Aaron Joel Craig & Stephanie Hope Lawlor
About This Episode:
This week on Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby welcomes Aaron Joel Craig (Same Boat Theatre) and Stephanie Hope Lawlor (Rooks Theatre) to discuss their co-production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in Hamilton.
This episode explores:
- Reimagining A Doll’s House as a story for 2025 audiences
- The intersection of feminism, capitalism, and personal freedom
- Building independent theatre in Hamilton’s evolving arts scene
- The power of site-specific and intimate performance spaces
- Collaboration between Rooks Theatre and Same Boat Theatre
- Creating sustainability and opportunity for indie theatre artists
- How theatre can thrive outside major city centers
- Turning creative frustration into community impact
Guests:
🎭 Aaron Joel Craig
Aaron Joel Craig (he/him) is a director, dramaturge, designer and performer. His theatre work focuses on questions of identity, power and how to stay hopeful in a difficult world. Some past projects include Test, Your Own Sons and The Conspiracy of Michael, and the national tour of Whale Fall, all with Same Boat, and Henry the Fifth and Waiting for Godot for Redeemer University and, most recently, Hamlet, the inaugural site-specific co-production by Same Boat and Rook’s Theatre. He lives in the East End of Hamilton with his partner, Cath, their two kids, and his probably-too-big record collection. You can find him some days at Last Supper Books, a new independent bookstore on James Street North, which also serves as the home of Same Boat Theatre’s monthly play reading and development series, Dispatches.
🎭 Stephanie Hope Lawlor
Stephanie is an award-winning multi-hyphenate who lives and works in Hamilton. She spends her days crafting artistic community, facilitating space for brave individuals to hone their creative voices, and making theatre with really great people.
Selected Theatre: Hamlet (Rook’s x Same Boat), Rebecca in Whale Fall (Same Boat Theatre in Hamilton, Vancouver, Toronto, then Hamilton again), Eleanor in Never Not Once, Cassandra in One Night Only, Liesl in The Sound of Music (Theatre Aquarius), Mary/Flowers in Mary’s Wedding, Vanda in Venus in Fur (Rook’s Theatre), Snow White (Drayton Ent.), Young Leda in Provenance (Berkeley Street Theatre), Florence in Why Do Fools Fall in Love? (Stage West), KC Downing in My Favorite Year, Wagner/Wrath in Doctor Faustus (RAPA), Mary Snow in Salt-Water Moon (Studio Theatre). In Concert: Don’t Laugh (Unless I’m Trying to be Funny) (cabaret debut), From Broadway With Love, Isabella Tarantella (Brott Music Festival), Stephanie and Shane meet Stephen, Women of Musical Theatre Festival (MAP, 2 seasons). Workshops: Too many to name, for Theatre Aquarius, Young Peoples’ Theatre, Young Street Theatricals, Berkeley Street Theatre, Sullivan Entertainment. Training: Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts (Randolph College), McMaster University.
Stephanie serves as Associate Artistic Director at the Hamilton Conservatory for the Arts and Director of Programming for the HCA Theatre School, and is a two-time Hamilton Arts Award nominee and the recipient of the only Innovation – Cutting Edge Gilded Hammer Award for her work in the Hamilton theatre community (2020).
Connect with Aaron & Stephanie:
🌐 Same Boat Theatre: sameboattheatre.com
🌐 Rooks Theatre: rookstheatre.com
📸 Same Boat Theatre on Instagram: @sameboattheatre
📸 Aaron on Instagram: @aaronjoelcraig
📸 Rooks Theatre on Instagram: @rookstheatre
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Transcript
Transcripts are auto generated and may contain minor errors.
[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast, and on this podcast I talk to Canadian theatre artists, from actors to playwrights to directors to producers and everything in between and beyond, some of whom are household names and others I really think you should get to know.
