Vivek Shraya - How to Fail as a Popstar

HOW TO FAIL AS A POPSTAR

Copyright 2021 by Vivek Shraya

Foreword copyright 2021 by Brendan Healy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanicalwithout the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.

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Greatest Love of All. Words by Linda Creed, music by Michael Masser 1977 (renewed) EMI Gold Horizon Music Corp. and EMI Golden Torch Music Corp. Exclusive print rights administered by Alfred Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch

Cover photograph by Heather Saitz

Photographs by Dahlia Katz

Copy edited by Shirarose Wilensky

Proofread by Alison Strobel

Printed and bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Title: How to fail as a popstar : a play / Vivek Shraya.

Names: Shraya, Vivek, 1981 author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020032456X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200324853 | ISBN 9781551528427 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528434 (HTML)

Subjects: LCSH: Shraya, Vivek, 1981Drama.

Classification: LCC PS8637.H73 H69 2021 | DDC C812/.6dc23

For Whitney Houston,
whose voice made a brown queer kid in Edmonton
believe in my own voice,

Madonna,
for showing me the power of pop,

and Shamik,
for being the original believer.

I decided long ago
Never to walk in anyones shadows
If I fail, if I succeed
At least Ill live as I believe

Whitney Houston, Greatest Love of All

I can recall the moment, in the summer of 2018, when Vivek called me with The Pitch. It went something like this:

Hi. So I have this idea for a play called How to Fail as a Popstar. What I am imagining

I cant really remember what she said after that. She had sold me with the title alone and my mind was already focused on how to make it happen.

At that point, I had known Vivek for almost a decade. She was initially one of my early social media friends. We followed each other on various platforms, liked each others posts and pics, and exchanged the occasional message. I remember being quite struck by her social media presence. She was one of the first people I felt was really using social media as a tool for self-expression. She took it seriously, long before most of us caught on to what this technology offered. Early on, she understood its power to create a mediated pop version of the self.

When I finally got to meet Vivek in person, I was somewhat surprised by her shy, contained, and, dare I say, understated demeanour. Yet a fierceness was present behind her eyes. It lurked in the seriousness with which she spoke of things. As I got to know her better through her performances at Buddies in Bad Times, photo shoots at my apartment with my husband, and various events around town, she began to let down her guard. I began to see the rawness of her hunger for self-realization through art, and I caught glimpses of the pain she carried of an unfulfilled story. It was a pain that I had inside me, too.

This was before her novels, her books of poetry, her talk show appearances, her modelling, and her emergence as a bona fide icon. Typically, a persons ascent to any kind of public adulation is accompanied by the rejection of any past failures. If they are acknowledged at all, they are reframed as stepping stones towards a truer, more real purposethe necessary stumbling blocks that help sharpen an artists ultimate and authentic greatness. But with the title How to Fail as a Popstar, Vivek was pitching a play that was a refusal to fall into that trope. And this was what hooked me, because fuck that trope.

Working on this play taught me a lot. I learned not only a ton about Vivekperhaps more than she would ever want me to knowbut also a ton about living with failure. Here are the top three lessons that I learned from Vivek about failure:

Like illness and death (and, quite frankly, most intense human experiences), our society is unable to cope with the real emotional consequences of failure. It compulsively denies our failures by turning them into life lessons or opportunities for growth. Just google failure + quote to see how society tells us to manage failure. With this play, Vivek is resisting what is deeply dehumanizing about the social negation of our failures. Our failures are real. The emotions they cause are real. The consequences in our lives and our bodies are real.

May we please be allowed to own our failures!

Once we can fully own our failures, then the real work of what to do with them can happen. Vivek suggests that our failed ambitions need funerals. They deserve the eulogies, the caskets, the wakes, the awkward conversations, the bad food, the solitary cries, the collective tears, and the burial. The act of mourning is how we, as human beings, process pain. Our failed dreams deserve this process.

So, youve owned your failure and youve laid your dream to rest. Whats next?

I dont know. Vivek doesnt know.

But what I learned from Viveks play is that life goes on, and this gives you a choice: you can keep on showing up in your life, or you can stop.

The play does not tell us if showing up will lead to greater happiness in life. But if, like Vivek, you have a life force that is driven by a deep hunger for something more, something bigger, then you need to keep feeding that hunger. Even if that hunger has caused you pain. Showing up wont satiate that hunger. It wont lead you to the destination you dreamed of. But it will take you somewhere.

And for the Viveks of this world, somewhere is better than nowhere.

Brendan Healy

Artistic director at Canadian Stage

November 2020

Hi everyone! Sorry to interrupt. My name is Vivek Shraya. Before we get started I just want to clarify something. When I say that I failed as a popstar, this is what I mean: