Dave Deveau is an associate producer and playwright in residence at Zee Zee Theatre.  Currently, he and his husband, Cameron Mackenzie, are co-curating Nyet: A Cabaret of Concerned Canadians, a showcase of 10 plays written in response to Russia’s new anti-gay legislation. Dave’s drag queen alter ego, Peach Cobblah, hosts Hustla: Homo Hip Hop at the Cobalt.

Sad Mag: Who are you?

Dave Deveau: My name is Dave Deveau, though people probably know me as Peach Cobblah. As a boy, I’m a playwright and teacher and I run Zee Zee Theatre with my husband, Cameron Mackenzie. As Peach, I’m a foul-mouthed hip-hop drag queen who runs events at the Cobalt.

SM: How did you start writing plays?

DD: What a good question. I actually grew up in film and TV, I was a child actor, which was great, and oddly enough, film introduced me to theatre, which is usually the opposite in terms of people’s trajectory. I went to a fine arts high school in a literary arts program where I sort of was trying out any form of writing – they were really great at introducing us to all sorts of genres and play writing, for whatever reason, [it] was a good fit.

Then I went and did two degrees in play writing, which is really hilarious because you don’t need a degree to write a play! You just need something to say and some basic ideas of structure. It’s wild to think that now I’m actually making a living doing what I wanted to do and it is sort of bizarre that it’s actually happened. It’s a lot of fun—it’s a lot of work but it’s a lot of fun. In order to make it financially worthwhile, you have to have, you know, five shows going on at the same tie.

SM: Yes, I noticed you seem to be involved in a bunch of stuff right now—there were many shows listed at the bottom of your email.

DD: That’s just the stuff that the theatre company (Zee Zee Theatre) is producing. I work with a bunch of other companies in town and I have four new plays in production this year and then two other shows that are happening again. Which is good, it keeps me out of trouble.

SM: And you’re still performing as Peach at the Cobalt?

DD: Oh yeah—all of the work that we do at the Cobalt raises money for the company. We just never say fundraiser because this is not the kind of city where you say the word fundraiser. People run for the hills. If you just say, “We’re having a really fun, gay dance party,” it’ll happen.

SM: What was the inspiration behind Nyet: A Political Cabaret?

DD: Nyet is based in large part on an event called Wrecking Ball, which started out in Toronto 10 years ago.  A group of theatre-makers started it as a means to artistically discuss things that were happening politically, in the country and around the world at that time. Oddly enough in May when Putin’s new legislation came about, one of our board members said my next play should be about Russia and I said, “yeah, it should.” However, I was in the middle of writing 5 plays—it takes a couple of years to fully realize a play—and I thought, “2 years from now is too late to talk about this!” But then I thought maybe we could do something within the Wrecking Ball model and so we asked playwrights across the country, playwrights that we know and playwrights that we don’t know whose work we admire, to come on board and write 5-10 minute plays about Russia, about Putin’s new anti-gay legislation. They could really head in any direction with that, with a maximum of 4 characters. So now we have the 10 pieces that we’re presenting.

SM: How many people did you approach about the project?

DD: Well, nobody said no. We thought, “we’ll ask this list and then if they say no, we’ll ask this list,” and nobody said no, which was kind of amazing. It made us realize that people really do want to have their voices heard, there just hadn’t been a platform for people to talk about it artistically.

So we partnered with Qmunity, which is a local queer resource organization that we’ve worked with quite a bit in the past. So they’re co-presenting the event because we thought that we could have the artistic conversation but Qmunity is more equipped to actually have a conversation. They’re organizing a panel discussion that will happen directly after the show – it will have community leaders and politicians and others to actually talk about the nitty gritty of what’s going on and what we can do about it. If we can do anything about it.

SM: That actually sounds like a really great idea. Especially after people have just seen the various productions.