If you stick around to the end of the episode, you’ll hear about who my guest is next week, but this week I am talking to Aaron Joel Craig from Saneboat Theatre and Stephanie Hope Lawler from Rooks Theatre, and together they are presenting Ibsen’s A Dollhouse in Hamilton, and this production sounds so intimate and exciting that I really think you should hear about it. And if you’re in Hamilton or going to be in Hamilton, you really need to check out this production of Ibsen’s A Dollhouse. And so now here’s my conversation with Aaron Joel Craig and Stephanie Hope Lawler.
Aaron Joel Craig, Stephanie Hope Lawler, thank you so much for joining me. I’m really excited to have this conversation with you to talk about the show that you’re working on, which is A Dollhouse. Many years ago, I played the role of Niles Krogstad in a production of A Dollhouse, and we had a lot of conversations about the relevance of the show at that time and how it wasn’t just a stuffy, everybody’s like so distant from each other kind of story.
But I’m curious about, just to jump in with both feet, about this production of A Dollhouse and what drew you to this play.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
So last year, around this time, we were just wrapping a production, a site-specific production of Hamlet that we did in a 140-year-old church here in Hamilton. And we were really excited at the idea of approaching another kind of site-specific project. And most of my last 15 years has been spent doing new play development.
And a thing that we learned when we did Hamlet is that it helps if you can Google the play sometimes to get an audience to show up. And so we started thinking about what are some of those, we did Hamlet because we were on tour with a show called Whale Fall a couple years ago, and we were in Whistler because we were in the Vancouver Fringe. We were talking about what are the roles you wish you could play?
And Steph said, oh, well, no one would ever cast me as Hamlet. And I said, well, let’s do Hamlet. And so it was a similar kind of conversation that brought us around to the idea of Dollhouse.
And then I think, I don’t want to speak for you, Steph, but as we started reading different translations and different iterations, it just became frustratingly obvious how relevant the show continues to be. And through some relationships that I have, we found ourselves in a back hall of a church building here in Hamilton that’s built in 1883. So just four years after the play was written.
And so that kind of felt like a nice kind of synergy. And so we decided that would be a good home for it. And so that was kind of the initial jump in.
You were saying the themes are painfully relevant. I mean, it is a truth that it’s a play that deals with predatory lending and gender roles and the general power imbalance of inherited financial systems. There’s a bunch of different ways that it hits things that we’re interested in and that are very relevant to our city.
And so, yeah, that was the genesis of it. I don’t know if you have other stuff you want to add to that, Stephanie.
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
Yeah. Yeah. Similarly.
I mean, the role of women today is so different from when the play was written, but it’s no less present. It’s no less shocking. The ending that is so famously divisive and shocking is no different in a contemporary setting than it is in the 1870s, right?
It continues to challenge just the deepest understanding that we have about duty, duty as a woman to your family, as a woman to society in the role that you play. In 2025, the needle has moved so little that I think the idea of a woman leading her family, leading her children is still pretty shocking. I told Erin this story, but my mom read the play after I told her that we were going to do it.
She hadn’t read it in years and she finished it. She said, I don’t like that woman. And I said, why?
And she said, she leaves her kids behind. And I said, I know it’s awful and crunchy and so difficult to stomach. And that is what makes the play so relevant.
It’s about having to make that difficult decision to choose yourself.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think when I did it years ago, like I mentioned, we were talking about the depth of the emotion in the play, which is something that when we first approached it, we didn’t see because it has that period-specific stiff upper lip and distance from each other and things like that. But in actuality, we discovered how high the stakes are for every character and why the things happen the way that they’re happening. And so once that opened up for us, it stopped being a period piece and became something very relevant.
What have you discovered about the play? I’ll ask Stephanie first. What have you discovered about the play as you’ve rehearsed it that you didn’t expect?
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
Early on, until relatively recently, I really struggled with that exact idea. I thought, I don’t know how to unlearn the things I know as a grown woman in 2025. I’m struggling to erate those thoughts in order to find this kind of naivete, this blissful ignorance that Nora has to the world around her.
Because she’s never been given those tools. She’s never been given that information. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.
