BY CHRIS DAFOE
The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, March 19, 1996

IN MAUREEN HUNTER'S latest play, Atlantis, currently running at Theatre Calgary, one of the characters, a Canadian drifter named Ben, muses on the nature of time and place.
"Whether what once was is no more, is truly lost to us - lost forever as we've come to think - or whether we reclaim it in some way, if only in our dreams, our longings," he says, reflecting on his affair with a mysterious Greek woman named Mircea. "Maybe the past isn't a place we leave behind, but a place we circle towards."

Ben's musings might just as easily apply to the Winnipeg playwright's own career as a dramatist. In the dozen or so years that she has been writing and over the course of six plays, Hunter has gradually moved away from comfortable and familiar settings.

Her earliest plays, Poor Uncle Ernie in His Covered Cage and Footprints on the Moon, were set on farms and in small towns, places Hunter knew from growing up outside the town of Indian Head, Sask., population 1,800. Her more recent plays have ventured further afield: 1992's Transit of Venus, which has been produced by a number of Canadian theatres as well as by the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, takes place in France in the 18th century. And Atlantis, a love affair told through alternating monologues, is set on the Greek island of Santorini.

And yet, if it's a long way from Indian Head to the isles of Greece, for Hunter, Atlantis also represents a circling back toward her past. Ben is played by Eric Peterson, best known for his portrayal of lawyer Leon Robinovitch in the long-running CBC series Street Legal. Hunter, however, remembers Peterson as another Native of Indian Head and close friend of her older brother Gregg, who died when he was 22.

"I think Gregg would have been pleased to see this happen," says Hunter of Peterson's performance. She's a soft-spoken woman and her tone grows even gentler as she speaks of her brother. "There was a tremendous sense of incompletion when Gregg died and I feel like I've closed a circle with this play. I've kept track of Eric through family and I'd always see him when he came through town and I've always wanted to write a character for him to play. It's just taken a long time."

One of the reasons it's taken so long is that Hunter, 48, is a relative late comer to the theatre world, indeed to the world of writing. She grew up on a farm attending a one-room school until high school, and while she joined the Drama Club, she never acted or wrote. She took a degree in English literature, but after graduation she drifted first into journalism, working for the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and the Winnipeg Tribune, and later into the corporate world, working in the communications department of the Canadian Wheat Board.

It was not until the death of her mother 13 years ago that she decided to give writing one more try.

"When my mother died of cancer, I smartened up pretty quickly because I realized that if I didn't do what I wanted to do, then my life would be over pretty quickly," she says. She quit her job at the Wheat Board and told her husband that if she wasn't a success as a writer within five years, she would go back to work. At first, she tried her hand at writing short stories, but it wasn't until she took a playwriting course at the University of Winnipeg that she knew she'd made the right decision.

"I really didn't expect to get into theatre," says Hunter. "I think there were a lot of role models for me as a short story writer or a novelist, but there weren't that many women writing drama. But when I took that course, I knew it was right immediately. I found writing short stories and novels a very introspective process and, really, I never thought I was all that interesting.

"What I liked about writing for the stage was that you had to present characters who came at a subject from completely different viewpoints. It forces you out of yourself and broadens you. Besides, I don't much like writing description and in drama, I didn't have to."

Hunter's confidence in her decision was bolstered by quick and early success. Her first three plays, Poor Uncle Ernie, Footprints on the Moon and The Queen of Queen Street, were staged by Agassiz Theatre, a small Winnipeg company devoted to producing local scripts with local talent. Footprints was also nominated for the Governor-General's Award for Drama.

"I was very fortunate," says Hunter of her association with the now-defunct theatre company...

Set in 18th-century France, the play tells the story of Guillaume Le Gentil, an astronomer who leaves behind a teenage fiancée, Celeste, when he travels to India to chart the transit of Venus, an experiment that will help establish the precise distance from the Earth to the sun. Produced to rave reviews in 1992, it was the first locally written play to be mounted on the MTC main stage in 25 years. Since then, the play has been produced by a number of Canadian companies. It has also been staged by England's Royal Shakespeare Company, a production that also led to a radio version, produced by the BBC.

Like Atlantis (and in a twisted way, also like Beautiful Lake Winnipeg), Transit of Venus is built around a love affair, but Hunter resists the notion that she is a romantic writer or that romantic love is essential to her work.

"I guess I'm a romantic at heart, but I didn't set out to make a statement about romantic love in any of those plays," she says. "I think I chose large themes and set love up against that. I'm interested in evolving relationships, but in both Atlantis and Transit, the characters are reaching for an understanding of divinity and how it fits in their lives and what they believe and where they stand in the cosmos. What Ben is dealing with is not so much love, but the feeling that he's brushed up against divinity and he can't let that go. In a way, love transforms itself into something greater."

Hunter, who describes herself as a fallen Anglican, ascribes her interest in the divine to aging rather than to any religious grounding.

'"The older I get, the more I keep coming back to that issue in my own life," she says. "And I sense it in my peers, the aging baby boomers who are having to come to terms with the death of their parents. David Mamet has said that the playwright has to deal with the fundamental question of life, which is death. I agree with that. I'm very fortunate to be in the position to express myself through my work and I think I have an obligation to address important questions. And I think one of them is, is there meaning, where is it and how do we find it? I don't have answers, but I'm interested in looking."

Hunter isn't sure where her search will take her next. While her last two plays have been inspired by books she happened to stumble across, she hasn't found the inspiration for her next one yet. Indeed, she's still trying to escape the inspiration and influence of Atlantis.

"When I'm writing a play, the characters will move into our home with us, eat meals with us, go to bed with us," she says. "We don't have any children and I've always imagined that when I'm on my deathbed, I'll be surrounded by all the characters I've created. And they'll be coming to me and complaining about all that I didn't do, how I let them down. So right now I'm just trying to get Ben and Mircea to move out. And it's difficult."

• Atlantis main page
• About Maureen Hunter
• Manitoba Theatre Centre's production of Atlantis.
• Director Steven Schipper's Notes
• Transmissions: Translating Atlantis
• An Interview with Maureen Hunter
• In Person: A Globe and Mail piece on Hunter