As playwright Dave Deveau’s original work, My Funny Valentine, hits the PAL Theatre for an extended run, Sad Mag chats with Deveau, director Cameron Mackenzie and actor Kyle Cameron about the play revolving around the 2008 California shooting of Lawrence King, an eccentric and publicly gay teenager who was shot in the head by a classmate whom he had given a valentine to days before. My Funny Valentine is simultaneously intense and light-hearted, looking at the murder of the 15-year-old through seven extremely different characters with varying degrees of separation from King and his murderer, Brandon McInerney
Sad Mag: Dave, for those who aren’t familiar with the story of Lawrence King, why did you decide to write this play?
Dave Deveau: I had been sitting on a binder of research about this case since it happened. I never intended to write a play about it. There was a monologue contest I wanted to submit something to and I had nothing, so two days before the deadline I started writing this teacher character who had possibly taught this gay student who was dead. She was basically hosting a parent council night and wanted to create some sort of documentation about protecting students. It was really rough, and I handed it in to the contest, and it did not remotely win. It was me as a playwright, onstage, trying to have a conversation with an audience because I don’t understand [the murder] and I’m enraged by it, and I have a hard time imagining I am the only person who is this fucked up by it.
SM: Kyle, there are moments in between your embodiment of each of the characters in this story where you appear to be another person all together. You’re actually billed as “The Collector” in the program guide. Who was that?
DD: Ah, there is an 8th character in the play…
Kyle Cameron: The script that Dave wrote is just a collection of monologues. The character I am in between the other characters is not in the script. It was a struggle to find some sort of through-line or framework that you could present these monologues within on stage.
One day in rehearsal we were talking about it and I brought it back to the idea of what the play was before, which was that the central characters is Dave Deveau standing on stage as Dave Deveau saying, “What the fuck happened here, I’m obsessed with this, is there any way I can make sense of this at all?” I’m not playing Dave anymore, I’m kind of playing Kyle on some level.
Cameron Mackenzie: It does become a person, an individual, who is obsessed with something, who has amassed this information, this stuff – so the shrine that is featured in the middle of the stage throught the play became more of a working instrument, rather than an obsolete thing that is put together and that you step back and worship.
SM: Being so emotionally attached to the subject matter of this play, were there any characters that posed a challenge when trying to connect to them or have the audience connect to them?
CM: I had a really hard time with Roger, [a teacher at King’s school who is slightly apathetic toward the murder]. That idea of decorum, the idea of, “Oh, if you just weren’t so gay you’d have been fine,” really grates on me. I realized I had to step back from that a little bit and let my collaborators Kyle and Dave step in. Kyle understands that side of the argument whereas I sort of rail against it.
KC: It doesn’t hit a chord with me the way it does with you.
CM: Once you step back and the character has been built a little bit and the voice starts coming from the actor, the director brain kicks in and I can tweak some things here and there.
SM: It was evident that you wanted to show all the sides of this story and not just portray Lawrence as a martyr. Why was it important to you to show that he did have flaws?
DD: Because we all walk into the show – I don’t think you’re going to find anyone in any audience who’s going to be thinking, “A kid is dead? I don’t give a shit.” It’s going to be sad whether you know the details of the case or not. Nobody’s coming in from the perspective that children deserve to be murdered. So we have that.
So why am I demanding someone’s attention for 80 minutes If I’m not giving them anything new that’s not going to challenge their own politics? Larry wasn’t a martyr. I think what makes him interesting is that he’s deeply flawed like everyone else. It’s the difference between a feel-good piece and journalism. You actually dig in to what’s going on—and I mean, there are a lot of details that came up in the earlier production that aren’t in the production anymore. The nitty-gritty. Like the fact that Larry was living in a group home because he’d accused his father of sexually molesting him. At the time of his murder, he was living in a group home. We don’t go there.
Nobody spoke at this funeral apart from a priest that hardly met him. Totally fucked-up to me. And there are more fucked-up things around the case, but I can only take an audience on so much of a fucked-up ride until they’re like,nope, I’m done, my brain and my heart are full and I just can’t.
SM: Has anything struck you in terms of feedback from the audience?
DD: No, not really. But what I love is that, especially opening night, everyone wants to come up and talk about the show and tell me their favourite character. I heard every character’s name multiple time and I was like “fuck yes.” That, to me, feels like part of my job has succeeded.
CM: And also the exact opposite, people who find the difficult characters, people that are who really couldn’t get behind that one character, that’s really interesting to me even more so than them having one that they do like.
SM: Now with Brandon McInerney’s trial date set, what do you think the legacy of this case could be? Or will this just go down in history as another shooting?
CM: I think it’ll just go down as just another shooting, to be quite honest. The fact that we don’t hear in the media that the trial date has been set. We had to hunt to find the trial date being set.
DD: I think there’s so much discussion about the difficult relationship between the idea of a child and the idea of an adult and where one kicks in and where the other takes over. I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting discussion that’s possibly precedent setting.
The fact that there is now hate crime legislation in the U.S. was just passed in 2009 and has added charges to Brandon’s case retroactively is going to be the first really headline-grabbing hate crime case to be tried post-Matthew Shepherd act.
KC: I don’t have a whole lot to say since I’m certainly the most removed from the case—I’ve done the least research and I know the least—which is somewhat ironic since I’m the one who’s talking about it onstage.
SM: Which almost makes sense, since some of the characters are so peripheral and are almost blasé (like Roger) about the murder.
KC: I think what can be difficult about it is what Helen [King’s compassionate teacher and the only recurring character in the play] struggles with: once we get the hate crime legislation then it’s like, “Great, this has happened. My little student is still dead.” It’s that weird thing of being an activist. People are spurred to activism often through some sort of terrible act, and they work tirelessly to get something to change, but on some level they may never be satisfied because that thing that spurred them will not change. They can look around like Helen does and see in the face of the students that something in the universe has changed, and that can be some comfort, but that thing that happened in the first place will never be undone.
My Funny Valentine runs every night at the PAL theatre on Georgia and Cardero until April 30 at 8pm, with an additional matinee showing April 30 at 2 pm. Tickets available here.