And over the last few weeks, what’s really clicked is that regardless of what she knows or what she doesn’t know, she is a woman trying to navigate this society that is so centered around men. From Rank to Torvald to Krogstad, all of these men are using her as a cog to their own agenda to interact with each other through Nora. She’s truly just like a puppet for them to make themselves feel good, to make themselves feel strong, to make themselves feel smart.
And so once I was able to shift into that understanding, I felt rage. I felt so much rage. And that’s been a really fantastic discovery, especially as we start to work on things like the Tarantella scene or the Act III reckoning between Torvald and Nora.
Finding that female rage has been very helpful.
[Phil Rickaby]
Aaron, what about yourself? You’re directing this play as well as acting in it. What discoveries have you made that you didn’t expect?
[Aaron Joel Craig]
One of the interesting things for me is how little of the internal life of each of these characters is actually on the page. Ibsen is breaking the mold for his time in the way that he doesn’t have anybody stand up there and tell you all of the things that they’re feeling inside. There’s no soliloquy to tell you about who these people are.
And so I think that’s been challenging in ways, but also has really driven us to take those tiny little moments that do exist where somebody tips their hand a little bit here and there. That’s been really fun to unpack the subtlety of it. We’re also performing and building the show in a room that is very small and very quiet, like really quiet, insofar as you can whisper a line to somebody and everybody can hear you throughout the room.
Those things together have offered a real opportunity to play with nuance in a way that you don’t usually get to in traditional theatre spaces. And in some ways, that’s the gift and the curse of the room, because if you get too big, then you’re in trouble pretty quickly. So yeah, there’s an interesting thing of trying to parse those realities of the script that does not have a ton on the page, but there is a great depth behind it.
And so being able to play in those small ways has been really interesting, I think.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I think it was one of my first exposures to, because the character of Krogstad appears as kind of a villain when you first meet him. And then once you start to get to his motivations, he’s less so.
And it was one of those first exposures to, oh yes, remember that the villain is not the villain in their own mind. They have their own motivations, and for them, they are just and right. It’s a fascinating, it’s a good exercise to take on.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
Well, at the risk of being overly postmodern, I’ve been talking about the villain of the play being capitalism, because it really is. I mean, the truth is, is that Nora’s put in a position because she doesn’t have the resources she needs to provide adequate healthcare for her husband, who is dying. And so she goes to a predatory lender, and she has to lie about her dead father signing papers so that she can do this thing.
And then eight years later, she’s still paying it off with terms that she doesn’t understand, like quarterly interest and compound interest. She’s dealing with all of these things that are just so… How many of us signed up for a credit card when we were in our first year of university and didn’t know what the hell we were doing?
You know what I mean? And so I think there are all of these things that are very easy to draw lines to how our society still works. But yeah, everybody in the play is in the position that they’re in because of a system that has forced them into compromising who they want to be, which unfortunately, I think it’s pretty easy to identify with.
Sadly so.
[Phil Rickaby]
Stephanie, you alluded to the fact that your mother had sort of forgotten the end of the play. And I think sometimes we in the theatre take for granted that people know how these plays end. That for us, because we know the play, we know how Hamlet ends, we know how a doll’s house ends, and all of these sorts of things.
These are things we take for granted. And yet, I remember many years ago, commenting on, I think it was Facebook, about the end of the Scottish play, and somebody took me to task for spoilers. And I thought, oh, right.
I know this play inside out. They don’t. And so we kind of have to be kind to those people, but also to remember that these are revelations for them when this play ends.
How are you guys dealing with that in this show?
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
Buds, listen, I think the statute of spoilers has to run out at some point.
[Phil Rickaby]
You think that after 500 years or so, that the statute of limitations on spoilers has run out. But I also think it’s worth remembering that people don’t know how these plays end.
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
It’s such a reflection of the fact that our theatre is iterative. The Scottish play is the Scottish play is the Scottish play. Romeo and Juliet is Romeo and Juliet.
A doll’s house is a doll’s house. It will always be a doll’s house. But it’s so far beyond just, I think, the ending being the interesting part of the show.
