Cameron Macleod is a grizzled, veteran face on the local comedy circuit. When he’s not directing short films or curating indie comedy festivals, Macleod can usually be found inhabiting odd and unlikely characters as host of the long-running Hero Show out of the China Cloud off Main Street.
The Hero Show is a place for sketch and improv comedians to test out new ideas and try things they might not have the freedom to do on other stages around the city, and Macleod is among the best at getting up on stage by himself and bringing wild and wonderful imaginary tales to life.
Which is why it’s surprising that Macleod has never done a Fringe show before, let alone a one-man show. The unofficial home of the one-man show – the monologue epicentre of Vancouver – the Fringe Festival (Sept. 8-18) was a logical next step for a performer with 10 years of experience behind him.
“I’ve been doing solo sketch comedy for you know, like 10 years… and I always said that I wanted to do a one-man show, but I never really knew what that one-man show would consist of, or what the theme would be,” the crackly-voiced comedian explains, seated in a busy Gastown coffee shop one recent afternoon. “I gave myself the goal at the beginning of this year that by the end of the year I would produce a one-man show and perform it to a sold-out audience.”
So he applied to the Fringe thinking that would be a good place to start, and when his name serendipitously came up for a slot earlier this year, Macleod's hypothetical deadline became real.
In a festival where audiences are on a first-name-basis with Fringe veterans, though, and a few great nights can make you “Fringe famous” across the multi-city circuit, there is a special pressure reserved for people making their Fringe debut. And picking a compelling theme or topic for your show – something that’s just quirky enough to stop people as they read the sandwich boards and playbills on Granville Island – can be the difference between a packed house and crickets.
Enter Macleod’s inaugural show: I Had Sex Until My Heart Stopped (cheating death and finding love in the modern age).
“For the first one, I obviously wanted it to be something special,” Macleod says with a wry smile, “and just kind of in the past two years, I’ve had some new experiences that are similar to some past experiences I’ve had, that involve near death experiences and weird sexual encounters. Which the majority of the show is based on.”
Macleod admits that his true stories about flat-lining and awkward sexual escapades are not something he's looking forward to reliving in front of a live audience, per se, incorporating that level of personal honesty, that kind of lived experience, is something that Fringe mentor Eric Rhys Miller recommends to all festival first-timers.
“[We tell them to] follow their own interests and to make it personal to themselves, and trust that their personal response to the theme or the form is what’s going to draw people in. The most successful pieces we’ve seen are the ones where people really trust themselves to follow their instincts and go deep into what matters to them – into that question or into that story that they really feel needs to be told.”
Miller’s theatre company, The Only Animal (The One That Got Away, DAREU!), has been a mentorship partner of the Fringe Festival for the past six years. Through The Only Animal, Miller leads months-long training intensives on how to write, produce and promote shows.
This year, the program has brought together 10 emerging young artists (ages 17-24) and their theatrical responses to climate change under the banner of Generation Hot.
Examples include Madelyn Osborne’s piece, Disposable Generation, on the false promise of plastics; June Fukumura and Keely O’Brien’s fateful carnival pageant, Apocalypse Parade; and Ariel Martz-Oberlander's creation, Lilacs That Come A Month Early Are Still So Beautiful, on the normalcy of climate change.
All four – in fact, all 10 artists in the program – are producing shows for the Fringe Festival for the very first time, and it’s all part of what makes the Fringe so compelling year after year. For all the TJ Dawes, Peter ‘n’ Chrises and Tara Travises – local performers who regularly earn rave Fringe reviews – what the Fringe also offers is the chance to discover someone new; something Miller sees as a credit to the support network the Fringe has established over the past 32 years.
“We’re huge fans of what they do in terms of offering a platform and a really supportive structure. I mean, they’re definitely a part of [The Only Animal’s] mentorship in terms of how they support artists and give them really good bones, and in terms of how to produce, how to publicize and promote, and be part of a community,” he explains. “Which I think is the most vibrant theatre community in Vancouver because it’s so big and so well loved and so open.”
“And you’re definitely seeing what’s absolutely freshest, right?” he continues, of the newcomers. “The [voices] who are drawn in by the opportunity to have some support as they make their debut. And that helps people to take risks and be represented, who wouldn’t ordinarily think, ‘You know what? I should do a Fringe show.’”
• The Vancouver Fringe Festival runs Sept. 8-18 at various venues. Tickets and showtimes at VancouverFringe.com
