A love of storytelling

BASYA LAYE

Theatre offers its practitioners a front seat in the study of human nature and makes the stage a fertile Petri dish of human experience. With a degree in sociology and a lifetime of experience on stage and behind the scenes as an actor, playwright and assistant director, Seth Soulstein has a particularly rich vantage point.

Growing up just outside of Philadelphia, Soulstein went to Brandeis University in Massachusetts and was a resident of Boston for several years, followed by a three-year stint in Maine. He arrived in Vancouver in 2009 with his wife, Margaret Mae, and “awesome dog,” he told the Independent.

Soulstein can’t remember a time when he wasn’t acting, but writing wouldn’t follow for several years. “I’ve been acting for as long as I remember – writing is much more of a recent thing. In grade school, I remember being in a pseudo-opera set in feudal Japan, and I was heavily involved as an actor (and, later, director) in my high school’s theatre company. During high school, I also did some brief commercial, film and voice-over work.”

His newest role is in the local production of New York-based playwright Itamar Moses’ 2009 one-act collection of five plays, Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It), on now at Vancouver’s Little Mountain Gallery. Love/Stories has been called “witty and engaging” and “a revelation,” among its other accolades from critics, and Moses has been hailed for his “keen eye on human feelings.” According to Soulstein, the plays’ unusual structure allows for a more complete investigation of their themes.

“What’s unique about Love/Stories is that it not only is an investigation of modern relationships, but also asks … about the connections between storytelling and relationships, and the ability (or lack thereof) of a storyteller to understand and communicate a variety of perspectives within a single situation,” Soulstein explained. “As a play, it’s built as a series of five short plays that can be performed separately or as a unified piece – within that unified piece, there’s a vast range of styles and themes but, yes, it all comes down to relationships.”

Woven through the humor in the play, there are sobering elements. “As pessimists often say, I think Moses was going not for fatalism but, rather, for realism,” Soulstein suggested. “In reality, relationships don’t always follow straight lines, have clear beginnings and endings, or even clear boundaries at all. I think [Moses] does a fantastic job of showing us the vagaries of love and loss; the joy, sadness, frustration, anger and regret inherent in all relationships, romantic, platonic, professional and otherwise.”

Performing at the small but cozy Little Mountain on 26th Avenue just off Main Street has its advantages. “To me, that’s what theatre is all about – giving an audience an authentic, intimate, live experience – and this play is built to do exactly that. It’s such a small, focused play, it would feel quite strange to do on a larger scale,” he said.

Soulstein is pursuing the academic angles of theatre as well as the practical, and he and his wife originally came to Vancouver to attend respective graduate programs at the University of British Columbia. “We were looking for a school that had good grad programs in both theatre (with an emphasis on social change; me) and landscape architecture (her),” he said. “UBC fit the bill! We’ll both be getting our master’s in the spring of 2012, if all goes according to plan.”

The attraction to the academic end of theatre is highly practical. “To put it bluntly – a steady job,” said Soulstein. “At Brandeis, I started a sketch comedy group, the Late Night Players, which we kept going with after we graduated. We ended up touring pretty constantly from 2002ish to 2009. Looking back on it, it was a remarkably steady income, but it was a life full of unhealthy hours, ridiculous amounts of travel and never-ending self-promotion and reinvention. I realized that about 98 percent of my time was not spent doing what I loved, writing or performing, but was, in the end, the day-to-day tasks of owning and operating a small business. I wanted to be able to work in theatre but also have time for family, gardening, other hobbies and, sometimes, a full-time career in performing doesn’t leave time for that.”

It was during his stint with the sketch-comedy tour that Soulstein became active in working for social change and he’s incorporated his activism into his graduate studies. “While in the LNP, we all were heavily interested in making our comedy political and in doing events that helped create social/political change,” he said. “I’m still definitely interested in the power that theatre has to change people’s understandings of the world around them, and to increase their awareness about inequalities, injustices, etc., so I’m focusing on that with my degree at UBC.”

Soulstein’s Judaism is also at the base of his love of storytelling and his pursuit of social justice. “I absolutely identify as Jewish, in an ethnic and spiritual way,” he said. “My wife and I, whenever we can, try to eat some bread, drink wine and light a candle on Friday, saying the prayers in Hebrew, but more out of a desire to connect with the ritual and remind ourselves to be grateful of these core aspects of our lives. I think mindfulness and gratitude are a core part of the base ideas of Judaism.

