Laura Mullin & Chris Tolley of the PlayME podcast

PlayME

Expect Theatre has created an exciting new initiative that celebrates the best of Canadian Indie Theatre on a national and international scale. The project helps raise the profile of Canadian playwrights by highlighting new works through a series of podcasts, making it accessible to audiences worldwide.

PlayME is transforming the way we experience Canadian theatre, by taking a bold and innovative approach to disseminating plays. The podcast features distinguished actors, and focuses on current and relevant scripts geared to the growing “on-demand” audience.

Expect’s Artistic Directors, Laura Mullin and Chris Tolley are spearheading this project, in partnership with organizations such as The Toronto Fringe Festival and the Playwrights Guild of Canada.

http://www.playmepodcast.com/
http://expect.org/
Twitter: @expecttheatre

Stageworthy:
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Twitter @stageworthyPod
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Transcript

Welcome to episode 113 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre, featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.

If you’re new to the podcast, please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’d also love it if you could leave a rating or a comment about why you enjoy the show. Your comments and ratings on Apple Podcasts help new people find Stageworthy.

If you want to drop me a line, you can find Stageworthy on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram at stagerootypod, and you can find the website at stagerootypodcast.com. And if you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at philrickaby, and my website is philrickaby.com. My guests this week are Laura Mullen and Chris Tolley of the Play Me podcast. Play Me takes new theatre scripts and turns them into contemporary radio plays. Play Me’s new season launches this month with Kat Sandler’s hit play Bang Bang, currently playing at the Factory Theatre in Toronto.

Do you do your own production, editing and stuff? Yeah, we do. We’ve started to hire out a little bit just because we can’t keep up. There’s just too much going on.

But yeah, for the most part, we do all our own stuff in the house. We do the Foley, do… Sorry, I’m just pointing to one email. Do you guys figure out your own Foley? Are you sitting down with mics and what sounds good, what sounds what? Or are you using found sound effects? Yeah, it’s a combination of the two.

A lot of the stuff we use ourselves and build ourselves. So we’re recording and humping tables and looking over stuff. And the other half is using royalty-free purchased sound effects.

Because there’s just some stuff that we just can’t. Or it would take a day to get a sound. The subway sound effect would be like the day to go down to the subway.

Sure, I mean, you’ve got to find the right time. That’s when people have somebody talking next to your microphone. Yeah, exactly.

The sound effects are there. Where was Play Me born? How did that start? Should I jump into it? Sure, yeah. So Laura and I were both writers and directors.

And we have this sort of great love of theatre. And this sense that the magic behind theatre is the fact that it’s so ethereal. It’s there, you have to be in that particular city or town to experience it.

And you have to be there for that very short period of time. And then it’s gone. And that’s kind of the magical thing about theatre.

But also at the same time as a drawback. Because, of course, if you’re not in that place and you’re not there at the time, you’re not going to catch it. And it also means that, especially with a country that’s so large, a lot of the different places, the cities, people in Vancouver don’t necessarily know what’s happening in Halifax.

And people in Toronto don’t know what’s happening in Manitoba. So there’s such a disconnect. And we have a love for podcasting.

So we thought, well, what if we put it together, those two ideas together? And we had also worked at CBC a little bit for – we did a radio drama with the CBC drama department when it existed before we shut down. And so we had a little taste of that. And we thought, well, let’s try and sort of merge these things and create something so that plays will be online forever.

So people will get a chance in 10 or 15 years’ time to listen to, say, Iceland with the original cast. So, yeah, that’s sort of – And I think also just as playwrights, because you spend so much time writing something and you often workshop it and have a dramaturg, compared to like a serialized show, a lot of time and work goes into it. And the ratio of people that see it is so low that it seemed a shame for so many shows to – even shows – and initially our idea was to bring more indie stuff that would maybe be at Summer Works or The Fringe or whatever next stage and be a great show.

But just so many of them, majority of them never go beyond – even if it gets four stars, it doesn’t go beyond that stage. So why not make them into podcasts? Because there is not that many radio dramas out there right now. And if there are, they’re in the old radio style, which is great, but not everybody’s into that.

Yeah, most of the ones that I know of are recreating the old serialized – even if they’re not like recreating old scripts, it’s that like 20s, 30s radio sound that they’re going through. Yeah, very dramatic, which is amazing. But there is room for contemporary, a contemporary take on that as well.