Our version of a doll’s house, when we started talking about it, we discussed these concepts that Aaron was just referring to, predatory lending, taking out a credit card before you really knew all the information you had. And we talked about it being a doll’s house for millennials, because that’s our experience, being promised a world that we didn’t get to receive in the way we thought we would. And so, yes, the ending is the ending, no spoilers.
But I think it’s the way we find our way there that is going to make it so interesting and so distinctly Hamilton, so distinctly the company that is creating it.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
Yeah. And I would just add to that, that I think there is something, like, yeah, I agree that getting to the ending is unique, but also there is something about, like, there is a joy to me in kind of the dramatic irony of all of us knowing where this is going. And I think there’s a gift in kind of the inevitability.
When we were working on Hamlet, it was like, okay, so one person gets out of this alive. You know what I mean? And I think there is something that is, yeah, there is a gift that you can give yourself, I think, in going into multiple iterations of a thing that you’ve seen over and over and over to get fresh perspective, but also just to experience kind of the reality that, like, everything ends.
And we don’t get to choose the way it ends, but we do get to, like, choose the way that we engage with that ending, if that is a coach’s thought, which are mine.
[Phil Rickaby]
I am curious about, because this production, and it’s not your first production together, as sort of a co-production between St. Boat Theatre and Rooks Theatre, what brought you two together? What brought these two theatre companies together to make work together?
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
We had sort of orbited around each other for many years. I think Rooks was born shortly after St. Boat. And we had kind of run in similar circles, but never really crossed paths.
And then it wasn’t really until Whalefall, I think, that we connected and saw so many similarities between the way we like to work, between our shared language, the way we articulate the work. And working on Whalefall was kind of the genesis of a really lovely working relationship in that way.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
Yeah, I saw Rooks’ inaugural production of Venus and Fir, 2016, 2015, somewhere in there. And I left the show and I texted Steven, who’s the other half of St. Boat, and I said, we have to work with Steph. You have to figure out a way to work with Steph.
And then it wasn’t until, yeah, Whalefall was developed during the pandemic. And we had a Zoom showcase of a script in 2021. And then we put that together in a real-life kind of way in 2022, and then toured it in 2023.
And I think it was really on that tour when we went up to Vancouver and then we were in Hamilton again and Toronto that we really understood that, first of all, this city is not big, right? There’s just not that many of us. And that makes it hard to make work generally, especially because there’s also a limited audience.
And so it was kind of a conversation around what would it look to pool resources, which is also just a hell of a lot of work to build a show. And so we have complementary skills, but we also have nearly identical priorities in terms of the work that we want to do. And so, yeah, it just felt like a very natural fit.
And also we were on tour in Vancouver for two weeks and we didn’t get sick of each other. And that, I think, is a really good, like if you can take a trip together and you can get to the end of that and be excited about the next time you see each other, that’s a really good tester for if you can make a show together, I think.
[Phil Rickaby]
More than just a trip together, to perform in a Fringe production together where everybody is that the pressure cooker of Fringe is, you know, everybody’s doing promotion, everybody’s out and about doing their thing and trying to get a show and are we making money and that sort of thing. If you can be friendly and still work together well at the end of that, it’s a pretty good relationship.
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
And share an Airbnb one room away and hear people snoring through walls. And if you absolutely share a bathroom, we can survive anything.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. You guys have sort of talked a little bit about Hamilton and the scene in Hamilton, which I’ve talked to a few people before. I was talking with Michael Cross a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about how, you know, it is a small scene.
You do have really only one professional theatre house in Hamilton with Aquarius and everything else is largely on the amateur side or the community theatre side. And that does make some things difficult in terms of producing in a city. But how do you both see the scene in Hamilton and what gaps were you filling with your respective companies?
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
I think, I mean, there are so many artists in Hamilton full stop, whether that’s theatre artists or musicians or visual artists. And that is a scene that I don’t think I saw with clear eyes when I first left to go to theatre school. I was so of the impression that if I wanted to be in the arts, I had to live somewhere else.
