Woman on the Verge

She’s a playwright who writes in many voices, but will the real Michele Riml please speak up?

By John Threlfall

She’s written about middle-age sex lives, teenagers with lethal attitudes and ad execs on the verge of nervous breakdowns; she’s been a lousy waitress, a Milan-based fashion model and a creative director for Starbucks; she’s mother to a young son, wife to a successful film and television actor, and the award-winning author of a dozen plays staged both nationally and internationally. Now, she’s back at the Belfry with a slice-of-life trio of X-chromosome monologues that seem more captured than created . . . but with a bio like that, it’s hard to know where truth ends and storytelling begins. Will the real Michele Riml please speak up?

Regardless of how little you know about her personally, dedicated Belfry audiences are already familiar with Riml’s work: Sexy Laundry was a smash hit back in 2003, and the far more dramatic high-school stand-off, Rage, was one of the more memorable offerings in 2009′s debut SPARK Festival. And while her latest—the world premiere of the Belfry-commissioned on the edge —returns to familiar themes of identity, relationships and consumerism (all with her characteristic wry-gal slant), any similarity to the actual playwright is mostly accidental. True, she does share certain affinities and insights with her characters and plotlines, and she does have a healthy sense of humour leavened by the life experiences of most early-40s women, but anyone expecting to hear Riml’s own voice emanating from the stage is in for a bit of a surprise. “I don’t think things up,” she says. “I write them down.”

The Siminovitch Prize-nominated playwright is explaining how she writes such effective characters and dialogue, regardless of age, gender or socio-economic situation — a process many might think simply involves having her dramatic creations share her own thoughts. “It’s not just me sitting around thinking up clever things to say,” she admits. “When the characters start talking to me, that’s when I know there’s something to be written. It’s more a way of seeing the world, walking around with a filter and processing things without even thinking about it. It’s so much more than just sitting down and typing—that, for me, is almost the end of it. I love the mystery of what makes people do what they do; I find human beings wonderful and infinitely interesting.”

Granted, while she enjoys the creative process (what she laughingly describes as “the artsy-fartsy airy-fairy part”), Riml doesn’t shy away from the real work of being a playwright — the research. “You don’t sit down to write something unless you know what you’re talking about,” she says. Case in point? The female cop in on the edge; she may have had the idea for that monologue, but the character’s voice only came after Riml spent time grilling an actual RCMP officer. “Your characters have to be authentic; if you don’t have the language, you won’t have the authenticity. I’m interested in that moment where things break or people fall apart — that’s when the truth, the authenticity, gets revealed.”

No surprise then that her own copywriting background helped inform the advertising world of her acclaimed 2008 play Poster Boys — but did her time on Italian runways provide background for the fashion addict at the heart of on the edge? “I had no clue,” she laughs. “I won a contest when I was 19 and got to go to Milan and work in a showroom as a model for a while; I was out of the sticks of North Vancouver and was suddenly in the centre of the high-end fashion world.” Alas, it didn’t last long and she was soon back home in Vancouver, being “a really terrible waitress at about 15 different restaurants” before segueing into part-time playwriting and ad copywriting.

“I just wanted a job that had something to do with writing,” she says of the gig that would eventually make her associate creative director for Starbucks. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to make rent money by writing plays. And advertising taught me so much about discipline, about letting go of my ego — if the client doesn’t like your idea, you don’t get to do it.” It also offered a flexible schedule for writing, and invaluable access to the manufacture of desire. “Whether you’re talking Holt Renfrew or Value Village, there’s a certain kind of woman who just loves to shop; it can become an addiction, and take the same place as alcohol for an alcoholic—which is particularly relevant in our society, because we all have a bit of that in us. In a funny way, it’s a search for something . . . but in the wrong direction.”

There’s that keen sense of insight again, which forms the real backbone of on the edge (as one character says, “truth is my identity”). But while she’s written three women with a lot on their minds, Riml equally credits her reunion with the Sexy Laundry team of director Andrew McIlroy and actor Susinn McFarlen. “We make a good unit. Some directors don’t even want the writer in the room on a new play, but I work really closely with Andrew; he actually lets me speak in the rehearsal hall — he says if he doesn’t let me talk, he can hear me sighing anyway,” she chuckles. “And Susinn is probably my truest muse as an actor . . . we just breathe the same way or something.”

on the edge is loosely based on the earlier trio of female-focussed monologues Under The Influence that played the Vancouver Fringe back in the late ’90s and the Arts Club in 2000. Yet only the “timeless, addicted consumerist woman” survived the transition to on the edge. “I just outgrew the other two monologues,” Riml admits. “When I wrote Under the Influence, I was in my mid-20s and I’m now in my mid-40s — I’ve always liked women in their 40s, and now that I am one, I like them even more — but one of the original pieces was about Princess Diana . . . another was about a new mom, and it wasn’t up to what I wanted it to be anymore.”

Riml spent last year completing on the edge — which she partially wrote in the Belfry’s belfry. “I think the folks working there thought I was completely anti-social, because I’d climb up the stairs in the morning and not come down again till four o’clock in the afternoon,” she recalls with a laugh. “But I was over without my son, without all the different things you have to do as a mother, so I just got to write and workshop the play — and I loved it. That building has such great energy, it’s an amazing place to work.”

But just because contemporary theatre audiences are exactly the place you’ll find these kinds of three-in-one women, don’t think this is just another canny marketing move by Riml. (Would you like coffee with that play?) “I wish I could write a piece of commercial theatre,” she laughs. “I’d like to be able to know that the audience was this or that, but I don’t really come from that place. I’m just sharing my experiences as a woman, and I’m lucky that I’m speaking to a theatre-going crowd.”

Always good with a closing line, Riml reveals her final insight just as the curtain falls on our interview. “Thanks for asking such interesting questions,” she says. “I was thinking about them at the same time I was planning a potluck lunch for some friends — and I kept going between, ‘Do I have enough forks?’ to ‘Who is the real Michele Riml?’,”she laughs. “And I gotta tell you, the forks kept coming back to my mind . . . so that’s who the real Michele Riml is.”

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If John Threlfall was a trio of monologues, one would run the communications desk for UVic’s Fine Arts faculty, one would be a sexy husband, jaunty father and west-coast witch, and one would be working on those books he’s supposed to be writing. Ah well, it’s like that old Meatloaf song: two out of three ain’t bad.