Debashis Sinha & Maev Beaty

Maev Beaty and Debashis Sinha joined Stageworthy host, Phil Rickaby to talk about Necessary Angel’s upcoming audio production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play The Great Fire.

Maev Beaty is a critically-acclaimed actor, writer and voice-over artist. She has originated roles in 23 Canadian premieres (Hannah Bunny, Kate Hennig’s The Last Wife, Michael Healey’s Proud and The Front Page, Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End, Sharon Pollock’s Angel’s Trumpet); co-writing and starring in award-winning theatre (Secret Life of a Mother, Montparnasse, Dance of the Red Skirts); performing in ensembles of epic theatre endeavours (Sheep No Wool/Outside the March/Convergence’s Passion Play, Nightwood’s Penelopiad, Volcano’s Another Africa, TheatreFront’sThe Mill); and interpreting lead classic roles across the country and over five seasons at the Stratford Festival (The Front Page, King Lear, She Stoops to Conquer, School for Scandal). She is a Toronto Theatre Critics’ Award winner, three-time Dora Award winner and twelve-time Dora nominee in both performance and writing, referred to as “the excellent Maev Beaty” by the New York Times. Her film debut (Mouthpiece) was a Special Presentations Opening Film at 2019 TIFF.

maevbeaty.com
Instagram: @maevbeaty
Twitter: @maevbeaty

Debashis Sinha’s creative output spans a broad range of genres and media, from solo audiovisual performance projects on the concert stage to the interior spaces between two headphones. Driven by a deep commitment to the primacy of sound, Sinha has developed his creative voice by weaving together his own experience as a 2nd generation south Asian Canadian, his training with master drummers from various world music traditions, a love of electronic and electroacoustic music and technology, and a desire to transcend the traditional expectations of how these streams might intersect and interact.

debsinha.com
Twitter: @sinhadeb
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/debsinha

Necessary Angel Theatre Company is one of English Canada’s most vital original creation and touring organizations. The company has a history of innovation and risk taking and engages theatre artists from a variety of disciplines in the creation of new work. An influential and original presence on the national and international theatre scene for over 40 years, the company has produced more than 60 productions, including 30 world premieres and 11 North American premieres. Work created by Necessary Angel has been nominated for and has won Governor General’s Awards for Drama, Chalmers Awards for Outstanding New Play, and numerous Dora Mavor Moore Awards.

www.necessaryangel.com
Twitter: @necessaryangel

The Great Fire: https://www.necessaryangel.com/the-great-fire

Transcript

Welcome to Stageworthy, a podcast about Canadian theatre and the people who make it, hosted by me, Phil Rickaby. This is episode 303 of Stageworthy, and I’m trying out a new opening. Yeah, I’ve been using the same opening and format for the last five years, so I thought that passing the 300 episode mark was as good a time as any for a change.

Let me know what you think. You know, for the last year, I’ve been working with audio, and not just with podcasts. You might remember my audio drama from last Christmas, St. Nick and the Big F*** Up.

I’ve been working on a new one for this year’s holiday season, so audio has been on my mind. So it was pretty serendipitous when I had the chance to talk to Debashis Sinha and Maev Beattie about Necessary Angels’ striking audio drama, The Great Fire. Deb is a sound designer and educator whose passion for sound design has led him to projects from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Berlin, Germany.

And Maev is a critically acclaimed actor, writer, and voiceover artist, and a Toronto Theatre Critics Award winner, three-time Dora Award winner, and 12-time Dora nominee in both performance and writing. Here’s our conversation. As somebody who’s created an audio drama, and who works in the audio sphere, as far as this podcast goes, there’s something about the audio medium.

And working in audio, I heard somebody say, and I fully agree, that it’s one of the most visual mediums. That with audio, you can paint a picture directly in somebody’s brain in a way that you can’t with film or television or other art forms. As far as painting a picture goes, or just the audio medium in general, what’s drawn each of you to this particular project? Well, I can say from a text-based point of view that one thing that Alan believes, and that I believe too, is that text work, heightened text work, or poetic text work, is physical theatre.

It’s very body-centred, and sometimes we separate those in our artistic spheres. We think there’s physical movement-based stuff, and then there’s heady text-based stuff. I think all theatre artists working now know that those separations are fictional, but I think that the pursuit of putting the image in someone’s mind is definitely where classical training or my experience with Shakespeare has both helped me and hindered me, because that’s exactly the goal, exactly, to paint the picture, to have them see it unfold, and it will be absolutely personal.

It always will be. It will be in a theatre, even though we’re all in a collective space together. Someone telling a story, you’re going to have your own picture, as you know, but in audio, it’s so personal.

So it’s been a fantastic… That’s been the crux of the biscuit, as they say, in trying to figure out how to approach each image and paint the pictures in a way that offer them as a very personal experience to each set of ears, as opposed to making them incredibly personal for me. And that’s been, I think, the really fun spectrum of challenge. And what I love about working with Alan and what I love about getting to work on a passion project like these is that you just make so many mistakes, and you can take a lot of risks.

