Audrey Dwyer

Audrey Dwyer has been a theatre artist, teacher and mentor for over fifteen years. She was a mentor for the Summerworks Leadership Program and led the program in 2012 and 2013. She was the Assistant Coordinator and Educator for Nightwood Theatre’s Write from the Hip program from 2008 to 2010. She has taught improvisation with TIFF and leads screenplay courses for young women. Her theatre credits include: Blue Planet (YPT), One Thing Leads to Another (YPT – Dora Awards for Outstanding Ensemble and Outstanding New Play), Patty’s Cake (Carousel Players – Dora Award Outstanding Play), Danny, King of the Basement (Roseneath Theatre). She won The Cayle Chernin Award for Theatre (Playwriting) in 2015. Audrey was the Associate Artistic Director of Nightwood Theatre and was the Artistic Director of Cow Over Moon Children’s Theatre. Audrey graduated from The National Theatre School.

Calpurnia
A hilarious and provocative look at class, race, and appropriation, Calpurnia invites us into an outrageous and unexpected evening at the home of a wealthy Jamaican-Canadian family. As Justice Lawrence Gordon (Andrew Moodie) prepares for an important dinner to introduce his son Mark (Matthew G. Brown) to a Senior Partner at a prominent law firm (Don Allison), his daughter Julie (Meghan Swaby) grapples with her new screenplay. Seeking to redress To Kill a Mockingbird through the perspective of Calpurnia – the Finch family maid – Julie, privileged and disconnected from domestic work, turns to her long-term Filipina caregiver Precy (Carolyn Fe) for research on servitude. But as Julie examines mammy culture from the inside out, her tactics are met with explosive results.

A Nightwood Theatre and Sulong Theatre Co-production
Written and directed by Audrey Dwyer
January 14 – February 4, 2018
Tickets: buddiesinbadtimes.com/show/calpurnia/

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Transcript

Welcome to episode 108 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about Canadian theatre makers featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.

If you want to drop me a line, you can find Stageworthy on Facebook and Twitter at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. And if you want to find me, I am on Twitter and Instagram at philrickaby, and you can find my website at philrickaby.com. My guest this week is playwright and actor, Audrey Dwyer. Audrey’s play, Calpurnia, produced by Knightwood and Sulong Theatre, runs January 14th to February 4th at Buddies and Bad Times Theatre in Toronto. Just one note, during our conversation, Audrey mentions police officers in schools, and recently, thanks to the efforts of Black Lives Matter, the Toronto District School Board decided to end that program.

Here’s our conversation. You studied at the National Theatre School? Yes. But before that, when did you know that theatre was a thing for you? Well, I was raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I went to the University of Manitoba for a couple of years.

Studied English literature and theatre, and I thought I wanted to be a journalist, and then I thought I’d much rather be inside the story than tell the same story that everybody else is telling. So you were already studying theatre when you were at the University of Manitoba? Yeah. So had you been exposed to theatre much before that? Yeah, I mean, I did some theatre in church, like I was in the school play, and I just did a show here, a show there, did a fringe show.

I was going to ask about fringe, because in Winnipeg, there’s no way to avoid fringe, it’s such a central thing. Did the fact that that was such a major part of the community there inform your theatrical direction? Yeah, definitely. I did a few fringe shows.

Improv is also huge in Winnipeg, and so I did a lot of improv too. I did my first professional show at the Manitoba Theatre Center, it was the Crucible, and that was an excellent and fun time playing one of the wild girls in that play. But it was after that that I felt like I wanted to get more training, work on my voice, work on my physicality.

And so, would you hope to get that from the University of Manitoba, or was that something you knew you could get from the National Theatre? Well, actually, I was being directed by Martha Henry in that production of The Crucible, and we were in the stairwell, just sort of hanging out, and she said to me, have you thought about doing this professionally? And I said, yeah, I think I’m going to go to Vancouver and try to be on The X-Files. I love it! Yeah, yeah, and she was like, oh, well, if you go to theatre school, you will be able to develop your voice, you’ll be able to develop your physicality so that you can have a long-term career, and basically have longevity in the industry. So I auditioned, and then I got in.

