MONTREAL -- While Joseph Aragon's offbeat original musicals were becoming crowd favourites at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, the playwright harboured a secret ambition to have a show produced at Prairie Theatre Exchange by the time he was 30.
The bespectacled Maples product blew out 30 candles last Sunday, with no date for his PTE bow in sight.
"It's still possible," says PTE artistic director Bob Metcalfe. "People are incredibly positive about this guy."
The Filipino-Canadian Aragon is about to become the first Manitoba graduate of the English-speaking playwriting program at the National Theatre School in Montreal. He spent his milestone birthday wandering the streets in a philosophical mood, contemplating where to go from here.
"It's weird that my graduation coincides with my 30th birthday," he says.
In a few weeks, Aragon will be moving home to seek his fortune as a full-time dramatist. Unlike alumni of other prestigious schools, he doesn't have recruiters lining up at his door waving job offers. He arrives back here unannounced, with a simple goal.
"I hope to be able to call myself a Winnipeg playwright," says Aragon, sitting in a bistro across the street from the NTS, the bilingual school that trained such local stage luminaries as Steven Schipper, Ann Hodges, Mariam Bernstein and Brian Perchaluk.
"At this point in the game, it's all potential. Anything can happen for him," says Brian Drader, the Winnipeg actor/dramatist who serves as the co-ordinator of the NTS playwriting program. "His promise is what's fabulous about his situation and scary about it. He doesn't realize yet how many people are watching him."
What he does realize is that he can compose the next Les Misérables, but if he can't sell himself and get his name on the speed-dial of theatre artistic directors, his scripts will be overlooked.
Aragon comes across as a reserved, self-deprecating guy with a nervous laugh. He keeps to himself, except for a small circle of close friends, and concedes that communication is not his strength.
Among his playwriting colleagues, he believes he has a lot to learn from an entrepreneurial self-promoter like Danny Schur (Strike! The Musical).
"He has a 100 per cent belief in himself and his work," says Aragon. "He knows how to get things done. Being at the other end of the spectrum, I hope to compensate for that by surrounding myself with a lot of people who believe in me."
Aragon has the advantage of already being a Winnipeg Fringe Festival name, one that draws lineups around the MTC Warehouse each July. He's written six fringe shows since debuting in 1999 with Swift Current. His last two -- Bloodsuckers! The Musical in 2004 and Illuminati: The Musical last summer -- were the top box-office draws among Manitoba productions. They even made money.
"Oh hell, yes," he says. "Musicals always do well. All you have to do is fill in the blank. Blank: The Musical will have people flocking to it."
In the immediate future, graduation means no dramatic change to Aragon's work routine. This is the time of year when he typically is in the middle of rewrites for his latest fringe entry and that's what he will do again shortly.
His latest is called Conclave: The Musical, a comedy about a plot to blow up the Sistine Chapel during a papal election in which cardinals sing and dance. As a Catholic, the irreverent script is his reaction to last year's conclave. In Illuminati, his spoof of conspiracy theories included a pope brandishing a machine gun and a dirty mind.
"He's a brave guy, writing these controversial things which might not be appreciated by his Catholic community," says Leith Clark, the director of Illuminati and a Sisler High School drama teacher. "He's quiet and yet has this outrageous comic mind."
Religious themes and figures often appear in his work. In 2003 his drama The Unlikely Sainthood of Madeline McKay won the Harry S. Rintoul Award for best new Manitoba play. Before he leaves Montreal, his third-year project, Euryalis and Lucretia,opens at the school's New Words Festival April 26. The central figure in that one is a real-life 15th-century author -- of a bodice-ripping romance -- who later became Pope Pius II.
"You write about what you believe and who you are," says Aragon. "Religion is something I'm inordinately preoccupied with. I've lived with it all my life. At one point I was toying with becoming a priest."
When you think of the theatre contributions of Winnipeg Filipinos, a stream of female singers like Ma-Anne Dionisio comes to mind. Playwrights like himself, Primrose Madayag Knazan and Rod Escobar Cantiveros have yet to break out from the fringe ghetto to mainstream prominence. Unlike the other two, he has yet to write what could be called a Filipino play.
"If there is anything I take from the Filipino experience it's being Catholic," he says. "I write about the world of spirituality in a modern life, which I know sounds very grant application-ish."
The son of an upholsterer father and a mother who is a nurse's aide, Aragon made his entrance into theatre at Garden City Collegiate, where he submitted his first script to the student competition PlayBlitz. His first dramaturge was Brian Drader.
After writing Swift Current, he joined the Manitoba Association of Playwrights and its young emerging playwright program, run again by Drader, who was the first to urge Aragon to apply to the NTS. The star-crossed relationship continued when Drader (The Norbals, PROK) took over the NTS playwriting program in 2004.
"My fate is so intertwined with that guy and I don't know why," says Aragon. "It's a little frightening how it's turned out."
While studying at the University of Manitoba, Aragon was the typical computer geek, excelling in all his math and science classes. But he used most of his electives on theatre courses and moonlighted as a member of the Black Hole Theatre company. He graduated in 1999 with his Bachelor of Science degree.
"It's still sitting in an envelope in my parent's trophy case," he says. "I've never had to show it to anyone or use it."
Aragon will soon be out in the real world, where it is all business in the highly competitive world of getting musicals produced. He's sending off scripts to the Cardiff International Festival of Musical Theatre and talking with Dry Cold Productions about developing Euryalis and Lucretia. He's got his new plans but hasn't forgotten the old dream.