And so we did, I would say, an entire recording of the whole piece, and that’s not the one that we’re offering. We went back to the drawing board and we started again because exactly of what you’re saying, because it was painted to… Those images were painted too much for my point of view and not enough for trying to find this sort of magical place to make space for the very personal image that each listener will bring. Yeah, so then I know Deb got to hear a lot of what we did in the old take and then heard the new one.

So I was so excited to know what that was like for you, Deb, in terms of what we’re saying. Yeah. The thing I always tell my students is that of all the designers, and maybe almost anybody who makes theatre, the people who work with sound, we actually have the easiest time in terms of making an impact.

Sound is connected to our primitive brain. We’ve all been experiencing sound from before we were born, right? We were swimming in it. It was just part of our DNA.

It’s just part of the cells that make up our body and our brain. So I always tell them we have to use our power for good rather than evil. There’s a place for, of course, sound that leads, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe of browsing music and all that.

It’s fun and whatnot, but when you’re working on a piece such as this, it’s a beautiful invitation. I’m really into cutting my sound. I’m kind of well known for always arguing with directors to cut sound cues.

The thing I always think about is, what are we not hearing? And in audio dramas, I think there’s a convention to really, like you were saying, paint the picture, to give the person the picture that you want. I think in my discussions with Alan and finding the way that Maev would explore her character and offer her character and the images that her character speaks of, we really wanted to make sure that we had that space that Maev was speaking of about allowing the listener to lean forward rather than lean back and to also play with expectations too. I mean, the beginning of the sound piece, I think, is a kind of, not overtly so, but certainly subliminally offering a very conventional experience.

And we pull the rug out from underneath that fairly quickly, I think, just like offering unexpected design to invite the listener to answer the questions of what is that I’m listening to or what am I hearing or what am I being offered? So that’s something that’s been really fun because that’s always something that I’ve been trying to focus on back in the days when we were on stages, you know, to make space for the words and to make space for the movement of actors in space and to navigate the, okay, now we don’t have people in space together and we don’t have a stage and we don’t have actors walking across the stage and we don’t have, you know, watching a physical body utter words. So there’s a lot of openness and I think I spend a lot of my energy fighting against trying to fill up that openness, I think. Yeah.

I know what you say about how sometimes in audio drama, the picture can be painted too specifically. I’ve found myself listening to some audio dramas in the past where the soundscape, the background sound is so overpowering and it just becomes too much that I’m put off by it. I find what I want is something just suggested to me.

My brain will do most of the work. Just suggest the setting to me. That’s all I need.

I don’t need every little sound to be in there because that can just be too much. It’s very true. And even, you know, when they are in there, like I’ve often said, you know, anybody can put the sound of a door in a speaker, but you have to know which kind of door you have to put in there.

So, you know, the right kind of population of a scene with sound, while it gives specificity, it also doesn’t, I think, make a fence around the scene, I think. It’s so tricky to figure out where the brain, when you’re performing or when you’re, I tend to be a bit of a dramaturgical performer, so I’m often trying to think big picture as well as moment to moment. And I, you know, you want to think about what the audience experience is like, but you have to forget about that, obviously, when you’re in the process of performance or embodiment.

But this question of redundancy versus clarity is really, I feel like I’m always on the pinpoint of that. I tend to be an emphatic user of words. That’s me in my life.

I’m like, I really mean everything I’m saying. And, you know, you have to make space. And so when I talked earlier about the classical text, that is a dangerous place for me with Shakespeare, because I just love it all.

So I want to give it every single thing. And it’s just exhausting for the listener eventually, or you don’t know, I think so much of stage picture is great directors are about helping the audience know where to look. And so great sound designers helping you to understand where to listen and what to where to point your what to retain.

And if you lean ever so close more into that, it’s just it’s too much. And the mic doesn’t lie. So if I’m if I’m doing the thing and I’m also doing the thing, and I’m also hoping that they’re going to get that I’m doing the thing.

And then Deb is offering the thing on top, it’s just too much thing. And then and then we get lost. And so and there’s questions of tempo, of course, and emphasis, of course.

But it’s psychological, too. It’s like it’s about. Yeah, it’s so just it’s one of those processes, this one.

And I have them in theatre and in audio, but where I wish we could give and we still might. We talked about dreaming about this in some way, but give the audience access to process a little bit, because I think it’s so fun for an audience to understand the difference, the extreme difference between line reading options or atmosphere, sound design options or, you know, and to say. In the outtakes, you know, have that come and we hope to have a submersive experience, but I sort of secretly wish that we can have this gift of like, just so you know, it could have been a whole other show like this is listen to listen to five minutes of this.

What if it had been like this, this kind of design and this kind of performance? Not necessarily better or worse, but just that’s I love to let audience in. I’m like, that’s what we do. That’s what the storytelling is.

That’s the magic long career worth of training that we have. That’s we’re making those choices. It’s all choices because, of course, you don’t want people to be thinking about that while they’re listening about why did they how did they do this? Want them to go on the ride? But it’s to me, it’s really exciting.

I think I think that’s exciting because you use the word magic. But I think to people who are not who don’t do this kind of thing, it is magic. Uh-huh.

