Retrospective | Stageworthy

In this, the 300th episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby presents a retrospective of some of his favourite episodes from the past 5 years. There have been so many conversations that it would be impossible to present all of the favourites, so we’ve narrowed it down to 6: Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Siobhan Richardson, Philip Akin, Helen Knight, Diana Tso, and Tanisha Taitt. You’ll find links to the full episodes of the selected episodes below.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 300 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’ve enjoyed this podcast, please consider supporting it. You can do that by dropping a virtual donation in the tip jar. I’ve put a link to that in the show notes, which you can find at the website or on your podcast app, or you could buy some merch at the online store shop.stageworthyproductions.com. In the store, you will find Stageworthy t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and more.

All of your purchases and tip jar donations go towards Stageworthy and help me continue to bring you great conversations in Canadian theatre. And if you can’t donate or buy from the store, please consider rating and reviewing this show. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, you can leave a review right in the podcast app.

And if you don’t listen on Apple Podcasts, you can still review the show by going to podchaser.com, searching for Stageworthy, and rating the podcast there. Thanks for listening, and thank you for your support. You can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website with the archive of all 300 episodes at stageworthypodcast.com. And if you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at philrickaby, and my website is philrickaby.com. Like I said, this is episode 300.

You know, when I started this podcast back in 2016, I never thought about reaching 300 episodes. I thought it would be a pretty amazing accomplishment if I got to 100 episodes. So reaching this milestone is pretty amazing.

I’ve been hosting this show for over five years, and in those five years, I have had some wonderful conversations. So for this milestone episode, I wanted to bring you some excerpts from some of my favourite conversations of the last 300 episodes. Now, I’ve enjoyed so many of the conversations I’ve had on stage where that it would be impossible for me to include them all.

So I’ve narrowed it down to six. Now, some of these conversations were had in person in rehearsal halls or in green rooms back when we could do that, and some were in more control spaces like a studio or over a meeting link. So the audio quality of each conversation varies, but I’ve tried to clean it up as best I can.

I’m going to put a link to the full episodes from each of these conversations in the show notes. Let’s start with my 2017 conversation with Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. Paul is most famous for his roles as Appa on the CBC show Kim’s Convenience, as well as his appearances as Carson Teva in season two of the Disney Plus series The Mandalorian.

At the time of this interview, Kim’s Convenience was just in its first season on CBC, and Paul was about to reach his 400th performance of the role of Appa in the stage play of Kim’s Convenience. Paul was also very active on Twitter and Instagram. He still is.

So I asked him about his handle, Bitter Asian Dude. It was kind of tongue-in-cheeky. There are moments, I mean, I’m sure you can ask my friends, when I get my hackles up, I tend to rant a little bit.

When I was younger, I was bitter. I was blessed with hair loss at a very early age. And so much like you, I was told that once I got older, I would probably find a lot more work.

Yeah. I started losing my hair when I was 21. And, you know, because of that, because I was going bald, basically, I wasn’t, I was too old looking to play the roles that were in my age group, right? And so I got sent out for older roles, and I was too young looking to play those roles.

So I kind of got screwed on both ends. And, you know, that was sort of hitting not a glass ceiling, but just having doors of opportunity closed to me because of not only the way I looked, in terms of, you know, my hair, but because of the colour of my skin. Time and time again, you know, that affects people.

And I, you know, I get it when the younger generation feels like, you know what, we’re not given any opportunities. We’re mad. We don’t want to take it anymore.

I’ve been there. I understand that. And, you know, and like when things aren’t going well for you in the area that you’re very passionate about, and you let it affect you, it bleeds into the rest, into your other parts of your life, you know? And for me, looking back at it now, I let it affect who I was.

And I was still fun. But there was this undercurrent of nastiness and bitterness that maybe I was using as a defensive mechanism. You know, I never used my anger or bitterness to hurt people.

I always sort of deflected it in a very, very humorous way, you know, towards my situation, or, you know, this is why I didn’t get it because I’m racist, you know, or this or that. And just stupid things you say that when you’re younger, you don’t know any better, and you just want to vent, you start to say. So when it came time to picking a Twitter handle, I just wanted something that A, people would recognize, and it was easy to remember, and B, that people get a laugh at.

And so, you know, it’s worked. Yeah. Your early days in the theatre, you’re talking about the, you know, not finding the roles there.

And believe me, around the same time that you were losing your hair, I was also losing mine. So I feel you. And, you know, having a young face, but a old scalp, could be a difficult thing to deal with in the business.

But then I had the advantage of some some white privilege there. So it didn’t affect me in the same way that it did. Like, because I don’t get seen in the audition room in the same way as a person of colour.

The role that you were getting in the back in there, when you were, you know, before, in the days before Kim’s Convenience, did you find a lot of stereotyping? Or did you were you able to find a community that was able to, to give roles that were worthy comes to mind, but more like just like, like people and not an Asian character in air? Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. On stage, I was always given a better opportunity than on screen, to be honest. You know, I remember the first big play that I was actually sort of recognized that and people sort of probably it was the second play I ever was called Mom, Dad, I’m Living with a White Girl, written by Marty Chan.

And he, it was he was having his Toronto premiere. And it was this about this Chinese couple and their son and the son was dating a white girl. And he was, you know, the son was a bit of a he’s a bit of a milquetoast and a mama’s boy was definitely afraid of how his mom was going to react.

If his, you know, when she found out that his girlfriend was white. And they were having a really, really difficult time casting the father in that role. Because, you know, it was the play was divided, it was a two structure, there was the regular world where it’s, you know, the older Chinese parents, and at the sound of a gong, it would slip into this fantasy world of the, you know, the old B movie, the peril of the yellow tongue type thing with it.

