Soulpepper’s Albert Schultz & Lorenzo Sovoini
Starting December 9, Toronto’s Soulpepper presents the cherished holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life, reimagined as a 1940s live-radio broadcast. Directed by Soulpepper Artistic Director Albert Schultz and designed by Lorenzo Sovoini.
Albert Schultz
Albert Schultz was born 1963 in Port Hope, Ontario and was drawn to acting through his mother’s community theatre work. He trained at York University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before joining the Stratford Festival Young Company under Robin Phillips where he played several leading roles including a lauded turn as Romeo.
Beginning in 1992, Albert spent three years on CBC’s hit television series Street Legal, followed by two seasons as the lead in the series Side Effects. His feature film work includes Beautiful Dreamers, I Love a Man in Uniform, Maximum Risk, Balls Up, Under My Skin, and most recently the lead in CTV’s made for TV film Shades of Black (a biography of Conrad Black) which aired in December 2006.
Albert is the Founding Artistic Director of Soulpepper Theatre Company and General Director of the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. Albert regularly directs and appears on stage with Soulpepper. As an actor, recent highlights include Hamlet (2004 & 2005), Uncle Vanya (2001, 2002 & 2008), Our Town (1999, 2006 & 2007), The Real Thing (2006) and The Odd Couple (2008 & 2016). He also leads the Soulpepper Academy and the company’s youth outreach and access initiatives.
Albert’s many honours include The City of Toronto Barbara Hamilton Memorial Award, the DareArts Foundation Cultural Award, The Toronto Arts Council William Kilbourn Award, the Salute to the City Award and the Joan Chalmers National Award for Artistic Direction. For his work on behalf of UNICEF, Albert received the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal.
Albert has received Honorary Degrees from Queen’s and Bishop’s Universities in recognition of his contributions to Canadian Theatre. In 2013 Albert Schultz was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada, and in 2014 he received the National Arts Centre Award for Artistic Achievement by the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Foundation.
Lorenzo Sovoini
Born in Thornhill, Ontario.
YOUNG FAMILY DIRECTOR OF DESIGN, RESIDENT ARTIST, SOULPEPPER 2016: Set & Lighting Designer: Incident at Vichy, The Testament of Mary. Set Designer: A Doll’s House, Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts I, II, III), The Odd Couple.
FOR SOULPEPPER: Set Designer: Marat/Sade, Happy Place, The Dybbuk. Set and Costume Designer: Eurydice. Set and Lighting Designer: Of Human Bondage (Dora Award).
OTHER THEATRE: Stratford Festival, Tarragon Theatre, Theatre Calgary, Belfry Theatre, Neptune Theatre, COC, Canadian Stage and many theatres across the country.
OTHER: Graduate of the Soulpepper Academy.
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Transcript
Welcome to episode 54 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre.
If you’d like to be a guest on Stageworthy or just want to drop me a line, you can find Stageworthy on Facebook and Twitter at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. If you like the podcast, I hope you’ll subscribe on iTunes or Google Music or whatever podcast app you use, and consider leaving a comment or rating. Albert Schultz is the Artistic Director of Salt Pepper. Lorenzo Sovoini is the Young Family Director of Design.
We sat down to talk about Salt Pepper’s It’s a Wonderful Life, on which Albert is the director and Lorenzo is the set and costume designer. Thank you both for talking with me, Albert and Lorenzo. It’s a Wonderful Life is one of those movies that people love.
My girlfriend has watched it every Christmas for as long as she can remember. I was never quite as in love with it as she was until recently, but it’s one of those movies that people watch every year. I’m curious about a lot of things because Salt Pepper is presenting it as a radio play, so there’s a lot of questions that I have, but just to start with why programming in a theatre season, It’s a Wonderful Life? Probably I should answer that.
We have, in the last few years, been expanding on this notion of taking December and turning into a family festival. I think for the future of the theatre, as well as for the present, it’s really important that we get several generations coming to the theatre together. I think it’s also in an age when we don’t have places that routinely we go, which in previous generations, we would go to church together to commune in whatever way that might be, and that was much more common in our society now in a sort of secularized society.
There’s many advantages, but there are, I think, also some certain disadvantages, such as going as a family unit and experiencing something together with other multi-generational communities. So that’s the broad thing, and this particular piece is a piece that, again, right now, as we look at, we went into rehearsals the week after Armageddon, and to be able to tell the story and go back to this story, I don’t know if you were reading Potter, I thought, oh my gosh, the rhetoric coming out of Mr. Potter in this, in terms of what kind of layabouts will we have if we just treat everyone a certain way, and it sounded like the kind of political rhetoric we’ve heard. So I think that’s, in terms of the spirit of the piece, it’s great to get together multi-generationally, sit down, experience a narrative that reminds us of what our blessings are, and also reminds us about the value of thinking not only of ourselves, but of others in our community, less fortunate.
And then, from a producer’s point of view, you also say, well, because it’s such a title, and so beloved, people are probably going to want to come see it. So hopefully, they will, and hopefully when they hear this podcast, they’ll go, right, I should want to go see that. Right? And then the added idea of doing it as a radio play, which is really kind of hard to describe, but the idea being that you are in the audience and you’re watching a radio company of actors in a radio studio put on a production of It’s a Wonderful Life, so you are seeing both the making of it, and then you are also experiencing the outcome of the performers doing the text, and so you could almost just sit there and close your eyes, and in one sense just experience it as if you are listening to it on the radio, and then you can open your eyes and you’re going to see like half a dozen actors darting about the stage doing classic Foley work.
Foley being the sound stuff, you know? Yeah, which is, I have to say, it’s an exciting kind of, you know, sonic event for an audience, just kind of see, hear the door, see how the door is being made, and most of the time, the sounds you’re hearing are never being there. In our case here as well, that it’s the actors themselves, whether it’s vocally, or it’s some object hitting another object to make the sound of a drawer opening, but it’s never just a drawer on stage opening, so you’re seeing a really fun, creative way of telling story through sound, and that’s something that’s going to be as enjoyable, I think, an experience as the play itself. Because I was wondering when I heard about the production, I was wondering how you, first I thought, it’s Wonderful Life, and then I read that it was a radio play, and I thought, how do you stage that for the theatre as a radio play? Well, it actually ends up in a strange way.