“Another core aspect of Judaism is storytelling, and the importance of asking questions. Having just come through Passover (my favorite holiday!), I’m especially reminded of this. We tell stories of the past to better understand ourselves in the present and, throughout that, we ask questions: Was this good? Why did this person make this decision? What does this mean for us now? To me, that’s exactly what the best theatre does as well.”

It was when he was at Brandeis that Soulstein helped come up with the idea for the Harry Potter Alliance, an organization that works with youth around the world on various social justice issues, using the characters in the Harry Potter novels as inspiration.

“As a sociology major at Brandeis, I took a lot of classes about storytelling and the power of mythmaking, as well as about social justice/inequality. In 2004, my troupe-mate Andrew Slack and I – both big Harry Potter fans – started noticing all of the ways we could tie themes from this modern myth into real life injustices. So after shows on tour, Andrew would grab a few lingering audience members and talk their ears off about this idea. In the meantime, Paul DeGeorge was making waves with an increasingly popular musical group he started with his brother called Harry and the Potters. We joined forces (the LNP even transformed ourselves into an entirely Harry Potter-themed comedy group for a few performances) and started the Harry Potter Alliance.

“I think Harry Potter’s popularity has helped it be an incredibly powerful modern myth, but I think the power lies less in Harry Potter than in humanity’s desire to tell stories and to better understand our world through them. We’re in the middle of transforming into a larger organization, called Imagine Better, that will hopefully find inspiration for social justice in a whole bunch of modern stories, Harry Potter being one of them.”

Soulstein intends to keep making his mark on the local theatre scene, however. His local accomplishments include acting at UBC and serving as assistant director and writing plays for the Vancouver International Fringe Festival, one of which will be remounted at the Cultch this fall. His involvement with Kinetichism, the new local theatre company that is producing Love/Stories, is recent and rewarding.

“I’ve found the community in Vancouver very unintimidating, open and inviting,” he said. “I’ve been able to leap from project to project pretty smoothly, and slowly I’m getting a sense of who knows who and how the web of theatre relationships here works. Bottom line is, there are tons of people here interested in doing tons of interesting/innovative work at a variety of levels. Kinetichism fits right into that – I was familiar with Britt (MacLeod, actor/producer) from a variety of mutual, UBC-related acquaintances, and have become good friends with Brian (Cochrane, director) while we’re both in grad programs at UBC.”

Being both a writer and an actor takes some balance, but they are deeply interconnected. “I think the two roles (and the variety of experiences I’ve had in each) inform each other immensely,” explained Soulstein. “As an actor, I can use my playwriting experience to help me dive into the text and understand why a playwright made the choices they did, and discover subtexts, themes and through-lines that I might have missed before. As a playwright, I can use my acting experience to have a stronger sense of what it actually means to take the words ‘from page to stage,’ and stop myself from some bad writing by imagining what it would be like to be an actor having to perform that script. The important thing is to be clear about your roles when entering any specific project; for Love/Stories, I am purely an actor, so I have to just have the faith that Moses has a strong vision and try to help him communicate that vision to an audience.”

And, just in case, readers are jealous of Soulstein’s unusually awesome last name, he said that it’s an egalitarian amalgam. “I was Reibstein and my wife was Soulman (itself an awesome last name). Rather than have one take the other’s, or burden our potential children with a hyphen, we decided to combine into the Soulstein you now see before you.”

With pay-what-you-can performances, Love/Stories is equally as democratic as its star’s last name and it promises to be a funny and poignant evening of theatre. Soulstein isn’t shy in his assessment of the show and noted that Vancouverites should see Love/Stories “because it’s fantastic! It’s funny, it’s tragic, it’s full of neurosis, emotion, cruelty and kindness. It’s a top-notch play done in an intimate venue for rock-bottom prices,” he concluded. “How theatre is meant to be.”

Love/Stories is at Little Mountain Gallery (littlemountaingallery.com) from May 11-26, 8 p.m. All shows are pay what you can. Tickets are available by e-mail at [email protected] or by calling 604-999-1522.

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