Community centres are designed to serve an array of needs: educational, social, athletic –but unless you’re taking an Intro to Improv class, they’re probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think “venue for guaranteed belly laughs.”
For Vancouver actress and screenwriter Sonja Bennett, few places on Earth are as hilarious as Vancouver’s community centres, rife as they are with absurd scenarios and bizarre interactions.
“There are a lot of warring camps,” says Bennett, who wrote and starred in 2015’s Preggoland (about a 30-something who fakes a pregnancy to fit in with her social group) and whose recent writing credits include an episode of CBC’s hit new comedy series Kim’s Convenience.
“It’s parents against non-parents, or fast-lane swimmers versus slow-lane swimmers, or yoga versus spinners. And to me, the more I thought about it, community centres are a microcosm for a lot of the conflicts that play out in the city.”
She chuckles as she recalls bearing witness to a showdown between a tai chi instructor and a step class teacher (“that’s another reason I love community centres: it’s the only place you can actually go to a step class") warring over music levels in a shared gym.
“I thought the community centre would be the perfect environment to explore the conflicts that we run into every day. They bring a very diverse demographic, which makes them juicy for conflict. You have people in their 80s side by side with teens in the same space doing different things, and that’s what I really love about it.”
And so Bennett – who taught a pottery class at a community centre when she was in university, despite describing herself as completely unqualified to do so – channeled her fascination with the peculiarities of community centre culture into Sunnyhearts Community Centre, a locally shot web series that hit YouTube and Telus Optik last month and continues to roll out new webisodes every Monday. View the first webisode here.
Sunnyhearts Community Centre stars Bennett as Bernice, the new program manager of the fictional centre. Each webisode in the eight-webisode first season follows Bernice as she attempts to navigate some absurd situation unique to community centre culture. “The original pitch was, ‘Think 30 Rock in a community centre,” Bennett says.
The series begins as Bennett’s character arrives for her first day on the job with a positive attitude and a framed photo of Oprah, only to encounter a lobby full of agitated parents battling each other for highly coveted spaces in swimming classes.
Subsequent webisodes tackle gym grunters, horking in steam rooms, change-room etiquette, and what happens when you’re taking a Zumba class taught by your estranged husband’s new girlfriend.
The series is funded by Telus Optik and co-executive produced by Preggoland’s Dylan Collingwood. Among the co-producers and co-directors are Matthew Clarke and David Milchard, the duo team behind the 103-million-hits-and-counting web series Convos with My 2-Year-Old.
Sunnyhearts Community Centre features a parade of BC film and television stars, including Viv Leacock (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency), Jill Morrison (Package Deal), Lisa Durupt (Murder, She Baked, and Bennett’s co-star from Preggoland), Olivia Cheng (Marco Polo), and Stephen Lobo (Continuum).
Even though Bennett has written for both film and television, scripting content for the web wasn’t exactly easy.
“We did a lot of research on the sweet spot of length for web stuff, and three to five minutes seems to be the sweet spot, and to tell a story that has a beginning, middle, and end with a character arc in that time takes a hell of a lot of discipline,” says Bennett, who was nominated for a Leo Award for Best Screenwriting in a Motion Picture for Preggoland. “This was probably harder for me to write than anything else I have [written].”
2016 marked another first for Bennett: first television writer’s room experience, by way of the Toronto-shot Kim’s Convenience; Bennett is credited as a story editor on all 13 episodes of the first season, and also wrote the sixth episode. “The writer’s room was really democratic and gentle and amazing,” says Bennett. “I’d read the play [by Ins Choi], and I was very moved by it. It was a dream first gig.” The comedy series – about a Korean-Canadian family that runs a Toronto convenience store – has been renewed for a second season.
Bennett says it was pure coincidence that Kim’s Convenience star Andrea Bang appears in Sunnyhearts, too (as Sunnyheart’s sardonic receptionist, Lucille). Bennett, Bang and co. shot Sunnyhearts in January 2016; Bang was cast in the CBC hit shortly thereafter.
Still, Bennett has enjoyed some unintentional cross-marketing as a result – at least, within her own family. “When we drive past the Kim’s Convenience bus ads, my son’s like, ‘Look, it’s the girl from Sunnyhearts!’” She laughs. “To my son and my son only, Andrea Bang is the girl from Sunnyhearts, not from Kim’s Convenience.”
Stream Sunnyhearts Community Centre on the Convos with My 2-Year-Old YouTube channel. Follow Sonja Bennett on Twitter @sonjabennett123 and @SunnyheartsCC.