Lorenzo and I, when we work together, tend to, me as a director, Lorenzo as a designer, we tend to try to make a space that allows for the actor’s imagination to be more engaged in the creation of the story, the telling of the story, and as a result, the audience’s imagination is more actively engaged, and what’s so interesting about this piece is there’s several layers of engagement. The first, as Lorenzo says, is we’re watching people make sounds that aren’t people’s sounds. That’s just fun, almost like a party game, and you’re seeing a whole bunch of people.
Now you’re hearing them do it in the context of, so you’re watching the reality of a studio of radio performers and sound makers. Then you are getting a story told, so you’re engaging in the story. You have all of these realities playing at once, which are following a particular narrative.
The added one that this one gives is it’s actually an adaptation of Frank Capra’s film on radio. So in other words, we’re not just taking an adaptation of the story, and instead of making a film, now we’re going to make a radio play. We’re doing a radio play of the film, and the fun in that is actually knowing that you can close your eyes.
I have a speaker in the rehearsal hall while everyone’s on their various mics and sound tables, and I can listen, and the pictures that come up, funnily enough, are not pictures of my imagined streetscape. They’re actually pictures of Frank Capra’s imagined streetscape. That’s what’s the added, you get this, not only do you engage the audience’s imagination, but you engage their imagination in the creation of a nostalgic experience.
That’s what this does uniquely, is you actively, with the audience, create a nostalgic experience. It didn’t exist before. You walk into the room, you’re looking at something that does nothing to it, but once the sounds start coming, that active game of creating nostalgia happens, and everything becomes sepia.
Yeah, it’s true. I’m kind of stealing this quote, but a really fantastic theatre director, Simon McBurnie, said that theatre exists in the mind of the audience. It’s not.
It’s the meeting of one’s imagination with what’s happening on stage to create this thing we call theatre, and I feel like one could just, you know, at one point when I first read it, I thought, why aren’t we just doing, well, it was very hard on paper to see how interesting and exciting the making of it would be. So I was wondering, well, why aren’t we just doing the movie? Why don’t we just do a theatre production of the movie? And, you know, first of all, you can never capture, I think, live, you know, with that film, especially in its kind of early stages of filmmaking. It’s kind of got a really interesting cinematography.
It’s got a naive quality to it, and really doing it as a radio play is inherently a very theatrical idea, a very theatrical way of telling the story that gives me a reason to tell this story on stage, rather than try to just copy-paste a movie on stage, which is not very theatrical. Not very theatrical and very difficult to do, because a movie can change scenes much more quickly than we can in the theatre. That’s right, and an audio play can do that as well.
Do you think, I mean, this is sort of, I don’t, nobody’s seen it or heard it yet, but I’m wondering if the idea of the nostalgia is the audio, the fact that it’s just audio recreating that movie, is, sort of helps with the nostalgia factor, that because it’s happening mostly in the mind, that the nostalgia is enhanced, rather than just sort of seeing it? I think absolutely, I think it absolutely is, in a way that once you supply, once you supply the visual information, if it’s too on the nose, if it’s too representational of what you’re supposed to be seeing, it in fact does the opposite of what they think it’s doing. It actually shuts down my options for what that might look like. So I recently saw a big production, a very popular production, of a children’s play, a book, a children’s book, an adaptation of a children’s book, which I had seen, I had read as one of my favorite books.
And when Mr. So-and-so, or Mrs. So-and-so, or the Queen of So-and-so, or the King of So-and-so appeared on the stage, they had full-on costumes, and their castle was, you know, everything in the book was given to me visually. So consequently, it was, I sat back, and there was nothing for me to do. And with young people, if you’re trying, as we are to bring them into the thing, what we have to do with something like this is, we have to use theatre as the place that engages them in that, so that they’re not, they’re getting so much served to them every moment on a screen, where they have no choice over what that forest looks like in their mind, because it’s shown to them on a screen.
They have constant access to that. You know, the theatre, I think, is the one holdout place where we can actually say, hold on a second, allow it to books. Books are the one, but what a book doesn’t have is the communal experience.
The theatre should be like reading a book communally. Right, but there’s a kind of, what the theatre offers is a kind of the beautiful shared magic trick, which is a transformation that happens. So a chair can become an airplane, right? Whereas it kind of can’t on film.
You’d be wondering, what is that person saying? Whereas there’s just, there’s a kind of convention, or multiple conventions, that you can direct, that you can establish, that everybody agrees that that chair right now can become a plane. And it’s, kids have no problem doing it. None at all.
They do it all the time, very quickly. And so really, I think, a lot of work we do, we tend to think about simply telling or serving the narrative that’s on the page. And so if it tells us that it should take place in the living room with windows, then of course we just do what it tells us to do, or some would.
And I’d like to think that the question is now, what is our theatrical living room? What does it mean to be in that place? And what’s so great about this piece is it immediately, you know, for me as a designer, you know, you get all kinds of different work that comes at you, and sometimes it’s challenging from a psychological point of view, trying to understand these characters, who they are, what makes them tick, as well as what kind of environment to put them in. In this case, it’s one of those joyous, also joyous experiences, where you can, it’s about delving into this particular setting in the 40s, to kind of bathe in a beautiful, romantic world that is the 40s, or our nostalgic idea of it. And we’re setting it in a radio studio, of course.
So you have the, I’ve had the joy of being able to examine and look at all the different kinds of radio studios that may have existed in and around that period. And so I think we are trying to capture very simply a kind of nostalgic, but also it has kind of a beautiful style to it as well, that I think fits the piece. But it’s taken me, it took me a little bit to know that, right, I’m not designing, I’m not designing for the movie, I’m designing for these actors that are in the studio.
