Oscar Wilde once said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Two McGill students have shown how beautifully art can imitate itself. After two full years of writing and planning, what started as an idea has finally become a reality for James Hugh Keenan Campbell and Charles Harries. Together, the two have written and directed The Hazards of Love: A Folk Opera.
Does the title ring a bell? The Hazards of Love is an album and folk opera by American indie-folk band the Decemberists. The band originally wrote The Hazards of Love with the intention of making it a musical, but the idea never materialized until Campbell and Harries took on the task themselves.
“It’s not every day that a really good band comes out with a really good album that tells a complete story,” Harries says. “There’s always this idea of concept albums; sometimes they loosely follow a theme which loosely follows a story, but this one actually put down a whole plot. All of the pieces were there. It just took us time to put them together and write a libretto.”
Using the album as their creative blueprint, the two had to use their imaginations to create a full script.
“The album was written with all these dramatic moments, but the storyline itself is quite ambiguous,” Campbell explains. “It took a lot of brainstorming and arguing to make strong decisions, but it was really cool to work within that structure and write in a connect-the-dots method.”
The story is presented as an “anti-fairytale.” It opens with two lovers (William and Margaret) too distracted by their own happiness to have another care in the world. However, this happy beginning starts to fall apart with a pregnancy and the introduction of several villainous characters, including William’s jealous fairy queen mother and the evil Rake. This upside-down love story evolves and is of course interspersed with the music of The Hazards of Love.
One might think it risky to take on such an ambitious project in tandem, but Harries and Campbell found that collaboration helped make their shared project reach its full potential. Both operated together to envision scenes during the writing process.
“It was very funny considering many of the scenes are between two lovers. People would walk past and I’d be on my knees holding Charles’ hands confessing my love for him. It happened a lot. Professors that once respected me … I’m not sure about that now,” Campbell jokes. “We were also able to take more risks with the writing because we knew we had each other. It’s very difficult to self-criticize, so if something didn’t work out then one of us would cut it out. It might have been a much more conservative script if either of us had written it alone.”
Listening to the duo discuss the play, their passion for the project is evident, even though there were some early setbacks.
“We pitched it to Player’s Theatre once before, and we didn’t get it, which was fair because the script wasn’t done,” Harries says.
Despite this initial rejection, the guys didn’t throw in the towel.
“It was an exercise in tenacity. It forced us to sit down and try again. We got together three or four times a week and just sort of reworked it.”
It seems the “hazards” of hard work have finally paid off.
The Hazards of Love: A Folk Opera performs at Players’ Theatre February 8-11 and 15-18 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $6 for students. Email [email protected] to reserve tickets.
