Drama/ 9 characters, 6 Men, 3 Women (double casting possible)/ Full Length, 90 mins.
Synopsis (from Vue Weekly): “Like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Scout, the hero of Ken Cameron’s play My One and Only, has come ‘unstuck in time,’ hopscotching unpredictably back and forth among the key events in his life, including an idyll with an impossibly sexy, gloriously yielding movie star. . . .
“Scout’s lover . . . is Marilyn Monroe, who has come to Banff, where Scout lives with his lonely, alcoholic mother, to shoot that turgid Otto Preminger potboiler River of No Return. The two of them meet by chance one afternoon on a deserted mountain road (“Ssshhh — I’m incognito!” whispers Marilyn from behind her attention-getting sunglasses) and they strike up an odd friendship when Scout allows Marilyn to take a ride on his bicycle. Scout soon becomes Marilyn’s pet companion on the set, helping her run her lines and smuggling bottles of whiskey to her, which he steals from his mother every night after she passes out. The whole situation is so sexually charged that it’s a wonder the virginal 15-year-old Scout doesn’t die from some kind of hormone overdose — Marilyn even winds up giving Scout his first sexual experience as they bathe together, naked, in a secret pool Scout knows about deep inside a mountain cave.”
Scout keeps getting pulled out of these blissful events, however, and into an incident 10 years later, in 1963, shortly after Marilyn’s death. It’s night, and Scout’s car has been pulled over by a California highway patrolman; Scout has been speeding, but when the cop discovers a map to Marilyn’s home in his glove compartment, it soon becomes apparent that he’s committed a crime a lot more serious than going 100 in a school zone. Gradually we realize the full extent to which Scout was never able to move on from his affair with Marilyn; he can’t stop reliving his time with her over and over again, and yet at the same time, Scout desperately wishes he could have done everything differently so that their affair could have had a happier outcome.”
– Paul Matwychuk, Vue Weekly
“Switching back and forth in time between scenes with Scout and his drunken slattern of a mother, whom he catches in trysts with the local reverend, Scout’s ongoing roadside lecture from an inquisitive cop with memories of his own to tell, and, of course, Scout’s encounters with the famous movie star herself — Cameron weaves an intriguing and convincing tale of boyhood obsession. . . . engaging, taut, and beautifully written.”
– Calgary Herald
Amateur and professional rights:
Ken Cameron,
808 22 Ave SE,
Calgary, Ab,
Canada, T2G 1N5
Ph: (403) 265-8564
Email: kenwrites@gmail.com
About the Playwright: Ken Cameron is a multi-faceted playwright whose work fluctuates between commercially accessible plays and alternative theatre. On one end lie plays like Harvest, which has been performed across Canada and My One And Only which was produced by Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites Festival, Workshop West in Edmonton and by the Bridge Theatre Company in New York City. Both have been published in Harvest and Other Plays.Dear Johnny Deere is a musical adaptation of songs by acclaimed Canadian musician Fred Eaglesmith, which was commissioned by The Blyth Festival and premiered there in June 2012. Dear Johnny Deere was revived at Blyth and Lighthouse Theatre and had a separate production at the Charlottetown Festival PEI in 2013. In 2015 Dear Johnny Deere was published by NeWest Press and produced by Theatre Calgary. It won both the Betty Mitchell Award and the Calgary Theatre Critics Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical. Ken is currently commissioned by the Stratford Festival to adapt the novel Cue For Treason by Geoffrey Trease.On the alternative end of the spectrum is How iRan: Three Plays for iPod, a creation recorded entirely on iPod as the audience moves through installations set amongst the stacks of a downtown library. With the iPod set to shuffle, there are over 10.6 million versions of the play. How iRan: Three Plays for iPod premiered at the IMPACT multicultural theatre festival in Kitchener Ontario and received its Calgary premiere at the High Performance Rodeo.
Ken co-founded Productive Obsession, an independent inter-arts performance company, together with wife and co-Artistic Conspirator Rita Bozi.
My One and Only premiered at the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays in January, 2004, produced by Alberta Theatre Projects.
“The intriguing oddity of Ken Cameron’s coming-of-age story is the way time lurches to a stop at the intersection of Fantasy and Desire. . . . memory, fantasy and physics make a mysteriously heady compound.”
– The Edmonton Journal“Cameron’s script, through its non-linear disjointedness, constructs a compelling portrait of a person hanging somewhere in time, caught like an insect in amber, unable to move forward, or erase the past in order to move on.”
– SEE Magazine