I mean, as you guys were working out what the logistics would be, did you initially think that it would be like a really simple thing that ended up being larger? Or how did – what did it become? What were your initial thoughts of what Play Me would be and what it became? That’s a good question. Yeah, I think we didn’t know whether it would have traction. We didn’t know whether it would work, whether we could get the funding to even move forward.

We didn’t know whether playwrights would want their stuff online. We didn’t know how the actors would feel about it. We didn’t know about ACTRA because there was nothing in place.

So we had to cook us – I think it was about nine months to negotiate contracts with ACTRA. And to their credit, they were really willing. They wanted to make it happen, and we had to work to get to that stage.

So yeah, there were so many roadblocks along the way that we were wondering whether we would be able to get to the point where we could even produce and put something online. I was going to say, I just think that’s been the real learning curve that we’ve had is where we thought it was a good idea, but as Chris said, would a playwright feel that if their play is online, will that lessen the likelihood of somebody putting on it as a production? Or would a theatre company feel that they don’t want to have a show on for free on a podcast? Would that diminish the likelihood of people buying tickets? But I think because we got in early enough, nobody knew what the answers would be to that. But everybody is very game to see the more something is out there, the more likely people are going to know about it and go and see it.

So we’ve had sort of the turnaround of not being able to produce all the stuff that we have opportunities for. So that has been amazing. But I would also say maybe the workload is more than we really understood.

Everything sort of expanded. The workload is a lot more than we anticipated, but also at the same time, the audience is bigger. Because we thought we were being kind of cocky by saying we wanted to put something together that’s national.

We wanted to put something together that people would hear right across Canada. What we didn’t expect was that there would be a huge hunger internationally for Canadian work. So our audiences now, we’re at about half a million, a little over half, more than half a million.

And nine out of ten are outside of Canada. That’s amazing. Yeah.

And that’s, I think, exciting to know that people outside our country are really hungry to hear Canadian playwrights, Canadian actors, and Canadian stories. Because we don’t think of it that way as Canadians. We don’t think that the people outside of Canada are interested in that.

And I remember an article a couple of years ago by Howard Sherman, who used to run the American Theatre Wing, had a great podcast at the time. It was one of the inspirations for me starting this podcast, in fact. He wrote about how in America they know a bunch of British plays, British playwrights.

And in Britain they know a bunch of American playwrights and American plays. But in both places it’s so rare to find. And he was actually like, where are they? And so I remember a whole lot of people saying, look at this, look at this, look at this.

And he was like, there is a hunger. I think we saw that this summer when Soulpepper went to New York. Yeah.

Well, Canada’s pretty hot right now, I think. Especially over there. I think there’s a lot of people that look to Canada and think of it as sort of a nice, cool, democratic, liberal place.

But I think also people, they just like good stories. I wonder, because one of our biggest listenerships is in Iran. And unless somebody emails us and tells us why they’re listening in Iran, we can just guess.

But I suspect some of them might be to learn English. But I think that they’re just liking good work. And whether it’s Canadian or not is maybe a… I think with Iran, too, it’s a very young population.

A well-educated population. And hungry for contemporary European, Western stories. I think that’s sort of a lot of the connection there.

I think that, yeah, because the people that are listening are the largest demographic is in the 18 to 34. Sure. Which is the podcast, people that are more consuming online.

You know, where sometimes people outside of that demographic will say, Oh, I’ve actually never listened to a podcast. Sure. I’m amazed, actually, how many people still say that.

And then maybe there’s enough people in that age demographic that may not have seen live theatre before. So it’s a great crossover. Isn’t it great about podcasts that you can see those details that you might not be able to know for radio, television, anything else, that you can see exactly where people are and that they’re listening? Yeah.

We actually had, at one point, there was this huge spike in listenership from Guam. Philippines. And we’re like, why? And we realized, oh, we had just put on Andrea Scott’s Better Angels.

And it’s all about a nanny coming into a white household. And they start to push the work, push the work. Then she can’t go out.

They take her passport. And it basically is examining domestic slavery and how that can happen in today’s world. And then you go, ah, we can make that connection to that spike in the Philippines.

Even though it wasn’t a Filipino nanny. Right. But the stories were definitely similar.

Aside from Play Me, when did you guys start? I mean, you’re both playwrights, you’re producers. Where did that come from for you? When did you start doing that? Writing and producing? Yeah, when did theater fall for you as a love? Well, probably a long, long time ago. Chris and I met in directing class at York University.

