Evan Bawtinheimer
About This Episode:
This week on Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby is joined by Evan Bawtinheimer, a Toronto-based, Dora Award winning playwright. Evan shares the inspiration behind his awared winning play, Patty Picker. In this candid and thoughtful conversation, Evan opens up about playwriting, his journey of personal growth and mental health, and why vulnerability and connection are central to his artistic work.
This episode explores:
- Evan’s evolution from musical theatre performer to playwright
- The value of personal storytelling and creating space for others
- Navigating imposter syndrome and artistic doubt
- Building a theatre company rooted in honesty, humour, and support
- Why community matters more than perfection in indie theatre
Guest:
🎭 Evan Bawtinheimer
Evan Bawtinheimer is a Dora Award Winning Bipolar Playwright from Toronto, ON.
He is a graduate of Fanshawe College’s Theatre Arts program and Brock University’s Theatre Arts program.
Patty Picker is his first professionally produced play.
Patty Picker premiered at the 2024 Toronto Fringe Festival. It was also nominated for a 2024 Tom Hendry award and Four 2025 Dora Awards, winning one for Outstanding New Play (Theatre for Young Audiences).
Connect with Evan:
📸 Instagram: @evan_bawtinheimer
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Transcript
[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast.
Every week I talk to a Canadian theatre artist, some of whom you may know, and others I really think you should. I have another great guest for you this week, one that I really think you should know, but before I get to that guest, let’s take care of a little bit of housekeeping. I want to talk first about my Patreon.
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And then every time I release an episode, it will download directly to your device and you’ll get a notification that it’s there. And you can listen right on your device without having to go searching for the episode. And that’s enough housekeeping for now, because I really want to get to my guest this week, who is Evan Bawtinheimer.
Evan is now a Dora award-winning bipolar playwright. He is the playwright of Patty Picker, which won the Theatre for Young Audiences Playwriting Award at the Dora Awards this past year. And Evan and I have a whole lot to say both about how he came up with that play, what it was like putting that play on at Fringe, and then going on to have a run after that at the Assembly Theatre, what it was like assembling the team that created this show, and a lot of thoughts about the state of theatre and playwriting in general.
I hope you really enjoyed this episode. I had a lot of fun having the conversation. And so here is my conversation with Evan Bawtinheimer.
Well, Evan Bawtinheimer, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you talking with me. After all, you are now, and you can call yourself, a Dora award-winning playwright for Patty Picker, which was at the Toronto Fringe last year and also had a run at the Assembly Theatre shortly thereafter.
How were you wrapping your head around the whole Dora award-winning playwright thing?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
You know, it’s an adjustment. It’s a little awkward because all my colleagues are saying I have to now promote it whenever I promote myself, saying like, Evan, you have to tell people you won the Dora, that way they’ll work with you. And again, it’s a little awkward, but I manage.
I manage.
[Phil Rickaby]
It’s good. It’s good. Those things, that looks like you could just like fit it in like a backpack so you can, wherever you go, you could just sort of like put that right on the table.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
What I want to do is get a really big gold chain, like Flava Flav, and instead of having the large clock, I just put the Dora on it. Because look, it’s got the perfect hook right here. You could just do that.
[Phil Rickaby]
Oh, you know, they didn’t used to, though, because it used to be, it used to be like the Harlequin character that they used to have. You can’t put that on a chain. You should not, no.
Not just you cannot, but you should not for sure. No, but no, but in all seriousness, I’m sure that like having your name read at the ceremony was, it was quite an experience. And do you, do you have a reluctance or do you have like any kind of discomfort with that title?
The title of my name?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
No, Dora award winning. No, no, no. Well, it was actually in hindsight, I should have known that I had a good chance of winning the award as soon as they announced the nominees because they didn’t stumble under my name.
Normally when you see Bottenheimer the first time you go, bah, bah, like you don’t know how to say it, but they just went Evan Bottenheimer. And I’m like, oh no, they’ve read my name before.
[Phil Rickaby]
They practice my name. Oh no. You don’t think that they practice everybody’s name before the ceremony to make sure they pronounce it right?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Well, there was one nominee from TFT that had like 15, 20 playwrights as part of the nomination. So I don’t think they practice all their names. Plus Bottenheimer is such an intimidating last name for some people.
Sure. But in terms of saying I’m a Dora award winner, it’s new because I have a large collection of Canadian plays on my bookshelf right there. And a lot of them say, you know, Dora award winner from 2007, Dora award winner from 2001, 2009.
And to be part of that collection of playwrights, it’s humbling beyond belief. I never would have expected it, at least not for my very first show, very first time around.
[Phil Rickaby]
That is an incredible feat, to be honest. I don’t know if it’s your first play, but it’s your first theatre for young audiences play for certain. And to even be nominated for a Dora first time out the gate is pretty impressive.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I definitely consider it my first play, period. I’ve had a few stumbles like a decade, 12 years ago, but I took a lot of time to practice my craft, like writing in a dark corner in the room just to get a sense of my voice. And this is definitely the first play in my voice right now.
So again, to have that be, the nomination was huge. And especially the nomination for the cast that I worked with, the director and the production as a whole was remarkable. But the win was, I, again, I was in a daze for about the next 48 hours going, I have no idea what’s happening.
And I’m absolutely certain it was a shock.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, how do you even know what to say when you have to go, had you planned what to say? Were you encouraged to write down?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
My roommate encouraged me to take notes just in case I happen to win. And I wrote down six names and just thought I’d add the rest. I wrote down my parents’ names, my brother’s name, our two performers, our director, and just thought I would just talk about the play a little bit.
But again, I never imagined it would actually happen. And I’m pretty sure when they announced Evan Bottenheimer for Patty Picker, it was in slow motion. And I, my body kind of went like this, where I just like, oh no, I have to get up and accept the award.
But it was, it was fantastic because I knew a lot of people in the audience from other companies, other projects. So to have people that I knew in the audience support me was, was wonderful.
