Morwyn Brebner’s play The Optimists, produced last winter in Calgary and opening the Tarragon’s fall season, trails a group of friends on a weekend in Vegas. Comedic and philosophical, the play explores the vicissitudes of love and the difficulty of reconciling hope with experience. A resident playwright at the Tarragon for the past five years, a co-writer for Ken Finkleman’s latest (as yet unnamed) CBC series and winner of seven Dora Awards, Brebner is quick-witted and sharp-tongued—with a future that looks perfectly optimistic.

Tell me about The Optimists. What is it about?
Well, it’s about love, mostly. It’s certainly about hope triumphing over experience. I’m not sure where that quote comes from, but it’s true. When you’re young, you expect things of the world and the world has limitless possibility. But as you get older, you have to rejig your expectations of what you thought your life could be with what your life is. It can be pretty devastating. So the play’s also about how you do that and still have hope in the world. How can you be an optimist when a lot of the evidence is to the contrary? The world tells you to be a pessimist. You don’t tell yourself to be a pessimist. Experience teaches you that. I think that’s true. The natural state of being alive is to be optimistic, because you kind of have to believe that things will be good. Even in love—love is bad, love is bad, love is bad—you still think, “Well, next time love will be good.” But it’s just like touching the stove again and again.

Well, because otherwise you may as well slit your wrists if there’s no hope, right?
Right, and in the play, Margie, the rational character, has a hard time believing that all hope is not a kind of false comfort. It’s an interesting question. But art to me is an optimistic venture. There’s a companion piece to The Optimists, called The Pessimists. I feel like everything I write is a corrective to the last thing, because when I look at the last thing, it seems incomplete, and I think, “Did I really think that? That doesn’t seem very good.” I’m a correctionist.

There are some novels that deal with the idea of determinism, that your fate is fixed, and I find that pessimistic. What do you think?
That’s true; that is pessimistic. But in making something, you optimistically assume that the act of creation is valid, that someone will read what you’ve written. If you’re feeling sad, or like life has no meaning, and you read something, like a Chekhov short story, you think, “Oh! There’s a communality of existence.” And just that is optimistic. But Chekhov wasn’t a pessimist. He was too attractive to be a pessimist.

Physically? You mean Chekhov was a babe?
Yeah, he was attractive: he had lots of lovers. I don’t know if that’s a good theory. But don’t you think it’s easier to be optimistic when you’re hot?

What about someone like Marlon Brando? He was hot, and not too sunny.
He was a pessimist, but it was a romantic pessimism. If you like it, it’s not pessimism. I’m not advocating a Pollyannaish view, though. It sounds so geeky to talk about it, but there was a quote from Antonio Gramsci, a sociologist, who said that people should have a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the spirit. And I think there’s truth to that. I think about the world, and the hot summer we’re having, and I think it is sort of apocalyptic to me. If we have more of this, will we have any more food? But then people have babies and you think, well, that’s fantastic. It is to me such an interesting question: how do people carry on? How do you balance life with awareness? There is a tendency in culture now to ignore complexities. Maybe it’s lazy to be optimistic, because it’s a way of saying, “I know that the world is difficult, but I’m going to choose to be hopeful.”

This may be an unreasonable question, but do you know what inspires you to write?
I think that writing comes from a desire to complete some kind of emotional circuit; or making something gives you a sense of emotional completion. You look around the world and you feel like you’re not represented. You see things a certain way and you have a drive to be known—to hide and to be known at the same time. And I think writing fiction is about that, because you can be incredibly confessional and still make things up, and nobody knows which is which. You can reveal yourself while hiding behind the guise of fiction, which can be very satisfying.

Since it’s so often thought that a play is the hardest thing to write, why do you think you started by writing plays?
I don’t know if a play is the hardest thing to write. You can’t write very much in a play. I think what’s hard is you have to strike a balance between economy and expansiveness. But I was exposed to theatre a little bit, I performed a little bit. The first play I was ever in was in Grade 6; it was Tom Sawyer and my brother was in it, too. I come from a family of notoriously bad singers, and I played Aunt Polley—they had to take my song down an octave, and my brother had a song and they just cut it. But in high school, I wrote myself some monologues; there was one where I played both Mae West and an earwig. They were talking to each other, and I, like, rolled around onstage singing “Like a Virgin.” I did this for people when I was in high school. But I think what I love about writing dialogue is that I love talking. I’m fascinated by how people talk. And when you write dialogue, you can write what people say, but you can also write what they don’t say. That way, you can get a very full and nuanced picture. And in fiction, when people travel, you can’t just say that they exit or enter. There’s something very direct about theatre.