Everything that happens actually isn’t. Yeah, to them it is. And we could show them without showing them all of the magic tricks like we wouldn’t want to reveal everything, but we could show them this fascinating thing that happens and how the choices are made.

And basically, you know how we made the salad. Yeah, I’ve always been interested in that. Like that, that was I was always, you know, when I was smaller, if I rented a DVD from Blockbuster or something and there was a making of or whatever, that would be the first fun to watch all that and then see the result, you know, see the salad.

Yeah, we went to see Blindness last week, Experience Blindness, I guess, that the Mirvishes are putting on. And Deb, I wanted to tell you the story, too, because we sat, I don’t know, have either of you seen it, Phil, did you see it? I haven’t seen it yet. So you go in and you sit in the space and you sit at little tables of two and you’re facing opposite directions.

So you’re sitting next to each other, but your faces are pointing the opposite direction. It’s an audio experience with some staging elements and atmospheric. And I think so much of the choices were fantastic.

I enjoyed so much of it. I had curiosity about some of the choices as well. But there was it’s blindness.

It’s like a post-apocalyptic plague piece. It’s eerie. It’s brilliantly written.

It’s spooky. And I happen to know that sitting at the other end of the room, there was another audience member who had a terrible cough and she was coughing through the whole thing. But we all have headsets on and she, poor thing, she did actually stick out the whole show.

But of course, Alan thought it was in the audio design because he was facing the other way. So his experience of this telling of this plague-ridden post-apocalyptic was haunted by these seemingly bizarrely timed, erratic, suffering, human suffering coughs that happened like background gunshots throughout the whole thing. Whereas I’m just distracted watching this poor audience member thinking, are you going to get water? Are you going to leave? But I was also aware that Alan probably knew or didn’t know.

And so I was like, oh, what’s that like to hear a cough at that moment? Yeah, sort of fun. There’s an interesting thing, and you mentioned wearing headphones for that show. And I think about how a lot of times I know a lot of people when they’re listening to podcasts or audio these days, they would listen with earphones in a way that when audio dramas were first being produced for the radio, that wasn’t something that people were considering.

It was coming out of a speaker. And so now there’s this real intimacy because now when we are creating a piece of audio work, we are speaking directly into the ear holes of our listeners in a way that we hadn’t in the past. And that is an incredible that can generate incredible intimacy for the listener, for the audience.

It’s such a gift to know that that’s going to be the the main avenue in which people will be listening to this. It’s allowed, certainly on a technical side, has allowed so many more possibilities in the range of choices and the dynamics of how the audio gets built. And so because there’s such this huge range of sound and sound picture that I can navigate with reasonable confidence that the fidelity will remain as it is in my ears that has allowed me to make so many more subtle choices that that still that that maybe would have been lost in another another avenue.

Hmm. That’s really cool. Yeah.

Yeah. Because, you know, having done having had the honour and privilege and pleasure of working with Deb in the theatre, it’s so you know, we’ve we’ve we did a show that was in two different spaces. And my God, like like transferring one sound design from one space to another when it’s going to be shared in a public space.

It’s really it’s hugely different. Yeah. But yeah, the consistency and the intimacy of that is really cool.

I remember really noticing when people when iPods became a thing post-Walkman and, you know, in those those couple of years where just everybody went out and got one kind of just before nanos. But my my favourite thing was on the subway. And, you know, people I heard plenty of boomers complaining that, you know, no one’s going to talk to each other anymore.

And I’m like, have you lived in Toronto? I don’t know who’s talking to each other. And what I loved was that everyone now is having such a personal experience, a personal audio experience, and they can’t help but show it in their face and body. So I just like felt like I was going to the gallery all the time.

I wanted to know what everyone was listening to because you have such intimate access. Actually, there’s so so little guard left on the you know, so someone’s like fully listening to a love song. Someone’s fully angry listening to something that’s working something out.

Now we know that a lot of people are listening to podcasts and it feels different because it was just like iPods first came out. It felt like it was all music and just this tapestry of human personal experience on the subway car. I loved that.

I found that that I think that podcasts do the same thing. I have fully wept on the subway listening to a podcast as well as struggled not to laugh outside. I know that when I’m Lost in listening to something, I know what’s showing on my face.

My guard is down, concentrating on the thing. So I am fully expressing. And sometimes if it’s a comedy podcast or there’s a funny moment literally on the subway, not wanting to be that guy in the middle of the subway who laughs out loud and everybody turns to look at what’s wrong with that guy.

But it happens. It’s true. I was listening to the Guilty Feminist while on a jog a couple of months ago when I realized I was laughing like an idiot while jogging with such a private sort of stupid like I must have looked like a happy dog, you know, when the tongue is lolling out and the eyes are bright.

And I was like, oh, yeah, I’m in public. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m curious about the genesis of this project.

You know, a lot of a lot of productions, you know, people have made the transition into digital media, often trying to do things either either prerecorded and delivered over, say, YouTube or something like that, or Zoom plays, just digital theatre. What went into what was the what was the plan that eventually led to this as an audio drama? Well, I I can speak a little bit to it. I don’t even know what Deb knows.