Nice. Was it the only place you auditioned? It was the only place I auditioned. Wow.

Yeah. That’s pretty good. Yeah.

How was it there? It was, like, huge. You’re constantly in class, you’re constantly pushing yourself. I think the greatest lesson I learned there was awareness, being aware of yourself, and how to get what you need by being aware of what you need.

Was it difficult to change provinces? A little bit, yeah. It was such an interesting time, like finding a place to stay. I didn’t know how to speak French, and my mom came with me, and we looked for apartments together, which was, I think, a little nerve-racking for us both.

I wanted to be close to the school, I wanted to be close to the grocery store. She was very worried about me being away from home for the first time, but we found a place that was a few minutes away from the school, so it was easy to get there and back. Do you think it would have been easier to do that without your mother? Does having your mother help you find a place, add an element of stress? Well, you know what, I was, how old was I? I was 19 when I had my, yeah, first time away from home.

She definitely helped. I didn’t find it too stressful with her. What was hilarious with both of my parents is that they helped me pack my suitcase, and when I got to my apartment and I opened it up, there were 17 rolls of toilet paper and five tubes of toothpaste.

Got to make sure you can get those. Yes, yeah, yeah, they just wanted to make sure that I was okay. Nice, nice, nice.

Did you, were you writing when you were there? We had a playwriting class, but that wasn’t my focus at all. I was way more interested in being an actor. I think I might have written a monologue or two, but definitely wasn’t really focused on that.

Sure. When did you start focusing on that? I think a few years after I graduated. I graduated in 2001.

I started to feel like I needed to write parts for my friends. I needed to just give my friends things to do that they wanted to do on stage and not to play stereotypes. So I started writing.

I started at Nightwood Theatres right from the hip program, and at that time, we just had to write a 15-minute piece. Yeah, I wrote a piece about a young woman burning her house down, and it was what it was, but that’s how I started. Then I started working at Second City in their touring company, and I took a bunch of improv courses and writing courses there because I wanted the challenge of comedy.

Sure. From there, I wrote another piece and then Calparian. Is there something that you were surprised to learn at Second City that you hadn’t learned in any of your other…? Yeah.

I think one of the things that I left with was the immediacy of comedy and always protecting the person with the lowest status. So if you’re making a joke, it’s not good enough to make fun of the person who has the least amount of power. At the end of the scene, they should have the most power.

I’m thinking about old comedy where I don’t think we always did that. Is that something relatively new for Second City, or do you think that’s been there for a long time? Actually, I don’t know. Okay.

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if they felt like it was a necessary thing for politics or if it was about we can’t have an audience of X amount of people laughing at the person with the least amount of power.

Mm-hmm. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense, actually, because I think that an audience today won’t go with that.

Yes. We will side with that person. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about where we’re at in the world right now is we’ve evolved, and that’s what entertainment is supposed to do.

That’s what theatre and film and all of these art forms are supposed to do. They’re supposed to move us forward so that we’re not laughing at jokes about hitting your wives to silence them. That’s not funny anymore, right? But it was before, and people could relate, and that was a beautiful, wonderful thing.

But many years later, we know that that’s not funny. And we have such a hard time looking at those things now. Yeah.

Our parents thought this was hilarious. Yeah. It’s exciting.

It’s really wonderful. Yeah. So Calpurnia is about… Well, it’s sort of about To Kill a Mockingbird.

Yes. It’s about the maid? Yes. Okay.

So tell me a little bit about this play. So Calpurnia is about a number of different things. It is inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird, and if you see it, you will be able to enjoy it even if you don’t know anything about To Kill a Mockingbird.

There’s enough action within it that you’ll be able to see it as a fully realized play. But in it, Julie is trying to reclaim To Kill a Mockingbird by writing a screenplay from the focus of the Finch family maid, Calpurnia. Okay.

It’s strange, because as you’re saying, if you don’t know To Kill a Mockingbird, I’m thinking they’re still teaching that in school, right? Yes. We all, if we went to public school, we’ve read it, whether or not we used Cole’s Notes or Cliff Notes or something like that to get through it. We all have some kind of connection with it.

Yes. If you haven’t read the book, there’s a huge chance you’ve seen the film. What is it that drew you to Calpurnia? The character? Yeah.

