We had our first read-through yesterday for And Bella Sang With Us at Sarah Rodgers' home. I haven't done a Fringe for a decade... but working with Sarah, one of Vancouver's most in-demand directors, on re-imagining a Sally Stubbs play that explores the fraught and forgotten history of Canada's first policewomen? How could I resist?
Maybe things are different here in Vancouver, but in my experience, it's not a typical first reading of a Fringe show when you have senior professionals – Barbara Clayden, Brian Ball – giving design presentations. First readings are always heady times, though, aren't they: full of possibility and enthusiasm; long before the realities of deadlines and budgets and our own limitations set in. And that's especially true when everyone there is doing it for love.
The cast crackles through the first read: I look forward to being in the room together. And I am very excited about fighting again. It's been years since I got to do some quality stage violence, and fight director Derek Metz is going to work with me to help blow the rust off. I've always learned choreography very very slowly, and I'm not able to really go after another actor until I'm pretty sure that (a) I know what I'm doing and therefore (b) they won't get hurt. Then, and only then, am I able to make it look like I want to kill them. Just another of the paradoxes of the theatre.
Tadoussac at the confluence of cultures
"Tadoussac, from the Innu word meaning "bosom" (refers to the capes on either side of the mouth of the Saguenay River, where the whales come to feed)"
Ah, Tadoussac: the place that nurtures both translators and whales.
When I first came to the Glassco Translation Residency, I'd already had over a decade of experience as an actor and playwright, with a sideline as a commercial translator that helped keep my fridge full and my French alive. When I left, I had the draft of my very first play translation, Philippe Soldevila's Tales of the Moon... and much had changed.
Within those ten days, I had been mentored by Linda Gaboriau, the preeminent translator of Québecois drama into English – an elegant and scintillating figure, in person as in prose. I'd shared good Charlevoix cheese, cultural insights, and theatrical war stories with some of the most exciting playwrights and translators in the flourishing theatre scene of Québec, as well as the translator and director Shahin Sayadi from Halifax, and the playwright Greg MacArthur from... pretty much everywhere. Moreover, I'd had a crash course in the thorny/ubiquitous politics of language in Québec... not merely as a topic of intellectual interest, but up close and personal. Everything about me – not only my aptitude and motivation for doing the work, but even the very way I speak the French language (halting-to-fluent mid-Atlantic diction, peppered with jarringly Québecois expressions) – was analysed and challenged. It was hard and it was bruising at times, but it left me with much greater skill, increased self-awareness, and renewed determination. Linda, thank heaven, steered me through it all.
Now, ten years later, I was finally going back, to work with Olivier Sylvestre as I translated his first play, La Beauté du monde, for Pi Theatre. Of course, things were very different this time. Linda had left the leadership of the residency in the capable hands of her protégé and friend Bobby Theodore; there was a whole new group of artists; and the languages being worked in included Cantonese, Spanish, and N’lakap’mux as well as English and French. Meanwhile our societies have (d)evolved in many ways, and our theatrical cultures along with them. Furthermore, I'm different. I'm a mid-career theatre artist now, and a translator with over a dozen plays to my credit: five of them have been produced to date, and three published. I'm no star, but I have a process, and a track record, and fewer and fewer fucks to give about what anyone thinks of my French.
What hasn't altered, is Tadoussac. Not really. It was spring instead of fall this time, so the spectacular sunsets were later every night: but the whales, the rocks, the pretty painted village on a bed of wild... the lovely and spacious old ten-bedroom cabin crammed with folk art, solid wooden furnishings, Bill Glassco's Tarragon Theatre memorabilia, and first-rate books... all were as I had left them. Like the apartment building in La Beauté du monde, the Glassco family's summer home is a character in itself... but instead of the carnivorous beast of Olivier's oneiric and haunting play, she is a gracious and welcoming small-town aunt who offers you seconds of everything.
Just as before, ten days of hard work, laughter, cultural exchange, and linguistic insights were enjoyed by all, with evenings full of good food (merci, Andrée) and good wine. It's still the way you always imagined university would be: the perfect cocktail of solitude and togetherness, communal life and the life of the mind, garnished with long, companionable walks. The sort of environment where Olivier could peaceably translate Jordan Tannahill on one end of the comfy old sofa while I was translating Olivier on the other... and we could help each other when we got stuck. Where my husband and I could both take part, thrilled to be sharing this special place, but spending most of the day delving deep into our separate projects with our separate creative partners. Where Charles could whirl Bea into an impromptu ballroom dance, while good-naturedly arguing about who was going to lead. Several of us opined that we could easily live this way for ages... except that we would miss our loved ones, actual theatre, and Asian food.
Actually, the biggest shift I noticed in the residency itself was generational. Bobby is a much more senior translator than I am, but age-wise he is more or less a peer... as were most of us this year (sparkling Alexis, profound Pascal), except for those (Olivier, Charles, rising talent Derek Chan) who were younger. On my way home, I had a wee drink in Montréal with the brilliant translator and filmmaker Shelley Tepperman, who since that first residency has become a dear friend. She said that, much as she hoped to go back to Tadoussac and felt that Bobby was a great choice to lead, she would miss Linda's stories; the breadth of her experience; her ability to draw on a lifetime of important work with the great figures of our time in order to guide the rest of us and put everything into perspective.
