After reading his novels, The Fire Line and The Timekeeper, I was in awe of Trevor Ferguson’s characters and writing/wordsmithery. Both were set around railway gangs busting their ass repairing the great national dream. As I had spent the summer of 1966 working on a extra gang for Ontario Northland Railway, I could appreciate the veracity of Ferguson’s locations and human depictions. His father had been an Anglican Minister and all of Trevor’s writing has a buried secular spiritualism that I am personally very attracted to. It also has a visceral exploration of the absurdity of human existence. In my continuing attempt to seduce great writers to come over to the dark side and write for the theatre, I phoned him up, offered him a play commission. He was between novels, he explained and jumped at it. $5,000 was a large lump of money for a small theatre at the time, but I believe writers and writing deserve respect and we found the cash to pay him. He gave us Long Long Short Long and, for a decade, Trevor became a theatre addict, writing three more plays for Infinitheatre. LLSL ended up in translation, produced, as Le Pont, at the Compagnie Jean Duceppe at Place des Arts. For the production of Long Long we convinced CN Railroad to supply actual rail, axle and wheel units, ties and spikes from their supply depot to help build the set. As both Trevor and I had, at one point in our lives, worked on the railroad, we had a great time helping lay the tracks, pounding in the spikes with the railway hammers provided. The set, a railway workers’ bunk car, designed by Maryse Bienvenu, with the forth wall open to the audience, looked as if we had somehow been able to float the real thing into the Studio of the Monument National Theatre. That original production, in June of 2002 was special. Andreas Apergis and Brett Watson at the height of their craft. Dino Tavarone just had to play himself, if only he could remember his lines.