It’s like I you know, it’s good to be transparent about the fact that I’m Alan’s wife. So not only are we collaborators, but I also live with the director programmer. But Roland’s piece, Alan, Alan and Deb and I all are huge fans and friends of Roland’s work.

I think I can say that. Yeah, that’s oh, yeah. And long term collaborators and big fans of his.

Yeah, he’s just his particular gift to how he speaks about what it means to be human and why we are where we are and how we got where we are is really I think it’s pretty mad. It’s amazing. It’s just amazing.

So I know that Alan loved this piece. The piece is like so many other artists these days. The piece was chosen far before we entered into this dark time.

It’s hard time and speaks to this time so completely. So like so many pieces that got programmed pre-pandemic that ended up being amazingly appropriately timed. But I know that this piece had never been done as I believe as a monodrama.

So a lot of Roland’s pieces are written on the page like long swaths of poetic text. He has a lot of line breaks and not necessarily character assigned. He has a few of these pieces that he’s written in this way.

And but so there’s been several productions, but I think all with more than one person. And so I believe the original idea was to attempt to stage it as a monodrama, which I think is beautiful because there is deep questioning of binary in it. There’s a questioning of right and wrong, lucky, unlucky, good, bad in it.

And so I think having that performed by one speaker is exciting and just automatically massages that binary in a way that the writing is also doing. But then, you know, so I think it was that I think that was I hope I’m not wrong in saying that that was the plan. And Roland and David, the translator, were very excited about that.

And then when the pandemic went the way it went and this idea arrived of creating an audio world, Deb, you were already enlisted to create the design for the live production, right? That’s right. Yeah. Alan approached me a while back.

We’ve worked together on a number of pieces. And yeah, I think initially it was supposed to be to camera in the theatre centre, but then with a live audience and then the pandemic went the way it did. And then I think there was and then Alan and I spoke about different possibilities.

And we thought about or somebody he I think suggested, you know, using a space and maybe we’d have a surround sound system, you know, all these different possibilities. But then even that became too problematic given how the pandemic was unfolding, at least here in Toronto. So we migrated to making a recorded work.

I’ve done a number I’ve been lucky enough to do a number of audio dramas over the course of the pandemic. The thing I wanted to really do was very explicitly mix this for headphones. So that was one thing.

So there are some tools and the way I’m mixing and placing some sounds, I’ve been able to take advantage of that a little bit more in a more fulsome way than I have with some of the other dramas I’ve done. So that was something that was really exciting. And I was excited to to wield that choice on Roland’s text because, yeah, I’m just such a huge fan of him as a person and his work as well.

And I think there was the fun of working with someone whose English is not the first language and especially an artist is I think there was some communication at one point about talking about why with the pandemic, why the choices were being made for safety, but also a beautiful conversation about artistically why this would be a good fit. And I think Roland originally misunderstood what was being pitched and he’s like, oh, no, please. And then Alan was like, no, no, no, it’s going to be this.

It’s going to be people going to listen to it. And then he was like, oh, that’s so exciting. So it was something got lost in translation and fixed again.

And I think they’re really enthusiastic about this. But also, I think the idea is to have an option that you can experience at home, but that there will be curated listening events and experiences, group listening experiences, the vision of which are really a beautiful coming together safely, but also atmospheric, a little bit like my experience of blindness last week. But it was really powerful to be listening to something in a room with other people, but having a private experience, but knowing we’re all breathing together and we’re having the same.

It was really great. So I’m hoping that the gods will smile and we’ll be able to do that. Yeah.

Yeah, I think there’s there’s a lot of a lot of possibility with audio, and I think we’re sort of rediscovering it in a way during the pandemic. I think that people have been, you know, we tried to do the Zoom thing for a while and that was. Whatever that was, I think some people are tired of that, knowing that a lot of people spend their entire days, their work days in Zoom, which makes it difficult to treat Zoom or similar things as an entertainment experience.

Whereas audio is a thing that somebody can put in their ears on their jog while they’re doing housework, when they’re on their way to work, all of those things, which affords a great possibility for just somebody having that personal, intimate experience. Yeah, we we have really reaped the the the benefit of being at this place in time technologically, for sure. I mean, just culturally in the West, I think, well, you know, probably virtually everywhere.

We’ve been primed to have our headphones with us and to listen to not just music on on those headphones. So, you know, that’s been a technological development that has really allowed us to offer audio dramas in a really meaningful way rather than a novelty, you know, and people have been so into podcasts. So it’s not a big leap to have a constructed kind of audio experience.

Of course, there’s also like this beautiful tradition of audio dramas from, you know, forever. I still listen to, you know, the Solitude Trilogy that was done by Glenn Gould in the CBC so many years ago, like really brilliant radio works. And, you know, actually the other day I listened to War of the Worlds again, the one where everybody thought Martians were actually landing.

They all hold a lot of power and, you know, there’s a lot of new technology and new possibilities with Fidelity that, you know, we can call on that long history of theatre over the airwaves and maybe update it and bring it into now. But, you know, I certainly feel very lucky that I’m living now at this time in technology because the entire society is primed to receive what we’re offering and there’s very little work that has to be done to get into people’s ears and to have them receive it in a really authentic way. We don’t have to prime them.

