Morgan Brayton has finally gotten off her fat ass

Funny lady Morgan Brayton tells us she has finally "gotten off her fat ass" and created a new solo show, Raccoonery!, just in time for the 2010 Vancouver Fringe, and while she insists you can “expect the unexpected”, in reality it is an hour of her and a whole new bunch of quirky characters, including at least one that identifies as queer.

Seriously, or as seriously as one can be around Brayton, her new Fringe show, Raccoonery! is a series of monologues full of strange characters like a moth in a bad relationship, an aging vaudevillian with a scandalous secret and a woman who hates her office co-worker.  What Brayton calls “the people in your neighbourhood”.

“That's right, it's just an hour of me,” said Brayton. “But it's me playing a bunch of different characters so, you know, if you don't like me, you can just pretend it's not me."  And she insists she is okay with that.

As a collection of monologues, arriving at each piece is done individually by Brayton, but as she uncovered common threads the piece started to come together.  In the end the show ultimately talks to what she calls “the amazing coping strategies we humans develop when our lives don't add up the way they should”.

But even before the characters are found and the situations developed, Brayton starts from what she calls "seeds".

“For instance, one time I asked my friend Jenny what year she graduated in,” explained Brayton. “She responded with, '84 parties more' which was her grad class's unofficial slogan. It was one of those 'bing' moments where I just stopped and made a note because I knew there was something I could grow out of that little seed she gave me”.

From there Brayton started thinking about the kind of things people were facing back in high school in the 80s.  That moved her onto the idea of a valedictorian speech by an unlikely candidate, and ultimately gave birth to Tanis in  Raccoonery!.

“I went to a particularly head banging high school so I know these girls, their bravado and their party-hardy ways. But I also remember that time as being full of fear, on both an individual and a global level so I worked on incorporating that. The result is a character that I think is funny and familiar and brave and scared. You know, like all of us.”

Despite working on another solo piece, her first being the critically acclaimed Girls Like Me a number of years ago, Brayton doesn’t feel like she is working alone, pointing to her relationship with director Shawn Macdonald who is probably involved earlier than most directors in the process.

“Shawn works with me from the time I have first drafts, not just from the rehearsal period so it's really only the initial writing period that I do alone,” explains Morgan.  “But it's definitely different than working in a comedy troupe. I loved my time with 30 Helens and with The Crawford Twins but I guess I just have stuff I want to say on my own right now.”

That “stuff” not only includes her characters but with Racconnery! it also includes music used as a bridge between each of the monologues.

“I came up with the idea of writing these dorky little songs. I contacted my friend Laura Lee [Schultz] and asked for her advice on how best to record these songs and her very advice was, 'let me help you'."

Not surprisingly, the music process for Raccoonery! sounds almost as unconventional as some of the characters that inhabit her show.

“I came up with the lyrics and the tune. Whenever I'd write a song I'd just sing into the voice recorder on my phone and then email it off to Laura Lee for her to put a little music behind. Then one day I went over to her studio and she played me these songs and I nearly threw up from excitement. My dorky little ditties had been turned into actual songs!”

And in an art imitating art kind of moment (think James Cameron and Celine Dion), Schultz also wrote a theme song for the show.

“We sat down one day and she had me tell her what the show was about, what the tone of it was, etc. I kept saying, ‘I don't really know what I want in a theme song’.  Then she went away and created it. When I heard it I said, ‘that's exactly what I want!’ She is mad talented.”

Brayton, no Fringe newcomer, has done a variety of Fringe shows since arriving in Vancouver some 20 years ago; some of them good, some of them bad, but obviously all of them memorable.

“I was in a horrible play back then where I played a wheelchair athlete/artist. Seriously, don't ask. Just horrible,” she recalled.  From there she worked on Daughter of God, several Fringe shows with her sketch troupe 30 Helens and of course her first solo show, Girls Like Me, in the 2005 Fringe.

But despite perhaps some misses in years past, it is evident that it is her need to make people laugh that keeps her positive, moving forward and bodes well for Fringe goers this year.

“I think laughter helps us remember who we are. I mean, it's involuntary, for starters. So, when you're laughing I think you're being your most true self. And when an audience laughs, you've got a room full of people being themselves and having a shared experience of being truthful. That to me is pretty powerful and pretty rare. For me, there's no better feeling in the world than instigating that experience".

Of course then there are the chips.  Brayton says they're pretty powerful too.

Raccoonery!
Performance Works
1218 Cartright Street, Granville Island

Thursday, Sept 9, 6:45pm
Saturday, Sept 11, 8:35pm
Tuesday, Sept 14, 5:25pm
Thursday, Sept 16, 10:25pm
Friday, Sept 17, 7:00pm
Sunday, Sept 19, 12:25pm

Following its premiere at the Queer Arts Festival, award-winning queer comedian and gay icon Morgan Brayton brings Racoonery! and its collection of new and favourite characters to the Fringe: an aging vaudevillian with a scandalous secret, a moth in love, and a hard-partying high school valedictorian. Combined with hilarious, original songs by Brayton and Laura Lee Schultz (drummer for the queer punk band, The Skinjobs), Racconery! is Morgan at her finest.

Visit http://www.vancouverfringe.com for tickets and information.