[Phil Rickaby]
Since we’re talking about the Dora award-winning play Patty Picker, tell us about what Patty Picker is.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Patty Picker is a, it’s a play about a high school girl named Patty, and she’s running to be grade 10 rep in her school until one day her arch nemesis blackmails her with an incriminating video of Patty picking her nose. And it goes viral over the school and it changes her entire world. And she has to learn how to overcome the embarrassment, but also how to forgive and forget.
Which I think in our current divisive world is harder than ever to actually let things go and, and, and show true forgiveness, especially for people who damage us in such an incredible way. And it’s, it’s a play about love and tolerance and compassion.
[Phil Rickaby]
So how did this play come about? I, a little while ago, you posted a, like a memory on Facebook, which was like a question that you were asking about theatre for young audiences. And you sort of like, I think you, you said, this is, this is a timely reminder of how this play started.
Where did the idea for the play start?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Well, I think like most playwrights, when they start, they start and stop, start and stop. I’m going to be a playwright and then it becomes a little bit too challenging. So they quit and then they start again.
They quit like that, like with most artists in general. And after my 12th time of quitting and coming back, I said to myself, okay, what are some things I’ve never seen before on a stage? What are some things I’ve always wanted to do on stage?
And I wrote down a list and it’s somewhere in my room of about 40, 50 things that I would love to do. And one of them was the hero picks her nose. And I went with that one and somewhere else on the list was I wanted to write my own version of The Goater Who Is Sylvia, the Edward Albee play.
And I took those two ideas, kind of merged them together and found out I wanted to write a play about how the nose picking is not just about nose picking. It’s about how we tolerate things that are incredibly different and how our levels of tolerance aren’t as high as we think they are. We’re tolerant of identity.
We’re tolerant of class. We’re tolerant of so much. And yet there are still some things that make us go, ew, I don’t want to associate with you.
Like, when I was pitching this play to prospective audience members to come see the show, the second I said, oh, and she picks her nose, a good number, like a couple dozen people went, ew, I don’t want to see that. It’s like, that’s kind of the point. It’s the fact that for as tolerant and enlightened as we think we are, there are still some things that we just won’t cross that are even tiny insignificant things like picking your nose.
Which is funny because, and I was talking with my cast about this, during the course of the production of the Fringe Run and the Assembly Run, I said to them, haven’t you noticed since we started the show, you just see people in the world picking their nose and no one seems to mind, but no one talks about it? And I guarantee you, Phil, in the next 48 hours, you’re going to see someone on the streets or on a subway or on a bus, and they’re just picking their nose like it’s no problem. And yeah, it’s something that’s there, but we don’t talk about.
[Phil Rickaby]
I’m curious about, you know, you said that one of the things you wanted that you wrote down, the hero picks her nose. Was that just a dichotomy for you of like, we don’t think about the hero doing something like that. We don’t think about the hero picking their nose.
And that’s something that jumped out at you?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
No, I’ve come to learn with my own process that I have two elements, and once I have both of them combined, I can start writing the play. And that’s the how and the why. And the how is typically a unique image or a unique sound or something that is obtuse in some capacity or absurd.
It just looks odd. And then the why is the reason. It’s why am I doing this?
What is the truth I want to convey? What is the purpose of this entire piece? And I knew that how was she picks her nose, but I couldn’t figure out the why until I did, and then they both came together.
So it’s just a blank symbol, so you use meaning in it. And once I found the meaning, the play just kind of stumbled together.
[Phil Rickaby]
And as far as the writing process went, how long did it take you to write that first draft?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I outline like there’s no tomorrow. I want to make sure that when I start writing the draft, I know about three quarters of the way through and let the last quarter just sort of find itself. But I outline as much as I can, that way I have something to work with and play with as I’m writing the final draft or the first draft.
So the outline probably took, I want to say, three to four weeks. But the actual first draft, because the outline was so fleshed out and I knew the characters well, I knew the scenario well, I knew the world building well, it took maybe 72 hours. And again, if anyone reads the scripts, the writing is very sparse.
It’s very, it’s all left aligned to the page. And instead of writing a complete sentence, I may just write a word or two words that represent something larger. So instead of saying, and then Patty went to the girl’s bathroom, it’ll just say girl’s bathroom.
Keeping in mind, Patty Picker is one monologue interspersed with scenes. And so she’s telling this as it’s happening.
[Phil Rickaby]
I find it, one of the things, I love listening to process because I think everybody has their own process. As a playwright myself, I pants it almost all the way through, at least for the first draft. I am a notorious, just like, I’m going to discover this.
And then once I get to the end and I understand the play, I go back and I try to make it look like I meant to do that in the first place. Um, I’m terrible at outlining because I don’t know yet. Do you know what I mean?
Sort of.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I think my outlining is my pantsing. So instead of pantsing out, for those who aren’t aware of what the term pantsing means, it’s like flying off the seat of your pants. Just like letting it just go on a whim.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
You’re meticulously beating it out scene by scene, line by line, act by act. You’re flying off the seat of your pants. So they call it pantsing.
And I think my outlining, where it’s literally just, here’s a sentence or two to represent a scene, and here’s a paragraph that represents an act, is my version of pantsing. Because I can do whatever I want because it’s only one sentence rather than dissecting a whole paragraph or two paragraphs or five pages.
[Phil Rickaby]
Right, right. Yeah. How does character develop throughout the writing process?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I develop my characters based on a type of moral argument where they represent certain sides of an argument. And in this case, Patty Picker’s argument was about tolerance and acceptance. And there are some people who are not as acceptant of other people.
Like Patty, when she starts, is very intolerant, but she doesn’t realize it. She hates drama club, even though her girlfriend’s in drama club. She hates her competition, even though it’s another person in her world.
She hates her dad for having an abortion with her mother. And she’s got a lot of pent up anger she’s not really expressing. And she relieves that anger through picking her nose.
