North Saanich writer M.A.C. Farrant, one of Canada's sharpest and smartest humourists, will soon make her theatre debut.
Next spring, Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre opens its production of My Turquoise Years. Farrant (Marion to her friends) won't appear on stage herself. The comedy is Farrant's stage adaptation of her 2004 comingof-age memoir, set in 1960 Cordova Bay.
She's had a long and distinguished career as a writer. But this is the 65-year-old's debut as a playwright.
"I just love it," she said. "When I was a kid, I was always putting on plays for the neighbourhood."
Despite being a longtime admirer, I hadn't met Farrant before. Especially enjoyable is her 2011 book, The Strange Truth About Us (Talonbooks). It's a dystopian novel written in experimental form - fragmented, with some pages containing just one line.
The Strange Truth About Us imagines our climatechanged world in the future. In the first part (the novel has three sections) a retired couple living in a gated community sips martinis and ponders what's to come, rather like folk relaxing to a string quartet as the Titanic sinks.
"We consider ourselves sophisticated people. Note our cavalier yet scrutinizing take on the world," declares one. The couple wonders, meanwhile, if museums and libraries will exist for future generations. They ponder catastrophic weather events: droughts, floods and hurricanes. They live, as many of us do today, in a vaguely numbed state of fear.
"We're afraid," said Farrant, sipping an Americano on the sundeck of her home. "We're afraid of what's happening to our planet, our lives, our bodies, our politics. Everything."
Her book may sound grim, but it's not. The Strange Truth About Us is shot through with Farrant's subversive wit, her acute sense of irony. As well as being poetic and thoughtprovoking, it is quite funny. In person, Farrant is nimble-witted and ready to laugh; an elegant blond woman whose green-blue eyes matched her sweater.
Humour, she says, has always been her survival tool. Her youth - as chronicled in the memoir My Turquoise Years - was often happy yet not always easy. Farrant's parents split up when she was a child. Born in Sydney, Australia, she was raised by her mother until the age of five. Her gallivanting parent was "a playgirl, a woman of the world." Farrant spent her early years with her living on cruise ships.
Her father then took charge. Because he worked at the Vancouver dockyards, supervising lumber loading, she was sent to live with an aunt and uncle at Cordova Bay. Farrant says the decade's optimism was for her - as a teen in the early 1960s - symbolized by a hip new colour dominating the home.
"Everything was turquoise," she said with a smile. "The toilet, kitchen sink, the linoleum floor. Pedal pushers."
The dark cloud over the summer of 1960 was her mother's promise to visit.
Farrant didn't really want a reunion with her mom, who for her 13th birthday had sent "wildly inappropriate" gift: a purple negligee with a plunging neckline. It arrived three months late.
That dreaded visit never happened, although Farrant did finally have an awkward meeting with her mother when she was 18 years old. Ultimately, her globe-trotting mom married a rich guy.
Her childhood memories are mostly sunny. She took ballet and tap-dancing lessons. Farrant was an outgoing girl who loved staging plays. One of these extravaganzas, with a cast and crew of a dozen, was titled Bon Voyage - a homage to the Fred and Ginger musicals she saw on TV.
She thrived in the stable home provided by her aunt and uncle. Still, being abandoned by one's mother couldn't help but leave a mark. Farrant grew up feeling markedly different from her friends.
"It probably became one of the single driving facts of my life," she said. "I remember my aunt telling me, 'If anyone asks where your mother is, tell them it's none of their business.'"
Farrant is writing a new book, The World Afloat, slated for publication in 2014. It will be lighter fare, a sort of antidote to the thematic "heaviness" of The Strange Truth About Us. As an exercise leading to its creation, Farrant set herself the task of writing one short composition each day for a year.
After 10 1 /2 months she felt "burnt out" (she was also working on the play). So Farrant took the summer off. Now she's resumed battle.
Before driving back to Victoria, I asked whether writing The Strange Truth About Us had affected her. Specifically, did grappling daily with the spectre of a grim future stunt her creative process afterwards?
Not at all, said Farrant.
"For me, I just put my head down and I do what I do.- One thing I've learned, we can't predict the future. There's so many things that could happen.
We don't know what they're going to be."
achamberlain@timescolonist.com
