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helen lawrence

BILL’S NOTES

conceived by stan douglasstory by chris haddock and stan douglaswritten by chris haddock

SPONSORED BY

MARCH 13–APRIL 13, 2014

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The director Kim Collier (Tear the Curtain!) first brought to my attention in 2012 a project that she was excited to be involved with and thought the Arts Club would also want to pursue. She took Rachel Ditor, our literary manager, and me to the studio of the noted visual artist Stan Douglas, who is well known for video and film installations as well as photography (his photographic mural of the Gastown Riot is featured in the renovated Woodward’s complex). The subject of Kim’s excitement was Helen Lawrence, a theatre/film hybrid that had been in development with Chris Haddock, creator of the television series Da Vinci’s Inquest. Excited by the talents involved, I knew the Arts Club had to participate, too, and I made the production of Helen Lawrence a cornerstone of our 50th season.

During the two years since that crucial meeting with Kim and Stan, the complex project has evolved through several workshops, and Kim is now no longer involved. But her contribution is acknowledged as the company she was working with at the time, Toronto’s Canadian Stage, is a co-producer. We have also been fortunate to have the Banff Arts Centre as a resource; the company will spend four weeks there as Stan perfects the technology that seamlessly blends live stage actors into virtual scenes. The commitment of all involved in the development of this unique production attests to their willingness to spend countless hours to ensure that Stan’s vision coupled with Chris’s script is given its proper due. Those who see this extraordinary work might find it difficult to view theatre in the same way again.

Bill Millerd Artistic Managing Director

SYNOPSIS (SPOILER ALERT!) The year is 1948. Vancouver is beset by a corrupt police force, and outside of the genteel confines of downtown, low-level crime spreads unchecked. Constables on the take are making a mint in protection rackets in the area around the notorious speakeasies of Hogan’s Alley, a hotbed of gambling and prostitution. Helen Lawrence, a striking femme fatale travelling under the alias Elizabeth Mansfield, heads north to Vancouver from Los Angeles, seeking the man who killed her hus-band. Checking into a war veterans’ hotel, she begins to inquire after the man who she thinks is the murderer. A series of wily men try to get information out of her as she proceeds, but she keeps mum on her intentions, and eventually works out who the killer is and where to find him—in Hogan’s Alley. Other intrigues swirl, as men back from the war and the proprietors of the Alley’s illegal saloons contrive a plot to save their unsavoury businesses from the wrecking ball. The city plans to raze the blighted neighbourhood to make way for a new highway, but its denizens have other ideas. Collaborating with crooked cops, they have gathered up enough money to buy off the mayor of Vancouver, who, in return for a cool $50,000, will stay the demolition teams and appoint as chief of police a duplicitous young inspector on good terms with the Alley’s residents. What’s more, some of the Alley’s best-connected will get the chance to move into legal business, as the mayor will ensure that their application for a liquor license goes smoothly.

At a Hogan’s Alley saloon late in the evening, events come to a head. While the mayor dines with the men who are paying him off, Helen sidles into the bar, pistol strapped to her thigh, to await her revenge. A fight breaks out, and shots are fired, leaving a man dead. During the commotion, Helen’s quarry slips out. She tracks him to the train station, where she boards after him. As the locomotive pulls away from the platform into the darkening night, wheels screech, and a shot rings out.

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Bill’s Notes: Helen Lawrence

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THE CREATIVE TEAM Stan Douglas, who conceived, cowrote, and codirected Helen Lawrence, is an internationally acclaimed, Vancouver-based visual artist, who works pre-dominantly in film, photography, and video. His oeuvre reflects an abiding interest in local history, and engages with elements of British Columbia’s past to address broader themes and global audiences; meticulous research and painstaking reconstruction form a distinctive part of his process. Douglas, a 1982 graduate of the Emily Carr College of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art and Design), has exhibited extensively around the world. The artist’s work has been included at the some of the art world’s premier exhibitions—in-cluding the Venice Biennale (1990, 2001, 2005) and documenta (1992, 1997, 2002)—and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Van-couver Art Gallery, among many others. Douglas was recently awarded the International Center of Photography’s prestigious Infinity Award (2012) and the Canadian Scotiabank Photography Award (2013). His work is represented by David Zwirner, New York, and Victoria Miro, London.

Chris Haddock, Helen Lawrence’s cowriter, is a well-known Canadian screen-writer, director, and producer. His television projects, notable for their focus on the fictionalized criminal underworld of Vancouver, as well as the city’s political and social issues, are Da Vinci’s Inquest, Da Vinci’s City Hall, and, most recently, Intelligence. In addition to his own series, Haddock has contributed writing to various shows, including MacGyver and Boardwalk Empire, and has worked on scripts for Warner Bros., Fox, and ABC. He is the recipient of thirty-four Gemini nominations, and has won fifteen, including six for Best Writing in a Dramatic Series.

