You have to dress so well when you do that.” “We don’t need more pretense in the world. because they are very much a part of the performance,” he says. And actually I think the audience likes that too. “More often than not you can jump-start the engine and then off they go. “Because all you’ve got is the words and the performance.”īut when things go sideways in a performance, as they sometimes tend to, McGie is never shy in doling out encouragement, or bringing the audience itself onside to help. “If I haven’t done my job right as a writer, and they haven’t done their job right as a performer, there’s no hiding. It fits them well, so they can really sink themselves into it,” he says.īut given the format of the show, the opposite is just as true. “If I do my job right, it’s fun for them. McGie likens the process to a tailor custom-fitting a suit to a customer. When the actors take the stage one at a time, a single, solitary chair is the only prop they have to work with. 23-McGie asks performers for a single word, which he then uses to craft a monologue for them. In the Chair Series-which returns to The Point Artist-Run Centre in Whistler on Saturday, Oct. I’m very, very superficial,īut for whatever reason I’ve got this little thing that’s built into my DNA that I have to exercise, and that’s all it is.” I’m not altruistic, I don’t read lots of books-I read Archie Comics. “I really wish I didn’t have it, because my life would be a lot easier,” he says. Where artists and their observers often tend to view that kind of compulsion through a romantic lens, McGie almost sees it as a curse. “I don’t really wanna go down that road, but it is the old, ‘even if nobody looked at or read anything I do, I’d still be doodling on a napkin somewhere’-because you can’t help yourself.” “Literally, I can’t not do this,” he says, adding the caveat that he’s perfectly aware of how “wanky” that sounds. Monologues with simple titles like “Sexy” or “Divorce” exist alongside outputs such as “Kindergarten Coup” and “Douche Canoe”-but in every instance it takes only a small amount of effort to imagine the content of each.įrom the outside, it’s a lot to take in- and that’s to say nothing about what’s actually happening inside McGie’s brain. Reading the list of titles alone conveys the entire spectrum of emotion McGie’s work spans-from absurd humour to romantic despair to existential doubt and dread (and everything in between).
TAILOR TALES VS TAILOR TALES PLUS SERIES
The preview section for the book, a collection of more than 300 monologues McGie wrote for his ongoing Chair Series productions, showcases the wide- ranging eccentricities that make up the playwright’s consciousness. To get just a small glimpse into Vancouver playwright John McGie’s prolific output from the past five years or so, one need only track down his book- I Really Don’t Care If You Buy This Book-on Amazon.