It’s two days before opening night, and Grant Winestock is five minutes late for my interview with him. I’m sitting on an outdoor bench at McMaster University, with my notebook and a coffee, nervously looking from left to right to see if anyone is approaching.
I don’t know what he looks like, but I gave him a pretty good description of myself: “I’ll be the guy sitting on the bench…with a notebook and a coffee.” I’m starting to wonder if I should’ve added more.
Suddenly an unshaven man in a dirty white T-shirt comes into view, frantically jogging from the nearby parking lot in my direction. I didn’t need to ask.
“I’ve never been this stressed before in my life. Writing exams at school is a walk in the park compared to what I’m going through this week,” he jokes in a voice that is anxious, excited and, well, dead, all at once.
The McMaster University student, along with Max Rose Begg Goodis, have written and will be directing the play Purple, which is set to be performed at this year’s Hamilton Fringe Festival from July 16-25.
The two first started writing the play over two years ago and finally got their opportunity to produce it at this year’s Fringe, Hamilton’s largest annual theatre festival. It’s a dark comedy that deals with issues of life, death, morality, and romance, all set in a fictional world that faces crises of mutant pigs, contaminated milk, and a destructive snow storm.
“It’s a dark, dark, dark comedy,” Winestock elaborates. “It’s funny at times, but it changes on a dime.” He was too noticeably tense and burdened for the rhyme to have been deliberate. His trembling hand might as well have been holding a fast-burning cigarette. “The play mostly deals with love and death, because really, those are the only two things that matter. I definitely didn’t want to fall victim to the student pitfall of writing a play about the life of a student. I live that shit; I don’t want to see it on stage.”
Purple features a cast and crew of mostly current or former McMaster students, so campus has become a hub of sorts for the group during this extremely stressful and busy week. It's also the reason I agreed to meet him on campus, for his own sanity. “We’ve been doing desperate last-minute rehearsals in lecture halls. We’ve got less than two days left and we’re still doing rewrites, building sets, everything. And because everyone has their own schedules, if we didn’t have campus as a central spot, we’d be done for.”
Indeed, Winestock looks up and says, “Oh, here’s Jimmy, our sound guy.” Jimmy walks by, not even knowing that Grant would be there giving an interview. Well-trimmed, thick dark beard; heavy glasses; gelled hair; stocky but not overweight stature; slightly below average height; unpretentious dark wardrobe. He looked like my my non-existent older brother if I were a character in a '90s teen movie. “I’ve only been working on this project for a little while now,” says Jimmy Skembaris. “I think they had issues with their last sound guy, so there’s still lots of stuff I’m trying to figure out. But to be honest, I think despite the problems, sound is the least of Grant and Max’s concerns,” he jokes.
Grant didn’t have a response, as he was busy giving instructions to his girlfriend and brother, both cast members, who had also just walked by: “Quickly, go down to the copy shop before it closes and get these promos done.” He then started apologizing to me for Goodis’s absence, saying she really wanted to be there for the interview but that she got caught up at home making a prop of a paper-mâché three-headed purple pig.
I started to feel as if I was intruding, taking precious time away from Winestock as he had only a day and a half to finish doing about a month’s work of preparation.
But he was confident that in the end, it would all work out. “I’ve been in this situation before, as an actor and not a director mind you, in which there is absolute chaos literally right up until the 11th hour. But as soon as the curtain goes up, everything somehow always magically works out.
“Having been involved so much with theatre over the years, doing it is at the end of the day just a lot of fun.”
I didn’t even bother asking him if the play’s mutant pig was also going to have wings. I was afraid of the answer.
For further information, including show times, visit www.hamiltonfringe.ca.