It’s her anxiety relief system, as it were. And so you have different characters representing different moral viewpoints. It’s funny because one of the more tolerant people out of the four is Preston, the bully character, because he says, even after he blackmails Patty with the video for picking her nose, he’ll say something like, I’m not doing this out of any vendetta.
I’m doing this because it’s in my best interest to as your competition. It’s not because you’re a woman. It’s not because you’re gay.
It’s not because you’re this, not because you’re that. And he’s surprisingly tolerant of her and her position, but just says it’s to my advantage, so I have to take it. Whereas Patty’s girlfriend Phoebe is supportive of Patty only so long as it suits her.
Once it’s revealed that, once the video comes out and Patty’s life is turned upside down, Phoebe leaves. Phoebe breaks off the whole thing because it’s not convenient to her. And we’ll only see her in private meetings afterwards, so long as it’s not public.
And Phoebe’s dad, who is the fourth character, knows about tolerance because of his relationship with his ex-wife, and knows that it’s an easy thing. Tolerance is an easy thing to do, but it’s also a hard thing to do, because you have to get over whatever vendetta you have against the person. You have to think about the bigger picture, rather than just the minute hatred you have against this person.
And the fact is, and this is a lesson that I think adults can take as well as teenagers, if you just spend your life hating people, it’s not going to do you any good. You have to forgive. You have to forget.
You have to move on. You have to grow. And it takes a while for Patti to learn compassion and empathy, but she does.
[Phil Rickaby]
Once you rode through it, you got your first draft. At one point, how many revisions? Did you revise a lot?
I end up revising a lot, because of my writing process. Was it a very clear first draft, or how much revision did you have to do?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
The final draft was about 45 pages, and the first draft would have been about 40. I know for my technique, I tend to underwrite. That way, when I get into the room to rehearse, there’s room to make things larger, rather than cut something.
The final draft was almost the same as the first draft, apart from a few cosmetic cuts. The only difference is the pre-climactic moment with Patti and her father, as they talk about tolerance in the world. Originally, it was literally one paragraph.
And the more I spoke to our director, and the more the director worked with the cast, the more we realized that’s the beating heart of this entire play. You have to flesh it out. And so that one paragraph became like seven pages of an actual scene, rather than just a tiny, tiny monologue.
I think I was trying to rush through at the beginning, just to get to the main meat of the argument. And it’s like, no, no, no. Here’s where the heart of everything is.
In this conversation, you have to flesh it out. And then once that came through, the play changed overnight and became something much more deep than what it could have been.
[Phil Rickaby]
Now, by director, we’re speaking about the incredible Cass Van Wick. And I’ve seen so much of Cass’ work this year at Fringe. And in the past, how did Cass come to this project?
And how did you put the whole team together for this production?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I applied to the Fringe under the teens section. The Toronto Fringe has a kids section, but I believe in 2024, they had a teens section where if the play was either produced starring teens or the target audience was teens, you could apply for it. And since Patty Picker is really meant for high school kids, it was a perfect fit.
I got into the Fringe, I had the script, and I was looking for a director to work with. And I had seen Cass Van Wick’s work in Bonecage over at the Assembly a few months prior. And after I saw that piece, I went, I have to work with her in some capacity.
Sorry, keeping in mind, Cass Van Wick, Caitlin Race, and myself all went to the same university, all went to the same program. They were one year ahead of me, but we sort of were in each other’s orbit. So Cass already knew who I was, I already knew who she was, and Caitlin.
So getting together with Cass, I said, look, here’s the script, here’s the pitch. At the time, I said it was pretty much done. It could use a couple edits, but the form is still solid.
And she got back to me a few days later saying, I think there’s something to this. And she accepted. And she had worked with Caitlin on Bonecage.
She’d worked with Anne Van Leeuwen, our other performer, who plays three roles in this piece, which is stunning how she did it. They were both phenomenal. And we had a table read, and I think Cass and I both knew right away that Caitlin was it.
She had the voice down, she had the character pretty much down after reading it just once. We knew.
[Phil Rickaby]
One thing that I will comment on about, you mentioned Anne playing three characters. And one thing that I noted in looking at play is right at the beginning, there’s some very quick changes in character. And that takes a lot of talent, a lot of definition, and a lot of deft skill to change characters that quickly.
So you needed somebody with the talent of Anne to be able to pull that off.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Well, I wasn’t in the room for most of the rehearsal process. I was working full time at the time, and their schedules didn’t work together. So I had trust Cass, Caitlin, and Anne on the rehearsal process.
So I don’t know whose idea it was to make each character have a specific prop to signify who they were at the time. Anne plays Phoebe, the girlfriend, Preston, the antagonist, and Pete, the father. And the father has a baseball cap, and Preston has his little emotional support dog.
And Phoebe has these little cat ears, like a headband. And they were placed on a coat rack at the back of the stage, visible to the audience. So in between scenes, she would just take one off, put one on, literally changing hats.
And again, I don’t know whose idea it was, but it was absolutely seamless what they did. Especially because the opening of the show is set to an overture from Marriage of Figaro, where it’s a movement piece between Patty and each of the characters, kind of representing what’s going to happen in the play later on. Which I totally stole from Mission Impossible.
Like, you know, the opening credits, they have scenes from what we totally stole that. No shame. And it worked so beautifully.
[Phil Rickaby]
That’s very brilliant to take that from Mission Impossible. Because I will bet, because of the context, most people didn’t think, oh, that’s from Mission Impossible. Oh no, how could that?
Now, after doing this show at Fringe, it went on to be part of the assembly season. How quickly after Fringe did the group sort of say, we need to do this again?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I believe it was the second to last show, cast came up to me and said, like, we have to do this again. We absolutely have to. Because they want to be able to promote it on their own terms, get it to a space that they know.
Plus, at that time, the reviews for the show, there was maybe eight or ten critics that came by to review us. And it was A plus, five stars around the board. We were best of Fringe.