So that’s how far back we go. We were in a class of eight. So Chris and I have been doing this for a long time.

Yeah, we’ve been working in partnership for a very, very long time. Yeah, like straight out of university. Yeah, straight, since we were… And I think we just enjoyed coming up with, you know, coming up with our own ideas and working for ourselves.

And, yeah, Play Me just became just another one of those many things. I think a lot of the work that we do always incorporated some kind of technology or some kind of media. So I think the big show that sort of set us along a certain path was called Romeo Juliet Remixed.

And that was in the early years where people were just starting to incorporate video. So we incorporated video. And it was Romeo and Juliet set in a rave, which is kind of topical now because you’ve got the rock and roll… Tower? Yeah, the Tower Gone.

So it was R&J set in a rave with, you know, all the technological experiences that came out of the rave culture way, way back then. And so we incorporated video and film. Text messaging, which was so new at the time.

I didn’t actually text message when we did it. And then we ended up doing a show at World Stage that incorporated audio where you could… You moved around the space, but you had an audio player that would bring you into the mind of the main character. So as you moved through, and that would help guide you through.

So it was a communal experience as an audience, but also it was a very intimate experience because you were listening with earbuds. So there’s always been sort of that. So Play Me has been a bit of a opportunity for us to take all the stuff that we’ve learned from live theater, from media, from audio, and try and sort of mash it all up.

When you mentioned that you’d worked with CBC before you did Play Me, what brought you into that? Did you have, aside from the multimedia stuff that you’d done, did you have a particular audio background that drew CBC to you? I think we answered a pitch. I think we just answered a pitch. And you never think in some of those things that somebody that doesn’t already have a relationship can actually get in the door.

But we were lucky enough to be able to write a radio play. And Gregory J. Sinclair, who was the executive for radio drama, invited us to be part of the whole process. So we got to be there for all of the recording, and it was so amazing to watch them.

They would do some of the recording in the studio, but then they’d do some of the recordings outside or in different spaces to get different sounds. And then to watch the whole Foley, just right out of the golden days of radio, the old Foley stuff happen and the different floors they would have. Yeah, the space was amazing.

So it was such a visual thing, actually. So that just really, I think, stuck in our minds. Yeah.

It was wild because they had this huge studio with strips of concrete and then wood and then tiles so you could create your footsteps. And then they had these giant staircases and then small metal staircases. They had this little tiny tunnel that you could walk through and record in.

It was just wild. So you were looking at this very old-fashioned art form through a window, but you were inside the cockpit. You felt like you were on the deck of the Enterprise with all these computers and everything.

So it was this tremendous mash-up of new technology and old art. It was really quite spectacular. And it’s a shame that when they killed the radio drama department, apparently they just ripped out that whole studio.

I was going to ask, but… Yeah, they could have rented it. There’s a lot that they could have done with it, but I think they just wanted to make the decision very final. Yeah, no going back.

And then, of course, podcasts. Maybe that was in around 2004, 2005, maybe that we did that? Yeah. And so maybe… I can’t remember exactly when it ended, 2008, 2009? Yeah.

But it just kind of feels like it missed the podcast moment. I mean, there were podcasts. It’s just that not everybody was… That was before radio got a hold of podcasts.

There were still a few… Adam Curry was the podfather. He came up with the whole distribution to RSS. And there were a few outliers and things like that, but it wasn’t what it was.

Public radio hadn’t got into it. There wasn’t a serial or anything like that. Right.

Yeah. So what’s your process for choosing the plays that you do? Well, it has been when we’ve seen a play or had a play sent to us that had a great script. If really you can have a script on stage, then it can still be good, but maybe the writing isn’t the number one thing.

Maybe there’s a lot of other elements to it, but the writing really has to be tight for a podcast. Yes. And it’s interesting because we’ll have a playwright in the room when we record, and they’ll hear it slash see it differently because there’s no blocking.

They stand and they read, and sometimes they move around, but it’s not being acted out. We’re not taping a show in a rehearsal in the same way. And we try to get different voices.

We’re just moving into a new phase where we’re going to be working with theater companies, and we’ll be presenting a portion of their season. So we thought, why are we doing this on our own? Yeah. Why not combine forces? So we’ll be starting in February with Factory Theatre doing Kat Sandler’s Bang Bang.

Nice. Yeah. That’s great.

