First-Person: Playwright Jeremy Taylor on his play Big Plans (SummerWorks)

... let's say ... difficult
A true story of consensual cannibalism rendered theatrical
by Jeremy Taylor

When I wrote Big Plans in 2008, I knew the subject matter was … let’s say … difficult. 

The play is based very closely on the real-world events of the so-called Rotenburg Cannibal. As many will remember, Armin Meiwes gained international infamy in 2001 when he killed and ate most of a man named Bernd Jürgen Brandes (beginning with the penis while Brandes was still alive). 

What separated this story from the all too constant barrage of similar news items was that there was a complicity between the killer and his victim: Brandes actually signed documentation declaring his desire to be killed and eaten by Meiwes. It was this complicity—and how it complicated the subsequent trial—that so fascinated the world at the time. And it was this that made the story interesting to me as theatrical material. Who were these men, what did they find in one another, and what happened over the course of that night?

I was counting on a certain amount of distance to cushion the horror of the story. After all, this is something that happened far away, both geographically and culturally. This happened more than ten years ago now, and it was a relatively minor news item here in Canada, even at the time. My hope was that this distance would allow the characters and the events of the story to become general: more a hypothetical situation than a true story. I had no interest in gore, or even in shock, really; I wanted instead to find the humanity, the fragility, even the beauty, behind this unthinkable encounter.

I have always felt that the script achieved this. It’s a difficult story to hear, no question, but by the end the journey has been worth it, for any number of reasons. And the first production, in Montreal in December of last year, confirmed this. 

What I could not have foreseen was Luka Magnotta. And suddenly the story has lost its distance.

What happens when a real-world event changes the nature of a story? I wrote one play, and my fear is that it will now become another. How many times have we wondered at the almost laughable insensitivities of Merchant of Venice or The Taming of the Shrew, fully knowing that Shakespeare wrote those plays for a different world? It feels like a hideous trivialization of the slaying of Jun Lin to wonder how it will affect our little production, but the question has been posed to me again and again, and I am forced to consider it.

Big Plans is full of comedy, for instance. Humour is, as far as I can tell, one of the best ways to deal with difficult material. Perhaps it comes as a welcome relief valve at a tense moment. Or we are surprised by the simple humanity exhibited by the monsters on stage, and it’s the surprise that makes us laugh. The laughter makes the material palatable, but it also drives home the play’s message. We are forced to ask ourselves why we are laughing, and if that laughter is okay. 

But can we still laugh when the wound has been reopened, and when we no longer have sufficient distance? I worry about this. I worry that audiences will see only the horror of the Meiwes/Brandes story and will miss the humanity altogether. Without laughter, I worry that the experience will become unbearable. I worry that the redeeming truths will never land, and that the play will be shocking, upsetting, nauseating, and nothing else.

Or maybe we need to laugh more than ever. Time will tell.

Big Plans opens at Toronto’s SummerWorks Theatre Festival this Thursday, August 9th. Director Tanner Harvey and his all-star cast of Andy Trithardt, Karl Graboshas, and Leni Parker have all returned to remount the original production in Toronto. The team brings a remarkable honesty to the story that allows it to be at once horrifying and somehow understandable. I think we’ve done justice to the play, and our work is done. The rest is up to the audience—and the unpredictable effects of the real world.

Also: Read a profile of Jeremy Taylor who directed another play in the festival, My Pregnant Brother