At the corner of art and high finance: Everyone Is Doing Fine at Workshop West. Meet playwright James Odin Wade

In Everyone Is Doing Fine, a new “comedy-drama” by James Odin Wade, premiering at Workshop West Friday, we meet a couple of stalled art school friends, late ‘20s, with nothing much going on. Sound like people you know? Sound like people you once were?

“The careers they’d imagined had never really materialized,” as Wade describes his characters. “Along comes this hedge fund manager who has jobs for them, who’s very interested in them, who wants to introduce them to people…. It’s very seductive.” Ah, and risky too.

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Wade traces the idea back to a time in his own life a decade ago, between engagements you might say, before the multiple awards (including the Alberta Playwriting Competition) that would soon attach to his expanding theatre career. Ten years ago the Calgary-based playwright had found himself, drifting and mapless, at a moment in life where the bright future is supposed to be sharply outlined, not shrouded in uncertainty.

He was just graduating from the University of Calgary with a master’s degree in playwriting. “I’d just done a short internship in New York, and I was back in Calgary. No longer in school. Nothing to do. And I’d been given this house-sitting job by a friend of a friend, and found myself in this really great Calgary mansion…. And it was the juxtaposition of of feeling adrift, ‘what am I doing with my life?’ and being surrounded by such opulence, that was the starting place of this play.”

playwright James Odin Wade, Everyone Is Doing Fine at Workshop West. Photo supplied.

Between 2016 and 2023 “I’d also started to think a lot more about political things … wealth disparity, casual corruption of the arts market. All of these were bleeding into the play a little bit,” says Wade, who’d moved to Brooklyn after his mansion-sitting gig, got married and started a family (his wife worked as a TV critic, and now they have two kids, ages five and eight months). In New York, he’d met a lot of people who wanted to be there to work in the arts. But the cost of living, “so astronomical!” and “the need to make compromises,” sidle into, well, everything. In a detail that’s in his play, Wade remembers one friend who lived in a tiny New York apartment “and there was a mushroom growing out of her ceiling; that was the sort of thing she had to deal with.”

The New York internship, incidentally, was inspiring. Wade had worked at The 52nd Street Project, an arts mentorship where 10-year-old kids “get taught the fundamentals of playwriting. And then they write a 10-minute play. And all the plays are professionally produced in the theatre with professional Broadway actors. The kids were so creative!” Wade was especially struck, he says, by the way that the kids naturally gravitated to the subject of friendship. “having friends, maintaining friends, getting more friends.” When his dad visited, he’d just assumed the kids had been assigned a theme, but no.

In the 10 years since Wade started writing Everyone Is Doing Fine the colloquial lexicon of 20somethings has changed a bit, as he says. “When I started, the characters were Millennials; now they’re Gen Zs.” Nobody will say “no good very bad don’t do,” for example. But slang adjustments aside, “both generations graduating into the work force now are feeling a sort of despair … of not being able to get the jobs they’re looking for. Or maybe that the prospect of owning a home seems completely remote. Some of the things that were in the water when I started writing are even more super-charged now,” Wade says.   

AI, the most hackle-raising of subjects, is one. It isn’t specifically mentioned in Everyone Is Doing Fine but, as Wade points out, but AI has had its impact on “consolidating power within a smaller and smaller group.” And the arts and artists are especially at risk from its marauding.

In addition to “being in a little over their heads,” he says of his characters Anika and Daniel, “they also confront uncomfortable questions about the kind of people they want to be…. It’s not all about a rich villain” leading them astray.

“My voice is very present,” he says, in Everyone Is Doing Fine, which got workshopped at Workshop West’s Springboards Festival in 2023.  “An undergrad student had once described his work as “heavy comedy,” and Wade, laughing, says “I think that kind of fits.” He talks about “processing a lot of dark things through my work…. But, for whatever reason, it just has to be funny. If it’s not funny, it doesn’t work for me. Not to say there isn’t real drama, but there’s comedy all the way through.”

His sister-in-law, who told him that “you sublimate morbidity through arts,” nailed the Wade muse, he figures.“I’ve written lighter comedies than this, but comedy is a real tool.”

And it will find its way through his new “jukebox Canadian east coast folk musical” Nowhere With You, workshopped at the Citadel’s Collider Festival in 2024 and 2025 (directed by Mieko Ouchi). “Lots of comedic elements, lots of drama.” The inspiration, as Wade describes, is the music of the Maritime singer-songwriter Joel Plaskett. Halifax-born Wade has been a fan since his high school years in Lethbridge.

“I’ve never had the desire to write a musical, but I’ve always had the idea at the back of my head that Joel’s music would make an incredible musical…. I can really see the show,” Wade says. “The thing about his music that speaks to me most is his tense relationship with (the idea of) home. That to me is dramatically compelling, wanting to be somewhere and wanting not to be somewhere, at the same time. And (holding) this irreconcilable conflict wherever you go.…”

It’s a conflict the displaced Maritimer and sometime New Yorker knows something about.

PREVIEW

Everyone Is Doing Fine

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: James Odin Wade

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Christina Nguyen, David Madawo, Sebastian Ley

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: May 6 through 24

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will).