SEE Magazine
Issue #393: June 14, 2001
Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved

On Stage PREVIEW by Kevin Wilson "People who include theatre as part of their social structure are all very old." Well, perhaps not all of them, and perhaps not quite so old, but Chris Craddock has a point to make. "I believe that teens need some good theatre," says the actor and playwright. "They represent our future as an audience, and sometimes they’re not shown the form with that in mind. It just doesn’t mean the same things that it used to." Craddock’s new anthology of plays for teens attests to his genuine interest in younger theatre folk. He attributes lack of interest to two factors. One is misperception. "I think that [young people] think it’s boring and expensive and something that’s difficult to arrange – when really it doesn’t have to be any of those things." The graduate of the U of A’s B.F.A program arrived in Edmonton from Kitchener, Ontario midway through high school. Although he was a self-proclaimed "drama baby," doing theatre all the way through school, it was in Edmonton that he made the decision to make the theatre his life. "Yeah. It was when I was doing the Teenfest at the Citadel, which is a now defunct really excellent thing that used to happen." He was playing a jock named Jimbo in Connie Massing’s My Face on Mars. "It was a 12-hour tech day and I was in the 11th hour and it was still totally fun." And that was that. Well, actually, there was plenty more. A dozen plays to his name. A handful more written with others. Three Sterling awards. An Enbridge award for Emerging Artist. And his play Super Ed was included in the NeXtFest Anthology, recently published by NeWest Press. And he’s not done yet, either. "I’m adapting a novel called Summer of My Amazing Luck. It’s all about welfare moms in Winnipeg." He fought for the rights, then pitched the idea to Theatre Network, who commissioned him to write it. "Darrin Hagen gave me his copy [of the novel], which I totally ended up highlighting and writing notes in the margin of and stuff. It’s terrible. I really liked it for a lot of reasons, but the main one was that it was about single moms," whom Craddock considers unsung heroes of our society. He’ll need to find time to write though. Amongst other things, he’s doing a one-man show (Moving Along) in Winnipeg and at the Edmonton Fringe this summer. For fun, Craddock builds and paints superhero models. He admits to a soft spot for the Hulk. "I think he fits into the fantasy structure of a lot of boys and men because he’s this smart gentle guy but then he gets mad and kicks ass totally. And then he has no responsibility for his rage because it wasn’t even him. I think that’s what men like," he laughs.

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