The parents were like the mom was the arch villainess. And the father was the toady sort of henchman. And, you know, they were chasing down agent banana, who was a son and the white snow princess, who was his girlfriend.

And it was difficult for them to cast because they needed an actor who looked old enough to play, believably, the father who was in his 50s. But who had the physicality and the stamina and the comedic chops to be able to play the over the top henchman in, you know, in the yellow parrot, the yellow claw world. They were killing themselves.

Because they could find actors who were old enough to play the dad, but who couldn’t do the physical stuff. And then they could find younger guys to play the physical stuff, but weren’t old enough, looking to play the father, believably. And, you know, I sort of slid in with my, you know, receding hairline, and my ability to grow facial hair.

And, you know, it was like almost a perfect fit. And so you know, that character was my first sort of foray into like, oh, okay, this is an actual, I’m not a stereotype, I play a stereotype. So I get to play that up.

But at the end of the day, he he has, you know, he’s, he’s a dad, and he’s worried about his son, and he fights with his wife, and, you know, things like that. And so that was my, you know, my second ever professional role that I’m very, very proud of. And theatre has afforded me a little bit more in terms of giving me characters to play.

I think that’s just the nature of theatre is the fact that, you know, time is limited, space is limited. So you’re not going to waste it with characters that don’t add to the play. Everybody should have like an integral role or this or that.

Film and TV, not so much. You know, that’s where I found most of the stereotypical stuff that, you know, you saw bang your head against the wall and go, oh, okay. And, you know, I’m not going to complain too much, because they put bread on the table for me, you know, they paid me, I went in, but you know what, they’re not satisfying roles.

I mean, if you look at my resume, the majority near the beginning, you know, the day player parts, I made a career as a day player, I show up, I’m the king of exposition, I explain things, and then I disappear. And so I played a lot of ER doctors, I played, you know, a couple of lawyers, I played, you know, a clerk, all these things, nothing really substantial. Again, it’s just I am a cog in a wheel to help pull the story along.

Because the writer didn’t do a good job to sort of get the main action of the story told. And I mean, that’s the way it is. Or like, whenever something big did come up for film and TV, it was always, oh, oh, it’s a Chinese gang.

Okay. Or, you know, it’s just all the same old, same old stuff. And if you look at it, well, who’s the writer? Oh, they’re not Chinese.

Okay, enough said, right? And yeah, me and some of the other actors, we joke about it’s like, okay, you know, they want these gangsters. But these are gangsters from the 90s from a Chow Yun-fat movie, right? Yeah, real triads don’t act like that anymore. That’s so not how, you know, and it’s so even in that, sort of, you know, you’re gonna get me to play a stereotype, at least have it, let it be a relevant stereotype, one that’s at least contemporary, instead of something that’s stuck in the past.

Yeah, so there’s that. But I mean, with all that too, there have been generals that I’ve been, I’ve had an opportunity to play, that have been very, very wonderful. You know, and it started with Randy Ko on Train 48.

You know, that improvised soap opera where I was able to, they gave me a ring to develop a real character, somebody who wasn’t just one note, that wasn’t just the colour of his skin, or just did one thing was defined by one single thing. You know, he was a complex, fully realized character, which I love. You know, Shoot the Messenger, I was able to play Marty Chen, who was the lawyer for the Gazette.

And I was able to work with some incredible actors and learn from them, as well and talk about their experiences. And of course, Kim’s Convenience, which is like the crown jewel for me. Yeah, to be, you know, to be given the lead on a television series is something I never, ever, ever thought was going to happen.

Totally honest. You know, it’s just, it’s not in the books. And you look at me, and you look at my body type, and my lack of hair, and I’m not sexy.

I’m not young. You know, it’s just like, what’s out there for me? You know, and then along comes Kim’s Convenience and just upset the whole, upsets the whole boat. And that’s why, you know, every moment I spend on set, I’m living a dream.

Siobhan Richardson is a powerhouse. She’s an actor, a singer, a fight choreographer and teacher, and she’s also an intimacy director. She’s also a good friend of mine.

So anytime we get to sit down and talk theatre, it’s always a good time with some really great conversations about theatre and performing and pretty much everything. She’s been on the show a few times, but the conversation I chose was from back in 2017, when she just started as an intimacy director. As somebody who does fight choreography, and you’re, I mean, among all the other things that you do, you’re a fight teacher, a fight choreographer, a fight fighter.

Intimacy is not that different from fighting, but we don’t tend to think of it that way. No, I think, yeah. Well, I think there’s a certain group of people who get that they’re similar.

But I get this all the time where I go, I know a thing, and then I forget that other people don’t know it, which as a teacher is something that I have to keep actively reminding myself. But I have these moments where I go, well, of course, they’re the same thing, because it’s choreography. And even in the approach to the material, it’s very sensitive material for people.

It can be full of triggers. It can also just be full of trepidation. Like, I don’t know what my response to violence is.

I have no experience. How do I act this? I don’t even know where to get started. I have my own experience with intimacy, but how is that going to translate? Who’s going to judge me on that? Because so much of human existence is about who am I attractive to? Who am I attracted to? I’m not attracted to anybody.

And until recently, that just wasn’t a thing you would admit. Yeah. It’s interesting because I think the idea of intimacy choreography takes away that nervousness going into… Like, Lorena’s thing is being like, so then we… And then they do what on stage? Okay.

