Posted January 20, 2025

The Interview – John Lazarus

John Lazarus

John Lazarus grew up in Montreal, graduated from the National Theatre School’s Acting program in 1969, and then worked in Vancouver as an actor, advertising copywriter, TV and radio broadcaster, critic, screenwriter, playwright and teacher. He taught Playwriting and Solo Show Techniques for 10 years at Vancouver’s Studio 58, and in 2000 moved to Kingston, where he taught over 2,500 drama students at Queen’s University, until retiring in 2021. John’s own plays, produced across Canada and around the world, include Babel Rap, Dreaming and Duelling, Village of Idiots, The Late Blumer, Homework & Curtains, Genuine Fakes, The Nightingale, Medea’s Disgust, Rough Magic, Trouble on Dibble Street, The Grandkid, and his series of plays for children, published under the title Not So Dumb. He lives in Kingston with his wife, Lin, and they have children and grandchildren in Toronto and Vancouver.

John, why did you choose to pursue a career in playwriting?

I just wanted to be an actor. I tell kids now that I went to the National Theatre School, and sometimes they say, “Oh, you took the playwriting program,” and I tell them, “No, there wasn’t one.” Not to knock the National Theatre School—there was nothing anywhere in the country. I once put out a question on Facebook: “Anybody my age, did you ever take a post-secondary playwriting course?” And the only person who answered was Stephen E Miller, the actor and novelist who lives here in Vancouver. He said he took a creative writing course at UBC, and there was a playwriting component as part of that. It turns out that that course was taught by Doug Bankson, who was an American, ironically, and a playwright—and a pretty good one. He wrote a play called Lenore Nevermore about Edgar Allan Poe, which I acted in in my youth. He was a lovely guy, and he introduced the idea of teaching playwriting to Canada, as far as I know. But nobody was doing that.

I was training as an actor when I was sixteen. I was in—as everybody is when they’re sixteen—I was in The Crucible. And we were in the middle of a horrible rehearsal. It was boring, and it was hot weather, and there were flies buzzing around; there was another guy in the play who couldn’t do it, and the director was spending all his time on him. And, you know, I thought, “This is still kind of fun. I’m still enjoying this, so maybe I should do this for a living.” I didn’t factor in the aspect of making a living doing it, because I was a kid, and I didn’t know any better. But I went to the National Theatre School to train as an actor, and I worked as an actor for five or six years.

Just to bookend that story, now that we’re back in Vancouver, I suddenly have an acting agent, which I didn’t go looking for. I went to a script workshop for a guy I know who asked, “Would you come and listen to my script and give me notes?” And I said, “Can I read something?” “Oh, yeah. There’s a part you can read.” I went in and the only other guy I knew was an actor friend, and we were playing enemies, so we were yelling at each other across the table. And afterwards he said, “I’m going to tell my agent about you.” So now I have an agent. It’s very strange.

That’s a full circle moment! So you trained at NTS and were working as an actor… What was your first playwriting experience?

I came here to Vancouver, and I got a job with a TYA company touring British Columbia. The plays were a mixed bag, and at least one of them was very frustrating to perform. I had this image of the playwright sitting at home collecting royalty checks while we were trying to sell children on this thing, and I thought it would be fun to try being a playwright. The idea of a Canadian playwright was almost unheard of at the time. My timing was excellent. This was the early 70s, when Pierre Trudeau began a series of grant programs: LIP (Local Initiative Programs) grants, and OFY (Opportunities for Youth) grants, which started a whole bunch of different kinds of groups, including arts groups, and including theatres. So after the tour was over, I was back in Vancouver and a bunch of us young hippies were sitting around looking at each other and saying, “Okay, let’s start a company.” We wanted to do things differently from the older people—whom we respected, but we were kids; we wanted to do something different. One thing they weren’t doing was Canadian plays, so we said, “Let’s do Canadian plays!” Oh, where are they? There weren’t any. But the guy who brought us together for that theatre company, which was called Troupe, was a guy named Jonathan Bankston, and he said, “Well, my dad’s written a play.” And I laughed out loud, which is something I tell students now: that that the idea of somebody’s middle-aged dad writing a play in Canada seemed ridiculous. In fact, by a weird twist of fate, the guy who wrote that play was Doug Bankson, the guy who was teaching playwriting at UBC!