Well, I was doing a play where I was playing a maid, and one of my co-actors remarked that the character I was playing was so strong, because she was so silent. She was being berated racially, and she didn’t speak up. And so he felt that I was really strong because I was silent.

And I thought that was interesting, because that wasn’t necessarily a choice. The playwright wrote those lines. It was an interpretation, and I immediately became curious as to why he felt that was a sign of strength.

Anyways, we spoke a lot about it, and he revealed that that stereotype is reinforced through literature, which made him believe that these women were silent, strong and silent. These women, these maids. And I thought, I don’t think that these women were so silent.

And that’s what inspired me to, one of the things that inspired me to work on this piece. It’s true. I think that there’s silence in, like we see it in the portrayal in movies, there’s a lot of that silence.

But I wonder, that’s a white person’s ideal of what the servant should be, is seen and not heard and sometimes not even seen. So I wonder if that’s his experience with that role, then it’s no wonder that he was like that strength. Yeah, possibly.

Mammy culture and that specific stereotype is very intentional. I did a lot of research on mammy culture, and I discovered that one of the reasons why these maids are silent or asexual or almost without a personality is so that these classes that are engaging with either a play, a film, a novel, they can feel like they’ve done nothing wrong by having a maid. Usually those maids weren’t paid well.

A lot of them were assaulted. A lot of them had terrible work experiences. They were not the wonderful family mothers that we have been taught to believe that they are.

So it was a very enlightening time to understand what the function of that maid was. Yeah. It’s interesting because as we record this, we are heading into the Christmas season.

And one of the popular movies at this time of year is It’s a Wonderful Life, which I have mixed feelings about because whenever we see the family at home when they’re in the past, they have their maid that is taking a lot of shit from the younger son. And they’re playing it off like, oh, she’s into it, but she doesn’t really have an option there except to play along. It’s a really kind of uncomfortable, they’re uncomfortable scenes to watch in this quote-unquote beloved film.

But it’s clear that this is a white person’s role, she’s not going to speak up there. Yeah. And these films and these novels, they are beloved.

They just evoke such warm feelings. They are filled with nostalgia. They’re intentionally nostalgic.

Yes. In the film To Kill a Mockingbird, and some people say in the book, it’s just got this beautiful mood of sadness to it. And as we listen to that, we can really be hearkened back to this time when people were racist and sexist, and we can really luxuriate in the fact that we’re not like that anymore.

Sure. The thing that I always found interesting when I read To Kill a Mockingbird, is the racism is so casual. It’s never is just there.

And so it’s really easy to just sort of like, from a white perspective, ignore it, and think, ah, it’s this idyllic, southern, it’s so calm and relaxed. And that’s the easy way to see it when you have the advantage of having light skin. That casual racism has got to be different coming at it from a different point of view.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think if you watch the movie now, which a few friends and I did, we were shocked.

We were shocked by how painful the film is today and how absolutely unbelievable Atticus Finch is the good guy, John Ewell is the bad guy, and everything in between is kind of neutral. Yeah. And so when John Ewell is killed, it’s as if racism is over.

And that’s not the case. The city is absolved of its stain because the bad guy is gone. But the casual racism is vibrant and alive.

It’s one of those books that I feel like, if we revisit it, we need to find a new way to relate to it. And that the way that we’re approaching the dissection of it in school today needs to change. I wonder, because it’s been a long time since I was in school, I was reading that book, and I do wonder how they’re approaching it.

Are they asking the difficult questions, or are we still just reading it for what it is? Don’t ask questions about that, because that’s uncomfortable for us to talk about. There are a few entries in that don’t really change. So the N-word is one of them.

Why shouldn’t we say the N-word? And equality, we’re all equal. Those are the two major tenets of the book, according to educators. I spoke to a friend of mine who said that he’s been trying to, a white guy, has been trying to have the schools that he works at not teach that book.

He tries to recommend other books. And he’s found that over the 10 years, little by little, teachers are discovering that they can’t look their Black kids, their Black students in the eye, because they’re actually not addressing the fullness of the book. It makes them uncomfortable.