Yeah. And then we’ve partnered with the Tarragon Factory Musical Stage. That’s Toronto.

We have Citadel Out West, Artistic Fraud Out East, Great Canadian Theatre Company as well. And then we’ve forged other partnerships that we still can’t announce yet of other companies for the next season as well. That’s great.

And that for us is nice because we’re still going to produce some indie work and still have that independent element there, but it also is a chance to sort of connect all these different theater companies and artists together as well. I mean, you were talking about, or earlier you mentioned, I think before we started recording, how you were weekly for a while. Had you intended to run all year long, never stopping before you sort of realized that particular grind and decided to break it up into seasons? Yeah.

I mean, we sort of naively started with that idea. And then we had some things happen that made that impossible. So I was going to say also part of it was funding.

So we’d had a tremendous support from the theater community. We had some decent funding for start-out funds. So we were able to sort of explode onto the scene and then do all our stuff.

And then the money ended. And it takes a little bit of time to get the money out there. And then we were able, we were successful in pulling in money from actually multiple levels of government.

So there was this period where it was a combination of personal stuff that was going on and we just couldn’t get the stuff out. But also we were just in between the funding cycles. For us, we feel very lucky now.

We’ve got funding that is rotational. So it’s composite funding and multi-year funding. So now we’re going to be able to keep it up.

So the plan is that we’re going to go back to weekly. There will be probably a period, say, over the summer where we’ll go on hiatus or we might repeat some of the past stuff. But we’re going to continue to try and feed the beast on a regular basis, something you know, I’m sure, really well enough.

I think it was good, though, for us to take a little bit of a breather because you can’t be cranking stuff out with the small staff that we have and plan and have a big vision. And I think because we had to sort of pull back a little bit, we have been able to come up with a bigger vision, which has been great because we don’t want to just do play me until we get exhausted. We want it to be something that continues, not just because we enjoy doing it, but because I personally would love to be able to go on my iPod as I’m walking to work and listen to a show at Citadel or listen to a show that’s happening at Artistic Fraud.

It’s hard enough to see shows here, and it’s impossible for us, especially with things like Magnetic North and opportunities that were around for you to see if you wanted to make the trek to where Magnetic North was. But otherwise, there’s not that many opportunities, really, unless you’re willing to travel, to really be plugged in because it’s such a big country with small communities spread out far. We hope to kind of lessen that.

That is the interesting thing about this particular country. I think in the U.S., I think that happens a little less because everybody goes to New York. Everybody thinks, New York, the theatre.

Maybe there’s a little in Chicago and a little bit in L.A., but the hotbed is thought of as New York, and here we have a bunch of different hotbeds, a different size, all over the country, and there are scenes that we don’t see. Like, will people in Vancouver know who Kat Sandler is? Whereas in Toronto, we are more likely to. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think also just, you know, I think it would be really amazing, ultimately, for us to be able to bring, like, you know, more perspectives to larger audiences, like art that’s coming out of the Northwest Territories or rural communities or indigenous communities and stuff. It’s just you don’t have to worry about the bankability of a show in the same way that you have to for a main stage because nobody’s buying a ticket. Sure, yeah.

You know, we hope people will listen, but… Yeah, and it also costs much less to produce a podcast than it does. It’s still sadly expensive, but it’s less than mounting a full show, so it means that we can take risks. We can do, you know, a show that probably wouldn’t necessarily make it to the stage for various reasons, which is a tremendous freedom, I think, for us.

Yeah, but it also, I mean, you know, you don’t have to worry about a run. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, you can do it. The run is one episode that people can download and listen to at any time. Do people… Do you rehearse much before? Like, what is the… Like, when you’re putting it together, obviously you’ve planned out, you know, what your foley is going to be, and you know what the play is going to be, and you know when you’re rehearsing, when you’re recording.

What’s the rehearsal process like for a show, a play that’s being recorded for a podcast? Well, mostly the shows we’ve done have had a run, so we’ve almost always, right? Almost always had shows. We were just actually recording one on Monday that hasn’t, but the majority of them have had runs, even if it’s just been a workshop production or it’s been a main stage production. We did Orange Dot that was just at Crow’s.

So we’ve had the benefit of having the cast know the show, which is huge. And then a lot of the foley actually happens after. Chris does the foley in post-production.

Sometimes some things are created in the moment, but largely it’s done after the fact. Yeah. Do you do, I mean, as the actors are familiar with performing the play on stage, are there many changes that need to happen for it to be an audio? Surprisingly, no.