So that I’m, so that the characters, they’re not the characters in the play, of course, they’re the actors that came in that day to do this work. So it’s been, it’s been a kind of real treat. It’s really different than you would normally tackle a play.
Yeah, I’m very curious about designing for this idea of the radio play. Are you designing on strictly the radio studio level? Are you designing visually the radio studio level? Are you like, where do you draw the line between the character and the actor in this case? You know, it’s an interesting question, because I think one of the, specifically when it comes to costumes, the two characters of Mary and George, they, I thought it was important, we were kind of looking at what they could be wearing, you know, it wouldn’t hurt to evoke the characters of the movie a little bit. And I don’t, do we have them playing other characters? No.
No. So on stage, you’re seeing two actors play those characters only. So it seemed to give us the opportunity to evoke our nostalgia for that movie a little bit.
But otherwise, it became kind of fair game into people are playing multiple characters on stage, or most of them. So it really, with the, I’m working with the actor to develop who that, that radio actor is. And they’re, and they, you know, so we’re working specifically one-on-one together, but I also have to think of the bigger picture that not everybody can play the sort of neurotic, ambitious radio actor that we have to find, if they’re going to explore a kind of type that we have to, you know, and we’re also trying to find real human beings.
We’re not simply just drawing broad characters. So there’s kind of nuances in there that the actors are, are figuring out. And all of that becomes a kind of backdrop, because we’re never focusing on it.
What’s fun though, too, is finding the, where a, where an actor can, or where we as a team can create interesting links between that person that is there as an actor and the character that we know they’re playing. So the George and Mary, the other one that’s only playing one character is Clarence Oggbody, the actor who’s playing Oliver Dennis, who’s playing Clarence Oggbody, the sort of guardian angel who comes in. We have purposely had him play only, everyone’s playing many parts except those three.
Right. And he plays just that part, and he is actually exploring, sort of floating a little above everyone else. And that’s, we’re having a lot of fun with figuring out how he stands in the action and outside of the action in the studio, and how does that become a reflection of what’s going on in the story.
We’re also playing with, to your question about design and how much of it is the radio world and that, we’re actually playing with a few places where we might, there’s a word we use a lot, Lorenzo, where we might push, push the aesthetic towards a sort of poetic realism as opposed to a naturalism. So there’s a few places in it where we may push towards, push the radio show and the visual representation of that. There’s one scene in particular that we’re going to play with actually mimicking the scene in the movie so closely, and even perhaps framing the scene as if it’s on, so the rest of the, and that you kind of, in a perfect world, in my imagined world you don’t even notice it happening, but suddenly you’re watching a two-shot in a movie that you recognize, and a scene that you recognize, and you recognize it visually as well as, and we’re going to play with when can we do that, when can we actually bring external visual elements or filmic elements into our process, not the imagined radio players process, but our theatrical processes as creators of this production.
So that’s all, that’s all, it may all go out. What it seems like, and it seems to be, and this is, Albert’s extremely, extremely good at this, but it becomes an editing process in a way by the end. You kind of, in a way, it’s like a big mixing board of trying to figure out how much of this you can bring in and how much of that to, to capture.
What are you trying to capture with this particular moment? And so, yeah, as you say, it’ll be interesting to see how imperceptible it could be, but yet suddenly you’re, you’re drawing people in by simply how you’re mixing and editing. And you can probably see me just today having sat, sat and watched them go from mic to mic, back to their chairs for two weeks. Now today I just started doing little shapings, so adding, adding hopefully almost imperceptible art to what looks like a naturalistic process of actors getting to a microphone.
You can do that, but the, the story brain that’s watching, the art brain starts to get a little restless if it doesn’t feel there’s a, there’s a hand at play. And if you’re really, really clever, you can get away with playing your hand without anyone seeing you playing your hand. But it’s, it’s, yes, it’s just a naturalistic radio play, except that there are artful elements all the way through it.
And that’s what we want to try to get. And you can’t point to them afterwards. You just felt that there was, there was, you know, there was some God in the details as opposed to just let it happen.
Right. And that’s, that’s trick. That’s the end of the day.
That’s what our job is. It’s hard. I’m curious as, I mean, a lot of people, like I said earlier, are so familiar with the film are as an actor approaching something.
It, I can imagine it being difficult not to hear the character from the film in your reading. Have you had to push past that, embrace it? How do you deal with, with something like that? Good question. It’s one that we just, that’s what Raquel and Gregory and I were just talking about.
Gregory Prest, who is playing George Bailey until I think a week before we started rehearsals, had never seen the film, actually hadn’t seen the film. But what we do in rehearsal, because we’re looking at the, we’re saying, Oh, is there a, is there a sound we’re missing? Or is there something in this adaptation that is being missed that we, so we’re actually screening. We’ll read in our first week, we would read 10 pages and then we would screen those 10 pages.
And then we would make little adjustments and then we’d go on again and Oh, okay. He did that. And I’m doing this on purpose in order to have the company constantly see the style of the playing.
So, so when I talk, when I talked a minute ago about making it look like it’s just life, but lifting it, the thing about Capra or Jimmy Stewart in particular as an actor is he, he seems at all moments to be completely rooted in real, but you wouldn’t accept it if I, if I played these scenes now with you and told you the level that he’s committing to everything he does. And he’s a master at, and it looks absolutely, Capra frames in such a way that it absolutely looks like people getting through a day. It’s an important day, but it’s just a day, but even walking in the street and having a casual conversation has a lifted aesthetic to it.
And it’s just a little bit lifted and lives on a more heightened plane in this stuff. And we need to figure out how to do that. So, so we’ve been screening it.
And today I started noticing that some of his speeches sounded different. And he actually said, you know what, I just decided, and he’s now going through that. He’s going to, he’s listening and he’s not going to imitate, you’re not going to try to do that or anything, but he is definitely going to, all of them, I’m going to encourage them to play the size of the thoughts and the specificity of the thoughts and not be shy.