I don’t even know how this is going to go down. To know there’s going to be some kind of… Somebody’s going to show us how to do that, and so we don’t have to worry about awkwardness of like, how am I going to do this? No? Okay, how about… Can I put my hand? It says, there’s like, skate directions, there’s like, A fondles so-and-so’s B. And the word fondle, it kind of puts your back and was like, ah, I have to fondle you now. Because most people have that sense of, I don’t want to violate this person.

I don’t want to make the rehearsal hall uncomfortable. And I had a colleague contact me and was asking, we’ve left the scene to last. And I don’t know what they’re going to do.

I mean, I trust the director, but the director feels very new with some of the stuff and has… We’ve been talking about it kind of, but not really. So we’ve left this to last, and I just don’t want to go in there only trusting other people to do it for me. Which is a different opinion, of course, from the people who are like, I trust my director.

I will, with abandon, trust my director, knowing that they will do something. And saying that with all the hope of that, but none of the belief. So sometimes it’s really just a matter of having the vocabulary of being able to say, let’s just talk about consent for a second.

Let’s just talk about, yeah, I’m okay with this. Let me take your hand and put it right here. I think maybe that works for me.

But also, what’s that story-based approach to it? As far as intimacy choreography is concerned, a lot of times what you hear about happening is like, okay, then just kiss. There you go. There’s no talk about all the various storytelling points that you can have in that moment, that we really lose when we don’t take a moment in the rehearsal to go, well, what’s the story of this moment? Because it’s two words, they kiss.

And so then you just go, well, I guess- Then I put my face on your face. Similarly, again, to me, this is why those of us in Intimacy Directors International, when we’re talking about this, we kind of go, well, we don’t want to keep talking about it, like fight choreography, because we all happen to be fight directors as well. But the parallel works for us because it is really a similar process in the choreographic approach to it.

I think that the parallel works for anybody who’s familiar with the idea of fight choreography. But also dance choreography, right? There is a dance. It’s like, oh, here’s some music, then dancing happens.

And if you just have someone who’s like, I’ve done some dance before, let’s do Hitchikoo, ball change, jazz square, is a very different approach than someone who has a vast vocabulary and goes, what’s the tone of this? What’s the story of this? Where are we getting to? What do our characters care about right now? And actually expressing that in the movement. Where did the intimacy choreography idea come from? Do you know where the start of that is? I will paraphrase. So my mentor in this, Tonia Sina, was doing her degree.

She was also training as a fight director at the time. But she was looking at movement and choreography. And something was happening in various scenes that were being done in other people’s directing projects.

And like, oh, there’s some kissing and touching going on here. Does somebody want to choreograph that? And she leapt at the opportunity. And again, this is a very short version of it.

From there, it pretty much sort of grew. She recognized a need and went, this is something that people need to have an intelligent approach for and not this haphazard. Well, I am brave and I will enter, which is also commendable as an artist.

But being brave and entering can be made smarter by having some of the details. It’s like, I can be brave and try to climb Mount Everest, but I bet you’ll have better success if I draw on the expertise of others on the way. And what Tonia does as well is what she’s been developing over the last couple of decades is also not just this is choreography, but there’s also an approach to the work.

Because intimacy for the stage, when you’re performing intimacy, can be very exposing emotionally, not just physically for people. But also, let’s say there is nudity, there is a lot of personal danger in that. There’s a lot of emotional danger in that.

So part of what Tonia does is it’s about her approach to it, about how do we get actors to communicate with each other? How as a choreographer do I manage, for lack of a better word, the rehearsal itself? How do I communicate with the people? Where do I place myself physically in the room? What kind of tone do I bring to the room? So that everyone feels safe. And I wish I remember, or actually knew, who said this, but I heard recently, a rehearsal space should be somewhere safe that dangerous things can happen, as opposed to a dangerous place where only safe things will happen. So I, as an intimacy choreographer, how do I come in and create a safe space so that we can really explore these things that can feel quite dangerous? So yeah, so a lot of Tonia’s work is very much about that entire negotiation, not just the approach to the choreography itself.

And you can really see a difference in a room. And I’m sure you’ve experienced it with other stuff where you’ve got a director who’s a little bit, as you will, will make a very different kind of tone of a room, as opposed to someone who’s maybe very jovial, or is everybody’s buddy, or is very much like the benevolent dictator. That creates very different tones.

So it’s making choices about what tone we enter the room with. Reading the people who are there, if they are really actually totally cash about it, and then they don’t need a lot of, they don’t need the space created for them, then that’s a different process than a room where everyone’s like, I have no idea how this is going to go. We have to simulate sex today.

Or even if, because again, intimacy is also not just bikini bits next to each other. It’s also like parent to child. It’s also best friends.

Let’s say it’s a scene where two friends haven’t seen each other forever, and that’s a very tender, vulnerable, loving moment. So how do we allow that to live and breathe? How do we create a hug that tells that story? Because it’s a very different thing than two buddies who saw each other like last month. Where is your starting place for that kind of work? So yeah, reading the room has a lot to do with it.

Also, keeping in mind the appropriateness of things like language, dress, it’s very much, it’s a little bit about presentation as well. But it’s very much about what’s the text calling for? What is the work? So we can help to distinguish between what’s the storytelling issues we’re dealing with? And what are the personal things that are maybe things we need to negotiate in order to have the work happen well? Let’s say it is a scene where clothes have to come off and someone’s really self-conscious about their belly. So maybe we don’t take any clothes off in the first rehearsal, because that’s not important to the storytelling at this point.

And so a lot of it is discussing what this moment calls for, what’s come before, what has to happen afterwards. And then the specifics of how we can tell that story. And it’s, again, very much like who are the actors in front of me? How are they interpreting these characters? And so how do we tell this story with these people? Like one pair of Romeo and Juliet is going to be different than another set of Romeo and Juliet.