And I think that also as, just when you look at it from a writer’s perspective, I think that’s been the biggest learning curve for me, which is an awful lot of the stage directions that are in there don’t, if you pull it out, it actually adds to the piece because what it does is it forces the listener to really use their imagination and create and paint the world. And quite often you don’t need that information. Sometimes even when you pull it out, there’s this moment of the audience is thrown a bit off because they know something is going on, something’s happening.

They don’t know what it is. It isn’t until a couple lines later that suddenly you fill in and you see what that tension was all about. And so we do, we usually have the writer in the room and occasionally there’s a moment where we go, you know what? We can’t, we can’t deal with this with Foley.

We can’t, we need a line change. And the writers are always very happy to make that change, but that actually happens much, much less than I would have anticipated. Our very first one we did for, which was Nicholas Bion’s Agamemnon, we did have someone read all the stage directions and it really, you know, it slowed down the piece.

Like when you’re doing a reading and somebody’s reading the stage directions, you can always feel the actors sort of like ready to go and having to stop for somebody to say, they kiss, you know, or whatever the stage director. Right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because we read a lot of plays now and it’s like, I just always love when there are not a lot of stage directions in general because it does interrupt the flow.

When we did the Orange Dot, there was a moment where a knife is introduced and nobody says that in the script. So we, you know, that’s just an example of you hear something and I think she, and then if you’re going to change a line, you don’t want to go, oh, a knife. So I think she, we hear her moving around and I think she said, it’s sharp.

And so you have to infer more. I guess when you’re listening to something, you have to pay attention maybe a little bit more. You do, but I mean, your imagination works.

Yeah. I’ve heard some people say that radio is a visual medium. Yeah.

That if you sit and listen, you see it. Yeah. In a way that even in film that you don’t see it.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, and it’s true because the world that you can create inside your head is going to be far, far more interesting than what necessarily somebody can present on either film or stage.

Yeah. You mentioned the other things that you’re doing outside of Plan B. What are some of those things? Aside from the Romeo and Juliet remixed and some of the other things, what else are you working on? Sure. We did a film about a year and a half ago called Awake and that actually came out of a theater piece that we did.

Laura and I were lucky enough to spend quite a bit of time working in the arts up in Jamestown, which is one of the priority communities in North Toronto, and we got to know a lot of the people who live and work there. And a story that came out of there, I don’t know if you remember, it was back in 2005, there was a shooting in a funeral home where a young man who was attending his best friend’s funeral was killed during the funeral. And it just really shook the city to the core.

And that was in the area that we had worked and we were able to connect with a lot of people there, mums, the mum who lost her child, the police, a lot of his friends, some youth who were gang-related, some who had escaped that world. And we put together a theater piece that was verbatim based on that. And from there, we were able to make a film of that.

And so that film right now is touring through the film festival circuit. It’s doing mostly the US and down through Europe as well. It’s going to be at the New Renaissance Festival in Amsterdam at the beginning of March.

What’s it like adapting a theater piece for film? Tough. Because you have to show, not tell. And also because it’s a verbatim piece, it was extra challenging.

I think it’s really paring down a story. In film, I think we started with a candle being lit and then blown out. And if you saw that on stage, you’d note it, but it means so much more in film.

So everything you show is really loaded, every expression. But it was a really great experience. It was a really hard piece because a lot of verbatim theater, the writers are the central figure.

And that’s done for a really good reason because it’s really easy to guide the story, create the arc. And then realistically, maybe half the piece is actually verbatim because if you’re the author, you’re writing your lines. So it gives you a little bit more freedom and it does give it a lot more structure.

We decided that just because of the nature of that piece, it wouldn’t be right for us to be part of it because we were not part of the story. So we wrote Awake in a way where it was verbatim, but we weren’t there. So that was the big challenge was how do you create that structure? How do you create the arc? How do you create all the necessary elements that you need for a piece without being there to be able to guide it? And that became also a huge challenge for the film as well.

So in the end, we ended up focusing just on a very minute part. We focused on the sermon that the pastor gave. And the sermon as that was given, that gave us the arc that we could then riff off of with the visuals and with the moments of being able to tell the story that led up to that moment.

And also film is very literal. In theater, you can, like in our stage play, we would morph into a dance piece or a song. We wanted it to be, we had video in it.

