Today we let Director Courtney Bassett take the reigns and talk about how a Pinterest board led to the writing of a play….
Sometime in 2017, in a less self conscious time, I was on fictionkin Tumblr. For those in the know, no doubt your cheeks just heated up with the shameful, delighted prick of recognition. We were stronger than normal fangirls. We didn’t just love our fictional characters. We WERE our fictional characters.
For those not in the know, the concept of trying to explain fictionkin even now is too embarrassing for me, so I’m going to use Urban Dictionary. “The belief that you were once a fictional character or a fictional species in another life, or that you feel spiritually connected with a fictional character or species.’ Basically, it was an internet religion strictly for fangirls.
“What if a serious, kitchen-sink drama was about the children from Willy Wonka?”
Sometime in 2018, in a pre-covid, hormonal haze, I rewatched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 1979 and fell in love with Gene Wilder. His soft voice, his bouncy hair, his roman nose, his wry looks. Whatsmore, Mr. Willy Wonka was obviously a despicable tyrant, which only sweetened the pot. As a young woman in her early 20s, an adult teenager, I saw myself in the snot-nosed, precocious, demanding, spoiled Veruca Salt. And thus, a Pinterest board was born. And of course, a new kintype.
My subconscious wanted more Veruca content. It insisted there must be more Veruca content! It speculated, imagined – no, no, remembered. God, the concept of kin memories is so funny. My fanfiction is so canon it’s a MEMORY. I wondered what happened to Veruca afterwards. Come to think of it, what happened to all of them afterwards? We all know that Charlie got everything he wanted. But what happened to sweet Augustus, who barely speaks a single line before a really horrific drowning fate? What happened to Mike, made into a tiny boy by a television atomizer? To Violet, inflated and humiliated? What happened to Veruca Salt after she fell down the garbage chute?
I started asking these questions to my longtime best friend and oftimes collaborator, Caden Scott. This was well before we’d moved in together, before we’d immigrated from Aotearoa to Edinburgh, before we’d started our theatre company, Half Trick Theatre. To my delight, he entertained my obsession. We built the characters as young adults co-living in a flat in Sims 4. This sparked the idea further – what if all these children grew up into rotten adults and were forced to live together?
“As a young woman in her early 20s, an adult teenager, I saw myself in the snot-nosed, precocious, demanding, spoiled Veruca Salt.“
Waiting for Wonka was born. Caden and I co-wrote the play back in 2020. We hot-seated each other, pretending to be each character. We turned a lot of that into dialogue. We went through the five characters and thought about what would the effects on them be as young adults grappling with such a crazy childhood event. We are inspired by shows like ‘Succession’; a family of misfits taking down a dynasty. We settled on the title because to nod to something taken so seriously in the theatrical canon as ‘Waiting for Godot’ just makes me laugh, but also speaks to how seriously I take fanfiction. What if a serious, kitchen-sink drama was about the children from Willy Wonka? After a development season last year at St. Augustines, it is my absolute delight to present live, staged fanfiction with Gilded Balloon at the Edinburgh Fringe. They really let me do that!!!
Please come see our show. It’s full of heart, shipping, cringe – and above all, it takes very seriously that a girl under the age of ten got inflated like a blueberry then had all the juices popped out of her. That is pure body horror, pure trauma. It is also, in another way, very funny. Did these children deserve these terrible punishments for such minor sins? I want to reject the idea that if you are a very good child then you will win at life. Naughty kids need love too.
Now for the kinnie Pinterest board.
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