Featured Member — Dave Deveau
Each month we interview member playwrights to share their work, stories and inspiration with the community. We recently spoke with Dave Deveau, an award-winning writer and producer who investigates queer themes that speak to a broad audience. His work has been produced across North America and Europe. He is the Co-Artistic & Managing Director of Carousel Theatre for Young People and was the Founding Associate Artistic Director for Vancouver’s Zee Zee Theatre.
Dave is devoted to developing intelligent, theatrical plays for young people that foster conversation. His plays for young people include Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls (Dora nomination, Jessie award), Celestial Being (Jessie nomination), Tagged (Jessie nomination), and Out in the Open (Jessie nomination). His plays for adults include My Funny Valentine, Lowest Common Denominator and Elbow Room Cafe: The Musical. In total, his plays have been nominated for 28 Jessie Awards, 4 Ovation Awards and 7 Dora Awards. He is published in Scirocco’s Fierce anthology and his first collection CISSY: Three Gender Plays is published by Talonbooks. He is also a drag performer named Peach Cobblah, and a proud queer dad to two glorious kiddos, who sometimes perform onstage with him and his husband.
Tell us how you got your start writing plays.
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. Some kids draw. Not me. From the moment I could write words I was writing stories. In fact, I have vivid memories of writing a story when I was about 5 or 6 called The Fairy Tale Criminal. My brother drew pictures to accompany my words. Hilariously, decades later that story’s plot feels like a rustic first draft of Shrek. But I’ve always loved theatre and did community theatre as a child all the while working in film/tv as a child actor. When I went off to high school I was fortunate to be in the Literary Arts program of a specialized fine arts school (Go Canterbury!), and within the Lit program we had to try our hand at every kind of writing imaginable from creative essays to journalism to poetry to memoir. Once I found playwriting, everything just made sense.
Much of your playwriting work is for young audiences. What draws you to theatre for young audiences, and how does your approach to TYA differ from when you write plays targeted towards adults?
I don’t know about you, but I find myself doubting whether theatre matters constantly. Maybe it’s the geography I’m in, but the average citizen doesn’t care much about the form, and that takes a toll. However, theatre for young audiences matters tremendously, it’s where I see the world changing, and I take the privilege of writing it very seriously. I get to introduce young minds to new ideas and give them the agency to decide how they feel about them. That’s astonishing. I’m called back to TYA time and time again because it’s where I feel the hope lies. Now that I’m a parent, even moreso, though most of my TYA body of work was created long before that happened. The rules/structures of TYA can be different, but the intention is the same, the humanity and core truth are the same and I take real issue with folx who think that TYA is lesser than.
Your work has been translated into several other languages, including French, Polish, Hebrew, and German. What was the process like for you to have your work translated, and is there any advice you’d offer other playwrights who might have this opportunity?
Translation is an incredible thing and I deeply admire artists who have dedicated their time to shaping and reimaging words in another language. I’ve been fortunate to have watched my work in other languages and experience how much cadence and rhythm is recognizable within a work regardless of language. I find that powerful. I’ve also seen my work in translation and thought “I don’t think I ever wrote this scene, but it seems to really work in this language”. Translation is a lot about trust. I will say, I’m not precious with my work — I believe that a translator will do what makes sense for their linguistic/cultural context even if it’s vastly different from what I’ve done in English.
You co-founded Vancouver’s ZeeZee Theatre with your husband Cameron Mackenzie, with a focus on amplifying 2SLGBTQI+ voices. The company is now nearly 20 years old — what have you learned over that time, and where do you see the company going in the coming years?
Though I was definitely part of Zee Zee from the beginning, it was truly my marvelous husband Cameron who founded the company. That was his baby before we had actual human ones. I think Zee Zee has become such a vital part of the queer ecology in this country, and that’s so exciting. And let’s make no mistake, I owe most of my playwriting career to Zee Zee — it gave me a platform to have ambitious conversations with an audience that I couldn’t have elsewhere. That first decade of Zee Zee a lot of the work we did was before its time. It’s nice to see the world catching up. On the cusp of the company turning 20, I’m excited realizing that it’s not going anywhere — that from nothing (truly nothing, just a few coins and big ideas) has grown something unstoppable.
As well as an award-winning playwright, you also perform as Drag Queen Peach Cobblah, though you’ve said that for many years you kept these two art forms separate. How were they finally able to intersect, and what impact has that had on each type of work?
Oddly enough, what helped bridge them was my kids. Kids are all about dress up and music and joy and not taking yourself too seriously, and that aligns so much with the kind of drag I do. We have created a couple shows as a family that gets performed for young people, which has been a gift. And now I’m seeing other pathways to letting Peach infuse my playwright brain and vice-versa. For the past few years I’ve been tinkering away at a solo show for Peach called “Drag Queen Death Scene” which tackles grief and loss through drag and big belly laughs. I’ve been working on it with my friends at Intrepid Theatre which has been a real tonic through some pretty rough years. It’s also a different landscape now: drag has gone mainstream and everyone has a certain expectation of what drag SHOULD be all because of a certain reality tv show. I think the mainstreaming of it all really makes me want to push the subversive kind of indie community-building drag I do even more.
What are you working on next?
I’ve been writing a new show for the Arts Club with my friend Meghan Gardiner called In The Crease which fuses drag and hockey, and explores how as parents we learn to be who we were destined to become by watching our children be their authentic selves. And I’ve just started on a new TYA reimagining of A Christmas Carol for Carousel which focuses on Eb, a pre-teen influencer who has forgotten all about the world offline. And hopefully finding homes for the shows I’ve been commissioned to write over the years that haven’t yet made it to the stage. (Who am I kidding, I’m a parent of young kids who also runs a company full time, I don’t get all that much time to write, but when I do it can be whimsical).
Do you have any favourite Canadian plays, and/or which artists are currently inspiring you?
Seeing Micheline Chevrier’s production of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs many moons ago, when I was still a high school student, is what propelled me to really become a playwright. I then did a deep dive into Tremblay’s work for about 15 years. It’s such a huge body of work, with characters popping back up decades later. I admire that.
But hands down, my favourite artist, whose career I’ve been following from day one is a drag performer-creator named Spike Boy. They’re almost 8 now, and I’ll continue being a fan for life. (I’m also their Papa, which helps).
Keep up with Dave on his website, www.davedeveau.com
Dave is the Co-Artistic and Managing Director of Carousel Theatre in Vancouver, BC: https://www.carouseltheatre.ca/
And check out the work happening at Zee Zee Theatre Company, also located in Vancouver: https://zeezeetheatre.ca/
Disclaimer: Playwrights Guild of Canada (“PGC”) is a national arts service mandated to engage and grow an active Canadian writing community. We promote Canadian plays around the world to advance the creative rights and interests of professional Canadian playwrights for the stage. The views of our members are their own. The opinions of PGC as an association remain neutral.
