scuffle. “Everyone in this business knows it’s not what you know but who you know in order to get work.”

Conversely, teaching people like Laurann Brown energizes MacLennan. “Teaching is one of the most gratifying things we can do as writers,” he says. “When you have to verbalize what you know, it’s like learning it all over again, more deeply.”

Whether teaching or writing, the task of adapting Coupland’s work remained daunting. Both Dunn and MacLennan were unsure of how the play would unfold until they sent the script to Coupland to read and invited him to attend a workshop. “It was nerve-wracking to have him in the audience,” Dunn says. “I had to force myself not to look at him to see how he was reacting.”

And how did Douglas Coupland react? “Adaptation is a strange thing, and this is the first anything somebody’s adapted fully,” Douglas Coupland says. “When I went to see the read through, I tried to manage my expectations to a very low level. I think I went into the theatre simply wanting the piece not to suck. And then it started and it was shocking. Michael kept the most important bits, invented all the new stuff in just the right way and made some of the most genius connective ideas that I never would of imagined. I came out of there feeling like I’d just heard the material for the first time.”

Dunn and MacLennan were not only relieved but also thrilled and invigorated. “Psychologically, this was a huge boost for us,” Dunn says.

Coupland, whose most recent novel, JPod is long-listed for the Giller Prize and whose first film project, “Everything’s Gone Green,” has been released, added his appreciation for the tricky art of adaptation: “It’s strange, but when I heard the play’s words, yes, of course I hear what they mean and what they’re saying but also, more powerfully and more unexpectedly, hearing each phrase made me remember more than anything exactly what I was feeling and going through the day I wrote those words. That’s something precious for me, too, and I think that in the wrong hands, that sense of personal time travelogue could have been damaging for me, and possibly frightening.”

MacLennan is proud that every idea in the book is still intact in the play. “The ideas in this play are things we are really questioning. The idea that we grew up in a generation that lacked for nothing and the result is that we didn’t develop the spiritual muscle we needed,” he says. “By attending the play, it’s like hearing our own inner thoughts. We hear that we have an okay life, focusing on some relatively silly aspect of it. But we begin to realize that we didn’t get a grounding in it that enriched or developed our interior lives.” He pauses and the sound of busy morning rush hour traffic in LA fills the line. “Or finding a way to connect with one another.” ¤

John Vigna is a Vancouver writer