We made the front page of the Toronto Stars Entertainment section. And we’re sitting here going, like, people absolutely love this show. Let’s try and produce it outside of Fringe and see what happens.
Try and get more young adults into the audience to see the show. Because there is an unimplied bias when it comes to kids’ Fringe, no matter how outstanding the show is. And I’m not saying myself for this example.
I’m saying the other kids’ shows that I’ve seen in the past. No matter how outstanding the show is, you’re playing to, like, third houses, half houses, because audiences will see kids’ show and think that’s for kids, it’s not for adults. It’s not for me.
It’s only meant for 10-year-olds and 13-year-olds. And we wanted to try and break through that barrier and put it up on our own terms. And it worked a lot better than we thought it would.
[Phil Rickaby]
Wait, at Assembly, were audiences a mix of, like, the teenage audience and an adult audience? How did that work out in the performance of it?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
It was an eight-show or nine-show run. And I was there for about six of them. And when I was there, the houses were pretty full.
And there was a mix of young adults and adults, which I completely owe to Cass Van Wick. Her producing skills to get young adults to come see the show was remarkable. If you’d have spoken to me 10 years ago and said, like, what’s the most important part of a show?
I would have told you arrogantly, the playwright. It’s the playwright first. You can’t do a show without a script.
Blah, blah, blah. And I would have staunchly defended that to the death. And the older I get, the more I work with other people, the more I realize, while the script is important, it is one element of a much bigger machine.
And Cass, Caitlyn, and Anne are capable of things I could never do. And if you ask me now, I would just say, like, you just need good people. And you’ll find a way.
[Phil Rickaby]
And Cass, Caitlyn, and Anne are some of the best people I know. Now, I want to sort of go back a little bit. I want to talk a little bit more about you as a playwright.
You’d sort of talked about moving from, like, you know, started to writing and quitting, and then started writing and quitting. But let’s talk a little bit broader. And tell me about what’s your theatre origin story?
How did you first get interested in theatre?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Well, I didn’t grow up with a theatre household. My parents never really took me to go see plays or musicals or operas or ballets or anything like that. We weren’t a very artistically-centered family.
But I was a very rambunctious, energetic youth. And when it came to high school, I was able to funnel that through my drama classes. Keeping in mind, at the time, in high school, I was an undiagnosed bipolar.
I am bipolar. And it should have been a very clear sign that I was bipolar, especially with how I behaved. But people thought, oh, he’s just energetic.
He’s dramatic. He’s got a lot of enthusiasm. It’s like, no, that’s mania.
That’s mania was happening. And it’s like, no, but he’s a good actor. Like, he can project.
He’s not enthusiastic. He can do all this fantastic stuff. Like, no, that’s Evan being insane.
So I went through four years of drama, high school drama classes. And when it came time to graduate, they said, what’s your best grade is what you should pursue. And so I said, well, I’m getting 90s in drama.
So let’s go for drama. And I was accepted at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. And one of the reasons why I went there was because I wanted to be as far away from the GTA as possible for the first time.
So London was a pretty good bet. But also, and I recommend this to anyone who’s starting out after high school. If you’re thinking of going into theatre, go to college first.
Because they put you in there on a practical level. You’re actually doing things. Whereas university, in my experience, is more theoretical.
You’re learning the concepts, you’re learning the history, and you’re writing more essays. But if you just want to sit there and act, college is where you want to go. And if you want to pursue your education further, then go to university and get your bachelor’s.
And then if you want to pursue further, get your MA and PhD and all that. That’s kind of where my history was. I went to college first.
Did a lot of acting. Took a year off and said, you know what? I still want to learn more.
So I went to Brock University for a performance with our mutual friend, Jess Gorman. And learned more about theatre as a practice and the history of it and the importance of it than ever before. I was actually particularly lucky because of how the college credits transferred over to university, I was able to finish a four-year program in two and a half years.
So I would have an entire university year with like three classes, four classes for the whole year. So I read probably every play. I could get my hands on in the library to the point where I was reading like three to four plays a week just to like absorb as much knowledge as possible.
And I still consider myself a performer. I was in the performance concentration. I was doing the main stages.
I was in the acting classes. But by the end of… But before graduation, I realized something.
I didn’t have the same passion that actors do. And you can tell right away that when an actor is an actor because of how they talk about the work. Like we would see a show at Stratford with my acting class.
And they would talk about, oh, did you see this person, that person, this person, that person? And I would be the one coming out of the play going, did you hear that text? Did you hear that monologue?
It was fantastic. Like the alliteration, the plot structure, like how it was formatted. And then they sort of told me like, I think you’re a playwright.
And yeah, that was kind of my educational background where I started out trained as an actor, but left as a playwright.
[Phil Rickaby]
Were you resistant? When they were coming to you saying, we think you’re a playwright, were you resistant to that? Or had you reached the point where you were like, yeah, I think you might be right?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I kind of accepted it because again, I wasn’t, I wasn’t watching, you know, five movies a week just to get a sense of acting style. I was reading plays nonstop to get a better sense of how play is written.
[Phil Rickaby]
Reading plays is not only necessary for actors, for playwrights, but it also, the more plays you read, the more you learn how to, you learn how to read them. I remember years ago when the theatrical adaptation of the magical school series that will not be named, came out, it was being advertised all over the place. You know, posters for it on, on subways, by an indigo and things like that, as though it was a novel.
And people rushing out to get it as though it was a novel. And then suddenly being so disappointed because they didn’t know how to read this thing. Because if you, you can’t just pick up a play for the first time and, and understand what it all means.
That’s a skill that has to be developed over time to be able to, to visualize what stage directions mean. And what does all of this do? How might this be put onto the stage?
And it is obviously did that play a disservice by treating it like a novel. But it also, I think is a lesson about the difference between reading a play and reading a novel.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
The one thing I would say about that to, to go along with that is that there’s structure. I believe all plays should have some semblance of structure in some capacity. And while the formatting of a novel and the formatting of a short story and the formatting of a screenplay and the formatting of a stage play all look different, they can still have the same structure.