But anyway, we were sort of programming the season as we went, and about two shows down, we had scheduled a couple of one-acts: one by my friend David Peterson, who has left us, and one by Jackie Crossland, who has also left us. Jackie wrote a sort of feminist take on Beauty and the Beast, and David had written a short play about Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall. And I thought, “This is my chance,” because it was a short evening, you know; we didn’t have enough content. I thought, “I’m going to write a one-act and fill out the evening.” And I thought that because the other two were based on folklore or fairy tales, that mine should be similar. And then I thought, “I should be able to write a play about the next thing I see,” which was nonsense. But I had that thought and when I looked up, the next thing I saw was the lighting man’s stepladder, because it was tech week. So I thought, “Okay, I’ll write a play that takes place on a stepladder.” And I decided that Alexander Deakin—a friend who came over to visit a couple of weeks ago, 52 years after we did that play—Alex and I would be these two guys on a stepladder, and the stepladder should represent the biggest structure in the world; it would be the Tower of Babel. I wrote the play in one evening, and I brought it in the next day. Alex and I read it, and everybody said, “Okay, let’s do it.” I thought, “This is great, this will be my career. I’ll write one of these every evening and I’ll get rich!” And of course, I couldn’t do it again.

I’d like to add, as a kind of coda to that story, that, Babel Rap, which was the name of the play, became the most produced play in Canada for several years. That’s correct, isn’t it?

It was a low bar. There wasn’t much happening.

You’re too modest.

One of the things I was really proud of was one year, a youth group in a church somewhere in northern Ontario started doing the play, and they were in rehearsal, and the minister came in and watched the rehearsal and banned it. He said no, because it was “blasphemous.” And then a month or two later the same year, also in northern Ontario, another church youth group was doing it, and the minister came in and watched and said, “We’re going to make this the sermon on Sunday morning.” They performed it as the sermon.

After that, I worked a lot with the New Play Centre, which is still going strong. (It’s now called the Playwrights Theatre Centre.) I churned out a lot of one-acts for the company, and hung around with people like Tom Cohen and Sheldon Rosen and Leonard Angel; Dennis Foon and Margaret Hollingsworth and Betty Lambert, a whole contingent of young playwrights. And it was a very lenient time because Canadian playwriting was suddenly a motherhood issue, so a lot of plays got produced that probably shouldn’t have, including a lot of mine. It was on-the-job training.

My first full-length play was a huge flop because I didn’t know how to structure it. I knew how to sustain a joke for half an hour, but I didn’t know how to structure anything bigger. That play was called Midas and it was based on folktales about the ancient king of Phrygia. It didn’t work. And it was a huge production by Tamahnous Theatre, which was a wonderful, wonderful company, doing all kinds of really interesting, cutting-edge stuff. And that’s the story I tell in the introduction to the book where I’m sitting in the audience going, “Okay, I’ve got to do this differently from now on.”

I’m just going to jump in to explain that “the book” is Two Ways About It: The Inside and Outside of Playwriting, published by JGS. It details your personal approach to playwriting, which you developed over the course of your career. This is a terrible thing to ask, but can you give us a quick precis of the Lazarus method?

Of course! What I had not understood, being self-taught, was that you need to construct a plot. And that there are two sides to the playwriting process, which is why the book is called Two Ways About It. So, what I practice and preach now is this: You need to spend a lot of your time in the mental frame of being outside the plot and manipulating the characters in the situations. You can do this literally, with index cards. You shove the cards, with plot points written on them, around on a table, and you see if you can put them in order. Then you take a break from that, and you jump down into the characters’ heads and try to forget that it’s a play. What you want to do now is to think of the play as if it were real life and have the characters pursue their objectives. You can jump back and forth between characters—and sometimes the characters will do something different from what you predicted in your tidy little plot outline, and then you can take that information back into the plot outline. And you keep going back and forth like that. That’s the basic thesis.

I’d like to add that your book also has a lot of practical advice for aspiring playwrights about how to manage their careers.

