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It’s a scenario that many Manitobans find themselves facing: a seemingly mundane, bureaucratic, yet consequential conversation with an adjustor or claims representative from Manitoba Public Insurance. Ratchet up the stakes with a couple caught in the web of a detective-turned-adjustor who will do anything to uncover their secrets, and you have Brighter Dark Theatre’s latest contribution to the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, Third Party.
Both playwright and actor Thomas McLeod and director Theresa Thomson have had their share of run-ins with insurance in their lives that have informed this latest piece of theatre. “It really lays bare certain elements of your relationships,” says McLeod. “If it’s a car crash or like, suddenly when insurance is involved, you’re like, ‘What is the nature of our relationship and how do I describe that to the state?’.”
The impersonalization of relationships that takes place during Third Party was inspired by an initial transcript of an argument that McLeod had with an ex-partner which illustrates two people who, despite their care for one another, must simplify the nature of their relationship to simplify the bureaucratic process.
“We’re very good friends now,” McLeod chuckles about his current relationship with his ex. “I like to think that it’s been a pretty fair representation of just like a tough human moment, converted into something maybe a little bit more valuable and productive.”
As defining a moment as this experience with his ex was, the nature of conversations had with insurance adjustors is often a banal one that does not necessarily lend itself to dramatic interpretation. However, for Thomson, this mundanity is a blank canvas with which to explore character.
“It means that you start paying attention to yourself when you’re on the phone and what [you are] doing,” says Thomson of these solo scenes. "You sort of have that lens outside of yourself. When am I taking notes? When am I fussing with my nails? When am I doing whatever else? And what would these things say about me?”
“When you think people aren’t watching is, I think, sometimes you’re the most honest.”
The human nature of Third Party’s characters – good and bad – is a dynamic that Thomson also observed on a personal level when she was in a car accident earlier this year. “I felt so bad, and I was prepared for somebody to be angry,” she recalls, “... and they’re trying to help me. If I put those [conversations] on paper, they’re absurd and funny.”
“It’s the balance of the truth that comedy comes from and the absurdity,” she continues. “It’s nice that I was able to experience and then, how do we observe it from a different corner.”
Third Party runs on the main stage of the Manitoba Theatre or Young People throughout the Winnipeg Fringe Festival before going on the road to the Edmonton and Vancouver Fringe Festivals. More information and tickets can be found at the festival’s website.