And I am such an advocate for structure in a play. I am obsessed with information in a play and how information is given to an audience member or given to a reader over time. And if you have the right structure, you can do that in such amazing ways.
Think of how Pinter’s Betrayal or Colleen Murphy’s December Man are told literally backwards, but the information is so solid, you can follow it. And to me, that’s what plays are. They’re just information, be it expositional information or character information, emotional information.
But that’s all it is. Once you can inform your audience as you see fit, and withhold information as well, because that’s part of telling the story.
[Phil Rickaby]
That’s part of telling the story. One of the things that I find fascinating about sharing information is how easy it is to do it clumsily. As you were talking about sharing information and exposition, I could not help but think of the ill-fated Green Lantern movie from many years ago, where it’s nearly unwatchable because everything that people say is entirely exposition.
There’s almost no character building because everything that people say is information. They’re basically telling, not showing. And it’s a very clumsy script.
And as soon as you start to see it happening, you can’t help but shift uncomfortably. And I’m not enjoying this because it’s just stiff. And here’s everything.
I’m just going to blah. Here’s the exposition. And there’s so many more clever ways or better ways to share information.
As you’re reading plays, as you’re experimenting with that and seeing structure, do you have ways that you’re able to keep yourself from falling into an exposition hole?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Hearing what you’re saying, I have two thoughts. And I guess they’re more questions. When it comes to a story, what was, let’s say, for plays, when it comes to a play, would you rather have too much information or not enough information?
And I’ve come to the opinion I would rather have too much because at least I know something rather than know nothing. And if you do something, and if something happens on stage without any context, without any information behind it, without any meaning behind it, it becomes meaningless. But if you provide me with at least something to grasp onto, even if it’s too much, I have something to grasp onto and I can follow it.
So to go back to your Green Lantern example, sure, it’s a lot of exposition and it is heavy with it. And it’s a lot of telling. At least they’re giving you something and not just showing you a bunch of random nonsense.
To go for another example of a superhero movie, it’s to date this podcast, I just saw the Superman movie a few weeks ago. And that was a lot of showing and not telling. Where it’s just like, we’re gonna just put you in the middle of it, no context, no backstory.
We’re just gonna show you a bunch of stuff and assume you have the knowledge to follow the story. And I’m watching this movie going, I cannot emotionally connect to any of this because you’re not telling me a story. You’re just presenting me random scenes.
And when it comes to my own information, I would rather tell too much than tell too little. But also in terms of show, don’t tell, I find that piece of advice not wrong, but not universal. I believe there are some things you have to tell.
Just off the top of my head, with most of Shakespeare’s scenes, they all end with, I’m not a big Shakespeare guy, but most of them end with a line or a couplet that summarizes what you just heard. The play’s the thing with which I’ll capture the conscience of the king. That’s tell it.
But we’ve seen it through showing of the scene. But he summarizes what we just saw through a lie. So sometimes you need to tell.
Sometimes you need that one line of dialogue that helps the audience get to the next scene. I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence. Sometimes you need that line all the next acts of the play.
[Phil Rickaby]
– Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not saying every, I think it’s a balance between the two, right? – Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
It’s not a universal where you have to only show and not tell and you can’t only tell and not show. – Yeah. – You have to do a bit of both.
[Phil Rickaby]
– There’s a certain amount of, I’ve told this story before, but years ago I did a production of, I worked for the company called Keystone Theatre. We did plays in the style of silent film. You can’t tell a lot.
So you can only show. And you could do as much as you can to try to give people motivations and find out, so people know who the characters are, but they can only really get a sense of who the characters are. And one of the things that we found fascinating with that process was that an audience would connect enough with the action that they would just fill in the spaces in the story.
They would understand what’s happening and they would fill in these stories, what might be happening. Because again, we can’t do like subtext. We can only do surface.
And so we would have people tell us about the show and what they thought was happening after it. And sometimes it would be different from what we intended. And early on in our performance of it, we would be like, no, no, no, that’s not what happened.
And then eventually we just got to this point where we’re like, no, no, I want to hear. I want to hear what your experience of this was, which is a fascinating lesson and letting go of the play. Because again, it’s an interesting experiment in like we can only show you and we have to, everything that happens has to be based in a character and a character’s motivation and then it will work.
But if it’s not, then you lose everything.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Well, even to go with your example, if the audience doesn’t know what motivates the character, they won’t get the subtext. Right. Yeah.
You have to give your audience some information and withhold other bits of information in order for a story to work. If you just give them all information, that’s news. But if you give them part information and then a bit of description and then the other half of information, that’s suspense.
That isn’t even storytelling. I took a directing class in university and I picked up a lot of good tidbits from it. But the one thing I’ve always remembered was that the average person can only withhold eight pieces of information at a time.
So if you try to bombard them with 10 pieces, they’re only going to remember eight and they won’t remember the last two. And so it’s your job as a director to keep things very simple. And it’s my job as a playwright to keep the information memorable, slow, and not bombarding with tons of pieces of information at once.
Because again, the average person can only withstand so much information at once. It’s the difference between reading eight words in a line or eight words stacked up upon each other. You have to see each beat clearly.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, that’s certainly, that’s really, I mean, we have to, you have to keep in mind what audiences can deal with. And also it’s, I think it explains why sometimes you’ll hear about storylines being dropped from a play or being dropped from a comic book or a novel or a film because it complicated the story too much. It’s a thing that sometimes has to happen is you have to drop something that you really like, but because it’s already too much information.
I would like to ask you, we sort of, before we started rolling, we sort of talked about, you know, you’re almost a day job. It’s not a day job, you’re a night job. One of the things that is always interesting in this industry is how people balance their work life and their creative life.