Because maybe they’re different ages, maybe they’re playing it more impetuously than others, or maybe these folks are really more just horny teenagers. I say just, that’s very judgmental sounding. Maybe they’re playing it as super horny teenagers.

So they’re both matching faces. And as long as that’s the story you’re interested in telling, then that’s a great choice. So how do we tell that safely? I mean, also physically, if you’re going to play two characters who just want to mash their faces against each other, how do you do it without breaking teeth? Well, there’s that.

That’s a logistic that actual teenagers don’t probably think about. But when you have to do it again and again. You have to do it every night.

And twice on Saturdays. And twice on Saturdays. Is there a resistance to the idea of an intimacy choreographer? Sometimes.

Some directors are like, no, I can do that myself. Some directors are, wow, amazing. I don’t have to deal with it.

But some directors really like to have their own view of the whole room. And they don’t want anybody else’s touch on what’s going on. And I totally respect that.

That’s the way they want to run their rehearsal. Fantastic. Sometimes there is pushback from actors as well, who are like, I need you telling me how to do my job.

Because they see it as maybe an imposition as opposed to a discussion. But that also depends on the choreographer going in. If someone is going in and is like, all right, we’re going to do it this way today.

And maybe they think what they’re doing is having positive, upbeat energy. Maybe the way it’s received that day is, all right, you’re doing it wrong. I’m going to tell you how to do it the right way.

So again, reading the room is so important. But that’s where you do get some push back from the performers themselves when they’re like, I’ve been doing this for many years. I’ve got this part figured out.

So that’s the thing. That’s great if all of the people involved in the intimacy are in that same boat. If all of them are like, yeah, we’ve been doing this for years, and we’re comfortable with it.

We’ve got this figured out. But if one of the other people is not there, then you have an uneven stage relationship. Yeah.

And I think that happens with everything too, right? Where you’ve got, oh, let’s do some close work on this scene. And one person’s like, I got this scene. I know exactly what’s going on.

And they end up being there in a way in support of the other people in that scene. But in that way, then you go, okay, cool. So you don’t feel you need an intimacy choreographer.

Your job then is to just be confident in the movement, and then allow the outside eyes to continue to adjust the full picture. And I wonder if that’s where some of the pushback comes from is they haven’t necessarily thought before about how the third eye sees it really differently. It’s a reminder that we all need sometimes like time passes differently on stage than it does in the audience.

In the same way, our perception of what’s happening from the inside is different than what the audience is seeing. And you can’t rely on like, oh, I feel that impulse tonight because it means that the story changes. And then let’s say you and your co-star have been doing this passionate kiss this way one day.

And then one performance, someone goes, oh, yeah, then I’m going to grab their butt or something. And then suddenly there’s… Yeah, that can throw your… It’s different than having just a slightly different expression of the text one day. Let’s say that person just doesn’t like being touched there or has, for whatever reason, that feels like a kind of violation.

Then they’re off for the rest of the performance. And sure, you’re going to deal with it and still say the things, but it’s a different kind of pushing somebody around than what’s acceptable within the we are being these people in this situation, as opposed to now I’ve actor. Philip Akin has been an actor and director for more than 40 years.

He’s a founding member of Obsidian Theatre and was the artistic director of Obsidian from 2006 to 2020. Nerds like me know him as the voice of Bishop in the animated X-Men series from the 90s. When I spoke to Philip back in 2018, he was directing the Factory Theatre production of The Men in White.

I asked him about what drew him to the theatre. Okay. Theatre for me was salvation.

We were the only Black family in Oshawa. My parents came up in 53. I came up in 54 with one of my brothers.

We were the only Black family until I was about 16, 17. So you can imagine in the 50s and 60s how much fun that was. And I was small.

I was like five foot two and with a big mouth. So it didn’t bode well. My brother Layton and I were great readers and we pretty much read out the children’s section of the Oshawa Public Library pretty fast.

And so it became a natural thing for us to grab our parents’ library cards, go down to the library on a Saturday, and we’d go in the adult section. We’d grab 10, 12 books each, come home, read them. The next week we’d do the same thing.

And then I learned about there was this library club which got to read and review all the new books before they put them on the shelves. So I went, bonus, I’m going to go there. Turns out the library club was really just a sham because what they really wanted to do was produce plays.

So I ended up being in a play and we needed more people, so I recruited all my friends. And so we did a play and it was very successful. And then I went to high school and started working at the theatre club.

But it was a place where… There’s enough issues at that time in history of being black in an all-white community where a lot of people felt it incumbent to tear you down on every level. And something like theatre was something that I could do that was protective. And it afforded me a way to succeed because of myself, but also people would like you and if they liked you then they wouldn’t kick the shit out of you.

So I kind of credit theatre and the 151 Chadburn Squadron, air cadet squadron, for really giving me a sense of personal accomplishment that I could do things and that even though you may have to… It became somewhat isolating, but it was you and your work that was important. And I think a lot of that lingers in me till today where I’m really easy to say about critics and whatever. I don’t care.

I don’t care. The work… I find it really hard to actually even talk about the work I do anymore because I just go, the work’s on the stage. Interact with that and then you have an idea about what I was doing.

It doesn’t get any clearer or better with me pontificating. But that all started back there where I was just this scrawny little five-foot-two kid and was finding ways to survive. If human beings are kind of like metal to be worked in the blacksmith store of life, how you get hammered, how you get heated, what you get mixed with changes the composition of who you are.

And so I feel that a lot of things happen to people and it kind of changes them. We get hammered into things good, bad, and different. We just get hammered into who we end up.