DD: Yes and that’s part of the joy of asking 10 writers to write from the same source material. Everyone has a very different angle and some people are tapping into material or arguments that I haven’t even considered so I think it’ll be a nice way to cap off the evening—to actually put all of those thoughts and arguments that we’ve taken in and wrap our heads around them and talk about them honestly.

SM: In terms of the formats of the various plays, what do they offer in terms of the conversation that there is to be had about what’s going on in Russia?

DD: What it will do is it will give more depth and more texture to the conversation that we’re having surrounding the legislation and also, in some capacity, a bit more context of where Putin’s legislation comes from—culturally what that legislation means but also trying to dissect the idea behind the legislation and where it comes from. I should say that everyone who is working on this project is working for free, which is something we don’t normally do, we don’t ask people to work for our company for free. It’s great for us to have this conversation and to raise awareness but we wanted to actually have direct impact so everyone’s working for free so that all the proceeds can be sent to the Russian LGBT Network, a community organization that is, nowadays anyways, mostly funding people’s legal battles as a result of the new legislation. I also called my theatre contacts in Toronto so Nyet is happening simultaneously there. Some of the same pieces as are being performed here and then they’ve asked some local playwrights to write some additional pieces.

SM: Are any of the playwrights going to be in attendance for next weekend’s show?

DD: A bunch of them will. Not all of them because some of them live in Toronto and elsewhere. It’s funny because October is always a really big theatre month in Canada. It’s when most theatre companies kick off their season, usually with a really big production. So, I would say 3/4 of the playwrights who wrote for our production, have plays opening somewhere in the country either this week or next week so they’re all busy. But they still found time to write the pieces, which is wonderful for us.

SM: How do you find it, trying to focus on so many different projects at once?

DD: Tricky. I think I need to plan my time more efficiently than I do. Even when you carve out a particular amount of time, say, “I have these four hours, I’m going to work on this play,” it takes at least the first hour to put my brain back into what that play looks like and what the structure and tone of the play is.

SM: Do you find there’s much of a difference writing for an adult audience, as opposed to the plays you’re writing for high school and even elementary school audiences?

DD: This is the first show for elementary schools that I’ve ever written the, third for high schools and it’s a very different form. It has a very rigid structure—I know that the show that I write has to fall within the period of a school day. It has to clock in at 42 minutes maximum which, when you’re conceiving of the structure of the play, is limiting in a sense. But limits are sometimes good things within the creative realm because it at least steers you in some direction. Writing for an adult audience, the world’s your oyster in a sense, it can be one act or two acts, it can be hour or two and a half hours, it can have five cast members. Wrapping my brain around theatre for young audiences, these are shows that are going to be on tour so you can’t really write in too many cast members because you’ll be sending them all on the road. When you’re considering that these shows could be playing in a gymnasium with 900 kids, it can’t be a show that’s too small and quiet. It has to have energy, it has to have movement. It’s been a lovely learning curve.

SM:  I’m very interested in the 10 different takes on Russia’s legislation that Nyet is going to offer. I, and I think a lot of other people, felt really blindsided by the legislation—Russia’s never been a pinnacle of rights and freedoms but still. Do any of the performances in Nyet address this?

DD: That’s just it—when everything hit, it became a question of why now? Like, what’s going on, what are you prepping for, I don’t follow. Some of the pieces are set in contemporary Russia, some of the pieces are set in contemporary North America. Some of the pieces have a much more historical approach. There’s one piece that ‘s a card game between 3 dead Russians, Tchaikovsky being one of them. So it’s nice to see how people have interpreted the best way to have this conversation with the audience. A lot of them are really funny. Nobody wants to sit through an evening of really dark, bleak performances. We already know that this is a problem so let’s at least find ways to find the light. And I think the playwrights have been really successful in that way.

SM: What else is going on that’s exciting?

DD: This is a big season for Zee Zee Theatre. This is our 6th season and by far our biggest. We started out doing 1 show per year and we have 5 this season, which is a lot, especially for a company that has limited resources, like we do. But certainly, everything we do at the Cobalt helps keep us afloat.