Yeah, I mean, how can you read this book that doesn’t, and not address it, because it’s not part of the curriculum, but also read this book that uses the N-word pretty liberally? It’s the same as if we were studying Hakfin. And just using the word in the context of a classroom ignores what that word means to the people of color that are hearing it. And you’ve got one part of the book, Tom Robinson is escaping from the police, and he’s shot at 17 times and dies.

And so you read that today, and you’ve got young Black men in the classroom. And if you’re not dissecting that and looking at police violence, not just in the United States, but here in Toronto, if you’re not willing to dissect that, then how are you serving all of your students? You’re not. You’re not.

If we don’t look at Boo Radley, who for some is the first time they’ve read about a person with mental illness, if you’re not dissecting that, if you’re not talking about mental illness, then you’re missing a huge part of the book. It sounds like we’re still teaching the book in the same way we did 20 years ago. Because you could do, from all of these themes, you could do an entire semester dissecting all of these things in a high school.

But they’re just like, just read the book, get to the next one. And I mean, I think that we know that we’re all equal already. In fact, Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, we know that we’re equal.

So how are you, like, we don’t need that lesson. And I also think that a lot of white people know that we’re equal. So if we can all agree that that lesson has been learned, then what else is there? There’s so many other things we could be taking from that book.

A part of the play that I really wanted to address was allyship, how we show up for each other. I think kids, with their simply learning that we’re equal, when bad things happen, like racism or sexism or Islamophobia, when bad things happen, you go, oh, I would never do that. I’m good.

As opposed to going, oh, what can I do to help? And so I think that that’s one of the ways that we can look at this book. Sure. I think that’s definitely an important question to be looking at.

You unpacked a lot about the book. And so for looking at The Maid and in your play, which is about somebody writing a screenplay, how does all of that come out? Yes. OK, well, I put that all of the allyship, racism, sexism, classism, I put that in the action of the play.

And so you’ve got a young woman who is named Julie. She’s from a very wealthy class. She’s Jamaican Canadian.

And she’s writing the screenplay. She’s having trouble. She can’t find Calpurnia’s voice.

And she needs to she needs to go deep and find it. Her brother, Mark, suggests that she’s unable to because she’s not black enough. And they both have their own concept of blackness.

She’s in a bind that pisses her off, that strikes a chord for her. And she proceeds to do the work. She proceeds to do some research on how to find that voice.

The concept of not black enough is something that we heard. We heard in the States during from some people during the Barack Obama years. It’s something that I think I’ve heard thrown around occasionally.

Is that do people like is that something that people get told frequently that they’re not black enough or? Well, you know, I think that the the thing with being black is it’s something that people feel like they can comment on, that it’s something that can be assessed. Sure. It your your connection to your culture is so unique.

It’s so personal. It’s so intimate that it’s it’s oddly accessible. Yeah.

And I think it happens on many levels. It happens in the queer community. You know, if if someone doesn’t read you the way they expect to read you, then they can judge you based on what you’re supposed to look like, you know.

Has Calpurnia been performed before? No, I’ve had a couple of stage readings of it. One was Nightwood’s New Groundswell Festival in 2014. And it was absolutely wonderful.

It was a great time. The room was packed. We had to add more chairs.

Calpurnia is a comedy. And people were laughing. People were standing up looking around.

It was it’s one of those plays where you’re laughing, but you’re not sure you should be. And you’re, you know, looking at your peers around you going like, should I be laughing at this? It’s really, it’s it’s really great for that. How long did it take you to write? It took me about three years.

I was a part of the Obsidian Writers Unit. And I was writing something that was just awful. And at the time, I was also in a play.

And I, you know, spoke earlier about the conversation that I had. And I had asked a friend of mine what he wanted to see in the theatre. And he was like, I want to see something that has to do with the past, but is a part of the present.

And we brainstormed for a bit. And I was like, oh, Gone with the Wind. And I was like, no, we can’t do Gone in the Wind.

Another theatre company is doing Gone with the Wind. I was like, oh, Casablanca. Like, oh, no.

And then I remembered To Kill a Mockingbird. And I had read it and studied it in high school. So I thought, there’s something there.