Your career looking at that has been one of those… For years, I compared the Canadian theatre experience with the US theatre experience and there was a long time where it seemed like you did theatre and maybe a little bit of television if you were in the US. But in Canada, you just did everything. And you’re very much looking at the things that you’ve done.

You’ve done a lot of everything. Well, I graduated, what, 75? And that was the nature of the business in those days. I mean, I was always amazed when I’d work with American actors and they’d be trying to make a distinction between a film actor or a television actor or a commercial actor.

And I would be like, dude, I’m working on a film today. Tomorrow, I’m at the CBC and then I’m doing radio drama. And so there was a grounding that was amazing, which doesn’t happen anymore, right? I mean, the radio drama died off, which was a real shame.

And the business has changed a lot, right? Just the quality of vocal work. I mean, I was directing out at Royal MTC and they just put in a quarter of a million dollar sound augmentation system for their main theatre because their audience was having problems hearing the actors. And I don’t know, but- Are we not teaching that in theatre schools anymore? No, I don’t think we are.

I don’t think, A, it’s not as simple as that. I don’t think it’s being taught in most theatre schools as much. I think the first thing that new students do once they graduate is stop doing voice work.

I think when you’re working in a lot of small venues, then you don’t do it. And then all of a sudden you get a job and you’re, I don’t know, at the Tom Patterson at Stratford, and you’re working with an actor who doesn’t know how to project their voice out their back. And you go, but dude, half the audience is always at your back.

And so I don’t know. I mean, I’m a bit of a… Somebody jokingly called me the Stalin of voice once because it just frustrates me so much. And I mean, even now I go to the festivals and stuff and I’m going, why can’t I hear? Why can’t I understand? What’s happening there? So I mean, the business has profoundly changed.

I think a lot of people are working on smaller stages, especially with a lot of the indie work that’s happening. People are primarily working on smaller stages and then, I guess, forgetting if they do it. Well, I guess… Here’s my theory of voice in a nutshell.

And this is what I say whenever I’m working with theatre students or, well, every cast actually. I say, usually actors have two voices. They have their theatre voice and they have their everyday voice.

And they’re both shit. They’re both shit. Because my standard of my everyday normal voice is what I’m using right now, which means that I’m sitting on a couch and I’m vibrating the back of the couch while I’m talking to you.

There’s no special effort. There’s nothing. Right? That’s what you have to have.

You have to have your everyday voice when you order at Starbucks that it’s a properly placed resonant voice. You may ride a bicycle. That doesn’t mean you’re ready for the Ironman triathlon tomorrow.

If you’re not working your voice every single day, then you have no chance of doing Shaw or Shakespeare or August Wilson or Stephen Adly Guirgis, all sorts of plays you actually don’t have the capability to do. You all think you do because you did your voice work in theatre school five years ago. And now it’s shit.

So it’s something that has to be utilized every day. I mean, you sometimes see some people who have all that vocal craft and they can sit and do an intimate scene in the Tom Patterson or on a festival stage and you can still hear every word. Yeah.

And that doesn’t mean loud and it definitely doesn’t mean pushed, but it means a properly placed resonant voice. And you can still do that in a small theatre. But the emphasis has to be there.

I met Helen Knight when she was performing her solo play The Art of Kneading at the Toronto Fringe back in 2019. I’d wanted to talk to her about her show as a fellow solo artist, but I was surprised to discover that we’d both grown up in religious households and we’re both preacher’s kids. We spoke about the origins of her show and ended up talking about so much more.

Well, why don’t we talk about The Art of Kneading? I’m curious about where that show came from for you. Right. So see portion A of this podcast.

The Art of Kneading had a few seeds of development. It’s a story about three women who are struggling in some way or the other with their connection to poverty and feeding of kids. And so obviously that’s something that’s very close to my heart and my history.

But I think, you know, there’s a few drops in the bucket that inspired me. One was, you know, I was out with some high school friends a few years ago now. So this isn’t even really that recent history.

But, you know, one of my friends was, I don’t even know what B got into her bonnet, but she was going off about welfare people and like, how ignorant they were and how she was surprised they could even read a pamphlet about something or other and like, how they just, wanted handouts. And I just turned to her and I was like, dude, you’re talking about my mom. That’s not okay.

And I was like, that’s my story. You know that. You were in school with me in the midst of that.

Like, what are you doing? And like, it got quiet and then somebody said, but like, don’t talk shit about my mom. I do want to jump in and say that. I mean, that is something, the whole vilification of people who are on welfare or have been on welfare is one of those things that like I’ve had, like I’ve been on welfare and you know, it serves a purpose and it’s not just so that like, you know, as some would say, oh, people who don’t want to work can buy smokes or whatever, but like it serves a literal purpose.

And, but I’ve had, I’ve had instances where people have found out that I was on welfare and like that sort of changed the relationship. Like I became a different person in their eyes because I’d been on welfare. I was terrified of that.

Cause I, I grew up in a time and place in the country where like the premier of, of Alberta walked up to a homeless man one day, like on unsolicited, like actually here’s the actual story. He was driving in his limo or sedan. Like he was being driven by a driver.

So that’s how the story got out. He made him stop. He got out of the backseat of the car, walked up to a homeless man, yelled at him in his face, told him to get a fucking job and then took a handful of heavy coins out of his pocket and threw them in the man’s face and got back in the car.

And that was the premier that I grew up with. And there were so many more people applauding him then, then, um, then as necessary, it didn’t affect his popularity. If anything, it probably helped his popularity.

