Bunburying playwright gets Wilde

There’s a pretty good chance that you have gone bunburying or will go bunburying at some point.

What is bunburying, you ask? Well, it’s claiming to have an appointment with a fictitious person just to get out of something. Or in extreme cases, it’s about having a secret alias to escape into a double life.

Oscar Wilde first coined bunburying in The Importance of Being Earnest. In this Victorian era comedy of manners, one of the protagonists, London dandy Algernon Moncrieff, invents Mr. Bunbury. He is an imaginary invalid friend in the country that surfaces whenever Algie wishes to avoid certain social obligations.

And now Edmonton playwright Andrea Beça (B, or Unless You Steal Her Pen!/She Came from Planet X!), is giving bunburying a whole new twist.

The artistic director of Cowardly Kiss Theatre has just returned from an 18-month stint at the University of Glasgow where she completed a master’s thesis in playwriting and dramaturgy. That entailed writing three plays, including Bunburying, which is about to receive its world premiere April 29 to May 8 at the TransAlta Arts Barns.

Under the mentorship of Philip Howard, director of Traverse Theatre and experimental playwright Selma Dimitijevic, Beça was encouraged to take inspiration from works that excited her. She dived straight into Wilde and was immediately struck by how his upper crust characters treated all things trivial very seriously and all things serious with a studied triviality.

At the same time Beça was in Glasgow, Britain’s feverish excitement for Big Brother was at an all-time high. It was the reality TV show’s 11th and final season and instead of running weekly, Britons tuned in daily.

“It fascinated me because the entire country shut down and tuned in. It became a big part of my environment and I was intrigued,” Beça says.

The similarities to Wilde’s comedy grabbed her. “There was the focus on food and beauty. Nothing has changed. We’ve just gotten more extreme.”

Reality TV shows as a whole, whether it’s Wives of Orange County, Extreme Makeover, Hoarding, Jersey Shore or Biggest Loser, appal her.

“Society is currently obsessed with beauty, with perfection, with altering ourselves. There’s this constant need and much of it is about status. It’s no longer reality TV. It’s gone too far.

“It’s what is wrong with our world. They destroy our expectations of ourselves and our world. People assume that’s how it should be. Somehow it seems wrong to tell people they need something different.”

Borrowing from the concept of deconstruction, the taking apart of traditional ideas, Beça writes a four-actor script where every character is constantly in flux. Included in the cast is St. Albert’s David Johnston.

“I hope people step away and question what they view, what they’re exposed to and what they view as an ideal. Either way, I know they’ll laugh.”