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§ Lawrence Russell. Born in Northern Ireland, educated in the U.K, Canada, and California. Playwright, fiction writer, critic, musician and multi-media artist. Formerly Professor of Writing & Film, University of Victoria. Twice winner of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Literary Competition. His stage plays have been produced in all the major Canadian venues, including the National Arts Theatre (Ottawa) and the Stratford (Ontario) Festival's 3rd Stage. His drama and electronic sound-text compositions have been broadcast on the C.B.C., A.B.C., Radio Canada International, N.P.R. (National Public Radio, US), the Pacifica Radio Network and other broadcast networks.

Books include Penetration (5 plays), Repeat This & You're Dead (stories), Radio Brazil (novel) and the recent non-fiction work Outlaw Academic (criticism/metafiction/autobiography). Recently: the Secret Island (2022) & The Temple of the Two Moons (2024)

Novellas: The Incarnations of Zuji | Temple of the Two Moons | The Highwayman of Shepperton | The 25th Hour

§ I had my first plays staged in the 1960s, when I was young and under the influence of absurdest theatre, and the one act play was the weapon of choice for the second generation of surrealist writers (think Beckett, Albee, Pinter, Arrabal, Mrozek, and others). Did some acting, won some awards (e.g. the Vancouver One Act Play Festival 1967 & 1969) and by the early seventies had professional productions in the major Canadian centres (e.g. National Arts Centre, Ottawa; Stratford 3rd Stage; Factory Theatre Lab and the Free Theatre, Toronto) as well as productions in just about all the university theatres across the country. Sono Nis published Penetration, a collection of my absurdest plays in 1974. Hardcover, with some illustrations by LR, and a collector's item today.

The first play I ever wrote was in Sunday School when I was eight or nine; an obedient piece of Bible propaganda about the Pharaoh's daughter finding the infant prophet Moses in a basket floating in the Nile). What happened? What led LR to the nasty dream fever world of the absurd?

In 1969 I experimented with using tape recorded voices in lieu of actors in my stage plays. Island was the first play, followed by Black Movie, in which the audience was confined to total darkness and subjected to a disturbing montage of dialogues and monologues, all written for 'audience fragmentation' (a term used by Ray Logie, a local director I worked with at that time). This was a natural progression in the surrealist matrix where solipsism and dream rule.

posters by Charles Brookman

DNA

§ I grew up listening to the radio, often in darkness when in bed going to sleep. It was magic -- the sonorous drift of static and distant, drifting stations full of forbidden revelation... words, music, tongues, etheric codes and corrupting transmissions. I was easily hypnotized and submerged in the subliminal plane.

DNA Stereo Magazine (1970--80) was a natural transition in my development as a writer and playwright. I knew how to play some guitar from my teenage days and thought if I could merge narrative with electronic music and distribute on tape, this would be an interesting mixed media expression full of possibilities in the psychedelic era.

LR: atonality & the evolution of electronic music »»»

Radio Drama

I stopped writing stage plays in favour of radio scripts in the 1980s. Here I worked mostly with the producer / director Bill Lane at C.B.C Toronto (Bill had previously directed several of my plays in Ottawa and Toronto). Perhaps the best of these was Snow Shadow Area, a grim tale about some mysterious child mutilations in a snow-bound town. Nominated for the Prix Futura. Others from this period include Possession, about a man who thinks he is the reincarnate of the Roman soldier who threw his spear at Christ on the cross; Winter Surf, about a missing surfer off the coast of Vancouver Island; The Dead Astronaut, an adaptation of the J.G. Ballard short story... and other scripts for The Vanishing Point series (many episodes from this C.B.C series are on the internet).

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