We don’t have to give them a tutorial. We don’t have to do any of those things. So I feel pretty for it’s one of the few parts of the pandemic, I guess, that we have now in 2020 instead of, you know, even 2015.

Yeah. You know, it would have been a very different new theatre, would have had to had to handle that in a very different way. So, yeah, we’ve been quite fortunate, if I can say that.

And I think that what you raise about the Zoom fatigue in terms of not wanting to consume more media after working on media of that kind all day. It’s also I’ve been really preoccupied and curious about why some things work on Zoom theatre and some don’t. And I think it is so much about what you said about putting images in people’s minds.

Like, how do you actually get inside their mind? And the Zoom really is really hard for that. And, you know, some have been effective. I do find from my tastes that it really helps when things are delivered right down the barrel when I actually feel like I’m making eye contact with the person on the other side of the camera, which is the opposite of what every film and television actor is ever told.

Like to never shoot down the barrel. So it is actually a really different thing. But I also got really concerned for my fellow performers there in that first six month wave, because to think that performing on Zoom on screen is in any way the same thing as performing to an audience is so cruel, actually.

Like some of the best performers we have in this country, I touched base with some of them after some of their performances, and they spoke about turning off the screen and just plummeting like into self-consciousness, despair, a panic attack, because there’s nothing coming back. There’s no access. And to just generate by yourself is so it’s just to think that you’re going to have the same result and then to actually undergo the lack of that result is it can be really devastating.

And I think a lot of tremendous performers have really taken it a hit to their confidence. Like, I know, I know, like in addition to the mental health struggles that we’re all facing, there’s a very specific performer self-doubt thing that’s come out of the result of this. There’s audio, you know, that’s what you’re signing up for.

And it’s different. It’s storytelling. It’s like reading for those of us who have kids, like reading to your kid at night.

And, you know, it is different. And you know that the story itself feeds back in a different way than the audience experience might or something. I don’t know.

But I’m curious and preoccupied about what this is doing to performers, this and the nature of performance. Go ahead. Sorry.

I think at the beginning there was this expectation that, oh, well, we’ll just do it on video. And there was this very little consideration of how different the medium was and how different the experience would be on the other end. And then so and then, of course, you know, kind of realizing that energy was not being sent, like you couldn’t feed off the energy of being in a room with other people, not just your fellow actors, but also the audience.

And so there was this kind of expectation that it would just be we’re doing theatre, but we’re just doing it online. And and then realizing very quickly that that is absolutely not the case. And that but, you know, climbing out of that hole took a lot of energy because I think people were just, you know, I was having a text, a conversation with a friend of mine and it was in March of 2020.

And they said, what if theater’s over like theatre as we know it, like what if it’s gone now? And in a way, I mean, it always it’s always over, right? It’s constantly renewing and reinventing itself, but like over. So that was like this, like, OK, we have to make sure it’s not over. But then, you know, like looking for a panacea that just wasn’t there and then digging ourselves out of that hole took a lot, a lot of work and time and is still happening.

And I think there are lots of great risks and lots of new ideas and new ways of like lots of great innovation coming as well. I’ve been working with the BMO Lab at the University of Toronto, exploring new like motion capture and and invisible motion triggers in space. And like, what are the new weirdo tech things that are being offered to theatre? And some of those are able to use in a screen interface that just aren’t in life.

And that’s cool. But it’s so awesome how often we come back to the same questions, the same questions of who are you talking to? What do you want them to understand? What are we saying? And are we being redundant or are we being clear, you know, like how to get it, get the goods across? That those questions, I think they’re at the basis of the human condition, right? We’re never going to lose them or or or or or solve them in a blanket way. They’ll always come down to in this moment.

What is the what is the what is the answer to the question in this moment? It’s never here’s the answer and we can use it all the time. So those, you know, those questions of storytelling and being in connection and those those very fundamental aspects of our humanity that are spoken to in theatre and stories, they’ll always be there and they’ll always need to be nourished. They’ll never be completely nourished, which I think is great, because every time we come into a situation, we can we can we can derive nourishment from that context.

But it’s still the same questions we’re asking, right? Theatre like, you know, you’re surrounded by hundreds of thousands of dollars of computer equipment at the BMO lab, but you’re still asking the same questions that you would ask that, you know, the past Moran backspace. And we still have to find those answers in the text and in the staging and in the design and in the sound of of of the words in the in the space. Those those questions always have to be addressed.

And, you know, I think I think maybe part of the initial rush to move to Zoom and to and to just like try and solve the problem of the pandemic in theatre was, OK, this can do the thing. And then realizing like, oh, it can kind of do the thing. But we’re not answering those questions that we need to answer when we have a collective experience.

Yeah, that I think of watching what trying to like watching Zoom productions and things like that and watching sort of that that involuntary reaction of there should be a laugh here, but I’m not getting anything. And those kinds of things, it’s so, you know, you could see it as as as an actor. You could see an actor, just even if it’s imperceptible, that moment when they’re there, like I get nothing and they’re working hard.

