I Am YEG Arts: Erik Richards
November 14, 2024
As a theatre creator and audio artist from Edmonton, Erik Richards strives to create plays which use music and genre to blend theatrical and concert aesthetics seamlessly into new and exciting forms of storytelling. His show Brother Rat, which is set to kick off the Fringe Theatre’s 2024/2025 season, blends songs, noise, and dissonant soundscapes to explore heavy themes such as mental illness, substance abuse, and the current housing crisis. In this week’s I Am YEG Arts story, we chat with Erik about his commitment to ethical production practices, how his love for punk music influences his work, and what audiences can expect from a performance of Brother Rat.
As a theatre creator you wear many hats, working as a sound designer, director, production manager, and playwright. How did you get your start in theatre?
I started the way that I think a lot of kids in the city do; I came up through really great drama programs, mostly junior high and high school. I had some great teachers and some really good opportunities that prepared me very well and got me really excited about doing this work. When I got out of school, I wanted to do my own thing and did the Fringe the next summer, and started doing Fringe every year after that. We did it for eight straight years with one to three shows per year with our company ReadyGo Theatre. I’m definitely a Fringe baby.
Tell us about an early role model or influential figure who helped encourage your art practice.
I have an old friend that I met in elementary school named Jeong Ung Song, and the two of us have kind of egged each other on for our whole lives. I’ve been really lucky that we started shooting silly little movies back when we were in school together and then did plays and improv together, and eventually produced our first Fringe shows together. We’ve been with each other every step of the way, trying things and finding our own way through it. So, I would say [Jeong Ung], is an artistic partner as well as a friend.
While pursuing your degree in Drama you focused on ethical production practices in independent theatre. Tell us more about these practices and how you employ these principles in your work. Have you noted any progress/changes in this area over the years, particularly since the major social changes during the pandemic?
When I was in university, I wrote my honours thesis on ethical production practice. This was coming out of 2021, just after COVID. I wrote [my thesis] partially as a response to my wife starting to work professionally in theatre – she’s a stage manager – and seeing it through her eyes. I think theatre has a tendency to be a very rushed artistic practice. Typically, we work on a six-day structure, rehearsing from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. We usually have Mondays off, and then we go into tech and our days can go even longer. All of this is obviously with the caveat that eventually we’ll open the play and then we’ll have less hours, but there’s still a lot of planning and two show days at larger houses, and things like that. I was interested in why we’re not working like everybody else, working the same hours. These questions led to research about people being taken advantage of for doing the thing they love, which I think is really problematic.
With Brother Rat, one of the really big things we focused on while writing our grants and doing our budgets was a five-day week and an eight-hour day. I’m really proud that we’ve been able to do that. So, myself and our producer Ryan Blair, who has been a big part of this project the whole time, worked really hard with our numbers and with our scheduling to make sure we have a full three weeks of rehearsal and a full week of tech. A lot of shows will do six days on, two weeks of rehearsal, and it’s just this crazy whirlwind, and we wanted it to feel more like a job – people have lives! We’re really proud that we’ve been able to do that and have the two days off and have eight-hour days. And then even moving into our tech process, we’ll be keeping an eight-hour day for our technicians and designers. This is the first time we’ve produced outside of the Fringe, and we’ve been able to stick to our guns, which is really nice.
Tell us the story and inspiration behind your show Brother Rat. What do you hope audiences take away from the production?
Brother Rat is inspired by the song “Brother Rat // What Slayde Says” by Victoria based punk rock band No Means No, which is about someone who’s struggling with mental illness and the symptoms of mental illness. I have extrapolated it out to mental illness that would probably have been egged on by substance abuse. As far as the story, what I want people to take away is that this is a show about grey areas and it’s about people with really foggy relationships with both sides of this “system”.
It’s a show about two halves and two worlds in a sense. There’s a world of concert life and partying and drinking and that side of things that has its consequences, but it also has its benefits in the form of friends, community, and being heard and feeling seen. And it’s also a show about the mental health sector and people who are in a bad way, who have been diagnosed with things, who’ve been prescribed medication. This is a show about characters who resist both sides of that coin.