Because again, the audience, people that haven’t seen the movie will hear it beautifully played because they’re beautiful actors. But those that have seen the movie won’t be spending part of the time going, yeah, but that’s not the way. So it could be a disadvantage if you make your, you know, it’s not about, this is, it’s a, it’s a radio drama of Frank Capra’s movie.
Right. So eventually he will sound like Gregory Press, but it will sound like Gregory Pless playing George Bailey in the movie. And that’s, I think what it should sound like.
You were speaking, like right when we sat down about the family aspect of this, this part of the season and the importance of that. This is something that’s been growing over time with Soulpepper. I think, I think it started with an annual production of A Christmas Carol and then sort of grew from there.
A biannual that we did every other year and then started doing it every year thinking, you know, cause we thought, well, we won’t be able to sell it out every year. And then we tried it and went, Oh yes, we can because people and people come back and people want it at this time of year. Well, because people, people love their Christmas traditions, right? They love their holiday traditions.
And just like people will go to the new Ross Petty show every year, they want something that they go to. They watch Charlie Brown every year. They watch A Christmas Carol.
They want to come to this. Nutcracker sells out, you know, they just know they put on the Nutcracker. It’s sold out.
Yeah. This is their moneymaker. So, so, um, what we’re trying to do is, is keep something that, you know, we have a production of A Christmas Carol, which is an exquisite production.
So we just keep it, we keep it alive. The cast has changed over the years. Joe’s still in it as Scrooge.
You know, there’s, there’s a couple of Joe and John Jarvis that have been with it for, you know, for 15 years. But there’s always new people, but we know that that there’s no, you don’t mess with that. But at the same time, what we’re trying to do is create new traditions.
So we built an alligator pie, which we’re bringing back for the third time. And we hope that that becomes a tradition. We hope that this one becomes a tradition.
You know, that’s the plan that, that we’re building and building on these. And I think it’s quite frankly, something that the whole city should be thinking about, because it’s a fantastic way to bring people to the city. It’s a fantastic to bring people that are in the city out.
It’s a great way of building future audiences. And it’s just, it’s just important as a society. Yeah.
To do this. Yeah. Tell you, I have a three and a half year old Roman.
And it’s this time of year when obviously, you know, you’re being bombarded. And you can’t walk down the street without being told what this time of year seems to be about. And, and there’s so much consumerism, sort of being shoved down your throat.
And that and that’s it, you know, that’s part of it. But it’s, it’s not really the community experience. And I think it is so important.
And it happens, you know, so now, I have this amazing thing, right? The first time last year brought Roman, guess he was two and a half, brought him to his first play ever, which was alligator pie, which we put on. And he was, like, trans fit, like, he did not take his eyes off the stage for an hour, at least. And clapped for every number.
Absolutely loved it. And you can’t, I mean, it just, you know, it fills your heart, but you you feel suddenly, you go, Oh, my God, theatre is a going to church. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s an opportunity for a community to you see other people’s kids.
And it’s so easy and obvious to experience that community experience when you’re seeing a family show. But that same experience is happening when you check off, yes, you see guys and dolls, it’s all it’s all coming together in one room to focus and meditate and concentrate on something. And you’re a part of it as an audience, it’s your energy is going into it.
And your focus is going into it. So I think of any other time of the year, the most where you’re so distracted, and so kind of stressed out about meeting expectations of this that it’s an amazing thing to stop and just sit in a chair and kind of experience something together. Yeah.
And, and I think this show is like, maybe a lot of fun. Yeah, it’s so much fun. And we’re having more fun in rehearsal than probably is legal.
Did you did you did you? I mean, the idea of doing a radio show, I think that’s something relatively new for like, I don’t think salt peppers done anything like that. No. Or it was there.
Was there any kind of? Yes. It was there any kind of trepidation about what that would be like what the what the rehearsal process would be a little bit I mean, one of the one of the things that I’m finding we were laughing, but I’m finding that it’s, it’s, it’s exhausting. Because we do only five hour days.
Normally, often you work 10 to 10 to six is a normal rehearsal day. When I because I’m also running the company, I never do that I do a five hour day. So we call them short days.
But even though short days seem really long, because you’re the amount of constant you’re literally concentrating on everything like you’re concentrating on how people are walking, how people are breathing. A scene that seems so simple, you know that the scene in the drugstore, he comes into the drugstore, and he gets given a suitcase by Mr. Gower, and they talk and then he goes and he trades a does a wish at the the cigar lighter and he goes outside onto the street and runs into his friends and gets in a cab and goes home, right? Okay, easy on the page easy. If it was a play, you’d do it like that.
Yeah. If it but the time it takes in a rehearsal to open the door and have the sound in the inside be different than the sound on the outside, have the internal and external sound, the atmosphere change, and all you have are microphones and actors. I’m not doing sound effects.
There’s no because it’s 1940. So no kind of complex computer. It’s literally live mics, right? And a bunch of people and we have to, we have to walk outside into a spring day with cars going by and bicycles and birds and whatever else you might need to set that up.
Then when you get in the cab, you got to get in the cab and the cab’s got to drive away. Because that’s the filmic piece that we saw, right? Creating the concentration it takes for everyone, as you close your eyes and listen to a little speaker and go, okay, no, actually, okay, can we go back? We need that one footstep to be a little bit lighter and come half a second earlier. And so be you processing stuff so much that at the end of two hours, I’m like, burnt out.
Is it taking longer to rehearse this than you thought it would because of all of that? No. And here’s the other thing, though, that happens. It actually, that stuff takes really, but we got through the play in detail much quicker because you’re working on that stuff.
We still have to go back and fix a lot of it. But the really cool thing is there’s, and I do love this, there’s no actor anxiety in the room. None whatsoever.
And actor anxiety is just something you always deal with. I don’t care what situation is, what play, there’s always actor anxiety. It’s usually attached to one of two things.
I’m not sure who my character is. And two, I don’t know what my lines, I don’t know my lines yet. And those are the two things that they’re, who am I in this play? And what do I have to say? Those are the things that make actors really anxious.
In this rehearsal hall, there’s none of that. They know exactly who they are. In fact, someone’s already done their performance for them.