I don’t know if you and I talked about this, but originally it was going to be a slim volume. It was just going to be that basic thesis about plot and dialogue. And then one evening I was making dinner, and I was using The Joy of Cooking. It’s a doorstopper of a cookbook. And on the back, the New York Times review quote says: “This is the Swiss Army knife of cookbooks.” And I thought, “That’s what I want my book to be, the Swiss Army knife of Canadian playwriting books!” Not that Two Ways is now a doorstopper—it’s still a normal-sized book—but I’ve tried to throw in everything else you need to know, like the business end of things and how to behave in rehearsal.

I was just looking at a partial list of your plays on the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia site, and it’s very impressive! I have a two-part question: 1) Are your plays like kids in that you love them all equally—or do you have favourites? 2) If so, can you reveal them?

Well, I’m fond of Village of Idiots.

I love Village of Idiots, which, by the way, has also been very successful! (For people who would like a sample, there’s a fun NFB animated short based on the play that can be seen here.) What other faves do you have?

I’m also fond of one that I think of in the same category with Village of Idiots, which is called Trouble on Dibble Street, which—unlike Village of Idiots—has had only one production but it was a lovely experience. It’s adapted from The Merry Wives of Windsor and was set in Prescott, Ontario in 1910. The concept was my friend Ian Farthing’s idea because he was running the Saint Lawrence Shakespeare Festival, which I was a fan of. Prescott is about an hour from Kingston, and I would often drive out and watch their Shakespeare plays. In 2008, Ian wrote to me, “2010 sees the 200th anniversary of Prescott. We are considering commissioning a play for the mainstage.” He wanted something that would ideally celebrate 200 years of Prescott history but would also have some connection to Shakespeare. I was desperate to come up with an idea, but then Ian added, “One goofy idea that came to me was The Merry Wives of Prescott—but maybe that’s why I’m not a playwright!” Well, I don’t know why Ian isn’t a playwright. We had a lovely time with that; I enjoyed that.

Now I’m going to plug a couple of plays that I think have been overlooked. One is a little three-character, one-act fringe show. We did it at the Toronto Fringe, and it’s called Exposure. It’s based on the wonderful historical fact that Louis Daguerre, the inventor of photography, bolted a camera into the window of his second-floor studio on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris to take pictures of the street. But it was a twelve-minute exposure, so when Daguerre took out the glass plate and had it printed or developed, the street always looked completely deserted. And then one day, a guy stopped to get a shoeshine and stood still for twelve minutes—and he became the first photographed person. We don’t know who he was. And I love that. So I came up with a little fantasy about it. Louis Daguerre is one character. The second was the shoeshine person, who was a middle-aged lady who used to work in the circus. She did magic acts, that becomes part of the plot, but now she’s reduced to shoeshines. And the other character is a young man who’s hoping to commit suicide. He’s going to jump in the Seine because his career is a failure. He calls himself “Anonyme.” Anonyme doesn’t want to be dragged out of the Seine with dirty shoes, so the lady does a shoeshine for him.

And I really want to talk about my most recent finished play, How Oscar Missed His Train, which is based on another wonderful historical fact. In 2013, I was researching a course in the history of comedy since Shakespeare when I was teaching at Queens. I thought I knew a lot about Oscar Wilde. But then I discovered that when he was 27, in 1882, he was one of the most famous people in Britain. The Prince of Wales requested an introduction to him, saying, “Not to know Mr. Wilde is not to be known.” And Wilde hadn’t really done anything yet! He’d written one book of poems that got crappy reviews. But he was a character. He was the first person to be famous for being famous. Gilbert and Sullivan wrote an operetta making fun of him, and he went to every performance he could go to, and he had a special box above the stage so people would see him come in. The people at the D’Oyly Carte Company, who were producing Gilbert and Sullivan, wanted to do a tour of North America. There had been some unauthorized tours, and they wanted to do an authorized one. So they contacted Oscar Wilde and they said, basically, “Would you do a lecture tour to advance our operetta that makes fun of you?” And he said yes. He did an eleven-month tour of North America. It was going to be three months on the eastern seaboard, but it was a hit, and he wound up going across the country. He went to Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans. Two side trips to Canada, which were his favorite parts of the tour; he loved coming to Canada. And he loved young men, as we know, and he also loved young women—he was bisexual; he actually later married and had two kids—and there were a lot of those around, and there was a lot of booze, which he also enjoyed. But the only town where he got so distracted that he actually missed the train to the next town was Kingston, Ontario, which is—you know, it’s Kingston! And I found that very funny. My first thought was, “Why has no Canadian playwright written a play about Oscar Wilde having too much fun in Kingston?” Then I realized it was because I was going to. But I couldn’t come up with a plot, so I wrote some other stuff instead. Then, in the summer of 2019, I sort of hit a wall. The other plays I had written were not being picked up, and I was feeling like, “Am I done? What am I doing here?” So I took six months off playwriting. And then around January 2020, I thought, “Okay, one thing I know is that it feels weird not to be writing a play, so I’m going to write something for myself, just for me.” So I started this, and by the fifth draft, I was going, “Yeah, this is fun!” So I sent it out and I’ve had some nibbles, but nothing definite yet. I’ve had plays rejected by one and all in the past, and usually I know why. But this one I think, is quite funny and has good possibilities and is well put together. By the way, I solved the problem of not having a plot by stealing a plot from The Importance of Being Earnest and a plot from Lady Windermere’s Fan and cobbling them together. Oscar would like the play, I think.

