Born into an exceedingly creative family — she is the daughter of the late novelist-journalist Carole Corbeil and of playwright-actor Layne Coleman — 23-year-old Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman has already carved out a promising niche for herself in the theatre world, adopting the dual roles of playwright and lead actor for Scratch, Factory Theatre's season opener. The play tells a semi-autobiographical story about loss, love and the evanescence of childhood through the eyes of quirky 15-year-old Anna, a young woman plagued to distraction both literally and figuratively. Corbeil-Coleman is a recent graduate of the National Theatre School in Montreal, where she came into her own. “The decision to go to school for playwriting was a really good one for me because I left [Toronto] and got to be alone and discover my voice," she says. “I learned how challenging it is to write for theatre; it’s the hardest medium to write for, I think.”

You come from a very arts-driven background. How have your parents influenced you?
I think the way anyone grows up really influences their lives and what they do.  I feel comfortable in the medium of theatre because I was around it so much. My dad hasn’t really influenced my writing — we kind of stay out of each other’s creative ways. We support each other, love each other and I’ve definitely learned a lot watching him work. The loss of my mom has influenced my writing a lot because it really engaged me with pain, which is a really powerful place to write from. I didn’t actually read her writing until after she passed away. I’ve just recently come to know her as a writer, and that’s been really lovely, but not as an influence in my writing.

Do you ever feel pressure because of your famous parents?
I feel the normal "what-am-I-doing" pressure of being in my twenties, but I don’t feel pressure because they were artists at all — I don’t hold that in my heart. I think that other people might compare me [to them] but I certainly don’t. I view myself as very separate.

Scratch was first written when you were 16. Can you tell me a little bit about why you wrote it?
I lost my mother when I was 15. I was trying to work out how I was feeling about it and I decided to write a play. It was very urgent and just sort of came out of me and then [I] didn’t look at it for years.

Was there a particular reason you picked that medium?
I think because I grew up so much in the theatre it seemed like the automatic thing to do, which, I guess, is not completely normal. It [just] seemed natural that this was the way I was going to express myself.

You have the very ambitious task of playing a character you created yourself. What challenges have you come across?
Because I’ve already seen four workshops that I wasn’t in, and have seen other actors doing it, I worked through a lot of the writing elements of this play. It’s fortunate that I could enter it as an actor. It’s been very challenging to learn my lines because I have everyone in my head. There are certain ways I hear how I wrote them in my head and that’s not necessarily how it should be acted, so I have to separate those two qualities. Of course, I sometimes get really angry at having to memorize such emotional lines that aren’t that logical [laughs].

You’ve said that you find yourself “cursing the writer often.”
I pretend she’s in L.A. by a pool and I think, "Screw you Charlotte, thanks for leaving me here!"

Of course, grief and loss are major themes of the play, bringing to mind the typified, Kübler-Ross stages of grief. Do you think those stages apply to Anna’s experience?
You can be told you're going to go through those stages, but of course you can’t be aware that you are while you’re in it. So she does actually follow all of the stages but she’s pissed off at being told that she’s in denial…because she’s in denial. 

There is a wryly humourous element to the play. Was this done intentionally as a form of comic relief?
No, because to me, losing somebody is a very absurd thing. The situation of sickness and death often has humour to it because we clearly have no preparation for how to deal with that in our lives. Lots of funny things happen, the way we handle it is very funny and my pain, laughter and joy all kind of live in the same place in my heart.