Jimmy Stewart already did your performance for you. And it’s written down on that page that you get to carry with you every minute of this run until we close. And so what’s amazing, this is what I didn’t understand or expect, was that when we go in the rehearsal hall, it’s all creative.
It’s all easy. It’s all fun. It’s all creative.
At times it’s tricky because you have to go back and it gets, but I haven’t even noticed anyone get frustrated. We’ve been doing this two weeks. There’s not even really any moments of you’re just, people are laughing and working and laughing and working, but there’s no anxiety for those reasons.
There’ll be anxiety ones. But it’s, I mean, when we talk about this a lot too, I mean, we have a great group of actors that are able and to kind of make something both being on the inside as an actor, but also as a theatre maker, kind of being able to also step outside the work. There’s a kind of expectation I think we have of everybody that we work with is that your responsibility doesn’t begin and end with just your line or your work or ease.
It’s just not my costume. It’s, there’s a responsibility to being able to step outside the work and leave essentially kind of the anxiety or the personal ego anxiety at the door. And this piece feels more than, it is so much about its architectural construction that you almost always feel it’s about, you’re building something from the outside.
It’s, there’s so many parts that make up the building, so to speak, that room has to be made, attention has to be given by everybody. So everyone’s kind of, Albert, seem to be, seem like you’re conducting in a way, but you have a whole bunch of people like a great orchestra that you have to be, can’t just be like only waiting for your violin part. You are in tune with everybody.
So it requires a kind of an opening up in a way to everybody. So you, in that way, it’s a really lovely experience. We have that scene.
So Raquel Duffy is one of our great actors is playing Mary Bailey in it. And she has a scene where she’s playing, she’s in a taxi cab playing the scene. She just got married and they’re in a taxi cab and they’re heading out for their honeymoon and the money comes out and then they get stopped because the depression hits.
Do you remember this? So she is actually playing the scene, playing this romantic scene. And she says her last line, she says, Oh George. And then she makes the sound of a car screeching and she does it.
Oh George. Like that’s my favorite. One of my favorite things.
Cause that’s exactly what Lorenzo’s talking about. She could be entirely in the thing, but she’s at service to the story. So she immediately switches the note.
When I asked her to do it, she laughed because it’s so fast and everyone laughs when they hear it in rehearsal. You won’t laugh in the audience. We laugh because we know no actor has to, in the middle of a scene, like finish their scene and immediately sound like a car except now.
So we laugh at that, but she does that and there’s no question. It’s just fun. And you’re at the service of the whole.
I imagine that’s like a specific skill that radio actors of the day possess. Like there are more technicians that way than say, uh, an on, you know, an actor, their performance can be in the editing, you know, that in a film that they do their thing, but they haven’t kind of a clue what it’s going to look like or how they appear. Whereas in this, there’s a kind of, they’re both, of course their voice and their intention is important, but they’re, in a sense, they’re also technicians that they get, they get what they have to do to evoke something on the other side.
Yeah. And all this stuff of, you know, I’m playing it, playing a very intimate scene, playing a very intimate scene, and then walking out of the room and just kind of leave from the room. But I’ve just moved, I don’t know what it sounds like, but I’ve moved 18 inches back, but it probably sounded like I left the room or something that, that they’re, they’re having to do all of that.
They’re having to play scenes for people around a mic, but they can’t look at each other. Right. And that, again, I think that’s so exciting for the audience.
It’s so fun to watch people playing a passionate argument, for instance, but they don’t look at each other. Right. They’re, they’re playing to the mic.
So they, you got four people like this playing to the mic and they have, and the actor has this. Because they can’t look at each other because then they’ll be looking away from the mic. Because then they’re off the mic and it sounds like they’re in the next room.
Right. So it was neat to actually, Mumbi, your assistant director, put together a really great package around just understanding the, the world of radio actors at the time, just in terms of their profession. And it was really, really interesting just in terms of, I think that they’re cut from a slightly different cloth than a kind of film actor or stage actor.
And, and even that kind of nuances in the world of hierarchy between Foley and, you know, that they behave more. Right. Yeah.
And we’ve, we’ve, of necessity, but also for, we’ve taken creative license around some of that. Yeah. And letting, because we’ve done, we did a, made an adaptation of, of Somerset Moms of Human Bondage, which a couple of years ago that used a lot of these techniques, a lot of live Foley, a lot of live sound effects, but all done on stage by the actors.
So there’s not a single recorded sound in that production. And yet it was a very sound rich production. And a lot of the actors that are doing this show are also in that show.
So they’re kind of used to it. But because of that, that just seemed strange for us as a company to have one person at a sound table and all the actors just acting. Yeah.
So we’ve actually, we’ve actually brought the sound effects to the front of the stage. So we’ve set up three front mics and we very often have, you see actors playing a scene on this thing and actors making a fire over here. Right.
And that’s just visually. And that’s, that’s a poetic license. With everybody working like that, there isn’t for the actor in the theatre.
There isn’t really an offstage. They are involved and the concentration of just like knowing and have, okay. The sound like having to listen so intently that almost sounds electric to me.
It is pretty natural. And they’re never, yeah. And you’re right.
They don’t ever leave. And there, there’s no, there’s no sort of, Oh, I, you know, not to my next scene there, they’re, they’re going in the crowd scene in a second. And then they’re, and they’re scratching something across a file in the next section very carefully.
And then they’re playing, playing one character and then switching to another character and they’re playing it on different mics at different distances. So it’s technically, it’s a very complex orchestral piece. I often forget just in terms of thinking about, about, it’s a wonderful life, the politics of it.
Because the things that I think about when I think of, of it, I think of Clarence and I think of the bridge and I think of the iconic scene after, you know, he makes his wish and he comes back to the town. Well, what I forget about is all of the things that Potter does and all the things that Potter’s after, which like you said earlier, are a little bit more important to point out now after the American election. And I think it’s, it’s interesting to do this now, not having, you couldn’t possibly know what the, what the outcome was going to be.
