As in any city, life in Winnipeg is complicated. Our feelings toward our city are a mixed bag, ranging from fear to love.

One of the best ways to navigate through this tangle of emotions is hearing the stories of our town — our own stories.

Winnipeg playwright and actor Carolyn Gray is one of the leading lights of telling stories with a distinctly Winnipeg flavour. Her 2007 play The Elmwood Visitation explored the 1923 visit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Winnipeg and, by title alone, it’s obvious her new play, North Main Gothic (debuting this week with Theatre Projects Manitoba) has some Winnipeg in it, too.

“I want to celebrate my city and tell stories about it,” Gray says. “With The Elmwood Visitation... people really responded to a story about their city and that really moved me.”

North Main Gothic, both a personal and societal tale of gambling addiction, draws not only from Gray’s love of “gothic literature, mysteries, romantic comedies and my city,” but also from deeper social issues affecting Winnipeg — issues she has witnessed first-hand.

“I used to work at the Sharon Home on Magnus Avenue,” Gray explains. “I was an activity worker and the activity girls, we’d always go up to the Yale (Hotel) in the late ’80s/early ’90s for a few draught and hamburgers, and back then it was such a nice, blue-collar place. And then one day the VLTs were there. It changed the place — it ceased to be a social, friendly place and it just kind of got dirty.”

Gray’s personal experience with the clear-cutting effects of VLTs on the lives of the addicted is a major factor in the play. While she laughs that there are a lot of her grudges in the work, it is a truthful, artistic exploration of the realities of our city.

“I was doing some writing exercises set in Winnipeg,” Gray says, “with people with no power in the city, and then people with a lot of power and putting them together... Every time the person with no status, the disenfranchised person, was able to get power from someone with money and power it was so exhilarating. And then I wrote the first scene of the play two and a half years ago... And I knew that this was the place where all those things that had been bothering me could go.”

With North Main Gothic, Gray may be airing personal issues, but they are grounded in Winnipeg’s real-world problems. Though there is a great need for these stories to be told, for her, it is anything but a chore.

“I find that I am writing about my city and it seems to be the only thing I want to write about right now,” Gray says. “I was thinking about it, it’s the entity I see first thing in the morning and the last thing I see at night. And it’s the most powerful entity in my life, this city. As an actor and writer you like to research what you write about, and I get to know my city every day. And I feel like sometimes I don’t understand it, but I also feel like I have a deep connection to it and that’s what I want to write about.”

NORTH MAIN GOTHIC
Theatre Projects Manitoba
April 8 - 18, University of Winnipeg’s Canwest Centre for Theatre and Film