Bill’s Notes: Helen Lawrence

allan louis, lisa ryder, and nicholas lea. photo by david cooper

STAN DOUGLAS’S HISTORY To anyone familiar with their British Columbian history, place names like Nootka Sound, Barkerville, Ballantyne Pier, and Strathcona call up a storied past, shot through with conflict, contention, and change. At Nootka Sound, in the late eighteenth century, global powers and the Mowachaht people sparred; in the nineteenth, the boomtown of Barkerville sprung up and then shrank away with the coming and going of the gold rush; striking dock workers and police clashed violently on the waterfront in 1935; and Strathcona blends the buildings and cultures of Vancouvers past and present. Each of these distinct locales has figured in Stan Douglas’s work, foregrounding his engagement with the complex social and political narratives that make up the history of his home province and city.

Douglas’s photography and film are often conspicuous for their attention to the many-sided memories of past events. In his series of photographs of Nootka Sound and the video piece Nu•tka•, both from 1996, he delved into the competing modes of vision and value that characterized early European contacts with indigenous peoples in British Columbia. In the video work, Spanish naval officer Esteban José Martínez and his opposite number, the En-glishman James Colnett, narrate from their respective diaries, recounting the standoff between the competing nations. As they speak, their words overlap and intermingle, muddying the audio, while the screen shows coastal terrain bereft of any human habitation—signalling that the prior habitation of the coast by the Mowachaht meant little to these early European explorers. Later work, like the video Klatsassin (2006), which tells the story of a Tsilhqot’in chief who took violent action to defend his territory against the incursions of Europeans and then became the subject of a manhunt, pulls at some of the same broad thematic issues. As with Nu•tka•, Douglas created photographs that harmonize with the video. For Klatsassin, Douglas created a series of portraits based on his research of the nineteenth-century British Columbia he documents in the video. These portraits, along with the series Western (for which he followed the gold rush trail from the Fraser Valley’s outskirts up to Barkerville) further contextualize his work, locating them in the fraught relations between the Tsilhqot’in and the thousands of miners rushing to the Cariboo goldfields in the late 1850s. These pendant pairs—photographic series and videos—have become common for Douglas. In 2007, he told an interviewer that the practice of doing both wasn’t strictly necessary, but for him it was a “parallel thing. It’s often a way of understanding where I am and what I’m looking at.”

6 7Bill’s Notes: Helen Lawrence

Helen Lawrence—part film, part theatre—finds its complement in the se-ries of photographs entitled Midcentury Studio (2010). Douglas employs an authorial conceit in this series: the photographs are supposedly the product of a novice photojournalist, returning home to Vancouver after the Second World War. The pictures in the series all bear dates from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Taking his inspiration for the fictional midcentury photographer from Vancouver newspaperman Raymond Munro, Douglas references and recreates images (some derived from the archives of Artray, which Munro briefly ran with a partner, Art Jones) in scrupulously accurate historical style. Several of his compositions echo photos taken by Munro and Jones, and others pay homage to the celebrated New York street photographer, Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. The black and white shots, some of crime scenes, suggest a macabre Vancouver, and hint at what curator Christo-pher Phillips, in a catalogue essay for Midcentury Studio, calls “dark forces operating behind the veneer of civic respectability.” Midcentury Studio—in addition to another series of historical Vancouver scenes, Crowds and Riots (2008)—helped Douglas uncover the Vancouver he would invoke in Helen Lawrence: a hotbed of vice and crooked cops ripe with often forgotten history.

Vancouver in the late 1940s was ridden with petty crime and paid-off policemen. As recorded by Diane Purvey and John Belshaw in their enter-taining recent history, Vancouver Noir, the city was plagued by bank rob-bers, safecrackers, and their pursuers, trigger-happy constables. Police officers were largely untrained former soldiers—as late as 1957 (and in an official police report, no less) the chief wrote that many had “received little or no training.” Perhaps this contributed to the department’s bent reputation, but so did the rot at the top. Walter Mulligan, appointed chief in 1947, vowed to root out the bad apples, and restore public trust in the force. However, not ten years later, in 1955, he was subjected to a gov-ernmental inquiry, which exposed likely unlawful dealings dating back many years, but not before an implicated top officer had committed sui-cide and Mulligan had resigned and fled to Los Angeles. Douglas mines these dark, morally ambiguous goings-on for Helen Lawrence’s story, and telling links to real-life places and people reveal further historical ties.

Many of the places referenced by characters are drawn from the period. The beer garden run by Buddy White in the play takes its name from Bud-dy’s Beer Garden, a staple drinking and dicing establishment in Hogan’s Alley, a then notorious neighbourhood—it was razed in the early 1970s to clear the way for the building of the Georgia Viaduct. Some action also takes

place outside the Scat Inn, another watering hole of ill-repute in the same area. To the west, the old Hotel Vancouver (located where the TD Tower now stands) did indeed, as in Helen Lawrence, house veterans returning from the war. An acute housing shortage led a group of veterans to take over the derelict hotel, which had been left empty after 1945. The old hotel was demolished in 1949, a year after the events of Helen Lawrence (the current Hotel Vancouver had already been in operation since 1939 just a block away). Another background detail that sets the piece in its time is the ref-erence to the untimely death of the previous mayor, who had a heart attack just a few months into his term. The historical allusion is to Gerry McGeer, who died in 1947, just seven months after he was returned to city hall.

