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    Winners and Losers
    Winners and Losers
    Winners and Losers
    Ebook119 pages1 hour

    Winners and Losers

    By Marcus Youssef and James Long

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    About this ebook

    Two buddies, theatre artists and long-time friends Marcus and James, sit at a table and pass the time together playing a made-up game in which they name people, places, or things – Pamela Anderson, microwave ovens, their fathers, Goldman Sachs – and debate whether they are successful or not; in other words, whether they are winners or losers. Each friend seeks to defeat the other, and because one of these men grew up economically privileged, and the other did not, the competition very quickly adds up.

    Winners and Losers showcases the work of two giants of the Vancouver indie theatre scene. James Long’s Theatre Replacement develops work specific to particular places and the people who live in them. Marcus Youssef’s Neworld Theatre investigates questions of power, culture, and belonging.

    Their first collaborative work is a staged conversation that embraces the ruthless logic of capitalism, and tests its impact on our closest personal relationships as well as our most intimate experiences of self.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateAug 7, 2015
    ISBN9780889229334
    Winners and Losers
    Author

    Marcus Youssef

    Marcus Youssef is based on unceded Coast Salish Territory, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada. His fifteen or so plays have been produced in multiple languages in scores of theatres in twenty countries across North America, Europe, and Asia, from Seattle to New York to Reykjavik, London, Venice, Hong Kong, Vienna, Athens, Frankfurt, and Berlin. In 2017, Marcus received Canada’s most prestigious theatre award, the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, for his body of work as a playwright. He is also the recipient of Berlin’s Ikarus Theatre Prize, the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award, the Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award, the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, the Seattle Times Footlight Award, the Vancouver Critics’ Innovation Award (three times), and the Canada Council Staunch-Lynton Award. Marcus co-founded the East Vancouver artist-run production hub Progress Lab 1422 and was the inaugural chair of the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Policy Council. Talon has published his Adrift, Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, Ali and Ali, Jabber, King Arthur’s Night and Peter Panties, and Winners and Losers. He is currently International Artistic Associate at Farnham Maltings in the UK, Playwright in Residence at Tarragon Theatre, and Artistic Associate at Neworld Theatre in Vancouver. Marcus also sits on SCALE, a national arts roundtable formed in partnership with the Climate Emergency Unit of the David Suzuki Foundation, inspired by Seth Klein’s remarkable book, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency.

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      Book preview

      Winners and Losers - Marcus Youssef

      Winners-and-Losers-Cover-EPUB.jpgWinners and Losers

      CONTENTS

      Embracing Uncertainty: A User’s Guide

      Notes

      Thoughts on Approaching This Text

      Production History

      Characters

      Running Time

      Production Notes

      Winners and Losers

      More Topics for Improvisation

      Acknowledgements

      Biographies

      Marcus Youssef

      James Long

      Other Plays by Marcus Youssef

      Other Plays by James Long

      For our families

      EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY: A USER'S GUIDE

      by Jenn Stephenson

      Here’s what Ottawa theatre blogger Kevin Reid has to say about Winners and Losers: "And this is where it gets absolutely fascinating and deliciously uncomfortable. This piece blurs the line between the theatrical and the real like nothing I’ve ever seen, and while I’m sure the actors are, in fact, just acting (mostly . . . I think . . .) it nevertheless feels bloody real, to the point where when it’s all over you feel almost garish for applauding. An experiment in realism that isn’t afraid to punch traditional stage boundaries right in the dick . . . this play won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if it doesn’t get you thinking and talking like you might be the Scarecrow in Wizard of Oz. Huge props to the actors, and I’d love to compare notes with people who saw it on different nights. This is theatre at its most real . . . and, therefore, at its scariest."¹ In his vivid response to the work, Reid captures the potent audience experience on offer, a kind of thrilled but hesitant fear that characterizes the central affective paradox of Winners and Losers.

      After the two performers introduce themselves – Hi. My name is Jamie and this is Marcus. Hi. I’m Marcus – we are initiated into the basic premise of the event; here we are just casually hanging out with these two friends as they play a witty game they have invented called Winners and Losers. As various topics are proposed for debate – microwave ovens, the Occupy movement, Stonehenge – the two perfunctorily dispense judgment. Grounded in a tough attitude of Enlightenment libertarianism, their assessment of what constitutes a winner turns primarily on whether or not the person or issue presented is autonomous, self-directed, and capable of having significant impact on his, her, or its social or environmental context. In combination with our philosophical discomfort with this thinking, our amusement is grounded in the disrespectful brevity and aggressive confidence of their conclusions, treating high and low subjects to the same brisk capitalist reduction. We laugh along at the absurdity of the game. Eventually, however, Jamie and Marcus raise the stakes and the play turns nasty when the two decide to insert themselves as the subjects to be judged. Between the two long-time friends, the knives of honesty come out and this game is suddenly a lot less fun both for us and for them.

      Presented as essentially an improvised, spontaneous event, hosted by Jamie and Marcus as themselves, Winners and Losers situates itself solidly in the early twenty-first century zeitgeist in Canada for reality-based theatre. (Although we can trace the roots of this phenomenon to the early 1990s in Europe and the United Kingdom, it is only in the past decade or so that it has flourished in Canada.) Reality-based theatre, or Theatre of the Real as it is also known, is an umbrella term encompassing a variety of performance strategies and styles where the principal aim is to establish connections to the lived real. It is a mode of performance characterized by: an interest in extending public understanding of contemporary individuals and society; a focus on representing and or putting living people on the stage; and an aesthetics of ‘authenticity effects,’ artistic strategies designed to generate (and then in some cases, destabilize) an impression of close contact with social reality and ‘real’ people.² Autobiographical performance, community documentary, verbatim theatre, theatre of fact, theatre of witness, tribunal theatre, restored village performances, and historical battle re-enactments all fall into this category.³ Winners and Losers connects to this tradition initially as a work of autobiography – its subject-protagonists are Jamie and Marcus as performed by their actual-world counterparts Long and Youssef – but it also manifests an attachment to this ethos through its concerted and strategic efforts to erase the theatrical frame and present something real. Beyond confessions of real-world personal details, Jamie and Marcus do real stuff. They roll on the floor and try to beat the crap out of each other. They drink beer. They play Ping-Pong. As we witness the crazy impossibility of scripting the movement of a Ping-Pong ball, its realness bubbles up. We feel an electric frisson at being in the presence of a really real thing. This is one way that Winners and Losers taps into the potent audience experience of reality-based performance.

      The other way that the real is made manifest is through deliberate exposure of the usual theatrical artifice. Winners and Losers continually reminds us that we are in a theatre and this is indeed a play. To begin the show, Jamie presses Stop on an iPod, stopping the pre-show music. Jamie and Marcus talk to the audience. They talk to the stage manager. They explicitly acknowledge that they are in the process of creating a show: Isn’t that a rule? One of us does it, then the other? "I

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