"Yeah," I said. "But I'm realising that, sooner or later, we're going to have to start doing that, too. Passing on whatever we know to the next generation... including Linda's stories. I mean, that's what we do, as translators, right? We transmit what we love, to the best of our ability, to the people we hope will care about it?"
"Huh," said Shelley.
"I know," I replied. "Me, too."
The annual Glassco Translation Residency in Tadoussac, Québec is Canada's only artist residency focused solely on the translation of plays. My thanks to Playwrights Workshop Montreal, Pi Theatre, and Richard Wolfe for this priceless opportunity... and to Briony Glassco and the Glassco family for opening their incredible home every year. You can read more about my translations here.
June: 3 Provinces, 3 Hats
Last month I worked in all three of my major disciplines in the theatre: as an actor, playwright, and translator. This is what my June looked like, more or less:
June 3: Launched this web site, designed by incredible in-law Desirée Sy.
June 4-5: Acted in He Said It and White Wines at the Cultch. (Vancouver, BC)
June 9: Flown to Toronto by Playwrights Canada Press, the largest publisher of Canadian drama (whose board of directors I joined this year) to attend their AGM. All the board members are playwrights. (Toronto, ON)
June 13-23: Glassco Translation Residency to work with Olivier Sylvestre on La Beauté du Monde for Pi Theatre. I wrote more about this extraordinary residency here. (Tadoussac, PQ)
June 26-30: After essentially trying to speed-date the entire Toronto theatrical community in four days... finally flew home.
"Very pleased" with Gertrude Stein
This was the craziest little gig. One week of work on He Said It (written in 1915), part of a double bill of Gertrude Stein plays, along with White Wines. Typical of influential women artists, Stein is someone we often hear about, but seldom hear from. Stein scholar Adam Frank of UBC started with a question: do her plays work? So Adam produced a series of recordings (I did He Said It with Lucia Frangione and composer/musician Dave Chokroun), which he found encouraging enough to gamble on putting a couple of pieces onstage.
Here's what it felt like to spend a week inside the brain of Gertrude Stein: fascinating, frustrating, liberating, flibbertigibbet, a cow. In Adam Frank's arrangement of the text, Sarah May and I loosely took on the roles of Gertrude and her life partner Alice B. Toklas, with Dave as a sort of Narrator/Looming Male Presence. Jimmy Tait – a beloved mainstay of Vancouver theatre, whom I had heard much about but never met – encouraged us to make bold and definite choices about what was going on in the moment, without worrying too much about the whole. So there were little status games and competitions; flirtations and rejections; fears about the outside world, and desperate searches for comfort in the domestic. And there was jazz.
"I was very pleased with embroidery very very pleased with embroidery."
I enjoyed my collaborators immensely. I also learned a great deal from the other company, and from the audience.
White Wines was set to music by Dorothy Chang and tackled by four singers as a blend of choral spoken word and avant-garde opera. Watching them for the first time on opening day, Sarah May and I were reminded of how much of Stein is sonority and swing, and how far you can go by digging into the poetry with precision and verve. The women of White Wines told us that they learned from watching our piece because it sounded like actual conversation – or fragments of many conversations – and we brought a real emotional, psychological dimension to it. I thought Adam could retitle his evening in the style of a dish at a fancy restaurant: "Stein, Two Ways."
The audience for this staged reading – who were these people? The house was packed, and not with a theatre crowd – was vastly different on each of the evenings. Our opening night spectators were giddy and ready to laugh at anything, so the show played as a sophisticated little divertissement. The next night was full of serious people: luckily for us, they felt attentive rather than cold. On instinct, instead of trying to beat the laughs out of them, we just kept plugging into each other: the whole tone of the show became more introspective, vulnerable, and sad (Jimmy and Adam said they much preferred that version). I'm not sure how much of the shift was our doing (second night, settling in) and how much of it was theirs: but the post-show cocktail reception was just as enthusiastic both nights, and these were not theatre people who try to buck you up after opening. As Jimmy said in rehearsal: perform strong clear actions, and people will project onto it whatever they need to. And it's all good.
Welcome to my web site.
I do a lot of things that may seem very different, but I see them all as just part of making a performance in collaboration with other people... usually, although not necessarily, in a theatre. Everything else I'm involved in – publishing books and articles, speaking to students, filing my taxes roughly on time – tends to be related to that.
When I was a child in Bewdley, Ontario (pop. 500), the school library was two small bookshelves in the hallway of my two-room school. So, at the age of twelve, I was thrilled to go to a library in a nearby town which had its own building, with two whole floors! On my very first visit, however, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed upstairs, to the adult library. Instead, I was to be limited to the children's section: to the kinds of books I felt I'd outgrown along with bedtime stories and perma-scabbed knees. I was so incensed at this insult to my intelligence that I marched right out the door and haven't gone near the place since.
