Gray, John MacLachlan 1946-

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Gray, John MacLachlan 1946-

PERSONAL:

Born 1946, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; given name, John Howard; changed name to John MacLachlan Gray, c. 1995; son of Howard (a flight lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Air Force) and Marion (a biologist) Gray; divorced from first wife; married second wife, Beverlee Larsen; children: Zachary, Ezra. Education: Mount Allison University, B.A.; University of British Columbia, M.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

CAREER:

Director, composer, actor, and author. Tamahnous Theatre, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, founding member; freelance director, 1972-76; actor and performer in radio and television shows. Contributor to The Journal, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Director of plays, including The Bacchae, 1972; Dracula Two, 1974; The Tempest, 1974; Bull Durham, 1974; Canadian Heroes Series 1 (with Paul Thompson), 1975; Preparing (with Buzz Bense), 1975; The Imaginary Invalid, 1975; and Herringbone, 1975, 1976, and 1978. Composer of music for all his own plays, as well as for Bull Durham, 1974; The Imaginary Invalid, 1975; The False Messiah, 1975; The Horsburgh Scandal, 1976; The Farmer's Revolt, 1976; The Farm Show (with Jimmy Adams), 1976; The Olympics Show, 1976; The Great Wave of Civilization, 1976; Money, 1976; and Le Temps d'une vie, 1978.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Dramalogue Award from Los Angeles Herald, Golden Globe Award from Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, all 1980, Governor-General's Award (Canada), and Dora Mavor Moore Award, both 1982, all for Billy Bishop Goes to War; Vancouver Award, 1988; Chalmers Award; Canadian Film and Television Award; Gold Medal, New York Film and Television Festival; Silver Hugo; National Magazine Award; Western Magazine Award (six-time recipient); named to the Order of Canada.

WRITINGS:

PUBLISHED PLAYS

Billy Bishop Goes to War, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1981.

Rock and Roll, Canadian Theatre Review, 1982.

Local Boy Makes Good: Three Musicals, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1987.

UNPUBLISHED PLAYS

(Author of music and lyrics, and director) 18 Wheels, first produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1977.

Bongo from the Congo, first produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1981.

Balthazar and the Mojo Star, first produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1982.

Snowbird, first produced in Canada, 1983.

Florence, 1478, first produced in Canada, 1983.

Better Watch Out, You Better Not Die, first produced in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1983.

Don Messer's Jubilee, first produced in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1985.

The B.C. Review, first produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1986.

Health, the Musical, first produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1989.

Amelia, first produced in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 1995.

The Tree, the Tower, the Flood, first produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1997.

FICTION

Dazzled (novel), Irwin Publishing (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1984.

A Gift for the Little Master (novel), Random House Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2000.

The Fiend in Human (crime novel), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2003.

White Stone Day (crime novel), St. Martin's Minotaur (New York, NY), 2005.

OTHER

(And codirector and composer) The King of Friday Night (video; based on Rock and Roll), 1981.

Learning to Be Dull: The Canadian Cultural Attitude (nonfiction), Saskatchewan Library Association (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada), 1986.

Lost in North America: The Imaginary Canadian in the American Dream (nonfiction), Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1994.

I Love Mom: An Irreverent History of the Tattoo (nonfiction), Key Porter Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1994.

Also author of musicals, television series, screenplays, and magazine articles; author of television play Eyes of a Cowboy. Author of regular column "Gray's Anatomy," for the Globe and Mail.

SIDELIGHTS:

John MacLachlan Gray is a prolific and award-winning Canadian playwright, as well as a director, actor, novelist, and nonfiction book author. In a column for the Toronto Globe and Mail, Gray wrote: "I used to write musicals, until they became complicated and serious and nobody wanted to produce them. So I turned to prose, written as musically as possible. With a novel, what's on the page is all there is. Even if my manuscript is the only copy in existence, it's still a novel. Unlike a script, I don't have to ask someone's permission for it to become what I see in my mind's eye."

Gray began his career as a successful playwright whose signature work, Billy Bishop Goes to War, was widely produced in the United States and Canada. The play "was the most produced show in America for four years," Gray commented in the Globe and Mail. "I will be one surprised dead man if I am remembered for anything other than that one show." A biographer for Contemporary Dramatists noted that in his dramatic works Gray "searches for signifiers of the Canadian psyche and finds them not only in conventional heroes like the World War I aviator Billy Bishop but also in an array of small-town heroes—band leaders, high school rock stars—who speak directly to the audience's local identification with the social and musical rhythms of its country." In the ensuing decades, Gray built upon his reputation as an actor, an author, and a contributor of political and social commentary to newspapers. He continued to write widely in a variety of styles and genres, he noted in Globe and Mail, producing screenplays, bibles for television series, magazine and newspaper pieces, musicals, radio shows, and more.

Gray's first novel to achieve international publication and wide critical recognition is The Fiend in Human, a noir thriller set in Victorian London and featuring a cast based upon the social strata of that place and time. The year is 1852, and as the tale begins police authorities believe they have arrested a man who is responsible for choking prostitutes to death with a white silk scarf. London tabloid reporter Edmund Whitty—whose own habits hardly bear scrutiny—dubs the alleged murderer "Chokee Bill" and seeks to make as much money as he can off the grisly serial killings. But when "Chokee Bill" insists that he is innocent, and the murders continue even though he is behind bars, Whitty decides to mount a manhunt for the real killer. Though Whitty's motives include the prospect of financial gain, notoriety, and promotion, he is nonetheless human enough to feel compassion for the unfortunate victims, as well as a dawning sense of alarm that "Chokee Bill" is facing execution for crimes he did not commit.

In a Las Vegas Mercury review of The Fiend in Human, John Ziebell wrote: "This is Gray's first effort at mainstream fiction, but it's abundantly clear the author knows what makes stories successful." The critic added that the novel "is always evocative, richly detailed and packed with trivia interesting to those of a historical bent." Library Journal critic Laurel Bliss found The Fiend in Human "noteworthy for the lovingly detailed (if sordid and unappealing) scenes of London." Commending Gray for "a skill worthy of Dickens," a Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that the author's "considerable gifts bode well for future forays into crime fiction."

Edmund Whitty returns in Gray's second Victorian England novel, White Stone Day. The handsome, educated Whitty knows he is underemployed as a Fleet Street journalist, but he is willing to take whatever he can get to keep himself afloat. Soon, his rather reckless lifestyle puts him in debt to a local crime boss, the Captain, who will forgive Whitty's sizeable debt if the reporter will help the Captain locate his kidnapped niece. Whitty agrees, and undertakes an investigation that places him in repeated physical danger, lands him in jail, causes him to be severely beaten over and over again, and nearly costs him his life. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book an "elegantly written, artfully mischievous romp." Gray "teases a brilliant portrait of nineteenth-century British life from the story's many strands," remarked Ilene Cooper in Booklist.

In his piece for the Globe and Mail, Gray observed: "The thriller, the mystery, the plot-driven narrative designed to induce tension over what happens next—that's how I see the future, full of hope and dread; it's what I think, therefore it's what I write."