So I’m curious about how you manage to find that balance in your life between the time that you spend at work and then still having time to be creative.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
It’s a challenge, especially because my particular job keeps me busy for anywhere between eight to 12 hour shifts, five to six days a week. And the only thing that really comes to mind is the fact that from my desk in my office to my front door is about 45 minutes. And I take a subway going north and a subway going east.
And on that subway ride, I daydream. I make notes. I outline.
Most of Patty Picker was done on my phone in terms of the outlining, the actual dialogue I did on a Word doc. But the outlining was done on a large notes app where it just let me sit down in a quiet space or as quiet as a TTC subway train his and just focus on this piece. Because I’m away from my home and I feel like when I’m out, I’m doing something.
And when I’m at home, it’s not the same. When I do get at home, I’m listening to podcasts on storytelling all the time. The frustrating thing is I’ve been searching for YouTube channels for playwriting, specifically for the act and craft of playwriting.
And apart from the occasional blog piece, there’s no content creators that do that. And yet, if you want to talk screenplays, you want to talk novels, you want to talk short stories, I could give you a dozen of each. And I talk about the formatting styles of a screenplay and the script and the story structure of a book.
And eventually it got to a point where my ability to write a play has been informed by my knowledge on how to write a book. And I take those two lessons and blend them together. So I’m constantly listening to podcasts on how to write a screenplay, how to write a novel, how to write a short story, how to write a poem, because there aren’t any content creators out there talking about playwriting.
There’s very little that talks about the act, like the act of playwriting and not just performance or directing or design. So I’m always thinking about how to tell a story, how a story looks like.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think that’s, I mean, I think it says a lot about where theatre sits in the consciousness of our society. But also, I mean, we’re talking about, people think of theatre and they think, often they think musicals, they think big Broadway musicals. They don’t think about the craft of playwriting.
And especially in North America, we don’t have revered playwrights in the same way that some are in England and things like that. Or there might be a few, but I can’t think of any modern ones really. It’s one of those, again, I don’t know if it’s gatekeeping, like are the people who are knowledgeable in the playwriting process, are they keeping their knowledge because they’re teaching that class?
Or like, I wonder what’s happening there.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I have a theory. Whenever I work on a new project, I reread about four or five playwriting guides just to like reteach myself how to write a play. That way, when I get to my 20th play, I’ll have done the cycle over and over again and it becomes more fluid and more natural.
And I was reading a book on playwriting, which I won’t name. And it was incredibly vague, even though it was a well-known book on playwriting that basically went, well, in the beginning, you introduce the world, introduce the characters. In the middle, you do the middle stuff.
And in the end, you close it. End of thought. And I’m like, no, that can’t be it.
That can’t be it. And yet, when you go to how people write novels, how people write screenplays, they talk about beats. They talk about like what could happen here, what should happen here.
And I think it’s because a lot of people think theatre is this amorphous, malleable lump of gas that can be anything, that can do anything. And while I believe that, I still believe that humans are hardwired for story. We know what a story is naturally.
We tell stories every day, even if it’s how was the weather today or how’d you get to work or how was your day. We tell stories consistently. We know naturally what a story looks like.
So when I read a playwriting guide saying, you know, the beginning is where you begin, the middle is where you middle and the end is where you end. And yet I can read The Anatomy of Story by John Truby or Story by Robert McKee. And they give you like, no, here’s what an inciting incident is.
Here’s what the individual crises looks like. They give you more detail. They’re more refined to it.
People think that you can just write a play. And I think that’s why there’s no creators talking about it. Because it’s just, well, just write it.
[Phil Rickaby]
It may also come from the fact that theatre itself is a collaborative process. And so instead of thinking, oh, we’ll fix it in post, people think, oh, we’ll fix it in rehearsal or something like that, which is not particularly helpful. I have a question for you.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Yeah. That’s okay. In preparation for this interview, I read a couple of plays with the intention to talk about like what I thought about them.
And I messaged you a while ago about this and I want to talk about this for a quick second. Okay, first off, would you say your playwright, actor, both, like, what would you say you identify as?
[Phil Rickaby]
I describe myself as a writer and performer.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Okay. And would you say you practice your craft consistently, always learning how to be a better performer, a better writer, and you’re always working on it? Yes.
These are trick questions. Would you say the more you develop your crafts and the more you learn about performance, that affects your enjoyment of other performances? Absolutely.
I guess my point is, I’m not by any means an actor, but I’d like to imagine there are professional actors out there who have been working for 15, 20 years, film, stage, television, all this stuff. They take workshops and classes. They’ve done their training, they’ve put in their dues and they’ll go to see a show and the acting is just not very good, for lack of a better term.
It’s not very good and it affects their enjoyment of the show. And I’ve noticed, at least for myself, over the past few years, the more I learn about how to tell a story, the more I don’t enjoy a lot of modern work because they don’t know how to tell a story. Have you noticed that yourself?
[Phil Rickaby]
I was actually having this conversation with my girlfriend just a little while ago because we have very different experiences seeing plays because she will leave a play and she will have liked it and she’ll enjoy it and I leave a play and very frequently I am very judgmental. I have these nitpicks and she pointed it out that as a person who is both a performer and a writer, I’m looking at these performances in that way. I’ve seen them in a more critical way and does it affect my enjoyment?
Yes, but every so often there’s a play that is just so good and no notes. And when that happens, I feel like I’ve transcended. And so it is absolutely worth it.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I find that too, although I’m finding that transcendent moment harder to come by. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not by any means a pretentious snob that says, oh, you didn’t do, you didn’t put this here, that there, so therefore you get an F. I’m very accepting of people at the certain level of their career.
If this is your first play and you’re at a fringe show and you write a one-person show, I’m not going to boo you. I’m not going to pan you because you’re learning. I was learning too.
We all have our growing pains, blah, blah, blah. But I don’t know. I read a play that was, and I’m not going to name it, but it was incredibly successful within the last five years in Canada.
And I’m watching it go, I’m reading it going, I don’t understand any of this. And I’m not sure how this thing got published. And I dreaded reading it a second time.