We wanted it to be very multi-arts because it’s such a sad story. We needed to give it some levity. That didn’t, I mean, you can do that in film, but it doesn’t always work.

So we didn’t incorporate that. It was not a long film. And in addition to that, we’ve done a TV show for kids on CBC.

And we do a training collaboration project with 25 young performers that are just starting their career. And we present that at Nuit Blanche every year. So we have a lot of separate to-do lists going on right now.

And how do you keep track of all of these to-do lists? How do you? Not very well. We go, oh my God, we forgot to do blah, blah, blah. Or we write an email saying, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.

But, I mean, so far we’ve been okay. It’s going to get much busier, though, just getting into a busy time. Yeah, that’s always been a struggle for us, just trying to stay on top of it.

The exciting thing is I feel like we’ve never done the same thing twice, which is kind of scary. It’s also exciting. And it means, I think, I feel like we’re always learning something.

There’s space to make mistakes and to learn from. And then the next thing that you do, you’re able to sort of take things up a level. I mean, it can be comforting to do the same thing over and over, and yet also really boring after a while.

You mentioned wanting to do indie stuff and things that happen in fringes and things like that. I was just sort of looking at the list. I haven’t been able to listen to all of your episodes, but I’ve listened to a few.

Have any of the ones that you’ve done been fringe shows that you put on, or is that something that you’re still thinking of for the future? So shows that we have done ourselves? For Play Me. Yeah, Grade 8. Was it Grade 8 or no? Shows that were in the fringe in the past. Is that what you’re asking? Were there any fringe shows that became a Play Me episode? Yes.

Dwayne’s piece. Yeah, Dwayne Morgan’s piece, Grade 8, I think started at the fringe. Yeah, it started at the fringe, and then we made it into the podcast, and then it actually was in soon after the fringe in Hamilton.

And he had people coming up saying that people had come to see the show because they had heard it. Yeah, it moved to Ottawa. Yeah, it moved to Ottawa because they had heard it, which was a little bit of our hope, but we hadn’t been able to track it.

So then to be able to hear that that happened sort of reaffirmed a little bit of what we had hoped would happen with Play Me. Yeah, we really hope that shows that haven’t had a chance on the big stage that we’ll still be able to get to do them, or even ones that have, that people, an artistic director in another area, or audience members will hear the podcast and go and see the show. And that’s very much the idea we’re working with when we’re working with the larger companies like Terragon and Musical Stage and Factory, that people will hear an episode of Bang Bang or Bunny and say, I think I like that show, or I think my mom will like that show, or I think my friend will like that show.

And there is the idea of you shouldn’t know anything about the show before you go. But I think it’s such an on-demand world now, and we’ve been using the analogy that you can get music, download music for free, and the business model behind that is so that you will go to the concerts. Yes.

Yeah. So we’re hoping that more people will go to the Terragon because they heard a podcast and they liked it, and they’ll say, you know, I liked that writer, or like that actor, or like that genre. And our hope too is that because, as you know, the podcasting demo is much younger, quite often it’s much more diverse.

And our hope is that that audience and that crowd will start to connect more with theater and that they’ll go from earbuds to sitting in the theater and that it will help really build the younger audiences for theater. It’s really great. I mean, this is sort of a generation that likes to hear the thing we know.

Yeah. How many people listen to the Hamilton soundtrack and still want to go see it, even though they know the whole show? Right. Some people will read a play before they go and see the show, right? I mean, you know, like I kind of don’t mind having a bit of an idea of what I’m walking into.

I mean, for me, if something is going to be really, you know, violent or really hard to hear, I kind of want to know. I just want to prepare myself a little bit. That’s just me.

But, you know, people have different reasons for that. And I think also, you know, sometimes you can appreciate a show more if you are not hearing it for the first time. I mean, I remember having read and reread Danny McIver’s House many times before I actually finally got to see him perform it.

And it didn’t lose anything for me. In fact, I think I was able to enjoy it a little more because I knew more the detail in the script. And for that, it was like his dynamic delivery, which sort of takes you along.

It’s fascinating. You’re like trying to catch up and what it is and all that stuff. I may just, if I may, take the opportunity to say that we are doing a project with the Playwrights Guild of Canada called Play Me Mono.

