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Toph Whitmore, LISFF 2024 Stage Play Competition Winner for “Dougie’s Last Christmas”
Can you please tell us about you and your daily life?
I'm a playwright in Vancouver, British Columbia; a proud immigrant and dual national; and a member of both the Playwrights Guild of Canada and the Dramatists Guild of America. I'm currently part of the Palm Desert Playwrights cohort in the MFA program at the University of California, Riverside.
When and how did you get into writing?
I spent nearly three decades in tech, most recently as a cybersecurity research analyst. My career consumed me, but I always wrote on the side, rationalizing that someday I would finally commit to my passion and write full time. With each new professional opportunity, I would tell myself that writing was out there on the horizon, something I’d get to eventually.
My "eventually" arrived last year, when I joined the Palm Desert Playwrights cohort in the MFA program at UC Riverside. Leaving a tech career was a big (and terrifying) decision, but it has been validated in no small part by recognition from organizations like LISP. In addition to the LISP award, my play "Dougie's Last Christmas" was a 2024 finalist at the Cambridge Script Awards competition, and its screenplay adaptation was an official selection of the 2024 Edinburgh and Montreal Film Festivals, a semi-finalist in the 2024 Emerging Screenwriters Comedy Screenplay Competition, and a finalist in the 2024 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. My shorter sketch pieces have been recognized by the Vancouver International Movie Awards, Houston Comedy Film Festival, and Lit Laughs International Comedy Film Festival.
How often do you write? Do you have a working routine? And what inspires you to create?
I'd like to say I'm disciplined in my writing routine...but I'm not. I try to write every day, though some days are (much) more productive than others. I have novelist friends that aim for daily word counts and such, but I measure progress less tangibly. For instance, if I'm working on character development, have I moved forward in understanding my characters? Do I know them any better? Are they more three-dimensional than they were yesterday? Do they have clearer motivations?
I write farce, with the occasional foray into darkly-comic murder mystery(!). My writing influences include Francis Veber, Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde, Martin McDonagh, the Coen brothers, Mischief Theatre, Wes Anderson, and more recently, Selina Fillinger and Cole Escola.
When I'm not writing, I'm bored. And thinking about what I wish I were writing. The urge to create is a wonderful, burdensome, dynamic, exhilarating, painful, and ultimately fulfilling affliction. I see a pretense in the world, and I want to blow it up. Theatre is a collective experience and wonderfully immediate: If I find something funny, I want to laugh at it with other people.
Several years ago, I was backstage for opening night of the run of my first produced play. The audience laughed at a joke I wrote. At jokes I wrote. And I melted. Nothing – truly, nothing – I achieved in my tech career ever came close to matching the pride I felt in that one fleeting moment. I've been chasing that high ever since.
How does it feel to have your work recognised?
It's always a great honor to have your work recognized. We all create amid uncertainty and rampant rejection. We accept that because it's part of the contract we make with ourselves when we commit to writing. Recognition is satisfying to the ego, but more importantly, it validates the choice we've made to create.
What are the best and most challenging things about writing a StagePlay?
One of my biggest challenges in writing stage plays is putting the puzzle together: fitting the scene structure, beats, characters, and setting all together to ensure the story gets told in the best way possible. I usually know where I want a script to go, but I often get blocked when I can't figure out how to get from point A to point B. Overcoming that is part of the challenge of play construction, and to do so I typically allow myself leeway (in plausibility, realism, pacing) to draft the connecting dialogue/scenes (with the expectation I'll rewrite aggressively).
The psychology of creating art is daunting. There will always be people who don't like my writing, and worse, discourage me from pursuing it. I'm lucky to be experienced, jaded, and cynical: I spent far too long caring what those folks thought. I don't anymore. Ignoring them means writing for myself, and effectively quelling the doubts that impede creativity.
There's little pretension to what I aim to do: I want to make people laugh. And when a line lands, well, there's just nothing better.
How did you develop the idea for your LISP-selected play? Is there a story behind your story? And, how long have you been working on it?
Two things contributed to the genesis of "Dougie's Last Christmas." The first was a simple question: Why not a "whodidntit" instead of a "whodunnit?" I imagined a murder mystery where every suspect thought they were guilty. I played around with the idea and soon realized it would require ridiculous contrivances, but orchestrating the preposterous became part of the fun of creating the work. (Quick-fire scenes occurring in seven different regions of the stage? Sure, why not?)
Second, I wanted to write an antagonist -- an unlikely and I hope unexpected villain -- based on someone I once knew. Petty? Maybe. But building the play around this character made the writing process exceptionally enjoyable.
Can you please give us a few tips about writing a Stage Play?
Sure! Here are a few approaches I use for creating new comedic stage work.
1. Write backwards.I aspire to create farcical comedy for the stage. I envision four or five key scenes, and then flesh out the missing pieces -- character, action, setting, beats -- to fulfill the narrative. Often, I'll draft an "explosion" (sometimes literal), typically an eruption of conflict in a climactic (or perhaps penultimate) scene, and then write the prior scenes to build to it.
2. Embrace the chaos. I write farce. For me, if there's no underlying potential for conflict on stage, then the play's not going to be funny. Setting is key to this approach. Placing my characters in a pressure cooker environment -- one which contributes to surfacing subjugated conflict -- sets up the play for comedic explosions.
3. Love the characters.Characters may very well be terrible people, but know them and love them. I've abandoned false starts because I didn't like the characters -- perhaps they were too simple, or I couldn't find their motivations.
4. Toss in the occasional anachronism.It's important for me to recognize my characters' respective humanity. Art that I find most realistic often includes something unexpected. In "Dougie's Last Christmas," the black sheep of the family alienates his family but then buys lunch for them. It's an intentionally unexpected action, but adds complexity and humanizes the character in a nice way (before he gets murdered several times).
What's the best thing and the most challenging thing about competitions and festivals?
Perhaps the best thing about entering your work in competitions and festivals is the validation you receive with recognition. The challenging thing, rather obviously, is the lack of validation you receive when you don't receive recognition! But both outcomes can be constructive. I enter my work in competitions and festivals in part to see if respected peers will think my creative efforts are any good. In doing so, I take the good (thank you LISP!) with the not so good (looking at you, other competition I didn't get selected for!), and use the (simple) feedback as motivation to steer my work forward.
Lastly, do you recommend the writers submit to LISP?
Yes, absolutely. I'm awed by the LISP jury and other competing playwrights, and utterly humbled by the prize. This award means more than others because it represents writers recognizing writers. And that makes it so, so meaningful. I enter this new year with renewed enthusiasm for my writing, and perhaps that's the most sincere endorsement of LISP submission I can offer.
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