And around the time when I returned to Hamilton and I started to get more familiar with the theatre scene in town, I realized how much there was going on beyond, yeah, beyond the one equity house. Hamilton is a city of community theatres. There are so many and the community theatre scene is so strong.
But there was really nothing to fill that gap between community theatre and booking a gig at Aquarius for six weeks. And so what I was really interested in, my collaborator at the time, Krista Colosimo, we’re really interested in is just making opportunities for those of us who are kind of in that in-between space who aren’t working at Aquarius, but also want to have maybe a little bit more agency over the kind of work that we’re creating, the work that we’re producing, the projects we get to work on and the roles we get to play in that.
I know for me, I was at a point in my young career where I was shifting from musical theatre into acting straight plays. I knew that I wasn’t, you know, I was knocking on doors and not really being seen for things. So I knew the best way to build out my resume was to produce work myself, was to put myself in those roles.
And then as I got deeper and deeper entrenched into this independent theatre scene, I realized there were so many folks just like me who are wanting to do very much the same work, whether it was new play development, like Same Boat does an awful lot of, or Michael Cross does an awful lot of, or producing work that, yeah, you can Google and have an idea of how many Tony Awards it won when it was in New York or whatever. So I think it’s a scrappy city and the indie theatre scene is really a testament to that, is like a testament to building bonds, building relationships and making art happen against all odds.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
I would agree with basically everything that Steph said. I mean, our company was born, as most companies are born, in order to produce a fringe play. And so it kind of came about in order to, yeah, do that.
Hamilton has a very strong fringe scene in addition to our community theatre scene. And there’s a lot of overlap between those things actually. But yeah, so we started as a fringe company that then realized that we didn’t want to watch things die at the fringe anymore.
And so as a way of, you know, doing our own development, because there just aren’t a lot of, there are no opportunities for new play development in Hamilton at this juncture, certainly. I mean, Aquarius has a great musical development program, but they don’t have a working unit, right, like playwrights unit or anything like that at this point. And so, yeah, we realized that we kind of needed to step into that gap.
And so that’s been a lot of what we’ve been doing over the last number of years. But, you know, also working other jobs and having kids and those things. And so there’s a reality that like for us, the thing that I’m really passionate about at this point is making sure that there is like good soil for the generations that are coming after us.
That they have, that there are opportunities to see new work being developed, that there are opportunities to see, you know, established works on stage that are not just in one place, that are in unexpected places even. You know, Hamilton has like a long history of being like, you know, scrappy or punk rock or however you want to frame it. There’s a really like, there’s a DIY blue collar kind of sensibility to the city, even though now it’s mostly white collar people living here.
But the blue collar sensibility I think informs a lot of the work that we do in that like, I just love to expose process as much as possible. I think that’s like really essential, especially for a city that is still learning how to engage with artistic practice in general. So yeah, that’s kind of the spots that we find ourselves.
[Phil Rickaby]
Well, you said about tired of seeing shows die at the fringe. I think the unfortunate truth about theatre and independent and new plays in Canada is they either die at the fringe or they die after their first production for the most part. Like we don’t have a path for further productions after an initial one.
So it’s one of those big struggles of Canadian theatres is so you’ve done a play now what? And I think that’s the, that’s the question that gets asked everywhere. Like what is the end?
Like what do we do after we’ve done the play?
[Aaron Joel Craig]
Well, and to like compound that there’s also like there’s money for play development, but there’s not money for established work. Like if you can, if you can get a grant to make your show, that’s awesome. It’s a big if and it’s an increasingly big if these days, but if you want to reiterate on that project, the likelihood of you getting money to do that is almost zero.
And so, you know, you have to find there. So there’s the financial realities. There’s also the like, honestly, the, like the dopamine hit reality of like, I already got what I needed out of that show.
So, you know, for, for us with Whalefall, it was like, okay, we did it at the fringe. It felt really good. It made sense.
And it also was like built small and, and, and felt like it was tourable. But then like the work of trying to take that somewhere else was the only way to do it was with a fringe tour or similarly, you know, we did a show a number of years ago called your own sons. It was about homegrown radicalization.
