| Richmond isn't a doctor... but he plays one on stage, in Qualities of Zero
The Province, Page B2, ON STAGE Where will you find Jacob Richmond on the opening night of his highly successful and award-winning play Qualities of Zero? Backstage, taking deep breaths. The Montreal writer plays the lead character and, although he trained as an actor and he's got good theatre lineage -- his mother is Janet Wright and his father is dramaturg Brian Richmond -- Richmond feels queasy. "It's slowly getting better -- the throwing-up backstage bit," he says. Richmond trained as an actor both at Concordia University in Montreal and at the Herbert Bergoff Studio in New York, but sees himself first as a playwright, then as an actor. |
Zero is the first play he wrote and it opened in Montreal in 2000. Since then, the play has drawn stellar reviews and won several awards. It all began while Richmond was studying theatre in New York, where in order to pay the rent, he looked after kids. "I was noticing a lot of the kids were on Ritalin," he says. It led Richmond to explore the nature of pharmaceuticals in our society: how we use them and how it affects our communities. And Dr. Roland Welby was born. Richmond's character is a grief-stricken neurochemist who decides to test his own creation: a drug that completely blocks the emotional highs and lows. The result is that Welby feels absolutely zero when facing the world. "His hubris is kind of his idea that he can control it," Richmond says. "It's his magical way of not dealing with emotions." Welby is surrounded by others whose vices protect them, whether it be alcohol, drugs or an obsession with death. What Welby finds, though, is that he can't insulate himself against the emotions of those around him. "It's a lot more difficult than taking a pill. The more he takes the drug, the more they begin to detest him. You do need to feel to be able to function in the world," he says. "It's kind of a Catch-22." |
Zero is described as a hilarious farce and Richmond says he wrote it as a sort of comedy. "It has a physicality to it. Almost dance-like in certain acts," he says. The play started out as an 800-page monologue and his father Brian helped him to pare it down. Richmond, who also wrote the critically acclaimed Legoland, now is working on a musical about a blind detective, which he hopes to have in workshop stage next spring. "Like any writer, you go through that period of 'Am I any good?'" he says. "I don't know that the feeling ever goes away. "You finish one thing and then start another project and then go 'Oh my god, it's never going to work.' It's a life of insecurity." Richmond calls Victoria home now, where Atomic Vaudeville's monthly theatre productions satisfy his creative need to write and act, which works well for him. "You learn how to put it together through acting classes. It's really beneficial and you get an idea of what you can do on the stage," he says. Richmond says the writing-acting gig works -- and he laughs when asked about the success of his plays. "I really quite like it," he says. |