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The Coffee Guest
Bonnie Nish interviews
Rogue Reese
Murphy and Trevor Spilchen
Spend a
half hour with Rogue Reese Murphy and he will have you in tears. His dark sense
of humour mixed with a quick wit just keep a roll of intelligent commentary
coming, all with a bit of a twist. On Saturday April 16, 2005 this versatile
writer/performer will be sure to move you in all sorts of directions with his
powerful monologue, Swimming in Cement. Add to this the multi-faceted talent of
musician/writer Trevor Spilchen performing The Reconstruction, a mix of
performance poetry with music and you will have an evening you won't forget for
a long time with their stage performance of Battered Souls.
Murphy and
Spilchen work well together. The shows that they have performed have brought
great feedback and they seem to keep each other going. Yet they come from
completely different backgrounds. Murphy who was born in Belfast Ireland and
raised in Brooklyn NY first began his career in acting at the age of 6 to
overcome shyness. By the time he was 16 he was working as a professional actor.
Spilchen who grew up in Sherwood Park just outside of Edmonton started playing
guitar when he was 12, formed his first band in grade eight and had his first
big show by grade nine.
"When I was
in grade nine I had to do a presentation of all the world's a stage and I
performed it on electric guitar to 'Wild Thing.'," Spilchen remembers. "My
teacher liked it so much he had me perform it for all of the grade nine classes.
It was from that point on that I began to take music seriously." He began
playing professionally in grade eleven, at which point he decided to move away
to attend music school spending two years at Grant MacEwan in Edmonton and
eventually ended up on the West Coast where he went to Capilano College.
About this
time he started doing solo gigs and writing instrumental music. He recorded his
first solo album. He formed a duo and then a trio with Sarah a woman he would
marry. Through out this whole time his music was developing along with his
individual style, a mixture of folk and jazz. 'Lullaby for Baby Who" a 72 minute
piece written for his daughter Talia, was begun in December of '99, and not
completed until the spring of 2002. It has never been preformed but he can
picture how he would like to do it when he does stage it. A multi-media feast
with a choir, dancers and paintings. While subtle in what he does he is very
good at incorporating a fuller picture, showing all of the various sides of what
on the surface may appear straight forward but is in itself complex when you
exam it closer, such as a lullaby exploding into a whole new world An infant's
world.
And that is
what he does with his writing. He takes a theme and works with it adding music
and rhythm, drawing you in from every angle. While much of what Spilchen does is
related to music he says that he has been writing lyrics on and off for all of
his life. He began writing poetry last fall when he started attending Twisted
Poets an open mic for poetry.
" I had
always done journal writing but I didn't realize it was poetry. In April of this
year I tried writing as a craft for spoken word as opposed as for lyrics. When I
write, one phrase or emotion will trigger me and I will go on from there. There
is always rhythm to it though. My music affects my writing."
Like
Spilchen Murphy believes he was also greatly influenced by an early experience
with a teacher.
" He took
the time to work with me to take the scripts a part. To understand the
characters on all different levels and be released into the characters. Subtext
is so important, the root of thing is never is never the thing itself. Still
today this makes sense."
And for
Murphy the inner monologue and subtext are essential to his writing, the
foundation of it.
" Because I
am an actor I build and live inside a character. When a character feels a piece
of clothing what he feels comes out in the writing."
It is in
part because of this that Murphy's writing is so much more than a character
study .These are full individuals revealing all those corners that people
usually keep hidden from the outside world, keep buried way down inside. He has
access to this. These are in-depth studies and multi-dimensional pursuits of
human nature that he gives us and we wonder where it all comes from.
Born in
Belfast and raised there until he was six he says that he knows he saw a lot of
violence that normally a six year old wouldn't see. People being killed, homes
being raided a lot of which he doesn't consciously remember. Moving away from
all of that to an area of Brooklyn which had a rough edge, he was exposed to a
lot of different characters.
"Swimming
in Cement is a combination of characters one of whom is my Uncle who died. I
tried to evoke his spirit, his friends, the people I encountered around him."
Murphy remembers his Uncle as a brilliant man, who had a lot of terrible things
happen to him at a young age. "He didn't choose his lifestyle He tried to come
out of it. Life is a circle. When he got up things were good and then he went
back to cement. His struggle was to try to get up and in the end he couldn't
anymore."
Spilchen's
Reconstruction piece is also about struggle. It is a compilation of a series of
pieces with a central theme that being the starting over or reconstruction
through the creative process. It is about Splechen's journey from his divorce to
a better place.
" The title
Battered Souls says it all. We are both talking about underdog characters.
Rogue's characters try to pull themselves up from wherever they are. Try to get
back to a happy place, a functional place."
Spilchen
believes Battered Souls is an interesting mix as he feels Murphy's work tends to
be more extroverted than his own.
Murphy says
that he moved into writing from acting because he felt he had a lot to say. He
didn't want to just be repeating other peoples words and ideas. When he speaks
we sit up and listen. Swimming in Cement is quite a tribute to a person who
greatly influenced Murphy his whole life through. It speaks to the truths in our
life's, the struggles we go through and the side of life we sometimes rather
just ignore. In combination with Spilchen's Reconstruction piece it makes for
one powerful evening. Battered Souls is intense, full of life from all of its
varied corners. Hopefully this is just one of many shows we have to look forward
to from these talented men. They can touch us and make us realize there are all
these things out there to be reckoned with and life is so much more than we
sometimes want to admit to.
Previous Interviews:
Ashok Bhargava
Shulamit Joffre
Sean McGarragle and Chystalene Buhler
T Paul Ste. Marie
Ariadne Sawyer ~ Re: The world Poetry Reading Series
Johnny Frem ~ Re: Bolts of Fiction
Liars of Orpheus ~ Re: The intentions of Orpheus
Estelle Bogoch ~ Re: Crosswords for Gardeners
Byron Sheardown ~ Re: Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine
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