Did you find it, I mean, every play has its difficult moments. Did you find it difficult to write? Or was it an easier play to write? Well, the first draft flew out of me. It was just, have you had that experience? Yeah, I have.

And it doesn’t always bode well for the second draft. But the first draft can really just sort of fly out. And then we have to fix it and make it good.

Yes. Yeah. The first draft I wrote in like four hours.

It was just magic. And then we had a reading at Obsidian. And people laughed and people were very supportive.

They were like, this is the piece. This is it. It’s like, this is juicy.

And then I got a grant and I worked on character and plot. And I wrote 200 pages, and it was just too much. And then I got another grant and we like pared it all the way down.

So it’s such a process. Yeah. You know, the play that you were writing that wasn’t very good.

And this is like, one of those things that’s fascinating. Anyone who writes has had that moment. Yes.

This is the thing that I’m writing. And it’s a train wreck or whatever. How did you figure out that it was? Because sometimes you can be blind to how bad something you’re working on is.

And sometimes it just smacks you right in the face. Yeah. Was it apparent to you right out of the gate that this was not working? Or was it? Yeah.

You know, I wrote this play. And I mean, I think it was okay. It wasn’t exciting off the top.

And so I thought, well, I’ll just work on it and I’ll find the excitement of it. But I was bored. It was about, you know, it was about a mom and her two daughters.

And I just couldn’t get the fire going. I really wanted to write something that had people sit up in their seats. And as an actor, I know what it feels like to be in something that is fiery.

You know, like when it’s almost like no acting required. The words and the conflict are so hot that it’s actually exhilarating. Yeah.

Yeah. I’ve only had the pleasure of seeing a couple of things that have just like you sit down and it starts and you just sort of immediately forward on your seat. Everybody in the room knows it’s good.

Yeah. I’ve also seen things that are just sort of like, they don’t have the fire. They’re just sort of like there.

They’re okay. Yeah. They don’t draw you in.

Yeah. I really wanted to write something that had people sitting at the edge of their seats going like, I cannot believe this. And as I was writing Calpurnia, there was a point where I felt nauseous and I went, okay, I’ve got something.

You know, one of my theatre mentors said to me that we want to see the character get into the mud. We want to watch them get out of the mud. And with that piece that I was writing that I didn’t like, nobody was in the mud.

Yeah. Everybody was just talking and the information and narration, but nobody was in trouble. So I wrote a piece where like every character is in trouble.

That it’s, I think that’s something that we sometimes forget is then is how important it is for our characters to, to get into shit. We’re so polite. And sometimes in Canada, our theatre is really polite.

Yes. And we’re so polite that we don’t want these characters to get into too much trouble. Yep.

But we kind of, like kind of gotta, gotta just like, like you said, crawl into the mud. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Can I ask you what it was that was making you feel nauseous? Well, uh, you know, Julie does something that’s just terrible. I’m not going to tell you.

I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to know. It’s like that, that.

Yeah. And did you shy away from writing it or did you know that you just had to stick with it? No, I had to stick with it. I mean, you know, this mentor of mine gave me that advice, but working in improv also taught me that, that like live theatre requires something messy and something instinctual, something visceral that you, you mean, you know, the average person might never do, but the character is like, Oh, I’m going to do that.

I’ll do it. The stakes are so high. The need is just so strong.

So one of the things you were kind of to send me your bio, and a lot of people don’t do that. I go into a lot of these things blind. I mean, one of the first things in your bio is talking about your work in social justice and things like that.

Um, a lot of, a lot of playwrights are just content to just like, I’m just a playwright. You know, I don’t, don’t have to deal with these things, but to put that, you put that front and center, which sort of like indicates how important it is to you. And so what draws you to that? Well, uh, it’s very important for me to be doing whatever I can artistically to move the conversation forward and to promote action.

And so in the pieces that I write, I, empathy is very important to me, but action is also very important to me. And so in the play, I display allyship and I display awful allyship. And I do that to show us the audience ourselves, you know, um, I show what it is to be a frustrated young black woman.

