Alan's Search For The Best Girl In Montreal
Canadian Playwright Adam Kelly on New Play at Montreal's Theatre 314
Adam Kelly's Alan's Search for The Best Girl in Montreal is basically an autobigraphical tale of this Montreal playwright / actor's lovelfie, for better or worse, as Cupid laughs in his face.
Kelly's convinced iconic HBO television series Sex and The City has forever levelled the playing field in the dating game and the changing roles of women. Is he right? For today's socially evolved gentler sex, are relationships really becoming too work?
Adam Kelly: Playwright and The City
On a scale of one to ten, do you think people even want to try and find anyone anymore, or do they want freedom for life?
Adam Kelly: “I think that is what’s going on. People want their freedom. I can only speak by what’s happening with me. There’s only so many times you can stick your hand in the fire before you start saying okay, well, maybe I’ll stop sticking my hand in the fire. It hurts. The fire is very alluring, and it’s warm, and it dances and things, but it does burn you as well.
“So, I think people are afraid of taking risks and getting hurt. I am definitely in that particular boat right now. I think people are looking for relationships because it’s instinctive. When life is good, and you have a world of plenty as (President Barack) Obama was recently talking about, we are a rich nation and our needs are generally taken care of. I think it's animal instinct that the next step after that is wanting to make more animals.
“We have definitely complicated things with all our 'criteria' and specifications of what needs to be there. So it has become really complicated, but I think there is an essential need to find love and companionship. Everyone feels it even if they have blocked it out of themselves. Then one day it sort of falls into their lap. Oh yeah. That feeling is good. I had forgotten about that."
I am in the same boat as you, recently burned and currently blocked, depsite this dating revolution.
“That's another thing that has really changed – the way things work nowadays and the changing roles of women. My other show The Anorak, explores that aspect of things a lot, but I think that the rules have really changed in a very short period of time. Shows like Sex and The City have completely revolutionized the way that women deal with men, and the way they approach relationships.
"It hasn’t changed things for men particularly, because from what I can tell, men don’t watch Sex and the City. From what I understand, every woman in the Western world has seen Sex and The City and likes it, without exception. Do you like Sex and The City?
I do. But the character that changed the most on Sex and the City, was not a woman, but a man. The four women, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte, changed for sure, but it was commitaphobe Mr Big, that had the greatest shift in his character arc.
Adam Kelly: “Right. I suppose. But who writes Sex and the City? A woman?”
No, it was created by two men: Darren Star and Michael Patrick King . It was based on Candice Bushnell’s book of the same name.
Adam Kelly: “Wow. That’s astonishing. I thought for sure it was a woman who wrote that show.”
At times, the character of Alan Norton sounds similar to SATC character Samantha Jones. Does Alan have 20 different women? How does the structure of the play work without giving it away too much?
Adam Kelly: “That’s the number I give to round it off. There are about 20 different women he encounters. Some of them are significant and take up a good chunk of the play, and others are very quick one-line things. That obviously reflects how some relationships work. Some of them are long and take up a lot of pages, and some of them are just one line.
"I have three actresses playing all 20 roles, so I have set them so that they are staggered. This has worked well because of how the girls are cast. I mainly cast them based on what I know of them. I know all these actresses, so I know what they can do.”
Alan's Search for the Best Girl in Montreal opens Feb 12 at Montreal's Theatre 314.
Part Three - Adam and His Girls' Multiple Roles.
Adam Kelly
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