And that was the most, uh, important person, um, with power, uh, in the province for years and years and years. And that was, and so when I was doing this show and I’m like, I grew up on welfare, here’s my mom. I was literally like, I was inviting my work colleagues when I first premiered this in Calgary.

I was inviting my work colleagues and people I didn’t know that well to come see it. And I was like, they may fucking hate me. They may hear this story and just hate, like, I didn’t know before I had done the show, I didn’t know how it was going to be received.

And I, and like, there was three or four times where I was like, I shouldn’t do this show. I, this is dumb. And, you know, I don’t, I don’t want my esteem in my colleagues’ eyes to go down to all this other stuff.

But I think really what pushed me to do this show is that everyone, including myself, knows the story of the story of someone, some woman, cause it’s always a woman, uh, some woman who had seven kids and is on the dole making $40,000 a month, um, off the government’s grant. Like everyone knows some, somebody, uh, why welfare or age or whatever social assistance program is bunk because they know this one person or they don’t know, but their cousin knows or their neighbour knows someone. It’s always, it’s always a friend of a friend, or I heard from a friend of a friend that they know somebody.

Yeah. And, um, so they all know someone like that and, uh, regard, like I could go up to them and I could say, actually, that’s not statistically accurate. And actually most people on welfare that can work are, and, you know, I can say that or I can offer them a story and it’s my mother’s story and it’s about the working poor.

And the fact that my mother’s story and our story is not unusual in that who we were and what we needed and why we were there is not, was not at all uncommon to people in the mid eight nineties. Like it was for us. We were so typical.

That’s the pain. Like we’re, there’s nothing special about my family and there’s nothing special about how we got, which is why I also don’t talk about how we got out. I don’t talk about the fact that my mother was a pastor’s wife because I did in my first iteration and I was worried that I was, um, I was, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for? Like morally trying to like give her more credit.

Like the ambiguity of whether or not my sisters and I came from the same father is left in the current draft because it doesn’t fucking matter. What you’re dealing with is someone who had the tenacity and the responsibility of choosing to raise children. And whoever the fathers were, were clearly not interested in participating in that.

And yet we have children that need food and we punished the one parent who’s decided to make sure that they have it versus the one off. And so I just don’t like, so it’s not interesting. It’s not interesting to me.

Like, well, what kind of, she must be a particular wonderful person if you’re not, you know, white trash or whatever the fuck that even means. Um, uh, so I’m just, I’m not interested in telling that. So I’m just interested in saying, here’s the story of a woman that really needed welfare and she took it and it was awful.

Um, but without it, we may have grown up on the streets without it. I don’t even, I can’t even fathom to think about where we would be. We may have even been in foster care, um, and not growing up together because you know, in the nineties, $4 and 50 cents was the minimum wage.

And so, uh, that’s, you cannot raise three children on that much money. You can’t even raise yourself on that much money. But, um, so, you know, that’s, that was the impetus for my show is I was like, I can counter this narrative in two seconds if you’ll give me, if you’ll give me the podium.

Um, and, and it was also sort of this, I was looking for something to write about and I wrote this essay one day about, you know, I have nothing to say. That was the title of my essay. I was like, fuck, what the fuck am I going to write about? I don’t have nothing to say.

I’m middle-class, I’m white, I’m cis, I’m straight. Like the fuck, you know, when I, when I wasn’t any of those, like, you know, I’ve always been white, when I didn’t have, when I didn’t have any privilege, that’s when I needed to tell my story. And yet, because I didn’t have privilege, I couldn’t tell my story.

And so it kind of, it kind of devolved into that of going like, oh fuck, now that I have privilege, now that I have a podium and I have an education and a diploma, which says I am worthy to take the stage and to tell you a story in a compelling way and, or whatever. And I have the training to allow me to do that. And like, now, after I’m no longer in need, I can tell you about being in need.

And, and so the irony of that really struck me. And I think that kind of, so it’s just a few things kind of coalescing together. It happened to be also, you know, a couple months after Donald Trump’s election and everybody’s like, well, it’s poor white people that got him there.

And it’s like, oh, great. One more, one more thing that will respond to that. Yeah.

So it was just a lot of stuff. Obviously, like, I mean, I’m still very, I get geared up. I like writing and making shows about things that piss me off.

And so the general ignorance about what the welfare state actually looks like and how it’s not a picnic and, and how dehumanizing it can actually be, and how poverty is not a moral issue. It is a systemic and financial one. Yeah, that’s a that’s something that pisses me off, and it gets me riled up.

And so that’s something good for me to write about. Diana Tso is a gifted playwright, and she joined me to talk about her show Red Snow, which was about Chinese comfort women during World War Two. We talked about some of the inspiration that went into that show.

I do have to say that Diana was a super good sport here. What you’re hearing is part of the second attempt at the interview. See, we went through the whole interview, and then I discovered that my recorder had failed, and I’d lost the whole thing.

She was kind enough to give it another go. And so we captured another interview. Diana Well, I was sitting in a dentist’s office, and I came across an article about ALPHA Education, and ALPHA is the Association for Learning and Preserving World War Two History in Asia.

And I went, aha, there’s somebody who wants to talk about it. Because during that time, when I was trying to talk to the community about it, nobody really wanted to talk about World War Two. One, you want to, you know, dredge up the past, the pain, and the tragedy.

So it was very difficult. There was not a lot of research material except for Iris Chang’s The Forgotten Holocaust, The Rape of Nanking. So I contacted Flora Chong, who’s a main organizer in this amazing organization, and she read my play.

She loved it. They became one of my supporters. And every year, they’ve stopped now, unfortunately, because most of the survivors have passed away.

