The Scrubbing Bench

The Scrubbing Bench is not a reading, not a play, and not a traditional film but a virtual performance. It is a hybrid of film and theatre, shot and produced during the covid19 pandemic amid health restrictions designed to keep people apart.

“There is so much creativity happening in the world now that didn’t exist when I went to school because of the internet. Now, because of covid, we are forced to re-imagine everything. It’s like walking into a dark room and trying to figure out where the light switch is. Maybe this switch is it, maybe not. This (The Scrubbing Bench) is like trying to find that light switch… Maybe we are on the brink of finding something new,” film and television writer and director Mervyn de Goeas told Sunday Newsday.

He said there were usually scores of people on a set or on location during a film shoot including audio, lighting, camera, make-up, and other professionals. However, things had to be done differently for The Scrubbing Bench, a project he believed was needed during the pandemic as a way to get together when people had to stay apart.

In 2011, de Goeas won his third writing grant from what was then the TT Film Company Ltd. By then he had seen a lot of LGBT-themed international films but at least one queer person usually died by the end of the movie. So, for Pride, he wanted to try his hand at an LGBT film where the queer character survived.

“When I applied for the grant, that was all I knew. I wanted it to be LGBT themed and for nobody to die at the end. I had no idea what I was going to be writing about.”

One Sunday de Goeas was at church meditating, because he loved the ceremony and repetition of the services, when he looked around at the people and thought, ‘What is your secret?’

“I’m standing there just randomly looking around at people and trying to imagine their stories because, in church, we present the best version of ourselves, not the true and honest person…

“That was how the story started coming to me. I knew it would involve LGBT themes, I knew it would involve the church, Catholicism in particular, and I knew it would involve how people deal with an LGBT situation. And every Sunday a little more would come to me.”

He did research and joined several online forums to observe how gay Catholic men deal with their situations. He read their stories and discovered “things he never expected.”

While he did not use their stories, they were an inspiration for his characters and the idea of judging themselves and being judged by an invisible presence.

The Westwood Park writer said the term scrubbing bench was a reference to being stuck in a situation and waiting for a change.

He explained that if someone went to a party and sat down for the duration, that person would be described as “scrubbing bench” all night.

“When we look around, I think we will see a ton of us are stuck on that scrubbing bench, just sitting down waiting for something to happen, whether it’s that job you always wanted or that relationship you always dreamt of, or having a child. We’re just sitting down and waiting and waiting. Until we decide to do something about it, we’re going to be stuck on that bench, we’re just going to be there.”

He came to this realisation from personal experience. When his 20s were over he felt stuck with his family and career and realised the things he thought would make him happy did not. So, he took a year to contemplate his life and at age 30 decided to be happy and made changes in his life, pursuing a career in theatre and film.

Although he finished the script, the film was too expensive to make at the time. Then, in March, “the world ended” and for 2020 Pride in July, he was involved in a virtual conversation about performance and art during “the covid19 era.”

The conversation led him to think about how he could contribute to keeping the theatre arts alive while it faced challenges never before seen.

However, he did not want to ask someone for the rights to their screenplay. Fortunately, de Goeas remembered The Scrubbing Bench script he wrote in 2011. He sent it to others for an honest opinion and the responses were positive. So, he asked actors if they would be interested and slowly, he built a production team.

Then the second wave of covid19 hit.

“We had to be distant, we had to be no more than five people at a time in any space, this is not how television works! Everybody is on top of each other, we are always in some enclosed space, as a director you’re looking over the camera person’s shoulder. How are we going to do this?”

What he did was build a four-person crew – director of photography Sean Edghill; production manager Tonya Evans; makeup artist Paulla De Souza; and himself as director – and they did multiple jobs including light, audio, and art direction, transportation and more so that they, along with a single actor, could film in a space.

Filming began at the beginning of September. The actors performed their lines opposite de Goeas, who would be off camera, and he edited it to seem as if the actors, who were in different places, and sometimes different countries, were having a conversation.

For example, actors Andrew Hall and Andrew Seepersad are in Canada, Charlie Reid in the United States, and Kyle Richardson in Spain. Olimall Gordon is in Tobago while the rest of the cast including Stephen Hadeed Jr, Kemlon Nero, Natacha Jones, Cecilia Salazar, Michael Cherrie and Eric Barry are in Trinidad.

Because of those limitations, he said, narration was necessary to introduce scenes and keep certain aspects of the script. Edghill also had to talk the actors through the camera work and lighting as the crew could not be there personally.

“As a director I want it to be a complete viewing experience. I don’t want to just throw away chunks of script because I couldn’t film it. It’s my job to pull it together.”

Obviously, continuity could not be a consideration as each scene was shot at multiple locations. However, he was fine with that because he wanted people to be aware and remember it was filmed during a pandemic, a “horrible but progressive” time when people were more creative than they had been in a long time.

He also did not want to screen the film on a video conference platform, like Zoom, where the internet connection could drop or electricity could go and that would be the end of it. Neither did he want people to forget to mute their microphones and generally get distracted by other participants.

Therefore, The Scrubbing Bench will be available on a private YouTube channel and the video platform Vimeo. With those platforms people could pause it, return to watch it at a later time, or they could watch it again and again.

The Scrubbing Bench will be launched on October 30 and continue to November 2. There will also be a question and answer segment on the morning of November 1.

Tickets can be purchased through Sun Tix Caribbean or people can e-mail thescrubbingbench@gmail.com for other purchasing options.