I did to see if I was wrong. I’m like, no, the tone is strange. The characterizations are strange.
It’s meandering. It’s just plain weird in a bad way. How did it get produced at X, Y, and Z?
And I’m curious, what do we do with this knowledge that we have without it completely ruining our experience in theatre?
[Phil Rickaby]
I will tell you exactly what I do when I’m sitting in a theatre and I’m shifting in my seat and I’m like, there’s the voice in the back of my head that goes, I hate everything that I’m seeing right now. And what I have to do and what I end up doing is I think, why? What isn’t working?
What’s missing from this? And I have to get analytical. And I use that as sort of like a lesson in how to be able to, instead of just like sitting there and hating everything that’s on stage or being uncomfortable or whatever the emotion might be, I end up trying to identify why isn’t this working for me?
And how could I avoid that in the future? I’m going to tell you one of my pet peeves in theatre and it happens all the time and it kind of drives me crazy is a play is progressing and then you get to the end and the lights go down and nobody knows that it’s over and the actors come out for their bows and then the audience suddenly realizes that the play is over. And to me, that always is like, okay, you didn’t figure out how to resolve the story to a point where the audience knows when those lights goes down.
This is over. And it happens. It happens a lot.
And I think it’s one of those things that we really need to fix in the theatre because the audience should never not know that the play is over.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
It’s like you didn’t end your play, you stopped your play.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yes, yes, that’s exactly right. Yeah. We just ran out of time.
Sorry, Matt Damon. Yeah, it’s the Matt Damon of theatre.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Slightly off topic, but still on topic. In a one hour, one act, how long do you give the play before you give up mentally? For me, it’s about 10 minutes.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, I was about to say the same thing.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Like my percentage is 15%. So if it’s a two hour play, 15% is, oh crap, why did I do this to myself? 25 minutes or something like that.
If it’s not working 25 minutes, I’m out.
[Phil Rickaby]
I will say what I need in a play is I need something right off the top to catch my attention. Yep. Right.
I need a hook right at the beginning. And if you don’t give me that, now I’m struggling for like, what’s going on? Who are these people?
Why do I care? Why do I care? But that’s the big one.
Like, why do I as the audience care about this? And I only have a finite amount of time with that before I think you didn’t care enough to do these things as a creative team, as a playwright. Like, I need the hook at the beginning.
I need to know who the people are. And without it, I’m just lost. Yeah.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I go to the theatre. Okay, this is therapy now. All right, all right.
As a bipolar person, my empathy levels are lower than the average person. It takes a lot for me to care about things that the average person cares about naturally. That being said, when I go to the theatre, I’m actively trying to empathize with what I see on stage.
Because I know it’s very easy for me to slip into just apathy and not give a damn. I go to the theatre because I want to feel something. Anything.
I’m begging you. And keep in mind, boredom is not a feeling. Boredom is a state of mind.
I want to feel fear. I want to feel excitement. I want to feel change.
Like, originally, my point of view was always, I want, when I go to see a show, I want my life to change. And then it gradually evolved, because I think that was a little too high of an expectation. It evolved into, I want my mood to change.
I want to be somewhat different from one hour ago, when I sat in my seat. And I find, not all shows, but a good number of shows, they’re not, they’re just not doing that anymore. Like, have you ever just seen a show and it just washes over you?
Like, I was watching a podcast on books, and they were talking about this ancient text. I’m going to butcher the name, but like, it’s the Navartets or something like that. And they described the three purposes for storytelling, which I never considered, but I can’t get it out of my head.
The three purposes are to entertain, to educate, and to experience. Now, as a writer, I can’t do it purely to entertain. It’s not within me.
I could never do a light comedy. I could never do a nonsensical farce with running around and doors opening and costume changing and things like that. I could never do that.
I need some kind of moral education or expression of self in what I write. Otherwise, it means nothing to me. If I’m going to devote a year, two years, three years of my life to this one play, I want it to do something.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Or at least have an opinion and not just be people running around being jerks.
[Phil Rickaby]
You know, here’s the thing about that. I don’t mind writing a farce, something that seems light at the start, but I need it to change at the end. I need all of that lightness to have a meaning.
And it was for a reason. I like to pull the rug out, like, oh, I’m here for this farce. And then at the end, all of that stuff happened to get us to this point, which is the serious moment.
And in that way, I feel like I tricked you with entertainment.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Exactly. Again, the three purposes of storytelling, education, experience, and entertainment, you’re not supposed to do just one.
[Phil Rickaby]
No, yeah.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Two to three, or if possible, three to three. And take Patty Pecker, for instance. I believe it has bouts of entertainment because of how the fast-paced roller coaster-ness of itself and how it goes from bit to bit to bit and watching Anne play three characters and the expressive monologues and the wordplay and the alliteration is fun.
And the education is the moral lesson on tolerance. And the experience is that one-on-one closeness you get with Patty as she tells you directly what her thoughts are, what she’s feeling. And it makes it a very internal sensation.
But again, I could never do something that’s just, like you said, running around without any kind of a grand change, any kind of grand purpose. Keeping in mind, I have friends who say, again, I have high standards. Like, no, one of my favorite boobies is Shrek.
But the thing is, and if you ever read the screenplay for Shrek and watch the movie, it is one of the most perfectly structured screenplays of the 21st century. And it does have entertainment, education, and experience. No, I just love that.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, no, I mean, it’s interesting because I think that, I personally think that if you don’t entertain, why is the audience coming there, right? This is my opinion. And I know that in some circles, it might, like if we’re saying you need two out of the three at least, if you don’t entertain, why did the audience come?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I think it would depend on how you define entertain. Sure, yeah. Is your idea of entertaining like circus-style rambunctiousness of jumping around and juggling and fire-breathing?
Or is the act of performance entertainment?
[Phil Rickaby]
Well, this is the thing, is entertainment can be subjective, right? Exactly. I think the idea to me is that there has to be something that brings the audience to that theatre.