And so we, we developed a version of that for the fringe and then took it away for 10 months and then retooled it for kind of a, a full-blown indie production. But again, like, you know, trying to get money to do that was nearly impossible. And so I think there’s like, there’s layers on layers on layers of this, but also it like, it looks great for granting bodies when a company like Aquarius or Terragon or whatever commissions their own new stuff.
And so they’re also not out trolling the fringe for a show that might work in their context. So, you know, outside of, outside of Kim’s convenience, which is like the, the one and I love inc. He’s one of the greats, but there’s not a lot of those stories.
That’s where there’s a reason why that one hits so particularly.
[Phil Rickaby]
There are three that I could think of in the history of the Toronto fringe, Kim’s convenience, the drowsy chaperone and to kick in her hair. Like those are the three shows that have gone on to have for like, Oh, nope. Fourth, my mother’s lesbian wedding.
That’s the other one. Yeah. I was going to get you on that one.
Yeah, no, no, no. Thank you. Thank you.
And I should be held to account for missing that one because we wouldn’t have come from away without that particular show. It’s true.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
But for ways, the other show that every theatre is doing this year, but the fact that we can name a handful, right? Five, four or five shows. And there are a hundred plus shows of the fringe every year.
And a lot of them are really good.
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
I’d still not reflective of the quality or, or what you’re seeing. I’d seen more shows at the fringe that I would love to see a bigger run for.
[Phil Rickaby]
But yeah. Yeah. I have seen, I mean, Michael Ross Alberts, the Huns, which premiered at the Toronto fringe did have a further production at the Halifax fringe, which is a rarity.
And then I think it’s doing a production in New York coming up, which is again, total rarities for these things coming out of the fringe, but it does also, it does speak to the, the, the limitations. The fringe is a way to get yourself out there, but it doesn’t. It there’s like, like with everything in this, in, in, in performing new things, it’s hard to find a path to further production.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
Well, and, and the past of further production is to do it yourself. Like, you know, I think about a show called Samka that was here in the Hamilton that a spindle theatre made. Like I think about it once a week, probably just a brilliant show.
Those, we love those folks. They’re great. You know, there are, there are ways to do it, but it’s interesting that almost like of the, of the shows that I have a relationship with the majority of them, their second iteration of some kind of site specific creation or retooling, because they’ve got to find a way to make it new, but also because we can’t get into theatres.
[Phil Rickaby]
Well, I mean, there’s already a dearth of theatre spaces. When I was talking with Michael dress, we were talking about the pearl company that had a space and disappeared. There are very few spaces, theatre spaces that are available for independent production in, in Toronto, in Hamilton, in so many places, which brings me to the space that you are performing in.
You mentioned it being a small space, you mentioned it being very intimate, but tell me more specifically, what is the space that you’re performing in and what drew you to it?
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
So as Aaron mentioned, he’s got this beautiful connection to Eucharist church, which is at one 30 Victoria Avenue North and Hamilton. And the space that we’re in is their hall. And it is a beautiful, bright windowed space.
Actually, it’s where we rehearsed will fall. So the space feels really, really good. It feels really creative, really juicy.
But there is a beautiful intimacy to it because it’s got hardwood, the walls are pretty solid, you just get so much reverb of sound of voice, like Aaron was saying, you can, you can breathe and be heard, you can hear a pin drop and the audience is quite close. They’re right up in the action. And there’s something so beautiful about that.
Because it just strips everything away, you have to do so, so little as an actor, you’re so present with the audience. And I think there’s this really great feeling of being a fly on the wall in a in a production like this watching something extremely intimate that you kind of feel like maybe I shouldn’t really be privy to this, but I also can’t tear myself away. Yeah.
And Aaron has done a beautiful job of really outfitting the space to feel like adulthood to feel like this beautifully crafted and curated space that this family lives in and exists in and it’s warm and it’s welcoming, but there’s still something so performative about it as you know, with an audience of 50 sitting on all sides on all four sides.
