Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jun 23/99) - Though most of the stories that make up the play Bush Pilot are not from playwright Erik Watt's personal experience, through his travel he's met enough pilots and heard enough stories to fill a book.

"I've done a lot of travelling around the North and of course, I've flown with a lot of people," says Watt, trying to explain the integral role of the bush pilot in Northern life.

"This country, even today we're still so dependant on pilots that they really are a special class of citizen up here. I hear of a bush pilot dying someplace, and I might not even know the guy, I feel really quite badly about it. When it's someone you know, well of course it's different.

It's Watt's journalistic endeavours that had him wandering the North.

"I used to be a reporter up here with the Edmonton Journal. I toured the North for the Journal and the Winnipeg Free Press for six years. So I got to know it pretty well. I got to know most corners of it."

Then four years ago, Yellowknife actor/director Ben Nind approached Watt.

"Ben Nind came to me one day and said, 'how about doing a play on airplanes and pilots. I've done a lot of writing about bush pilots and that sort of thing but the idea for a play was Ben's. That sort of intrigued me. I'd done a lot of skit writing before, but never done a real serious play."

Watt had previously written skits for the Winnipeg Press Club's Beer and Skits -- an annual staging of parody by newspaper people. But working on Bush Pilot proved to be very different from the slapstick style to which Watt had become accustomed.

"When I first drafted this script it was a story written in play form," remembers Watt.

"And when Ben saw it he just said, 'Oh we can't do that.' It wound up being a six month free for all between he and I. We fought every inch of the way over that play. He'd say, 'Let's change this because this is dull and we can't do anything with it.' And I'd say, 'that's beautiful writing!"

One such moment occurred over the phone. Nind made a suggestion. Watt opposed it. A battle ensued, until Watt finally just slammed down the receiver. When his wife asked why he kept on with the project, Watt remembers saying, "I like working with Ben."

"When you write you're trying to get it all into the written words that people will read. And when you're doing a play, you forget that there's so much that the cast can do. You have to underwrite for a play. It's a very tough difference."

Watt maintains that right up to opening night, spent and exhausted, he didn't think very much of the script.

"But my God, these guys hit this thing and it just came to life," he enthused. "Ben is an incredible director, he really is. The cast just put in as much of themselves as they could."

In Bush Pilot all stories are true stories accumulated over the years by Watt. In the research stage though, it turned out that some were better categorized as tall tales.

"What we've tried to do is get people to realize what sort of life a bush pilot has and what he does."

From 50 skits, the show was whittled down to 23 or 24, says Watt.

Bush Pilot opens tonight at 8 p.m. at 3505 McDonald Drive and stars Lindsey Rocher, Murray Utas, Karen Johnson and Nind, who takes over a role for the second time this year. The show runs till Saturday.