Douglas’s work, including Helen Lawrence, is in dialogue with the past, but no one single version of it. Real events from Vancouver’s past mingle with a largely fictional cast of characters, allowing for an exploration of what might have been. Instead of a single narrative, the audience is pre-sented with one that interweaves threads of art and history. The play re-imagines and recreates history to tease out alternate versions. This is not wholesale replication; instead, it is a sincere re-examination, an attempt to reconnect viewers with times, literally and figuratively, out of mind.

computer rendering of hogan’s alley in 1948

8 9Bill’s Notes: Helen Lawrence

FILM NOIR, VANCOUVER NOIRA man in a trench coat hustles down a bleak, empty street, shot in black and white. His gloomy shadow flits across the brick walls. An alleyway gives onto the street, and against the corner leans a knowing blonde proffering a cigarette. Quick, what sort of movie are you watching? It must be a film noir. Helen Lawrence—with its midcentury setting, criminal overtones, and a murder at the centre of the story—calls up an imagined era centred on noir’s filmic conventions and their imagined Vancouver iterations.

Film noir, insofar as it exists as a genre, is defined by recurring characters and situations, brought to the screen in what has become distinct visual shorthand. Products of the United States in the 1940s and ‘50s, classic film noirs take some of their visual cues from German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s. They are shot in black and white, usually with stark lighting. Noir cinematography also emphasizes irregularly framed shots and the extensive use of facial close-ups. This visual style brings to the fore the dreamy, often uncertain tones associated with noir plots. Moral ambiguity and eroticism are staples of film noir, along with storylines that take in convoluted tales of crime and misadventure. Certain characters, like the hardboiled, whisky- swilling, moodily smoking detective and the beguiling blonde (invariably labelled a femme fatale) are time-honoured noir archetypes, and though not always present, they spring to mind as mainstays of the style. Classic noirs (like Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, and The Killers) incorporate many of these characters and characteristics. “Film noir,” as a descriptive term, was coined in 1946 by critic Nino Frank, though it did not come into common usage until the 1970s. Now the phrase has the power to call up both the films and the era they were made in, linking the fictional and real postwar worlds.

Midcentury Vancouver had all the elements of noir: crooked policemen; gangsters and smugglers; dark, rain-slicked streets, and an air of pessimis-tic cynicism. Newspapers ran stories of armed robberies, frequent gunplay, rampant safecrackers, and encounters between street corner gangs. In Vancouver Noir, the writers report almost incredulously that the Vancouver Sun documented a 1958 bank robbery in which the robber slipped a note to the teller that read “this is a hold-up, hand over the big bills,” then flashed the gun in his coat and said, “Hurry up—in about two minutes you’ll get this.” Could more noir-like words be written? It is in this rough, bumptious port town, at the intersection of fact and fiction, that Helen Lawrence is set.

The themes and plot of Helen Lawrence mark it out as a noir-inspired work. The murky postwar underworld is exposed, and the double-dealing charac-ters hatch plans to improve their own situations in morally suspect ways. What’s more, at the heart of the story is a murder, a quintessential narrative feature of noirs. Also included are a deceitful would-be police chief, a femme fatale on a quest for vengeance, and a Los Angeles investigator hot on her heels. (This L.A. connection links Helen Lawrence to the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, famous writers of hardboiled detective stories often set in California). Period details, like the frequent smoking and even more frequent drinking, further put audiences in mind of the era.

By co-opting the visual language of the times, Helen Lawrence transports us back to a little-explored part of Vancouver’s history. The predicaments, tone, and characters all owe something to noir archetypes, but Helen Lawrence tells its own unique story within the conventions, one that ex-plores our varying ideas of how 1940s Vancouver looked and felt.

design by nancy bryant

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SPOTLIGHT ON:KIM’S CONVENIENCE

Many of us wonder where writers get their ideas. What drives them to face a blank page and begin to write a story from scratch? Playwrights take their inspiration from all kinds of places. Sometimes the stories are in-spired by people or ideas that amuse a writer—Veda Hille and Bill Richard-son’s Craigslist Cantata, for exam-ple. Sometimes writing begins as research about a subject in the news that disturbs a writer, something she wants to wrestle with to understand better, such as Colleen Murphy’s examination of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and the meaning of courage in Armstrong’s War.

Often writers are inspired by their own families. Ins Choi’s Kim Convenience is just that kind of story. His parents arrived in Canada from South Korea in 1975 with him and his two older sisters and only $200. His play is inspired by his family’s history and ideas about community and legacy that he expresses with great insight and humour. Choi has spoken about this play, set in a cor-ner store in Regent Park in Toronto, as a love letter to his family and

“to all first-generation immigrants who call Canada their home.”

A C O R N E RS T O R E

C O M E D Y

KIM’S CONVENIENCE

GRANVILLE ISLAND STAGE, APR 24–MAY 24, 2014

MY NOTES

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MARCH 13–APRIL 13, 2014