Zoom, you know, we’re sort of pushing a technology that was never intended to do what we’re asking it to do and which is why it’s been imperfect. And there have been some other things that are slightly less imperfect for that. But there’s been nothing that’s like perfect for theatre.

But I have been so impressed with the risks that people are taking. Like you said, Mav, and all of these people who I swear two years ago, if I’d said, why don’t you try doing that in a digital production? They would have said I could never do anything on a computer. And then they innovated.

They were like, well, this is what I’m going to do because I need I have this drive to performance. So they figured it out. They figured out how to work their their webcam, how to work their computer, how to work Zoom and all of these things and have produced some pretty interesting things.

And I think that’s that’s wonderful and speaks to the resiliency of of theatre artists. For sure. And there have been some great Zoom.

I’ve had some great Zoom experiences that, you know, fully embraced what was going. I actually my she’s not really my niece, but she’s kind of like my niece, you know, like a very close friend of the family. And she’s in a university theatre program.

And I saw all her shows this year. And I tell you, the young people. Oh, my gosh.

They’re good at this. Yeah. They had such a good time at those things because they were like, it’s a Zoom thing.

This is how we’re going to do it. The back end stage management is on Discord. You know, we’re running the thing.

Somebody’s firing, you know, firing OSC commands to to Zoom through like they were all over it. And it wasn’t of course, it wasn’t the same thing as being in the theatre with them. But they were like, OK, these are the shortcomings.

How do we get around it? Here are our answers. Maybe the answers were not always correct or for me anyway. But, you know, I had a tremendous amount of fun at all those shows.

I completely agree. Most of the stuff I’ve seen coming out of arts high schools or or theatre schools are like a cool new thing. I feel so old even saying a really cool new thing.

But yeah, like this sort of hybrid new genre that I was like, this is I would not I would not have thought of at least 75 percent of this, like of how to play with the screen, of how to make me feel like I’m actually having an experience that I’m not having. Make me feel like I’m navigating my own laptop, even though you’re doing it for me, making me feel almost like a VR sort of vibe because you’re you’re doing it so masterfully. And you’re 18.

Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s fascinating because there, you know, I could figure it out, but I I wasn’t a kid with it. Exactly.

Whereas up with this stuff, they’ve grown up with it. And you just tell them, OK, this is what it is. It’s digital.

And they’re like, I know how to do that. I’ve been doing that my whole life. And it’s like brilliant that they can produce these these innovative things in a way because I’m sure that when they decided they were going to go to theatre school, this is not how they thought they were going to go to school, but they’re making the best of it.

And they’re doing some interesting things. Yeah. Yeah, I do feel heartbroken for some of the young actors, though, that I’ve seen who are like, I can tell that you want to just be doing the thing that you always said you were going to do.

You just want to play Olivia in Twelfth Night in your graduating school show in a really great dress that you rented from Stratford. And you want to get it and you will somehow will make it happen. Yeah.

I’m kind of excited about about what’s going to happen when these these these kids who are graduating, say, this year are going to get together next year at Fringe and be like, we’re doing that show we wanted to do. And they they they have their little reunion and they they do the thing. And it’s amazing because they’ve been hungry for it for over a year.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s going to be quite a a beautiful explosion of love all over.

I think so, because I feel like, you know, that you mentioned the people who who were asking, like, is theatre over? And I heard people March, April, May last year who were already like, this is how it’s going to be forever now. This is it. This is this is this is this this is it.

This is all there is. And I kept thinking how that’s pretty pessimistic. I can’t I can’t get on board with this is how it is forever now.

We’ve the industry has survived plagues, pandemics in the past. We theatre has come back every time it’s been it’s been shut down. I had to believe if I was going to go forward in life that there was going to be that we would go we would gather in theaters again.

I just had to. Yeah, I definitely had a few. I mean, I think there was a grieving that had to happen for a lot.

Like a real it was a real grief. And we did also lose some incredible artists. Yes.

And so there was actual grieving of actual people. And then there were grieving of jobs and grieving of planned productions. And to have such a our industry certainly has been disproportionately.

Yes. Yeah. Set to see.

And so I think that’s it’s really important to acknowledge that and to go through all the feelings and the fear of that, for sure. And because it’s real and and then we can innovate and pivot. But, you know, I had friend muggle neighbors who, you know, who would say, so what’s it? You know, what’s your pivot? What are you going to? Oh, guys, how can I begin to explain to you how that’s not possible? And yet, of course, we’ve seen so much innovation and that I do think we know that there were a lot of things that were overdue to change anyway.

Absolutely. And so the amazing opportunity of this moment is one that I hope we don’t glide over. I hope at the institutional level we don’t glide over it so that we can continue to centre and front artist autonomy in like agreeing how the new return will be, because I don’t think there’s any question that we will want to gather together in person to experience live performance and storytelling forever.

I just think there’s no question. But but now, you know, and Bogart, who, you know, was the creator of Viewpoint, she has this great introduction in one of her books where she talks about opportunity after tremendous trauma and chaos and how there’s this magic space that opens up after something terrible happens. And it’s very brief.

