Character Love

Trampoline started as a joke. “I had an idea with a friend where I just pretend that this guy, as part of his therapy, had to write a dream journal,” Shane Adamczak explains. “I just thought I'd keep it online and see if I could convince people that it was not something I was writing but just a website that I really enjoyed sharing with people. I wrote that for about a year and it kind of started as a joke but then I fell in love with the character a little bit.”

The character is Matt and the blog is called Matt's Dream Journal. Adamczak initially had Matt just describe his dreams but by the third or fourth post, other elements of Matt's life had begun to creep in – his parents, a bully at school, something about a creepy uncle. “It was really fun and I kind of just let my brain just spew it out because I was like, 'it doesn't really matter what I write because it's Matt that's writing this'. I left some typos on purpose and weird ideas and tried not to edit it too much and just wrote it as candidly as I could.”

After a year of surreptitiously writing and sharing these blog posts, Adamczak discovered he had himself a fully fledged character. So, he decided to write a play about him.

In Trampoline, Matt isn't a kid like he is in the blog, but he is still pretty strange. His dreams are exceptionally vivid: so vivid, in fact, that they have begun to creep into his waking life. “We have a lot of these imaginary creatures that appear that are mostly puppeteered by Ben [Russell] in the play,” Adamczak says. “We have a snake and there's a couple of monkeys and a few other surprises that pop up while Matt's just trying to live his normal, everyday life.”

These days, Adamczak is based in Montreal but the Perth actor and writer wanted to come home for Trampoline. Weeping Spoon Productions, which consists of him and four others, has a good relationship with the Blue Room Theatre and they've already debuted a number of plays there. He plans to stick around for Perth Fringe in February, then head to Adelaide Fringe, and finally back to Montreal, where he intends to remount the production for a Canadian audience.

Most of what he's been doing lately has had to do with his alter ego Zack Adams (Adamczak's Ziggy Stardust, according to one description), which he's been touring through Canada for the fringe festivals over there. He's looking forward to getting away from his Zack Adams material and doing something a bit different. “Most of my stuff is comedy and it always tends to be a little bit dark, so in that way [Trampoline] is the same, but it's the first play that I've written in a while... it's my return back to doing ensemble-based work, rather than it being all about me.”