And that, that now this, the, this, this play resonates more as a result of that. That’s why our actor playing Potter is going to have an orange face. Yeah.
And a big comb over. Yeah. It actually went through my head and I thought, should we make him, give him a little New York accent, you know, but we won’t go that far.
I think people will make the connection, but yes, it’s, it’s, you know, we were talking on the first day, we said, when we started, when we, when Obama got elected the first time, we were doing Raisin in the Sun here. And so of course the cat, you know, it was a major event for the cast. Everyone was watching that and Trump got elected and on, we had just, it was on our second day of rehearsal for this play.
And very often I find that fate turns it that way, that, that the art that’s being made tends to somehow speak, speak to the time. And this, this play speaks directly to the issue that, that, you know, has come to a head with the Trump election. But, but we saw back in 2008 with Fannie Mack, et cetera.
And I mean, like the whole, the whole thing about the deregulation of the, of the mortgage industry and, and like so much of the stuff that, that we’ve been reading about in the papers and the horrors that have been falling out over the last several years are exactly the issues that are at the center of this piece. Yeah. It’s hard.
I mean, the, the, it is possible to get a little bogged down in some of the, the technicalities of, of, of, you know, the savings alone and the, there’s something going on with the bank. But I think that, that it is overall the story about, you know, I think that it does speak to the things that are happening now, which is interesting that a movie and a show from that far back can, can resonate for us now. I would like to ask a couple more, a little bit more about just Salt and Pepper in general.
Lately, I mean, the, the mandate of Salt and Pepper, and you can correct me if I’m, if I’m wrong, has, has been modern classics or classic theatre. However, one thing that I’ve been really happy to see over the last few years is more original Canadian work. Was there a particular impetus to, to start fostering that work as opposed to just do the, the classical work? Yeah.
Yes. Essentially. Pretty organic.
Yeah, pretty organic. We, we started out, we started out as a, as a classical repertory company because Toronto didn’t have one. And because there was a group of us who didn’t want to have to leave town in order, you know, we had families or whatever, or lives here, careers here, and we wanted to be able to do the work that we loved and we’d been brought up on in our own town.
And we did that, and there was a huge reaction to that. But very quickly, any, any kind of theatre institution of any value and any of any scope cannot be narrowly defined. And, and this, what we realized as we grew inside the community, and as, as we invited more and more people in, is that in order to be alive, you have to be, you have to be responding to not only what is sitting on a shelf, but what is being spoken and what is being written currently, not only in your, in your world, but in your community.
And that did that, that, that came a few years later because the first thing we had to do was establish a company. And we established the company based on these sort of known works. But, but we, we began doing adaptations and translations in our very first year.
People still think, oh, yeah, the classical company, but we were doing, we were adapting plays very early on. Like Platonov was, we were less than a year old, and we were doing that. We did the North American premiere of an unknown Chekhov play, which we adapted.
And then many, many others since. So we’ve done it all, translation adaptation, all through our life. It’s really only in the last five years that we’ve taken on full-on original plays, Kim’s Convenience being the first that we did.
And because Kim’s Convenience had so little success, we decided not to do anymore. This is going nowhere. We were just talking to Lorenzo, I said, I’ve lit that, he did the lighting design for that.
And we’ve probably done, we’ve probably lit it 12 times. It’s been absolutely everywhere. And of course, TV now, but, but yeah, it’s, I think it’s really important for an organization like this to have all of that going on, just as, and we’ve started to make, to re, to recommit, to making, to making sure that as we’re bringing all this new work in, and as a new generation of artists is coming, that, that we’ve made a recommitment in our, at our training level, but also on what we’re going to put on stage to make sure that we are still holding on to those great works that got us here in the first place.
And I don’t just mean Soulpepper, I mean, all of us, you know, Aeschylus and, and Shakespeare and Chekhov and Ibsen, they got us all here in the first place. And if we let go of that, in this setting, there’s, you know, we have the, we’re the one institution that has the resources to do works of that size, while at the same time investing in new work. So we’ll continue to do that.
In terms of investing in new works, just, just for, for anybody who doesn’t know what kind of, like, what are the ways in which you’re investing in the new work? Several, there’s a ton of stuff. So for instance, right now we’re embarking on a, I’ll let you talk about yours in a second as one of these, but we’re embarking on a massive project, which we call Project Imagination, which is, we, we went out to the, a bunch of the leading artists of the company made a list of about, I think, 60 Canadian artists of all disciplines and backgrounds, all geographic, so representing all the geography of the nation, the cultures of the nation, the various artistic disciplines. And we went out to them with a provocation to come up with an idea for a project that they could make with us, or on us, using our resources, including human resources, that would help, would be something that they were passionate about, that would define where we’re going as a nation.
And it might be looking at a, something that’s 7,000 years old, or it might be looking at something that is completely out of that artist’s imagination, and they want to come in. And we’ve got a whole bunch of those seeded right now, everything from an adaptation of Animal Farm that we’re working on right now, to adaptation of, we have two different Canadian novel projects going on, one which is a musical, and one which isn’t a novel adaptation. You talk about the one that you’re doing with Diego.
Yeah, so first to say that I think for most of my experience of coming out of university in the mid-90s, my understanding of what, how you created a new piece of work is, in this country, is it starts with a playwright. And so playwrights play, and you workshop that, and it’s an actor-driven process. And, but around the world, there’s work being made in all kinds of ways, and I think something that Albert has opened the door to is to look at the how we tell a story, or how we make something process, can, challenging that, and changing the formula a little bit as to what it means to write a new piece of theatre.
And so that suddenly opens the door to other disciplines coming in and having some degree of authorship, really, which is, you know, pretty rare. And so for me, Diego Metamoros came up to me and said, you know, I want to create this piece called right now it’s called Cage, and all I know is that I’m obsessed with studying apes in captivity and cages. I’m also very interested in John Cage, the avant-garde composer, and I thought that’s kind of weird, and I think that’s something maybe we can look at.
