Wanting there to be equal representation for all the plays in The Banana Festival, I took a minute this morning to scribble down a few paragraphs about the background for my play, Fortress of Solitude:
Fortress of Solitude (thanks to Leah Bobet for the title) is set in Toronto, and while there aren’t many overt references to geography or history, it’s a Toronto pretty much like the one we’re used to. Except, of course, for the fact that superheroes (and by extension, supervillains) are real. There are women and men who can fly, or shoot laser beams from their eyes, or take tremendous amounts of punishment without being harmed. There are evil geniuses hatching plots involving giant robots and interdimensional catastrophes. The city is often in peril. But other than that, life is pretty much the way we know it.
It’s a setting I’ve used before, in various unpublished fiction and another play Monkeyman is developing, my comedy The Nefarious Bed & Breakfast. But while those stories are broader and more cartoonish, I wanted to try telling a more personal story within the same overall framework when I put together Fortress — something serious, though of course with the elements of comic relief to which a world containing Top Dog, Maiden Mystic and Force Girl would still be prone. I wanted to see if I could bring out of this world some honest emotion, some characters the audience would be able to sympathize with and relate to.
Of course, I’m far from the first to do so. Comics and graphic novels have grown increasingly more sophisticated over the past few decades, and there are many storylines — even in the superhero books — that have truly touched me with their depth and emotional resonance. The work of creators like Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Mark Waid and many more have pushed the boundaries of what a story set in a super-powered universe can be, and I’m a huge and unabashed fan of the genre.
Fortress of Solitude is my slight attempt to do something similar within the limitations of the stage. My Toronto has brightly-suited superfolks flying through the air fighting giant monsters, but when those people go home they have real relationships, real problems to deal with (or run away from). I hope it’s a world you’ll find as interesting as I have.