I've come back to loving the stories we share with children, including some of the projects in these pages. Three of my plays were created in while I was Artist-in-Residence with the Blyth Festival or the 4th Line Theatre. Many audiences who have connected deeply with the above material might not share my enthusiasm for My Mother Dog. Some patrons of the theatres I have worked with in fairly conservative rural communities might be as shocked by The Vic as my more urbane friends would be nonplussed by the play with the talking quilt. As you'll see, I'm drawn to a wide spectrum of work, from TYA to NSFW. The production photos should give you a sense of which areas of the site you would like to explore. But it's all me, it's all here, and you are welcome to all of it.
May has been a bit of a blur. Here's a brief round-up.
April 28-May 7, 2016: I adjudicated the impressive, even thrilling crop of plays produced over the last season by the students at the the Arts Club Theatre's playwriting intensive, LEAP. I also had the pleasure of addressing this year's cohort on their first day.
May 2, 2016: Mexican Hooker #1, Carmen Aguirre's eagerly-awaited follow-up to Something Fierce, was already an internationally acclaimed bestseller a few weeks after its release. I got to introduce her at her Vancouver book launch. It was packed, of course. The people in the room included some of the Carmem's fellow Playwrights Theatre Centre Associates; her sister; and her first friend in Canada... as well as some people with personal connections to a central story in the book: the story of the infamous "Paper Bag Rapist". It was a moving night of reading... and, of course, salsa.
May 22, 2016: I Lost My Husband. My translation of Catherine Léger's J'ai perdu mon mari, commissioned by Ruby Slippers Theatre, received its first public reading as part of the Ta Gueule series in the rEvolver Festival at the Cultch (Vancouver, BC). My description: Evelyn loses her husband in a bar bet. And she's not too sure she wants him back. Fabulous cast; good turnout; and much, much laughter. And although Catherine couldn't make it from Montreal, she was well represented: her father happened to be visiting from Quebec!
Coming up in June: Glassco Translation Residency, Tadoussac, Quebec
Canada's only residency focused on the translation of plays is the Glassco Translation Residency in Tadoussac, east of Québec City on the St. Lawrence River. The family of the late Bill Glassco – founder of the Tarragon Theatre and a hugely influential figure – owns a lovely summer home there. He began the tradition (which the family has honoured) of turning it into an artist residency for a few weeks each year. Thanks to Playwrights' Workshop Montreal, I translated my first play here – Philippe Soldevila's Conte de la lune – under the watchful eye of Linda Gaboriau, my first translation mentor. Ten years and twelve plays later, I will be returning... this time to work with Olivier Sylvestre on his Governor-General's Award-nominated La Beauté du monde under the watchful eye of Bobby Theodore. (This translation, commissioned by Pi Theatre, will be shared with Vancouver audiences at a public reading in March 2017.)
Playwrights Colony, Banff Centre for the Arts
The segment of the Playwrights Colony that Natasha Greenblatt and I were at Banff for is called "The Retreat". No readings, no actors, just a cabin to yourself for two weeks and one friendly non-judgmental visit from the Colony's director, the magical Brian Quirt. Plus as many of the Centre's activities - concerts, exhibits, readings - as you want to take in. Or not. And people taking care of all the cooking and cleaning and everything that takes time and energy away from your work... And artists from all over the world to break bread with. I made massive progress on my play Turbulence, and I hope to have something to show you all shortly.
There are 8 studio/cabins altogether in the Leighton Artists Colony at the Banff Centre, and each is named after the architect who designed it. My guy, Michael Evamy, was an Alberta star. He designed the Calgary International Airport. Everything here is angles: triangles, diamonds, even a sort of pyramid base. And absolute rivers of light.
I never used the desktop computer except in the evenings, to play a ridiculous but very comforting Youtube video of a crackling fireplace. Mr. Evamy designed my studio with a fireplace, but the Banff National Park bureaucracy overruled him, so I feel confident that the architect would approve.
In the background of the photo above, you can see my writing partners. I also had whiskeyjacks, ravens, squirrels, a pair of elk, and one woodpecker manically concussing himself against a nearby birch tree. Some days I felt like (a very old) Snow White. Hard to believe the rest of the Centre for the Arts is just a little bit over that ridge. In here, I felt like I was in an alpine Arcadia.
At the very end of my residency, I was deeply moved to learn that I was there as the recipient of the George Ryga Playwright Scholarship. George Ryga was, in many ways, the father of English-Canadian playwriting. In 1967, he took a prestigious, big-ass play commission – in Canada's rah-rah boosterish centennial year – and, with the brave, poetic, and stunning THE ECSTASY OF RITA JOE, turned his outraged spotlight on the travesty happening down the street from the theatre: First Nations women being tossed onto the colonial garbage-heap of society. Relevant much? He then followed up with CAPTIVES OF THE FACELESS DRUMMER, a sympathetic look at the FLQ: so controversial at the time that it got the wonderful David Gardiner booted from the AD's office at the Vancouver Playhouse. And Ryga was effectively blacklisted for years. This was a man whose courage, empathy, and sense of social justice knew no bounds. It's a lot to live up to.