And we are going to be interviewing four different high-profile playwrights, including Daniel McIver, and sitting with them live and talking about a monologue that they’ve written in a play, and really just diving into that monologue and hearing about the process of creating that monologue and the challenges. And, you know, rather than analyzing a play as a whole, it’s just this, you know, zooming in on that one piece. So we’re going to be doing that with Daniel McIver, Judith Thompson, Debbie Young, and Keith Barker.

So those will be live events where audiences are invited to come and we’ll record it, and then it will be released. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed about Play Me is interviews after a play, like an interview with Rosamund Small or a dramaturg after and talking about what went into the play. And I always, because I think that not only are the things that we create fascinating, but the minds behind them are fascinating.

So I really do appreciate that after the play is finished on Play Me, that you talk to somebody who was involved in the creative process, and that’s one of my favorite things. So I really like the idea of diving in with these playwrights as well. When is that expected to start? The interviews again? Well, it should be starting with the plays.

So we’re just scheduling all that now. I think we fell behind with The Orange Dots. We have that one outstanding.

But otherwise, we have done an interview for every show, and we will continue to do so. And Play Me Mono. When’s Play Me Mono? Oh, sorry.

It will start to air in May, but the live events are going to happen at the Red Sandcastle Theatre in Leslieville starting in March, March 6. And we’ll have it all on our… I will definitely be keeping track of that. And it will be fun because it’s going to be a very intimate space too. That’s the thing about the Red Sandcastle, because it is such an intimate space.

It’s not like you’re sitting in a massive theatre. You’re in a very small room. And just to be that close to Judith Thompson and hear her talk about her process.

I’m really looking forward to it. That sounds really exciting to me. Are there… We’ve talked about some of the plays that are coming up.

So Cat Sandler’s Bang Bang is starting in February. And there’s some other stuff coming up. Are there… It’s almost an unfair question to ask you to tell me what you’re looking forward to that’s coming up.

But I’m going to ask any particular plays that are coming up that you’re really looking forward to. Well, it’s hard not to be very diplomatic in saying I am looking forward to them all. I have to say I love Cat Sandler’s dialogue.

So I think that’s going to be a really exciting start to it. But I’m equally as excited to work with Peta Moscovich, to work with Musical Stage. Actually, that’s also just really interesting is we’ve never done anything musical before.

You mentioned Musical Stage, and I was very curious about what… Because doing a straight-up play is one thing. But what are you doing with Musical Stage? For them, they had these pieces that they had developed. Mitchell Marcus said, we love this work, and it’s really very strong work, but it doesn’t fit into your traditional theatre presentation.

So they have this great work, but they don’t know how to present it. So that’s when we were talking to them, he said, would this work for a podcast? And we looked at it, and it actually fits perfectly with a podcast. It’s commissioned pieces that are inspired by artwork.

So you have the possibility of having the artwork online so that you can see it, and then you can hear the piece of music, and you can make those connections that way. So we’re doing three pieces from them. And it’s going to… I’m excited by it because you’re experimenting with lyrics and lyricism.

You’re experimenting with music. You’re mashing in art into the whole piece. And for us, too, it’s just, I think, going to be interesting to work with mixing that, and how do you create the… still have the same kind of intimate… the intimate element to it without it being a detached musical.

And unlike a play, when we do a play, it’s almost like we’re taping a TV show where we don’t always necessarily do it in sequence. If there’s like five actors, and most of them are at the beginning and not at the end, or vice versa, we’ll usually try to do it in sequence when we can. But sometimes we’ll record the middle, and then the start.

And if somebody flubs a line, we take it in chunks. It’s not like we run the play from start to finish. But you can’t really do that in a musical.

It doesn’t work in the same way. So we’re just going to live to tape, essentially. So yeah, that’s taking us out of our comfort zone where we’re not musical stage or musical people.

So it’s going to be a great learning opportunity for us. What’s interesting is the idea of just sort of going straight through. The cast album of Hadestown from the New York production of that was actually done in front of a live audience.

Really? Which is fascinating to hear. Because usually we don’t… When we hear a musical, we hear the cast recording, it’s completely separate from the audience. But this was every song, every moment, with the audience laughing, listening, gasping, which was really interesting and really drew me in.

So just even going straight through. Because even when they record a cast album, they’ll stop, they’ll start, they go back, they do the whole thing. But just to go, whatever happens, happens.

So to record that is a fascinating idea. Well, I know that you’ve got to go. So I want to thank you for talking with me today.

I look forward to the next season of Play Me and everything that comes out. That’s great. Thank you so much.

We really appreciate this.