But he knew that he wanted to not, he wanted the process, the footprint, and how we’re going to get from A to B to allow for something for him, something new to happen. And one of the ways is to take the playwright out of the process, and in our case, to take a director out of the process, and to look at, we started with looking at the methodology of how John Cage made music. And we took that methodology and we thought, how does that apply to making a piece of theatre through a process he calls chance operations? And that became our diving board.
We brought in Richard Ferran, a sound designer, composer, and the three of us got in a room and started with real things. The company invested in this glass cube, this plexiglass cage, so to speak, that really is our text. It’s the thing we brought in the room to say, this is going to for sure be here.
So now what are we going to do? And so that is no different than somebody bringing in, I’ve got this line to be or not to be. I think it’s cool. So we started creating a piece that way, and we’ve gone through two workshop developments, which again, is really rare to be given two weeks, and then to be given another two weeks.
Which is to say that all work, depending on the kind of work, it requires different support, and the road to get it there is different. So we’ve been given this incredible opportunity to write as we move forward, starting from complete zero, nothing except these kind of, the structure. And from there, we’ve developed so far, 50 minutes, 50 minutes of writing, five minute piece, that now has two designers kind of performing in it, but Diego Matamoros at the center of the narrative.
And it really is actually a kind of non-narrative experiential piece that is, I think, a really new addition to Soulpepper’s repertoire. And something that would be on in terms of the scope of the new work we’re creating, this would be something that would be on, what we would say, on the edge of our artistic practices. It’s pushing the edge of our artistic practices.
And it won’t be a thing that has a massive audience. Animal Farm will probably sell more tickets than Cage. Animal Farm will sell more tickets than Cage.
He says they’re sold out because he made a theatre that is all design and no room for seats, which is what he does all the time. Damn designers. But the fact is, these works on the outside of the practice become very, very important because they’re the prow of the ship that tells you where you’re going.
And it doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to put work in a cage, but it does mean that we are going to hopefully, that the company will continue to investigate the genesis of ideas and creative processes. And there’s, as I said, there’s a list that we have some where we went strictly out to playwrights, some where we went out to musicians, some where we went out to visual artists, some where we’ve gone out to poets as the initial, or choreographers, as the initial impetus for a project that will then be built on. And then there’s a whole series of things like, hey, we should have an adaptation of this Dickens novel.
And what we do is we get an awful lot of work seated. So there’s no company in the country that’s got as much in development. I think we probably have about 25 different projects in development right now that are in serious development.
And are these all things that you’re, like, they’re not imminently produced, like to be produced, you’re investing in? They will be rolled out over, I mean, the gestation of cage will only be about a year. Some of them will have been, Animal Farm has already been around for two years, it will probably see life in the next year. There’s other projects we’re starting on.
We have a musical that Mike Ross and Sarah Wilson are doing that’s been about a year and a half in gestation, and it’s having a concert version this December. And it’ll be another year before we all get together and make a production of that. So some of them, some of them are years and years, some of them can be, I would say the shortest, a year is about the shortest ever.
Human Bondage took about a year from the first idea to several drafts, getting into rehearsal, building the production. Spoon River took about three years. So each thing has its own way of evolving.
And what we do is we just kind of keep an eye on what’s, so we happen to know from the last meeting that the Animal Farm is very close. So we just start to think, okay, we got our next planning program, we might be able to get it in the fall. So it kind of rolls like that.
What’s so exciting about this, and I’m sure after how many years, the fatigue of going to the shelf and going, well, should we bring dust that one off again? This is the way the majority of our country puts their seasons together. And so we do finally start seeing the cycle of the same. So it really becomes a bit, well, who are we going to get to do it differently this time? But at the source of it is that text.
And what’s interesting about this and so exciting about this is it’s actually the community of artists and what they need to say at the time they need to say it, and what they want to express, that is defining what the season should be. It’s really exciting. Now it takes a huge amount of commitment and resource, you are, in a sense, there’s a gamble, I imagine, in that you just don’t know, whereas you could say, well, the amazing thing is you could just keep bringing Death of a Salesman or Off the Shelf and say, we know they’ll come to this, and we just have to find the actor.
Whereas then your motivation there is, it’s not as complex and interesting as what might happen. And so what we’ve seen with, you know, Of Human Bondage, for example, is we made something that even us as artists didn’t know. Like we had that kind of in us in a way that has now shaped how we want to continue to work and challenge ourselves.
It’s kind of a blessing to both, I think, the artist and the audience. Because I think they kind of love, they seem to keep coming back. Well, it’s interesting if we look at the work that has been sort of the seminal work.
I did a sort of census with about 40 key stakeholders, artists, board, audience, staff, etc., a couple of years ago. And I would say 10 of the top 15, or let’s say only five of the top 15 shows that came out as assumed by people, Soul Pepper stakeholders, audience, etc., to be definitive productions, only five of them were plays, started as plays, which to your earlier question about starting off as the classic, that’s an unheard of, like that’s kind of scary, almost impossible to understand that, because you would have thought, well, for the first five years, all you did were plays. But they’re all adaptations.
And in fact, if I think of the great productions I’ve heard of in Western theatre in my lifetime, like the monumental productions, I would say the only one that’s a play is Peter Brooks’ Midsummer Night’s Dream. Outside of that, they’re all things that were adapted from a novel, or adapted from an album, or adapted from a photograph, or from a painting, Sunday in the Park with Georgia, Les Miserables, The Mahabharata, Conference of the… So many of them are coming from epic poems, or novels, or it’s having theatre makers make theatre out of something that didn’t start as theatre. There’s still great productions and great plays, but companies are defined, I think, and artists are defined often by, maybe with the exception of Ivo van Gogh, who right now is taking classics and making us see them in such a startling way, but he’s a once-in-a-hundred-year artist.
But very, very rarely does a generation give us its great productions. It’s amazing. But it’s amazing how doing what then becomes really interesting is, side by side in a season, how this new kind of work relates and is in conversation with this older play.