Yep. And it is unlikely to be the education portion. It might be, it might be, but for the most part, when people go, when the average person goes to see a show, there’s something that they’ve been presented with as something that makes them want to see that show.
And it is likely something that is about the entertainment factor of that show.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Yeah, and I agree to that. Although, at least for my own writing, I think the entertainment comes not from the actions, but from the content. Sure, yeah.
Where it’s that I’m not going to entertain you by, again, like having them do somersaults and wacky nonsense. It’s not within my, I’m not a goofy playwright. I’m not necessarily a funny playwright.
But I will have the entertainment of the moral argument, which I think can be fascinating, can be engaging.
[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. It’s that thing off the top. It’s the hook, right?
It’s the hook that you need to be able to draw you in so that you can stick with the play to its resolution.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Exactly.
[Phil Rickaby]
And so like entertainment, I think sometimes in some circles, we get caught up on entertainment as if it is, like you say, circus clowns and somersaults and all that sort of thing. But entertainment is a much wider thing. And the idea, and it’s because people think, oh, when you say that the theatre should entertain, some people are like, what, I should bring in clowns?
And it’s so much more, it means so much more than that. Now, I mean, here we’re sort of, we’re drawing to a close, but I don’t feel like we’re there yet because we’ve had this conversation that about theatre and the nature of theatre and the nature of playwriting. And I’ll turn the question around to you that you asked me earlier, which is when you are in a theatre and you’re watching something and it isn’t working, what do you do?
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
I have only walked out of a play once. And that was not because of the play. It was because I walked out, went to the lobby and then vomited.
Not because of the play, but because I was sick. I have never walked into a play. I don’t know if I ever will.
Only because I made this my day. It’s not just that I’m there for the hours that, no, I set time aside. I canceled other plans or didn’t make other plans.
And I went to the theatre to watch your show. If it’s bad, I know that it’s hard for me to listen to it. Because again, I have no clue what’s going on.
It’s one thing for a show to be boring, but understandable. It’s another thing for it to be confusing. It goes back to our original or whatever the topics we talked about before.
Would you rather have too much information or not enough information? If I have too much information, that’s fine. I can still follow something, even though I may miss a couple bits here and there.
I’m thinking of a show that this relates to where it’s that it wasn’t told properly and it wasn’t set up properly. And because of that, the whole show was hard to follow. And I’m sitting there in the back, getting dizzy.
But just, it’s confusing. Because again, I’m actively trying to engage with what I see happening on stage. And I cannot follow you.
And you’re not making any attempt to bring me into your world. I guess the short answer is, I wouldn’t abandon the show. But I would be very wary about any future shows that you or your company may present.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I know what you mean about not walking out of a show. I’ve never walked out of a show.
I have ditched it in commission. That’s fair. But, and that’s rare because I respect, I know how much work, we know how much work goes into these things.
I don’t want to be like, I don’t want to be that guy. But, you know, it’s, I have too much respect for the people on stage to like get up and walk out. So that’s why I choose to make it an intellectual exercise if something isn’t working for me.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Yeah. Like you said to yourself, how would I fix this? How would I rewrite this?
How would I edit this? How would I dramaturge this?
[Phil Rickaby]
Yes. Yeah.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
You, like, you always learn more from what doesn’t work than from what does work. Because it’s one thing to say, oh, let’s read the Hamlet and learn all the good things about it. Like, well, no, how about we read this work in progress and talk about the things that aren’t working so we can notice the problems in our own work rather than just like notice all the good things in a good play.
[Phil Rickaby]
As we’re drawing to a close, I’ll ask the dreaded question that people ask playwrights all the time. Oh, no. Is, are you working on something right now that you can talk about?
And if the answer is no, that is an accept, that’s an acceptable answer. No, yes.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
One of the great things about how I work is that it’s very difficult to steal from me. Even if I told you what I was doing, because earlier on in the conversation, I talked about how there’s the how and there’s the why, and you blend them together to make a new idea. So if I came up to you and said, I’m writing a play about nose picking intolerance, go.
Like, you couldn’t steal that idea from me because it wouldn’t make any sense to you. So like, right now I’m working on a play about roller coasters and apathy. My goal is to make Canada’s most depressing play.
I’m writing, I’ve got a play about body odor and freedom of speech, and I’m tinkering with a musical. I haven’t found the right hook yet, but it’s about the gender pocket gap, where like, you know, men have pockets, but women seldom do, and their pockets are decorative and that. Yeah, I like that idea.
But again, I just find a lot of strange, it’s either an image you’ve never seen before with an idea that you do know, so it becomes new, or an image you do know, but an idea you’ve never thought of, and then that idea becomes new.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think it’s interesting, like, I think generally for most people, like, we could share, like, the two things that we’re working on. Like, I can tell you about the play that I’m working on about two actors, long-time marriage, and they’ve just divorced, right, as they’re about to start doing a production. I’m telling you it’s true.
And the version of that that you would write would be completely different from the version of it that I would write. Just like you could give me the themes of Patty Picker, and what I will produce is different from what you will produce. Exactly.
Because every playwright has a different point of view, and a different outlook, and different way of working. So even though we might start with the same theme, we’re going to produce something entirely different.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
Exactly. Was that the play that you brought to Sing to Your Supper? Yes.
I still remember that play. It was really good. Or that scene.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, yeah. I’m still working on it. I’m still working on it.
I need to find the right ending for it. It has an ending. It needs, there’s just some stuff in the middle that I’m sort of like, again, I write it, and then I make it look like I meant to do it in the first place.
You’re a pantser. That’s exactly right. Oh, well, Evan, thank you so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it. It was a great conversation. And again, congratulations on being a Dora Award-winning playwright.
Thank you, Phil.
[Evan Bawtinheimer]
A long-time listener. I highly recommend anyone in the theatre to come by and talk to you. Glad you’re back.
Good lord, glad you’re back. And I hope to be on again sometime soon.
[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. Come back anytime.