I show what it is to be, uh, a young black woman, who’s coming into their politics and what it looks like when you mess up and what we do with people who mess up, you know, there’s this sort of, uh, disposability culture that, you know, if you mess up, uh, politically, if you say something wrong, someone’s going to call you out and then you’re like excluded from community. I wanted to, uh, show audiences like what that looked like. Not everybody’s going to be able to identify it as, um, as politically as some of my friends would, but all in all, I do feel like it, it’s, it’s my way of contributing to what the world would look like if we all had the same amount of power.

It’s interesting because thinking about, you know, you’re saying that, that, you know, maybe some people won’t see the poli- like how political it is or those things. In a way, in my mind, that’s a little, that’s more effective than wielding a sledgehammer for the political message because it gets under your skin if you don’t know it. Yeah.

Whereas when you try to hit somebody over the head with your idea, they, they tend to get out of the way. Yes. Um, so for the people who recognize the politics, that will be something they go, yes.

And for the people who don’t quite recognize it, it’s going to, it gets under the skin in an effective way. Because I think, you know, for a lot of these characters, they’re just doing their thing. Yeah.

Um, you know, I have a character named Thompson who, um, is an older white man. He’s got a Jamaican wife. He has mixed race kids.

Um, he’s deeply connected to his wife’s Jamaican family and he travels to Jamaica. He has a full and varied experience of, uh, blackness, which gives him permission to comment on it. So he thinks, and so, you know, when you have people who are, um, you know, given permission by a certain group or a certain group of people to engage, you know, we, it’s interesting to me that racism, uh, like sexism, uh, is one of those things where you think that you’re not doing that thing because you’re a good person or you, you have a background, but what we forget is everybody’s an individual and it’s not enough to treat people the way you would want to be treated.

You got to treat people the way they want to be treated. And that just means more work. Yeah.

No, it’s interesting because the idea of, because you have a relationship with black kids, black wife, whatever gives you the perspective and a white guy would think that, right. Yeah, totally. Um, I grew up, my brother, my brother’s adopted, he’s black.

So, um, I grew up with, uh, I think early on a bit of a, the same kind of idea when I was, when I was younger. Um, it wasn’t until much later that I realized how different our perspectives were, um, because his movement in the world was different from my movement in the world. When I learned how often he was pulled over when he was just trying to do work.

Yeah. You know, um, that kind of thing and all the little, all the little things that he experienced that I had no idea about because that’s not how I see the world. Um, it was shocking, but also an important lesson to learn that even though we grew up together, our experiences are different because of the pigment of our flesh.

Um, wait, do you feel shocked still when he tells you these things? Always. Yeah. Because again, I know it, but to hear it like, um, and you know, now he’s got three kids, two of whom are boys and, and young black boys go from being cute to being considered dangerous almost overnight, depending on their size and their age.

Um, and to watch that happen to his kids as well, I’m constantly shocked by, by that. And not because part of it is I like to think that people are supposed to be better than that. Um, and so I’m shocked by that.

I’m shocked by the fact that it still happens and it’s almost 2018. Um, but also, you know, I’m, I’m thankful that he keeps reminding me cause I don’t get to be complacent about it. It makes me question things that I do, which I think is important.

Yeah. Um, and it’s made me aware of my own white fragility, which some white people don’t like to hear about, but it’s like, it’s made me very aware of it. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean like the, I think the common response is shock, right? And I think one of the reasons why, uh, we get shocked is because we have, uh, we have a very like skewed idea of like what the world is. And I’m saying this too, as, uh, someone who consciously, uh, tries to feel like the world is like this wonderful place all the time.

You don’t want to leave your house. Um, you wouldn’t leave your house if you thought that every interaction was going to be horrible. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, my goal with Calpurnia is to show people what to do when you are shocked because it’s the shock goodness, if that’s a word, it’s the shock goodness that, uh, makes us frozen when we could be doing something about it. You know, um, it’s the down more than ever, I think.

Well, I mean, I think you’re right because we’ve gone. I remember, do you remember the, that glorious age just after, you know, maybe like less than 10 years ago, just after Barack Obama was elected president and everybody was talking about how we live in a post racial society, how quickly we have gone from, Ooh, race doesn’t matter anymore to hearing about Nazis marching in the streets. Yeah.

And here as well. Yeah. We think we’d like to think that it’s a Canadian problem.

Yeah. It’s American problem. It doesn’t happen here, but it is here.