They take educators from across Canada and Australia to China and Korea to meet the survivors. And that includes the comfort women and all survivors of World War Two, learning more about World War Two history in Asia, visiting all the different places of importance, of massacres, of medical experiments by the military, the Japanese military. And that was such a humbling and precious experience to meet the survivors firsthand and talking with them and, you know, hearing their story live and feeling their pain.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is no real comparison with hearing somebody tell their story.

It’s different than reading it. In terms of learning their stories, was it hard to find the people who’ve been comfort women? Was that a difficult thing for you to locate them? Well, through ALPHA, so through Flora, through that tour with educators, they set up all these meetings to listen to the testimonies of comfort women, of World War Two survivors, ones of chemical warfare, the whole range. And then that was in 2009.

In 2008, after speaking with Flora, she set up an interview with me by connecting me with a professor in Nanjing. So I had a phone number. I got there.

I called him. He set up these interviews, and it was just amazing. So I met a woman, we call her Masha.

And the last time people went on that tour, she was basically going blind from crying all the time, because pain is still something within her. And this is, you know, over 75 years. And she took me to, we went to her home, I sat there.

She gave me her hot water bottle to keep me warm. And I’m trying to push it back to her and my hands were frozen. And she was just so welcoming and so open to talk about her story.

And I was just so grateful for that. And then I met a man named Mr. Chang. And after interviewing him at a cafe, he said, you still have time, because I really want to take you to a special place.

And he took us to Swallow Rock. And Swallow Rock is a place where many massacres happen, but nobody really knows about it. So the Japanese military would pack truckloads of people and tell them that they were going to be free, and take them to Swallow Rock, which is a cliff, and then have them walk off the cliff into the icy waters of the Yangtze River.

And so many massacres happened there. And I was so grateful that he took me to sites that like are not on the, you know, the historic map that we may not all know about. And when he escorted us to the bus to go back to the main city, the heart of the city downtown, I just broke up.

And I just, you know, cried for like half an hour on the bus, like nonstop. It just totally overwhelmed me and affected me from his from his testimony to him taking me to this place. He said that he watched his mother being bayoneted by a soldier.

And as she lay there dying, she heard the baby, their baby brother crying, and asked him to find the baby brother. And he found his baby brother crawling on ice, snow on top and ice on the bottom. So he would crawl forward and slide back.

He brought the baby back to his mother and the mom breastfed the baby till she passed away. So from that moment on, I named my play Red Snow. I saw the whole place and I saw this baby and I saw the whole place, the chaos, and this frozen moment where this baby’s crawling back and forth on the snow.

And I realized the snow is probably not white. And so I named it Red Snow before it was called so many different things from rage because I was so upset about it to pain to silence because nobody would talk to me. And then finally it became Red Snow.

It’s been very powerful to present that both here, but then to take it to China and have it performed there. Absolutely. Now, when did you start working on Comfort, which is the play that you have coming up? Right after I came back from China because I discovered funding in an envelope to write the next play, which was such a blessing.

So they wanted me to write about, my proposal was to write about the grandparent’s story from Red Snow. And eventually while I was writing it, it kind of morphed into something else because what if she didn’t die? What if she lived and survived the war for eight years? Because in China, World War II actually started in 37, not 38. So it became not a sequel, but an entirely different story.

And it became about a comfort woman. She was not only raped once, but becoming a comfort woman and how she survived and how she was separated from her dear friend and love and what happens when they get back together and how they survive. And that’s what comfort is.

The term comfort woman is something that when you first mentioned it, I don’t think I understood what that meant. That’s the term that the military use. And it’s so… Comfort women hate that word.

Of course they do. It’s basically somebody who is forced into sexual slavery. And this is something that happens that we don’t hear about.

I think it’s starting to be more prevalent in the media. There’s movies, there’s more books, more literature now on it. There’s the Chinese Comfort Women, which is the book I discovered in 2014, which veered me towards writing about the comfort women because I realized a lot of people, even people on my team, thought that the comfort women were only Korean women because they are so vocal.

Some of them live in the same place in the house of sharing, and they’ve painted and found a place of healing. And people come and visit them and share their testimonies. But in a lot of places in Asia, all the survivors are all segregated.

They have no place of healing. They have nobody to talk to. And so I wanted to give voice to their stories.

So it was great that this came out. It was a book that took, I think, over 10 years to collect all these stories and to have the women repeat their stories so that the memory was clear and that the facts and everything were accurate. So I decided to give light to those stories.

People don’t even know that there were Dutch women who were also comfort women because Indonesia was a Dutch colony during World War II. It sort of highlights the importance of telling the stories, even ones that are not… We love to tell heroic stories, and we love to tell stories that have a happy ending, and we love a certain type of story. But with history, history often doesn’t have a happy ending.

But if we don’t tell the stories, then they get forgotten, and it’s like they never happened. It’s really important to work that you’re doing with this play. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. Even though it’s tragic, I always bring a light of hope. And the hope also is not only in the characters, but hopefully they reflect us as humanity itself, the choices that we make.

Tanisha Taitt is a director, actor, playwright, educator, and activist, and she’s also the artistic director of Cahoots Theatre. She’s been an artistic mentor for the Paprika Festival Creators Unit, program director for The Musical Stage Company’s youth training initiative One Song Glory, and since 2013 has been a dramatic arts mentor with the Toronto District School Board. I spoke to Tanisha in 2019, and I asked her about the road that led her to becoming an artistic director.

Oh my goodness. Okay, so theatre was not what I wanted to do when I was younger. Music was my love.

