Elaine Lee and Inside Out Theatre

By Stephen Hunt

When she was an art student at Simon Fraser University over a decade ago, Calgary artist Elaine Lee’s first real play—a monologue—explored an experience both universal and painfully personal. “It was actually about being a woman in my situation,” she says, “who’d never been asked out.”

The situation Lee refers to is the fact that she weighs 27 pounds, and is confined to a wheelchair. Diagnosed with Osteogenesis Imperfecta (aka Brittle Bones), she was not expected to live past the age of two. Instead, she lived in a hospital for the first five years of her life, before moving with her family from Vancouver to Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up, before returning to Vancouver to study at Simon Fraser, before moving on to Emily Carr University in Vancouver, where she obtained a fine arts degree.

Elaine Lee and Col Cseke | Photo: Courtesy of Inside Out Theatre

A Calgarian since 2010, Lee was recently named playwright-in-residence by Inside Out Theatre, a theatre dedicated to presenting work performed—and frequently created—by differently-abled artists.

In 2015, Inside Out artistic director Col Cseke met Lee at the initial meeting of the Calgary Congress for Equity and Diversity in the Arts, at Arts Commons.

“I remember her saying something to the tune of being new to Calgary,” Cseke says, “and so far, she hadn’t found her way in—or where she could be, in the arts community. She hadn’t found her gateway yet into Calgary and the arts community, so I felt like maybe we had that to offer her.

“With Inside Out,” he adds, “I always feel like I want to make sure that any artist knows that we’re interested in supporting and developing artists, so I just went up to her afterwards and said hi and exchanged information—and two years later, here we are.”

Where they are is working together as collaborators on Make Love, Not Art, a play in which they both star, as a budding art star (Lee) and gallery curator (Cseke) trying to negotiate both their professional—and personal—relationship.

It’s not autobiographical, but for Lee, Make Love, Not Art is definitely personal.

“We’ve created this fictional story,” Lee says,  “however some of the events and things that happen in the story actually happened to me in some way, shape or form.”

What makes the experience of putting it all down on paper, then performing it is that she knows it won’t quite conform to the image most people who know her in Calgary have of her—although re-shaping that identity is also too good an opportunity to pass up.

“They see me as this tiny, 27 pound person,” she says, “who just roams around [the city], and they don’t actually realize I have a university degree and I have all this background [as an artist]—playwriting, filmmaking and professional levels of art [training], where I’ve actually won national competitions.”

One of the major themes Lee takes on in her work is our notion of beauty.

“It’s discussing the subjectivity of beauty and… what defines beauty?” she asks. “Does it have to be just the stereotypical figure eight [female] body or can it be a uniquely shaped body of someone who is born differently?

“I don’t like to actually emphasize or focus on the fact that it’s [about] someone with a disability,” she adds, “because I think in this world, we’re all uniquely shaped, and it’s just the way we perceive things—so that’s basically the emphasis and focus of the play.”

Cseke believes that Lee is the ideal playwright to take Inside Out’s work to the next level—the planned 2018 production will be the first fully professional production by the company.

“The idea with the playwright-in-residence program,” says Cseke, “was that we would find—and Elaine’s the perfect example—an artist who has a story to tell, who has a play inside them, but just hasn’t had the opportunity yet to go through the process of what it means to take the idea of a play and get it onstage.

“The play discusses in part the way that Elaine’s character is able to exist as an artist,” he adds, “then it evolves into a story of the character Elaine plays, and me and the character I play, and the possibilities of a relationship [between us]. What happens between these two people when they’re making choices in private with each other and what do they expect in the light of day—what are the expectations for them, someone with Elaine’s body, and what kinds of relationships they can and cannot have.

“When you get down to it,” he adds, “It is an uncomfortable conversation for people to be exposed to.”

For Lee, steering the conversation into the audience’s discomfort zone is precisely the artist’s’ role. If that means a whole group of Calgarians are going to re-imagine her identity when Make Love, Not Art opens early in 2018, so be it.

“I like to break the rules and boundaries of what people see,” she says. “I feel like people need to step over those boundaries, and see beyond what they think on a surface level.”

For more information on Inside Out Theatre visit insideouttheatre.com.