Lauren Brotman and Amy Blanding are going to paint the streets of Prince George in theatre.
Their canvas is paper, their brush is words and the first of them came from a letter to the editor published in The Citizen.
The two local performance artists had only recently met one another and their early interactions had sparked a creative collaboration, but it didn't have full form until the municipality took the step to paint a crosswalk with rainbow colours to symbolize mainstream solidarity with the LGBTQ community. Someone criticized the move in public letter form.
That galvanized their thoughts.
They suddenly had the compositional direction they needed and it is in fact the title of the project: Painting The Streets.
It's a play, but it isn't finished yet. The public will help them with the writing process this Friday and Saturday when Brotman and Blanding perform some small snippets at the Prince George Public Library and gather feedback from the audience. (More such public vignettes are anticipated.)
They are joining forces with Theatre North West and the library, with the finished product expected about a year from now.
"We, as artists, are privy to the process of making theatre. So much magic happens in that process that the audience never gets to see. So this time, the public is going to be involved in that process," said Brotman.
"For both of us, this is very personal, the writing that we have done so far, and we've had to talk through, together, how to best handle the power and vulnerability that happens when you create something and it's put out there, right into the hands of an audience and all those reactions," Blanding said.
Workshopping the play makes that vulnerability all the more raw, but they expect the finished product to be all the more strong because of the intermittent public input.
What they know so far is, the play has two characters, each one played by Blanding and Brotman. Each character has come to Prince George from faraway big-city places. They find each other and they help each other through their discoveries of the barbs and pearls of a small city built in a big wilderness.
These characters have been pieced together based on their own experiences. Blanding moved here relatively recently after an upbringing in Colorado, Ariz. and eastern Canada; Brotman moved here a couple of years ago from Toronto.
Brotman is an actor and playwright by trade, and the co-proprietor of Bound to Create Theatre Company. Local audiences have seen her in The Secret Mask and The Girl In The Goldfish Bowl by TNW and in her own Shakespeare production done on the lawn of city hall last summer.
Blanding was seen most recently in Mary Poppins, but she was also in Evil Dead: The Musical, had a role in the short film Behind The Reds, and is best known as a member of the folk/alternative band Black Spruce Bog.
The two were known to each other but met for the first time when they were assigned to the same table at a recent career fair at the library - in the same room now being used as their venue for Painting The Streets. They hit it off and decided to combine their talents for this theatre exercise.
"People, I think, feel overwhelmed by things right now, and that's if you're talking about the environment or politics, women's issues, global conflicts, black Americans getting shot by police over nothing," said Brotman.
"We wanted to talk about that. We both had similar sentiments and similar emotions about that and this was a form we could use to bring that out into a bigger public discussion," Blanding said.
"It was our call to action, but it is not a call for anyone else's action. We're not telling you what to think, here, or what you should do. It is not a one-sided discussion, everything we're talking about is complex, so to understand it better you have to get in and look more closely," said Brotman.
"You want to be an ally, you want to help and be a positive member of your community, but you can't always see the way or have all the tools for that, but you can get together with people and bring up different points. A play is such a great meeting place for that," Blanding said.
The Bob Harkins Branch of the library is literally their meeting place. Painting The Streets has its first showing on Friday at 4 p.m. and again on Saturday at 1:30 p.m.
It is free to attend and will be finished in about 20 minutes.
"The partnership we've developed with Theatre North West has now grown," said library spokesperson Amy Dhanjal. Earlier this year the two groups announced a curated reading list and topical book display at the library for each new play in the TNW season. "We are so happy to collaborate with another major cultural institution. We provide spaces for community groups of all sorts to bring people together for learning and sharing, so this project is a perfect fit."
Painting The Streets is happening in conjunction with B.C. Culture Days, a provincewide set of events aimed at boosting the arts.