[Phil Rickaby]
There is something about intimate spaces. I mean, you’ve performed at the Red Sandcastle in Toronto, which is an extremely intimate space. And I’ve spoken to people who were going to do a show there.
And I always said to people like, that audience is going to be closer than you think. When the audience is that close, the relationship between actor and audience gets a little bit more blurred. You don’t have that moment where you look out of the crowd and you can say, I can kind of see the two people in the front row.
You can see everybody. And so they become part of the performance. How with this play in all of its intimate moments, how are you dealing with that intimacy in the scene?
[Aaron Joel Craig]
So first of all, I just think it’s like a very, it’s a funny thing to, like, it’s funny to me to take like the quintessential fourth wall drama and take all the walls away and just put bodies there. I just think it’s kind of dumb. And I like that.
I like a little bit of silliness in my work. I think there’s an interesting thing that has, that, that we all are experiencing where a lot of our intimate relationships and our like intimate moments are being broadcast constantly now. What is reality TV?
If not a doll’s house in a way is being invited into these moments that you’re not supposed to be there for. And so I think there’s an interesting kind of, there’s like an availability there. Like you can comment on that a little bit, but I think, especially since COVID, like I’ve, we’ve only worked in the round since COVID because I think the presence of the audience to each other is as important to me to their, as their presence to the play.
And also like the, the way that you get to see somebody else’s reaction to this moment also informs, you know what I mean? And, and the, they become a part of the exposure because they’re not hidden either. You know, this show is lit with lamps and so the light is low, but you can still see faces across that room.
And so in the way that Nora and Torvald and Ranked and all of these characters are exposed, you’re also exposed as an audience member. And so there’s an interesting kind of like baked in empathy almost to that, that I think is really compelling to me as a, as a director, as a designer, as a performer, all of those things I think are really interesting.
[Phil Rickaby]
Stephanie, as Nora, you’re on stage quite a bit in front of the audience. You are going to be looking at them quite a bit. I mean, you have performed in the round before, but this fight, like you guys have both been saying, like there are these intimate moments, which feel like the audience is intruding on.
How are you prepared for that closeness of the audience?
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
Listen, right, first of all, you don’t have to remind me. I’m very aware. I’m not stressed about it at all.
I think, I mean, Nora, Nora as Torvald Songbird exists in this birdcage, exists in this perfectly curated life. We talked a lot about the space that Nora exists in versus the space everybody else exists in and the limitations or the permissions that that gives her or gives other characters. And I think having the audience, they’re there in the birdcage with her.
They’re not leaving. They’re there in these moments. They are watching her every move and experiencing her every interaction.
So where Torvald might not be privy to every conversation she is having, obviously, the audience is witnessing sort of the unraveling of her situation over the course of these three days so intimately, so closely. I think there’s something so exciting about that, particularly for Nora, feeling that presence, feeling those other bodies in the room as other people sort of come and go through the space. I don’t know if that’s a good answer.
[Phil Rickaby]
No, it’s an excellent answer. I mean, it is disconcerting looking at an audience. When I was getting ready to perform my solo show, The Commandment, which I did the first time in Hamilton at The Fringe there, my director, Richard Bone, was like, so of course you’re going to be looking at the audience.
You’re going to be looking in the audience’s eyes. That’s your scene partner. And I hadn’t considered that.
And as soon as he said that, I knew he was right. And I hated it because I was used to that separation. But once I got past that, because the first performance, I did not.
I looked between people. I cheated. I cheated.
But after that, I couldn’t imagine not looking at them, having them there as scene partners. And it really changed my perception of those moments and that space and what an audience and the interaction with an audience could be. It was a fascinating thing to experience.
So, I mean, you’re not the only one, Stephanie, who has to be that close to the audience in these awkward intimate scenes. Everybody else is as well. Aaron, I’m going to ask you to speak for the rest of the cast.
How is everybody else feeling about that closeness?
[Aaron Joel Craig]
Yeah, I mean, so I think for a lot of folks, it’s theoretical until the bodies are there, and so it’s like you can you can kind of talk yourself into it. You can be like, yeah, the chairs are there and we’ll have to think about legs. And there is kind of like a more kind of technical reality.