Our main stage show is in March. It’s a play that I’ve written called Lowest Common Denominator and it looks at inter-generational relationships, something I’ve always been curious about and fascinated by. This particular relationship is between an 18-year old boy and a 47 year old man. We did a workshop of it last July and it was really exciting to watch the audience watch the show. They were there—they were there in a way that I did not even think possible for an audience in a reading. So we’re gearing up for that. But mostly our brains are just all Nyet, all the time right now. My husband is a drag queen as well, Isolde N. Barron—and Isolde and Peach will be hosting Nyet together, just to give it that extra sparkle. Why not? I wonder how President Putin would feel about Peach Cobblah. I don’t think they’d have much in common but you never know. He seems to like taking his shirt off in photos; Peach seems to like wearing very little.

SM: How did you get into drag?

DD: Well, my husband and I have been together for just over eight years and neither of us were drag queens when we got together. I’ve always considered myself a drag hag—if I’m traveling to a city I’ve never been to, I have to go to a drag show. It grounds me.

So when my husband was living with me in Toronto, we used to go to this weekly drag show that no one went to. There’d be 10 people in the audience every week. But we loved it. We were able to see the artistry behind drag. When we moved here, we were watching a drag show one night and it was just sort of a bad, tired drag show. I turned to my husband and I said, “you can do better than this.”

And so Isolde was born.

At that time, my business partner, Brandon, and I ran a monthly event called Queer Bash and Isolde was our star. It was such a successful event! It was the first event that we brought to the Cobalt. Then we decided to step it up and also run a weekly drag show at the Cobalt called Apocalipstick, which Isolde was also the star of. During this time, Cameron (Isolde) was up at Studio58, directing a show in which the entire cast played drag queens and kings and he was teaching all of these theatre students about drag. We wanted to put them to the test because you can learn all you want about performance but until you’re actually in front of an audience, especially an audience in a bar setting, very different from a theatre – until you’ve done that, you know nothing. So we made them all perform in front of an audience at a public show, in a section called Mean Teen Queen, which was about introducing new, baby queens to the audience. What we soon realized was these mean teen queens were making amazing tips—they were cleaning up! And Brandon and I, at that time, had been running Apocalipstick for about 2 or 3 months and it wasn’t making any money and we knew that it would take time. But we thought, “why don’t we do a Mean Teen Queen once a month, just for fun, just to make some money for being at the bar?” So we did and the response was huge. Then I started getting gigs elsewhere and then we put Queer Bash to bed and started doing Hustla. Because Peach Cobblah does hip hop drag, it felt like a very appropriate outlet for her so I host the show with Brandon’s drag alter-ego, Bambi Bot, every other month and it’s become a very regular part of our lives. Which is weird.

What’s exciting is that, through stuff like Nyet and another show we did for Zee Zee Theatre, we’ve been able to find some crossover between our drag world and our theatre world. We do a show called Tucked and Plucked: Vancouver’s Live Herstory, Live on Stage. We’ve done it twice and we’re doing it again in the new year. It’s sort of like a drag talk show, where we have some of the city’s most recognized queens and some of the oldest queens in town and we find out how the drag scene emerged in the city and why. A lot of people are like, “Ok great – men in dresses!” and its fun but when you look at its roots and why it started and what was happening within the city’s structures at the time, it lets you appreciate what the drag community is and what it can be a lot more. I never in my life thought I would be a drag queen, never, and I love watching drag shows. But never from the point of view that I would want to do that. But here we are, life’s full of surprises.

Nyet will be performed on the Granville Island Stage on Sunday, October 27 at 8pm. Tickets ON SALE NOW: $17 (including service charges. All proceeds to benefit the Russian Queer community. Available at www.vancouvertix.com or 604-629-VTIX. More information about Zee Zee Theatre can be found here.