Music was my passion. I wanted to be a singer-songwriter, or perhaps if I couldn’t make it as a singer-songwriter, a record producer, or an A&R person. That’s what I wanted to do.

And so after going to Ryerson, where I studied radio and TV, I went to the Harris Institute for the Arts, and I studied music industry business and production, audio production, and that was what I wanted to do. And I was writing, my song catalogue is probably somewhere around 1,100. Wow.

Yeah, I’ve been writing since I was 13, and my teens and 20s were insanely prolific. I was writing a song a day at one point for months. Wow.

And sometimes multiple songs a day. And so I was like, that’s what I’m going to do, clearly. And I’ve been singing since I was very, very wee, like three years old.

But I had a bizarre experience with a record company where an A&R person told me that he loved my stuff, but I sounded too white and he didn’t know what to do with me. Wow. So that was interesting.

What do you even do with that? So I wrote a song about him called Tale of the A&R Man. Which I think is a legitimate thing to do. And I wrote that song.

And after a while, after years of kind of doing the demo thing and all that, and realizing it wasn’t happening, I had to start to really rethink my life. I had to really rethink my life. And I was still devoted to doing it.

But it wasn’t happening. And I was doing other jobs to survive. I was working in box offices, I was ushering, all of those things.

And one day, I was going through NOW Magazine, and I saw an ad for an audition for The Vagina Monologues. And I was like, oh, and I knew the play very well, because I had been an usher for it when it had first come to Toronto. So I stood at the back of the theatre and seen it probably 60 times.

And I was like, I know this play, I can do this play. And so the audition was, I think, either later that night or the next morning, there was no time really to book an audition. So I just went where it was, and I crashed the audition.

And they said, we’re sorry, we don’t have any spots. And I started crying. And I’m like, but I came all the way from the east end of Scarborough.

It was so sad. And they were like, okay, this chick is crying. Okay, we’ll find you a spot.

So they found me a spot. And I auditioned in front of a panel of about six people. And at the end of the audition, there was just silence.

And I’m like, I don’t know what that means. And they ended up giving me the closing piece in the show and telling me that that was stunning. And I was like, oh, okay.

And so I was cast in the show. And suddenly, I was in a cast, and I was in a cast with Judith Thompson was in the cast, but I didn’t know who she was. She was just to me, Judy from the cast.

Rachel McAdams was in the cast. She was really lovely. I learned hanging out with her for a day that I’d never want to be a star because it’s like being in a fishbowl.

We went to Tim Hortons and all people there were staring at her for an hour. So that was weird. But that was the beginning.

And doing that show was great. It was absolutely great. And then after doing it, the producer of the show was going to step down.

And I said one day in jest, oh, I’ll produce it. But then no one else made the same joke. And so I became the producer.

And once I became the producer, I didn’t really know what producers did. But I knew that the one thing that they did for sure that I knew was that they hired the director. So I became the producer, promptly hired myself, and directed the show every year for the next six years.

Produced and directed it for the next six years. Because it was an annual event. V-Day Toronto was this annual fundraiser to raise money to end violence against women.

And we would give the money to local shelters and women’s organizations. And so my theatre life and my activist life started simultaneously. And I became very deeply connected to working in that realm.

I had also been a crisis hotline counsellor for the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre before. So it was something that felt very natural to me. And I just led that from 2007 until 2013.

And then I led a national campaign. And after 2014, I stepped away from that a little bit. And at that point, I was really in love with theatre.

I had devoted myself to theatre. I had begun working professionally. I had become an apprentice with Obsidian in 2010.

That was my professional break. Philip took me on as an apprentice. And after that, doors started opening.

So I started to assist and direct and work with other companies. And that was how I started. Between 2010 and 2014, I worked a lot with different companies, worked with Musical Stage, led their youth initiative program called One Song Glory, did lots of drama and theatre leadership work with the TDSB, was a resident artist educator with YPT.

And before I knew it, I had this resume of working with a lot of companies. So that was kind of where it went. And I think probably around 2016 or so, after six solid years, I looked back at my resume and I was like, okay, this is getting super serious.

And so I think at that point, I started to think, wow, at one point, a position of leadership might be cool. But I still thought it was going to be like 10 years from now. Did you have to learn entirely as a trial by fire? Was there anybody who sort of like guided you through producing? Or was it just like, I guess I will figure it out as I go? Nope.

The producer actually had promised that he was going to give me like a little handbook manual. And I was excited about that. And then she didn’t give it to me because she was mad that I had decided to direct.

She didn’t think I should direct. She didn’t think I had experience. She’s like, you’re going to destroy the show.

And she never gave me the handbook. So I directed and produced on instinct. Would you advise that for people? Well, it was funny, because keep in mind that when I started with the monologues, I didn’t have a theatre background.

I had a music and an audio production background. So after doing it the first time, and it was beautiful, and I felt this like wave come over me of I love acting. I thought I should probably study something.

But at that point, I’m like, I’m an adult. I can’t go back to school full time. Like I’m way past that.

I have a job. And so I went searching for theatre education. And I found at Seneca College, the one diploma program in the country that was continuing ed.

Really? And I was able to go to theatre school in the evening and work during the day. Wow. And that was like, if that hadn’t happened, I would not be here.

Because that actually gave me some some theatre chops that allowed me to put that on a resume to get the obsidian apprenticeship. I have spoken to so many amazing people in the last 300 episodes. And I’ve had so many great conversations.

These are just a few of my favourites. Remember that all episodes are available for free at stageworthypodcast.com. So feel free to head over there and listen to some episodes you might have missed.

And while you’re at it, let me know your favourite episodes. Thanks again for listening. I’ll see you next week.