What’s really key is that it’s not a play about people who are refusing treatment pathways, it’s about people who tried all those things many times and have been hurt by it, and it’s not as simple for them as like to just get on Trazodone. They’ve probably been there, and they’ve been on different meds, and they feel awful when they’re on meds and they feel awful when they’re off meds. They’ve gone to counseling, and they’ve had experiences where they felt degraded, or they felt talked down to. It’s not a play about “the first step is starting”. That stuff has been tried 1000 times and it didn’t work.
As far as the story goes, without giving too much away, it’s a show set at a punk concert. Our set is comprised of concert gear, like a drum kit, amps, guitar, and bass, and they play a show. We talk about those two worlds and the three people in the play kind of go through it.
Your passion for music is evident in your work, such as your upcoming production Brother Rat. How does your background in music influence the theatre you create?
This show is influenced by the music that I grew up listening to. It’s like a love letter to the music that was forced upon me by my parents; we all have music that is from our parents. It’s a punk show, and it’s an adaptation of the song “Brother Rat // What Slayde Says” by the punk band No Means No that was pretty active during the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, and the music is meant to reflect that. It’s hard and it’s loud. In the creation of this latest version of the show, I was interested in this clash of these bands that I grew up with and then also getting into musical theatre in school and falling in love with that as well, and questioning where is the show that sounds like the bands that I grew up with? There are rock musicals and punk musicals like American Idiot, RENT, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch – these are all punk and rock influenced and I would never say that they’re not those things – but I wanted something that was reflective of what I knew punk to be, which was like ear plugs in and a mosh pit. I just haven’t seen that. I know people have done it before, but I was interested in whatever my version of that was.
It’s funny because the themes we touch on in the show were there before the music. Years ago, I wrote a version of the play called Brother Rat that had no music in it, and then put 26 minutes of punk music into it in the last two years. Something always felt wrong to me about writing a play adapted from punk music without including any actual music.
What’s next for you? Tell us what you’re currently working on or hoping to explore next.
With working on Brother Rat pretty intensely for the last couple of years, what I’ve discovered is that there’s something for me here to mine in the genre of this hybrid piece between a concert and a play. That was kind of a big goal when we went to set out to create the show; we really wanted it so the actors play a full set – 26 minutes of music – which is the length of an opening act at a punk show. There’s a play in there too, and there’s obviously characters, and there’s a story, but I think that I’m interested in pushing that further and getting closer to a true hybrid piece exploring different genres, going more toward the concert angle and mixing in characters and storytelling. I think that’s the thing that I’m really chewing on after this. The reality is that it’s been so fun to come in every day and play music at 10:00 AM, and use the music to find the characters and the show. And teaching our songs in a way that’s like band practice; it’s not like here’s the sheet music and these are the demos, please play this now. We got to ask, what is this song? Let’s find our own version of it because it’s three new people playing it. I’m interested in taking that a little further.
About Erik Richards
Erik Richards (he/him) is a director, sound designer, and production manager from Treaty Six thrilled to be presenting his work as a playwright for the first time with Brother Rat. He has been directing and workshopping new works at the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival since 2017 along with his collective ReadyGo Theatre. Select credits include, Infinite Life (Coal Mine Theatre), The Pillowman (TheatreYES), La Bete (Talk is Free), DION A Rock Opera (Coal Mine), Boy Falls From the Sky (Talk is Free), The Cabin on Bald Dune (Dog Heart), Talk Treaty to Me (ReadyGo), Dead in the Water (TheatreYES), and Evandalism (Fringe Spotlight).
About Brother Rat
Written by Erik Richards with music by Josh Meredith and Erik Richards
November 26, 2024-December 7, 2024 at Fringe Theatre Arts Barns
Sickness, family, love and noise. Punk Rock and concrete. A play with music, Brother Rat explores the triumphs and pitfalls of our mental wellness system through the lens of the band Theresa Give Me That Knife as they play a show in downtown Edmonton. Robby, Slayde, and Dianne play their instruments live in a ferocious bid to choose life ahead of grim survival and escape the tangled web of pipe and cable that has led them in and out of public housing.
