Director’s Note: Buddy

It was during Darrin Hagen’s playwright-in-residency with Theatre Network that we first started discussing the world of his new play BUDDY. Darrin had written a play called DAY 412 and we were both very fascinated by the question of what are the influences that shape us as men? We wanted to examine men and delve into the myth(s) of masculinity, or better yet we laughed and called it ‘the lies my father told me’ or ‘never told me’.
We kept coming back to influential points in your life, turning points, like when you graduate from High School and your life changes so drastically that it can never go back to what it was. You realize that your close friends helped shape you and challenged you to become who you are today. Yet sometimes all that remains of your friends is perhaps a picture, a memory.
From that idea we knew that we wanted to create a world or a backdrop using video to create stage pictures, perhaps pictures of the landscape or pictures of the characters. Then after our first workshop with Ian Jackson and the actors Jesse Gervais and Mark Jenkins we discovered that we could use live cameras to create images to tell our story.
The dynamic of seeing those images and the ability to see the stage and the live image at the same time became our obsession and our world of this play.
The rest is what you will see as we tell the story about two friends growing up in a small town and their fateful summer when they get a camera to make a movie about their last summer together. Two friends, two buddies, who leave each other a lifetime of impressions that never fade.
 
Enjoy.