What it means to be a family

Before putting pen to paper on The Comeback, Trish Cooper and Sam Vint had never written a full play together.

But for years, the married couple has been gathering the material that made the culture-clash comedy possible: the embarrassing encounters, the confusing conversations and the beautiful moments that undergird the messiness of domestic life in Winnipeg.

Aside from their first-ever co-written script finding its way to the John Hirsch Mainstage at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, the parents of two have already had a banner spring. Their oldest son got accepted into his dream program at Emily Carr University, while their youngest has made significant strides in his budding sledge-hockey career.

“All this in a matter of two weeks,” says Vint, who primarily works in film and television. “On paper, we are killing it.”

A week before opening night, Cooper and Vint trade trash-talk and loving anecdotes at breakneck speed, sorting through the details of their courtship and creative partnership, which dovetail in The Comeback, originally conceived as a kind of Métis spin on my Big Fat Greek Wedding that has since developed into a more modern, multi-layered comedy about cultural exploration, family dynamics and self-identification.

“I think that it’s about a family that survives a relationship and a relationship that survives a family,” says Cooper, whose previous writing credits include Social Studies and Mom’s the Word at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

“Hey, that’s pretty good,” pipes in Vint.

Cooper and Vint met through friends in the late 1990s, when Vint was the manager of the Fyxx restaurant on Albert Street.

“That’s how he knows all the artists in Winnipeg and what kind of coffee they drink,” says Cooper, who was at the time a member of sketch-comedy troupe the Royal Liechtenstein Theatre Company.

A fellow Liechty worked with and later moved in with Vint, and soon, the Cooper-Vint partnership was born.

“I don’t think we ever wanted to collaborate,” jokes Vint.

“But at a certain point, we started realizing that our families were pretty funny,” says Cooper.

“We were talking about how on paper, you could describe my mother’s upbringing and her mother’s upbringing as being really similar,” says Vint, who is Métis. “Both of them grew up in rural Manitoba, had a bunch of other similarities politically and ideologically, only my mother was a part of the ‘60s Scoop and lived with a family that hated her and her race.

“It’s interesting how you can frame that in a storytelling way. You start with the similarities and then they diverge.”

The comedic seeds of The Comeback gradually started to reveal themselves, especially on a trip to Mount Currie, B.C., where many members of Vint’s family live on the rez.

“… at a certain point, we started realizing that our families were pretty funny.”–Trish Cooper

“We walked in and the uncle gave our youngest son a gun to hold on to because the bears were all around,” Cooper remembers.

“Reserves just feel different, right? A kid holds a gun, nobody blinks. Our son has spina bifida and immediately there was somebody trying to help him climb a tree,” Vint says, laughing.

“One of the kid’s names was Simon, and I thought they said Salmon, so I almost said, ‘Nice to meet you, Salmon.’ So that became our joke whenever a white person says something silly. ‘Nice to meet you, Salmon’ was the working title for the first few pages of the draft.” (The Comeback’s title was inspired by John Ralston Saul’s 2014 book of the same name, says Vint, who calls the book a major personal inspiration.)

While the jokes piled up, the story still wasn’t apparent. For a while, Cooper and Vint considered writing the show as a series of disconnected scenes.

“What we pitched (to RMTC artistic director Kelly Thornton and former RMTC associate artistic director Audrey Dwyer) was ‘We’ve got a bunch of these stories that do really well at parties,’” says Vint.

“Audrey encouraged us to keep going, to dig deeper in the writing and to be fearless, because I think we were being careful about not just family, but politics and race. She told us to keep going, and we had what felt like six plays. So finally, I think it was (playwright) Ian Ross who told us, ‘You can write another play. Don’t write all of the plays in this one,’” Cooper says.

The one they ended up writing was inspired by the socially conscious comedies of Norman Lear, the satires of Mel Brooks and the high-boil dramedy of a more contemporary program, the Chicago-set restaurant dramedy The Bear.

In particular, the writers single out the award-winning episode Fishes, which features Jamie Lee Curtis, as the matriarch, driving a car through her living room wall.

No cars crash into The Comeback, but Vint has a story about that too.

“My cousin was hit inside a dollar store shopping for spatulas,” he says.

Jokes aside, the script — which begins with a one-night stand between Jesse (Gwendolyn Collins) and aspiring playwright Adam (Cory Wojcik) — delves into pressing conversations, reflecting on Vint’s and Cooper’s own identities under one roof.

“My cousin was hit inside a dollar store shopping for spatulas.”–Sam Vint

“We’re talking about Métis identity in this play and the roots of why Métis people have had a rough ride in this area, but we wanted to make it accessible. We didn’t want to go out and lecture people and tell them they’re a—holes or whatever. We wanted to invite them in, and I think we do that right off the hop in this play,” Vint says.

To ensure that was done respectfully, Vint’s mother Val served as the play’s cultural adviser.

“She came to a run-through yesterday and was borderline heckling,” says Cooper with laugh.

Before the heckles, Val Vint and elder Ron Bell helped to set the tone for the rehearsal process at RMTC, holding a pipe ceremony, doing a round dance and smudging before and after the use of traditional drums.

“We were in there yesterday, and they have the sage in the air and the drumming, and the actors are in the background practising, and it was just f—king great,” says Vint.

“When we did the pipe ceremony, Ron said that if you do something from a good place and put your heart in it, you can’t go wrong. The right people are coming from the right place, and I think the results will be up on the stage.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com