So when suddenly your season has a mixture of that, suddenly you start, there’s a kind of, two things are hitting up against each other, and there’s a bit more of a dynamic as opposed to just six or seven, what we call classic plays, you’re starting to see. And those new works start to shape how you tell those old stories. I can’t go back and do Doll’s House the way I’ve done.
I’ve had the great luck of doing it twice, and it didn’t come… I absolutely went in a whole other direction the second time, because it’s post-Bondage and post all these shows that I did that have come to, I think, define how I like to now work as an artist. So those things are shaping how we tell these classic plays when we go back to them. So it’s all kind of feeding into itself in a really exciting way.
It just takes this guy to make the dream happen. I think it’s great. I actually think the development, giving the idea of just letting everything, giving it the time to develop, is a rarity in theatre.
And just to allow that, I think it’s a great thing. So I thank you for that. Thanks.
You know, one of the things too that we did in the last year and a bit, two years, is we started investing in the things that normally don’t get invested in, which allows for things like Cage to happen. In other words, to say to artists, go into a room and play, but we’re going to put a technician in the room with you, and you’re going to get lights, and you can get some technical support. Because traditionally, particularly in Canada, traditionally the creation of new work, the incubation of new work, has been five playwrights in little offices writing a play and then reading it with a few actors and getting notes from a dramaturg and going back into their little office.
It’s not about creating theatre. It’s about creating play. And there’s value in that, but if everyone’s doing that, you’re going to get a very bookish theatre.
You’re going to get a play-based theatre culture, which is what we’ve had in English Canada for a long time. And I think we’re breaking out of that now, and I think we’re taking a leadership role in that. And I think one of the ways of doing it is actually just saying, now when you play, you get these tools, too.
And it’s just shifted things in an important way. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, it’s just a rare thing, occurrence, when companies will invest their resources in that way. Because you don’t immediately see the revenue come back, I assume, from a workshop.
So you’re investing, I guess, in the long term. And I think it’s smart, because those shows become richer, but it’s rare. I’ve been talking with a number of people, and people often say, you know, we never workshop things in Canada.
We don’t have time for that. We write it, get a third draft, throw it on stage, and that’s good. But I think it’s important to do that kind of work.
I think our country has been caught in a vicious cycle, in a very unhealthy relationship with the work we do. And we’ve come to this thing where we just, like anybody in a bad relationship, you start to make excuses. You start to go, well, there are good days.
Well, the other thing that we’ve done is, when you talk about getting caught, we’ve gotten caught with shrinking funding, too. Or funding that has not grown at the level of the ambition of a community. So now you have, you know, 1970, you send funding levels, and there’s 10 amazing Canadian playwrights.
Then you jump ahead 40 years, and there’s 400 people that call themselves working playwrights instead of 10. And the money, maybe you have twice as much money as you had back then, but not much more than twice as much money. And suddenly, so what happens is, nobody generally in Canada, and this is also something that we’re trying to break, nobody is writing plays for more than three people.
And as you do that, the dramaturgy defines the scope of the stories you can tell, the aesthetic that you can build, like literally that you can put on a stage, the geometry that you can create with one, two, or three people versus 22 people is a completely, one is theatre, and one is story. They’re very different things, because I know, like when I write, I always think like, okay, so if I put more than four people on this, it’s not getting produced. Which sort of kills the creativity.
It’s a real problem. And this doesn’t happen in countries that have national theatres, which is why we also have been using this national civic theatre phrase, in that what we’re trying to say is, we’ve actually built up enough resources, and we have to do it every year, but we’ve actually built an infrastructure that has, you know, we have two resident designers here that are here full time, that also happen to be two of the most brilliant designers in the country. And then we have really, really clever student designers, always two at any given time going through the academy, who are also extraordinary.
And we have an academy of 17 young artists coming up. We have a composer, eight performers, two directors, two producers, two designers, and two playwrights, who are all like really, really smart, active brains, working in this thing all the time, plus all the other stuff, so that when someone’s making something, and all of these resources are available, now I can say to you as a writer, okay, come in, look at the resources here. Now, like Marie Brissard, when we brought Marie Brissard on Project Imagination, you know, she’s worked with Lepage, and then on her own, all around the world, and she knows all of that.
She came here, and we took her on a tour of the place you met with her, I met with her. She said, I’ve never seen this anywhere, anywhere in the world have I seen this. And she came back with a proposal.
She actually, of all things, wanted to work with our combat team. So our two combat people, and our designers, and our actors eventually, but in her world, she had never run up against people who were given resources to make, to think about combat beyond a sword fight in King Lear, but to actually think of it as being a piece of our creative palette. And she, so you know, who knows what that’s going to be.
And you touched on something that we should really just make sure we cover, because the Soul Pepper Academy is training burn, which I was a member of the very first one 10 years ago. If you know, you just have to look at the basic facts are, if you look at the productions in the last five years, six years, that have come to, not totally defined, but have certainly defined or have certainly audiences have grown to love and are continuing to come back to, are like how much of those shows have been impacted by Academy, Academy graduates. Look at all the shows we’re taking to New York.
So we’re taking, we’re taking seven of them, they’re all. So, and that is to say that, while it’s a training program, it’s the, what we’re focusing on, I think, is developing the artists and the voice of the artist, and not just making them really good crafts people. But there are people that are graduating and have a real artistic voice and a desire to tell story.
And they’re shaping the stories we tell. So they’re not satisfied this, every generation is different. Oh my God, I sound old.
But I’m, but now I’m through two academies of designers that I’m training. And they all have very strict, like, strong points of view on what stories should be told, and, and how they should be told. And so they, they, they, they bite at your heels and they clamor to get in and to open that door to tell that story.
And when Alfred’s made that, you know, that allowed Mike to make Spoon River, it allowed, you know, so these things are coming to, to define the community. So the academy is all over it. Yeah.
So, and not using, you know, some of them then go off into the world and bring that elsewhere and not always here 100%. It’s transient, but, but the, the, the amazing thing is that the footprint that it’s leaving is pretty, pretty outstanding. Well, we’re at the end of our time.
And I’d like to thank you both for your time. It’s been a great conversation. Thank you very much.