It’s briefer than you think it is. And so entering into and insisting on making more space instead of hurrying to a new normal is very hard for us. But I think it’s important.

I think that the conversations that we’ve been having over the last year are the ones that have been put off for a very long time, that there was always an excuse that we’re just too busy. We’re in the middle of production. We can’t have that conversation.

We can’t make those changes because we’ve got to do we’ve got to be prepared for the production. There was like this treadmill that prevented having the important conversations and making important changes. And with this, with everything stopping, if it can be said that anything good comes out of the pandemic, one of them is that we finally had the conversations potentially because it hasn’t you know, we’re not fully open yet, but there were promises made about changes and that gives us an opportunity when things reopen to make a more equitable and a safer space, safer spaces, better spaces and and just a better theatre world for us all.

I think I you know, we just have to be vigilant. We have to because it’s we did there were a lot of promises made and a lot of learning happening. And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from my colleagues is that it takes time.

It always takes more time than we think to actually have meaningful, lasting change in any of these directions. And really intersectionally, like like really a lot like theatre, you know, the whole six days a week, 12 hours a day thing, you know, that’s not working for anybody and it’s especially not working for some of us. So it’s like things things from actual work schedules to pathways to agreement to programming and who who is getting to tell those stories.

It’s really widespread. And so if it’s going to be so wide, it has to be slow. But we just have to keep pressing our shoulders on the stone because it’s got it’s yeah.

I think that’s that’s that’s the trick is is is the vigilance, because, you know, a lot of organizations made some very public statements and commitments last year and over the last year. And it’s it it takes vigilance from the community to remind them now and then that, you know, as you’re talking about opening, you said this, you committed to this. What’s your plan forward? Mm hmm.

Yeah, I think I think one of the things that has bemused my students over the last couple of years is this is my, you know, just the insistence that I that they take breaks. Hey, everybody, turn off your camera. Everybody go outside.

Let’s see who does the most relaxing thing in this 20 minute break. The person who won, by the way, last year’s made a plate of nachos. They were nice, although somebody had a nap.

So that was good, too. But they’re bemused and they laugh. But I’m like, look, this is something you’re here.

You’re in first year. You’re in second year. We’re going to get this in your bones.

You’re going to take time for yourself in the day. You’re going to walk away. You’re going to go feel the sun on your face because that’s the world we have.

We should have been building a long time ago. Now we have this opportunity to build it. So we have to, yeah, be vigilant and sow the seeds as soon as we can, because, you know, if if people come out of their their schooling going, no, wait a minute.

No, no, that’s no, that’s not. We’re not doing that. We don’t need to do that.

We can get the work done, whatever. I mean, we’ve all been in situations where, you know, a company says we’re not doing any 10 out of 12. We’re going to, you know, a long day breaks at 9 p.m. And we start at noon, you know, and the work still got done and the work is still good.

So it’s not that it can’t be done. So, yeah, just making space for that going. I’ve been I’ve been checking out.

I spent a lot of time in the sonic arts world. And right now, a big theme in visual arts and sonic arts and media art in general is this idea of refusal. So Transmedia is running a year long kind of festival about refusal and how saying no opens up so many more possibilities for saying yes.

And I just love that frame, you know, in saying no, we’re offering a new way of saying yes. And I think that’s a really important frame to to to hold on to as we as we slowly navigate our way back into our black boxes and our theatre spaces and basements and, you know, warehouses and factories where we’re putting on our shows, you know, saying no means that we’re saying yes to something else. Yeah, I like that.

I like the yeah, the non-binary of that, like that there, you know, there are other ways. Just it doesn’t take much to imagine other ways of doing things. Yeah.

Yeah, I have thought about all of these people that I know, I know and I’ve known for years who seem to never stop. They wake up in the morning and then they they go to this workshop and then they work their their their their lunchtime waiting job and then they go and they do two other things before they fall asleep at like one or two in the morning because they’re just like going, going, going. And they’ve never stopped.

They’re always going on the weekend. They’re always going during the week. They never take time for themselves.

And all of a sudden. They’re. Forced to take time for themselves.

And I kind of hope that that’s something that. We can all get off the treadmill now and then, and that in a post-pandemic world, we don’t feel like we have to be going constantly, that occasionally we can say we can say, I’m going to sit in a park for the afternoon and not do anything theatre related. Yeah, I think there’s a there’s so much there’s so much intersectionality around all all those kinds of possibility.

There’s, you know, certainly I’ve you know, we’ve all lived that life, right, where going to bed exhausted at two in the morning when you woke up at seven was kind of like, you know, in my 20s, it was like a victory. It’s like I’m a working artist. Yeah.

But, you know, I was also wrecking my hips or whatever. And this so that kind of weird macho toxic thing is had to be let go because we didn’t have that space to to operate in that way. So that’s good.

You know, the but you know, then we also look at income precarity and how they’re funded and how people are paid. And, you know, you know, like how, you know, never mind the larger society. But how how much, you know, I mean, I still get asked to do design work for free.

But it’s like, well, it’s not that’s kind of what I do. And I can’t. Well, exposure, blah, blah, blah.