Thank you for giving us a sneak preview of that one, John! I want to ask you about your teaching career, because you are a master teacher, as we know, having received many from testimonials from students for Two Ways About It. How does your teaching practice feed into your writing practice or vice versa?

It’s been very good to be to be able to do both, because when I’m writing and I run into a snag, I think, “Okay, what would Professor Lazarus tell me?” And it keeps me honest. You know, I was leafing through the book the other day, and I’m not holding back or sugar-coating anything. I’m just trying to tell them the truth. I felt that way in the classroom. “Am I telling them what I actually do?” It’s as simple as that. My friend Jane Heyman says teaching gives you “beginner’s mind,” in the Zen Buddhist sense. I once found a wonderful quote in a book on financial planning. I can’t find the book, but the quote was: “The expert never gets tired of the fundamentals,” which is wonderful and wonderfully true.

I don’t think I’ve got much more than that to say about teaching. It’s a way of checking in, you know? I once had a student say to me, “Are you like a karate teacher who keeps one move for himself and doesn’t tell anybody what it is?” And I said, “No, I’m giving you everything I’ve got. Honest!”

And if readers want to read everything you’ve got, it’s in the book.

Giving it all away and keeping nothing in reserve.

Quick story: I taught at Studio 58, which was a conservatory theatre program. I had the great luxury of not having to mark them. I didn’t have to give them a grade, but all the students had to take the class. The philosophy was that we wanted to turn out actors and tech people who knew what everybody else was doing. So there was this whole area of the school where everybody had to do some work in somebody else’s department, and I was part of that. I told the students, “It’s going to be one term, but you’re going to write the first draft of a one-act play. It’s going to be original. It’s yours.” And I said, “I’m not grading you, so I can’t flunk you. So, you know, you can’t fail. I don’t care about quality. I just want you to do it. Have the experience.” And I said, “Frankly, if you don’t finish it, I can’t do anything about that, but I hope you’ll finish it.” I don’t think anybody ever failed to finish the draft in the ten years that I taught there. But many years later, I ran into a former student at the Ottawa Fringe, in the in the beer tent, along with someone who was a mutual friend of ours. So the three of us sat down to have a drink, and in the middle of the conversation, the friend suddenly turned to the former student and said, “Right off the top of your head, what’s the most valuable thing you ever learned from John?” And the former student instantly said, “You never have to finish it, and it never has to be any good.” And I’m going, “No, no, dude, this was a teaching strategy. This is not a life lesson!” And he said, “John, I’ve applied that to everything in my life. It works really well.”

John, I usually ask people if they have some advice for aspiring playwrights, but since you’ve already written a whole book about that, I thought I’d ask you something else. I read that you enjoy studying Latin, so could you possibly give us a wise Latin quotation?

I studied Latin in high school, and I liked it. And a couple of years ago, I found a battered old Latin textbook in the Queens University bookstore and bought it. It’s here, and I put it aside for a while, but last night I picked it up again and started making notes. Okay, here’s one: De gustibus non est disputandum. Which means “You can’t argue about taste.” If you like chocolate and I like vanilla, you’re not going to persuade me. Taste is beyond rational discussion.

You know, I worked as a critic and that was something I kept in mind. Yes, I have my taste, but that’s kind of beside the point.

I think that’s a pretty good place to end it, John. Thank you very much for doing this!