While The Leftovers is best known for being a Judgment Day-themed HBO show, capturing the depressing existence of people who must carry on after watching everything they love disappear, it also serves as an appropriate, if inadvertent, metaphor for Charles Demers’ political reality.
The Vancouver comedian watched in horror this past fall as his beloved democratic socialist party, the NDP, gradually lost their way, their 2015 federal election chances, and effectively vanished from the national political conversation.
Demers had been inspired to pen his autobiographical one-man show, simply called Leftovers, about being a lifelong political outsider prior to that, however, during the height of the Stephen Harper regime. At the time of writing in 2014, there were still orange aspirations that the NDP would not only retain their stronghold in Quebec but also make gains and be able to advance some of their left-leaning ideas politically.
The Neworld Theatre-produced play – a theatrical hybrid of standup and storytelling – premiered at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby last March, poking fun at this optimism and laughing at the realities of being a socialist in a capitalist world – stuck with the “leftovers” of the 20th century – while holding on to hope that better days were ahead.
Then the Liberal party – Canada’s centre party – swooped in on its path to victory to comfortably occupy territory that more traditionally belonged to the left: Legalized marijuana. Prescription drug cost cutting. A Minister of Climate Change. An enhanced Canada Pension Plan. Deficit spending. More roads, schools and seniors’ homes. Long-ish, flowing hair. Riding the bus...
Overnight, things seemingly did get better, but at the NDP’s expense, leaving a large group of anti-Harper “winners” inexplicably disappointed.
So, Demers returns to Leftovers, making its Vancouver debut with the 2016 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, to humorously explain why.
Like mother, like son
Charles “Charlie” Demers was born on July 1, 1980.
That being Canada Day (and coinciding closely with the defeat of the Quebec referendum six weeks earlier), his mother Robin – a hilarious, generous, “Tommy Douglas Christian” – saw the date as a symbolic birth story for her son.
It would become a running theme in his life; one of the first to appear in Leftovers.
“The way that my mother enters the world of the piece is through her two expectations for my life,” Demers says. “Expectations is maybe a strong word,” he amends with a smile. “These were never there in an overbearing way, but two things she kind of said from the beginning was that I would be a comedian, and I would be the prime minister of Canada.”
Seated in the plush seats of the York Theatre, where just one night earlier audiences had been laughing along with his latest pop-culture skewering script for the East Van Panto, the fiercely intelligent 35-year-old has exceeded his mother’s first hope: three books (including a BC Book Prize nomination), a recurring role on CBC’s The Debaters, a breakthrough CityTV news comedy show called The List, Just For Laughs festival appearances, a stint writing about theatre for this very newspaper, and a position teaching creative writing at UBC – all born out of a finely tuned talent for standup and sketch comedy.
Sadly, Demers was unable to share those milestones with his mother. She died from leukemia when he was just 10 years old – a difficult subject he explores in his recent book of essays, The Horrors. But, having been born in 1951, during the roll out of Canada’s Old Age Security Act, the creation of universal health care and the building up of the so-called “welfare state” after the Second World War, it’s easy to see how her ideologies came about, and the influence they had on her son.
Conversely, though, as Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism and Ronald Reagan’s right-wing conservatism rose in popularity, Demers says his generation witnessed the decay of those very systems.
“My whole life has been the dismantling of that post-World War II apparatus,” he says, “And I talk [in Leftovers] about the years that we had together, during most of which she was very sick and was dying. […] Those intimate moments and intimate memories were deeply private and personal, but were also social and were reliant on the public sphere, whether it was provision of medical care that she received, or the fact that she was receiving disability payments.
“And so, in relation to my mother,” he continues, “the show ends up being about what’s most personal and private in our lives, the values that we’re raised with, and how those values come out later on in life. But also about living in society, the way in which that society looked after my mother and me, and what the erosion of those values meant [to] the world that her son was supposed to one day be prime minister of.”
A lifelong loser
Life as a “shrill leftist” hasn’t been easy on Demers. In fact, months after the federal election has faded to the new normal, Demers says he is still not recovered from how it all played out.
“I’m finding myself very disoriented by a world where a lot of the people around me are very happy politically. Where even I have to grudgingly admit that there are things that I’m very impressed by or happy with myself,” he explains, “while at the same time finding that all these things are being, I guess, delivered by the wrong team.”
For many a mild-mannered Canadian, this level of political distress likely seems alien. Demers has been involved with “radical left politics” since he was 15, however. It has shaped his friend groups, his work … it’s even how he met his wife.
So, with the rise of Justin Trudeau, he and Leftovers co-writer Marcus Youssef felt it necessary to incorporate some of Demers’ newfound conflict into the show.
“[After Trudeau], there was a feeling of, ‘Wait a minute, why aren’t you happy. You won…’” he laughs. “But in some ways […] the defeat of the NDP this past fall, and their total political capitulation leading up to that, really actually drives home all of the deepest fears of this piece in a much more effective way than doing it when Harper was in power.
“We’re […] in a place, politically, where all of our expectations have been managed to such a degree that it’s hard to even picture what someone to the left of Justin Trudeau would look like,” he continues. “Which is such a weird thing because he ought to be the middle of the road. That’s the centre party! And yet to so many people it feels like Che Guevara is running Canada,” he finishes with a laugh. “I think a lot of people are just left with this feeling of, what is the left for?”
The young father adds that Canada’s new two-party outlook has left him questioning how to raise his two-year-old daughter.
“Am I going to burden her with this job of hoisting up the losing side of every political argument for the rest of her life?” he asks, with a healthy dose of self-deprecation. “Are we going to raise a next generation of people who will only ever be frustrated and defeated their whole political lives?’”
Pop these leftovers in the microwave and find out.
• Leftovers runs Jan. 26-30 at the York Theatre (639 Commercial). Tickets from $19; PuShFestival.ca. The PuSh Festival takes place Jan. 19-Feb. 7 at various venues around Vancouver.
