Building 17: A Conspiracy In One Act
Fri Sep 6, 6:45pm
Sat Sep 7, 7:30pm
Sun Sep 8, 12:20pm & 5:30pm
The Bus Stop Theatre 2203 Gottingen Street PWYC
T. Roy remembers watching TV as the Berlin Wall fell. "You could feel the emotion of people trying to break down barriers and it was of course very symbolic, and you could feel 'wow, OK, maybe we're entering a time of world politics where it's going to get better, we're not going to be afraid of what the Russians are saying every day, maybe finally there's light at the end of the tunnel'," he recalls. "And then the Bosnian war happened, Rwanda happened, and you realize well now, instead of two big superpowers we have a lot of localized conflict where two superpowers still have their own play—like the Russians and Americans in Syria."
His Fringe play—something he calls a "bucket list project"—picks up where the wall's broken promise left off, a monologue aiming at the military-industrial complex through a fictional veteran's retelling of Operation Allied Force.
He says meeting Syrian newcomers inspired the script, a heavily researched piece exploring war's hubris and long-falling shadow.
In the seven years Roy's lived in Halifax, he's never missed a Fringe. He gets his fill of theatre the way others feast on seasonal produce: Watching play after play, never wanting to miss something ripe and delicious.
Now it's finally his turn to helm a stage with this, his theatrical debut. He feels an all-encompassing nervousness, and wrote into the script that his character also has stage fright so he can use cue cards.
When people leave his show, he hopes they'll "try to discuss what we talk about when we talk about military deployment. This is so sanitized, the version that we get. You'll get a snippet of information, and you'll get twice as much information about what the Kardashians did on the weekend."