You know, like there’s so many there’s so many conversations we just have to shut down and let go of. And they’re all interconnected and in so many ways and tied to not just a larger, just theatre community, but a larger and just more just society. Yeah, I think we’re the the the lacuna of the I mean, I hate to call it a lacuna of the pandemic, but that space in which we can actually go, no, wait, we actually have to have this conversation now where there’s space for it, I think is kind of a given us the opportunity or some of us to really see the connections between just like the entire universe.

And it’s not just our community, but it’s also the community of people who work at Amazon and the ones who have to like bake pizzas when it’s 50 degrees outside because it’s too hot for us to put on our ovens. You know, like all those things, they’re all so interconnected. And I’m so excited that in the in the rehearsal halls, virtual and real that I’m inhabiting.

And I have to say, it’s mostly driven by young people who have been challenging me on, you know, even as a person of colour, it doesn’t make me an expert on income precarity. Or even though I’ve had a precarious income my whole life, I knew my parents were there if I needed them. I knew that I had a support system around me.

I knew that I could navigate unemployment or the welfare system if I needed to, because I had computer skills and English and like all these things. And so the young people that I’m encountering are going, wait a minute, you’re operating off of this assumption. And me going, oh, right, right.

The threat, the the the threat of the thing that I’m holding doesn’t end here, six feet of me. It actually goes out the door and down the street and over to there. You know what I mean? It’s very interesting.

And I think there’s something in the the yes and yes, I think there’s something in the piece itself that’s asking this. I mean, the the Great Fire is very simple in a lot of ways. It’s very simple.

It’s like a fable. But at its centre, I think, are those exact questions of like, where does the thread from you go out the door and down the street and how and does income precarity just happen to one group of people and it just doesn’t happen to another group? Or how did that happen? Or when do we when do we make those moments of division between us and me and you? And that’s that’s just the the very haunting sort of massage of the piece. And then being Poland, it just kind of leaves you with that.

It’s been really fun. It’s been really fun for me to because I get your performance, your edited performance. We have a great dialogue editor on the project, Emma, who I taught at York University, who’s doing a fantastic job.

And so I’m really lucky. I just get the performance that Alan and Maev and Emma have constructed. And kind of like I’ve been doing theatre for so long and I’m I’m horrible at reading scripts, like I’m just terrible at it.

I just have accepted it. I’m not good at it. OK, there are some words I can make some notes, but I don’t know what’s going on until I actually hear it.

And so listening to you, Maev, uncover those threads that we’re talking about and those connections between us and them and how they pop out to me at very unexpected times. Like there’s two characters, there are two young lover lovers, Marion and Martin. Martin, thank you.

It’s not the winemaker’s son, is it? One, it doesn’t matter. He’s from the I think he’s from the rich family and she’s from the not as rich family. But yes, anyway, they they’re kind of connected, you know, through the through the piece.

But then like their connections kind of pop up at these strange times, like when I’m not expecting it and I kind of remember or somebody mentions I can’t remember if it’s the winemaker’s son or what, but somebody mentions the winemaker and then it kind of goes, oh, right. And he’s got the son and and they walk. Well, I don’t want to give any spoilers.

Yeah. You know, when they’re together and, you know, people see them, it’s all these different connections and these moments that you’ve seen them connected or heard them connected throughout the piece just kind of come to life and like popcorn in a weird way, which is so delightful. I mean, you know, it’s in the writing and the performance.

And I’m constantly surprised. And it’s allowed me to work very instinctively, which is what I do anyway. I just kind of make some choices and hope some of them stick.

But it’s really because there’s such a strong. Yeah, it’s a fable and it has the power of a fable, too. I mean, all his writing does, it’s very powerful in that way.

And because there’s so much power in the words in the story, I feel very comfortable working from that place inside me, that fable place and seeing all these different things pop up here and there when you’re really when they’re very unexpected. It’s it’s absolutely delightful, I have to say. Yeah, it’s and it was that shifting.

Which we were talking about with the challenge of Zoom theatre and the other, you know, it’s how to shift the storytelling like in theatre. I’ve been thinking about these containers of storytelling lately, and it feels to me that theatre, the storytelling container is pointed outward. It’s pointed to the audience.

That’s like the direction. And in film or television, it’s pointed inwards. It’s actually reversed.

And so in audio, it’s like feels like this strange like options. Like whether you are going into my internal thoughts as I’m working out a thought that I’m having versus giving you the information and you the listener and I want you to come with me. And those those shifts of the storytelling point is has been like popcorn, too, because Roland is doing it in his writing.

He’s like, and then always I’ve got goosebumps. I just look down and always there’s a moment with his writing where there’s just something weird where you think you know where you’re going and then there’s something some secret that he knows that that that makes us drop drop the needle for a minute. Yeah, yeah.

Well, thank you so much, both of you, for having this conversation with me. Thanks for spending an hour talking with me. Of course, I really appreciate it.

And I’m super looking forward to listening to this. Thanks, Phil. That was such a I didn’t know what we were going to talk about.

That was a lot. Yeah. Thanks for listening to this episode of Stageworthy.

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