Yeah. I mean, it’s here. And the scary thing is it’s always actually been here.

Um, and that, you know, post racial, I know like one man becoming president of the United States doesn’t really change the lived experience of so many, um, African American people. Um, nor does it change the experience of, uh, black Canadians, you know, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a thing. Um, but it’s not the thing.

No, no, it’s not the thing. It is interesting though. I think, um, how slow we in Canada are to recognizing that we have our own work to do.

And, um, I addressed that slightly in Calpurnia, um, because Julie is essentially writing about an African American, um, experience. Uh, her brother says that she should be writing about a Canadian experience and she addresses colonization in her work. And, um, it’s just a brief moment where we get to see what her politic is as she is growing through her politics.

She’s like pushing through, um, her values in order to, to grow. But it’s in Canada, I feel like, you know, we still feel like it’s, it’s not the same in many ways. It is the same.

When one of the first times I was in New York just a few years ago, um, this was like, just after, I think it was Eric Garvey. And there was the massive march that really kind of launched the Black Lives Matter, Matters movement, um, sort of like galvanized it into a thing. It was a march that had been going on for like one o’clock in the afternoon.

And my girlfriend and I, at the time, we encountered it at like six o’clock at night. And, you know, we watched it, we stood in it. And as we were leaving, number one, we were able to leave it, you know.

But also, um, we left feeling so smug that this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Canada. And it was later on that I started really, you know, talking to my brother and his, and his kids and things like that. And just that it does happen here.

We’re quieter about it in some ways. And in some cases we don’t, it’s not quite as dramatic, but it happens here. And we, white people, get to ignore it in a way that people of colour don’t.

Yeah, I mean, I had to take pause because you actually, like in New York, you were able to walk away from it. Well, that’s the thing, right? Whereas I feel that a lot of African Americans did that march with the complete risk of their life. Absolutely.

Risking employment. It’s such a huge risk to go on those marches. And I think, you know, here in Canada, we we really, it’s not in the news.

It’s not documented in the same way. It’s, it’s here and it’s always been here, you know, stop and frisk. We’ve got carding.

It’s, it’s terrible. Not to mention the stuff that happens that has no name, you know. Yeah.

There’s nothing, I think, more frightening than how police in schools have been quite normalized. And I wonder about that, you know. In the second part of the play, we get to see how Mark is like working on a case.

He’s a lawyer. And I touch on police violence slightly. But I think, you know, having police in schools and the normalization of that is harrowing.

And, you know, we, it happens here. The kind of racial violence, it happens here. We’re not exposed to it in the same way.

And it’s so easy. Again, because of, I think, books like To Kill a Mockingbird that are dated, nostalgic, that we as Canadians are left going, oh, well, not us. Yeah.

But in fact, us, big time us. Oh, yeah. I heard, I was talking to somebody and they, you know, they had their father had grown up in the States and he was black.

Her father said that he preferred racism in the States to racism in Canada, because at least in racism in the States, you knew where it was. And in Canada, it was behind a hand or so polite that it was, it was ugly. How subtle it was.

Yeah, it’s those kind of microaggressions can really, really chip at you. And it can leave you feeling quite displaced. There, it’s, it’s unnameable.

Yeah. And it’s insidious. Yeah.

Yeah. I think a lot of racism is also couched in ignorance, is couched in, I didn’t know any better. And it’s, it’s really, it’s so harmful.

We’ve, white people are so easy. We forgive it. My uncle didn’t know any better.

Oh, it’s just uncle Ted. He’s, he’s from another time, you know, instead of, instead of like, calling uncle Ted out for being a racist. Yeah.

Things like that. We, we allow it. Yeah.

Yeah. And there, I mean, there are countless things that people can do. I mean, they can Google it and find out what to do when their uncle’s being racist.

There are classes that you can take, you know, you can just say, stop, you can start with stop and then see what happens next. It’s just about moving from being shocked to action. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s also about understanding that in terms of allyship, that you’re, you’re never off the hook as an ally.

Like you’d never get your ally gold star. It’s always something that you’ve got to like hand in at the end of the day. It’s always a work in progress.

