by Samantha Giordano
HEADS Magazine
September, 2005
page 56

I don't think anyone in the audience at the Reefer Man show thought they would ever be sitting in a swelteringly humid little theatre watching some guy run around and tell a story about marijuana. Not even if the Reefer Man himself would have believed it either if a few years ago you had told him he would be playing sold-out Fringe Festival shows, touring Canada and spreading the good word. This one-man comedic play was written by Russell Bennett and Gillian Stevens-Guille and has already attracted the attention of producers in the U.S. Bennett stars as lawyer Charlie Kovacs (as well as at least a dozen other characters) who ends up getting busted for having a grow-op in his basement. Heads sat down with Bennett (a.k.a. The Reefer Man) to talk about his play and the pro-pot message he's spreading across Canada.

H: How did you come up with the idea for Reefer Man and how did you decide that this was the medium in which you wanted to express your beliefs?

R: Reefer Man first came from a rant about the marijuana prohibition and how wrong it is. I'd done a documentary on it which was aired on CBC about Chris Clay's case, and so I had tons and tons of research, and I wanted to do a multi-character show. So the first reason was I wanted to say something about how stupid the pot is and the second was that I wanted to do a multi-character play. I'd seen multi-character shows before, a really good one in New York called Fully Committed and man, I said "I gotta try that!" So I combined my rant and I tried!

H: The main character Charlie says he's curious to try pot after Officer Cecil comes into their class to discuss narcotics. What do you think of the current state of drug education in schools?

R: I haven't been in school in a while so I don't know what drug education is like today, but when I went to school drug education was all about fear, and if it's stayed the same, then it's the wrong way of going about it. It's totally ridiculous to scare kids away from stuff because as soon as you try and do that they're like "Oooh! What's that?" It becomes this Garden of Eden that the want to go and try. The right approach in my opinion would be to tell them exactly what it does to you, like when you drink five beers in a row you're gonna vomit! If you smoke a joint you're gonna feel funny, you may experience some light-headedness, or you may get a little clumsy, may get hungry, maybe have the pasties, so tell people what it's really about and how to use it responsibly so we don't have kids who are abusing the stuff. And then everybody blames the substance if it's abused and they don't blame the problems that encourage the substance abuse. But basically drug education, which is fear-based, is totally out-moded. We need a new approach.

H: Do you smoke before brainstorming or writing?

R: I would get high and I'd write some ideas and I'd look at them the next day and I'd go "Damn...I was so high!" I created the Reefer Man logo when I was high. At first it was a reefer man with a pot leaf heart in the chest and then I thought "No man! It's a head...he's got a pot head!" And so that's how I created that. Most of the story came about when I was not high, when Gill and I were just bantering back and forth. And we wrote so many drafts. I mean I've got 30 drafts of this play. And there's all different scenes that are not in the play, characters you'll never see...we wrote so much for this because it was our first play and we had no idea what we were doing.

H: You won a lot of awards at the 2004 Fringe Festival and played a lot of sold-out houses. Did you ever think it would come to this?

R: I had a dream once that I would be showered with joints and bud from a standing ovation, and it happened. But it was a long road to get there. My first show ever was in Hamilton almost exactly a year ago to four people - all volunteers - in an apartment that was converted into a theatre, with four lights and a ghetto blaster for a sound system, and the Hamilton Vice Squad came to the show to see if I was selling pot. It was a long road from there to Vancouver where an actual crowd came and threw joints at me at the end of the show. Yeah, I mean it was a dream, but that it came true...Wow! That was awesome.

H: What's next for the Reefer Man?

R: See, the fringe circuit is a marvelous way of honing a story, honing a play. After eight cities, 60 performances...man it was tight. It's tight now. The plan was to write the play, get a good story and then take it to the States. I'd love to take it to the States. I have a producer who likes the script in L.A. I have a company who's interested in putting it up Off-Broadway...it's all kinda negotiations...nothing is solid yet, so I'm still looking. I would love to turn it into a film after it had a nice run in the States. And also, my need as an activist was to make a play like this so that other people, women and men, could do this story in cities everywhere. So you know, education, theatre can meet at the same place, so the word gets out that marijuana prohibition must end.

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