And you know, as soon as you’re patting yourself on the back for a job well done, then you know, you’ve done something wrong. No, you, you, you get to, if you had a silver star, you get to give that back. Yeah.

You can give that back. In my writing, I’m, I’ve written a rule for a Filipina actress, Julie’s maid is Filipino. And so I have Filipino relatives and Filipino friends.

And I knew that from my experience as a black person, who’s played tons of different roles, I knew that as a, as a writer, I needed to honor the people that I was writing. And so for me, it was really important to have theatre people read it and give me extensive notes. And to have non theatre people read it.

And also give me extensive notes. And that in the rehearsal process, to be working like alongside our actress who will be playing pressy, to make sure that I’m always on point. Because anytime I feel like, as a black woman, I’ve, I’ve got it, then I know, then that I’m, I don’t.

So it’s, it’s, as an ally, it’s very important to check yourself and to be always willing to listen and self reflect and apologize and do the work. Yeah. And I think, I think some of us are really bad at apologizing when we get it wrong.

Yeah. Defensiveness. It doesn’t help.

Yeah. And, you know, I’m sorry, I got it wrong. I’ll do better.

So I didn’t know. Yeah. Yeah.

It’s interesting, like looking at To Kill a Mockingbird now, and, you know, the character of Scout, such an innocent, also an icon, a huge icon for the queer community. And, you know, Atticus teaches her about racism, the mob of angry men who want to lynch Tom Robinson, you know, meet him at the courthouse and XYZ. Anyways, he tells Scout that these, this lynch mob has a blind spot, that their passion for killing this black man who’s innocent is a blind spot.

And that’s always stood out to me. Because that, that kind of hatred, that kind of action is not a blind spot. It’s a choice.

And so, you know, when you look at the book, and you go, okay, this is how we’re teaching our young people about racism. This is how we’re letting them kind of sit back in a passivity that only makes things worse. You know, if we’re on the bus, and we’re seeing something that is racist or sexist, it’s our duty, like we can’t sit here as Canadians and say we live in the best country in the world.

And when we see things, where we’re like, well, I can’t believe that happened. Or, oh, that’s not me. We have to, we have to speak up.

And so that’s one of the reasons why I’m, I’m, I feel like there are, there are other ways to examine the book, which is one of the reasons why I wrote the play. Yeah, yeah. No, we need, as you talk about it, I think, you know, how are we still, how has the curriculum in schools not evolved, that we’re still reading these same, these same books in the same way? We need, like, there are other books we could be reading.

Yeah, I mean, you know, these, some of the teachers love the book. And it’s so easy for them to talk about a book that they know that they have like an emotional connection to. I think it’s very expensive to buy new books.

Yeah. You know? Also, curriculum is, it’s calcified and solidified by people who are not the teachers now. Yes.

And it’s, it’s, like, they don’t have the freedom that they used to have. Yeah. I feel like when I was in school, the teacher might be like, all right, we’re reading this book.

They have a list of books that we can read. Everybody does these ones. Here, we’re going to read this one.

Yes. And now it’s like, these are the books we’re going to read. Yeah.

But again, I wish that we’d examined them in a more deep way. This play, you said you’re in rehearsal. We start rehearsal on December 18th.

Okay, so that’s coming up. Yes. The show opens, like, near the beginning of January.

Yeah, we open on January 17th. Yeah. So, like, this is, like, got to be pretty exciting.

I’m really excited. I really am. As director, I’m absolutely thrilled and thankful that it’s being produced by Nightwood Theatre and Sulong Theatre.

So I, honestly, I can’t wait. Yeah, everything’s moving right along. Got to be kind of like a locomotive at this point.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re having tons of meetings and everything.

It’s really great. Are you on social media? Yeah, I mean, I’m on Facebook. I don’t tweet.

Do you Insta? I am on Instagram. But my Instagram is private. Okay, that’s fair.

That’s fair. Do you have a website? No, but I should get one. Everybody’s telling me I should get one.

It really helps when people want to Google you. It’s like, it just comes up. Yeah, if you Google me, you’ll just get like a bunch of headshots and old plays.

There’s a lot of information about Calpurnia, if you Google you right now. Yes. Yeah, that too.

Calpurnia, that too. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Phil.