I think there is a there’s an emotional reality that doesn’t hit until you’ve got bodies in the room. One of the interesting things is that we have kids working on this show. You know, we’ve got two kids who play Nora and Torvald’s kids.
They’re, I think, seven and nine or so. You’re right in that range. And so, you know, this idea of like, how aware are those kids?
Like, we want them to be aware that the audience is there, but not there. And so like those kinds of communications, like we’re having to be a little more pragmatic maybe than we would be generally. And I mean, in some ways that’s a gift, right?
Like when you have to kind of distill what you’re trying to do to communicate to these kids who are not, you know, capital A actors, right? They’re kids and they’re wonderful. They’re asking all the right questions, which is a real gift.
Shout out to Maeve and Harvey. They’re great. But yeah, there’s an interesting thing where I think, yeah, it is as with any show, right?
It’s all theoretical until you get an audience in the room. You think you know what the laugh line is. It’s never that line, right?
So there are all of those realities that for me, it’s like the best we can do is make sure that we’re taking care of each other and then we’re taking care of the audience by taking care of each other. And so I think that’s like, you know, I mean, in some ways that’s the gift of the intimacy of this play being mostly two hand scenes is that, you know, if, if Steph and I are on stage together, we’re mostly just talking to each other. And so the rest of the world can kind of disappear a little bit, but yeah, honestly, I have no idea what it’s going to be like.
It’s going to be pretty wild when we got there. That’s amazing.
[Phil Rickaby]
I do want to start turning away from a doll’s house for a second. I do want to talk a little bit with each of you about your theatre journeys and some of the things that you’re into in, in Hamilton. Steph, you haven’t been on this show before.
So I wanted to ask you about your theatre origin story. You mentioned thinking you had to go away when you went to theatre school and then coming back. What first drew you to theatre?
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
I was so lucky to have two parents that love theatre. Desperately. My mom took us to see all the musicals at Sean and Stratford.
My dad is a big Shakespeare classics guy. I remember seeing my first Pinter sitting next to my father at the age of 14, which was bizarre and awesome. So I saw a lot of theatre growing up, which I sort of credit to my early training at that age.
I also was insanely shy and introverted and quiet. The idea of setting foot on a stage was horrifying, but still in the recesses of my mind, I was like, but I’m going to do it. I’m going to be an actor.
I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stand on a stage, but I’m going to do it. It wasn’t until my late teens that I found my way to Lou Zambronea’s theatre program, which used to run out of theatre Aquarius. That was kind of it.
I remember walking into the theatre on the very first day, having never set foot on a stage, and just feeling like, yeah, this is the thing. At the time, that program drew all of the musical theatre kids in Hamilton, or at least a lot of them. At that age, the prevailing opinion is that you’ve got to go to Sheridan, or you’ve got to go to Randolph, or you’ve got to go to one of these schools that’s going to get you where you want to go, because Stratford is the be-all-end-all, and Drayton is the be-all-end-all, and you want to work for these specific goals.
I was very much under the impression that if I wanted to do this, that’s what I had to do. From there, I completed my degree at McMaster, and then I moved to Toronto and went to Randolph, and had a phenomenal experience there. I had great training.
I really enjoyed my experience, which I know is not necessarily how it is for everybody, but I was really grateful to leave that program with an agent and some gigs lined up, and then worked pretty steadily for the next decade, on and off, as anyone does, before I found my way back to Hamilton, having booked a gig at Aquarius, which felt very full circle, and thinking, you know, I’m just going to move back home for a bit.
I’m going to go do this show, and I’m going to save some money, and then I’ll go back to Toronto. Then that was really when I moved back to Hamilton and thought, oh my god, there’s so much good stuff happening here. I think I can stay and continue to do the things I want to do, maybe even more meaningfully than it feels like I’m doing it now.
[Phil Rickaby]
Was that a difficult choice to make? Was there a lot of pressure pushing you back to Toronto, or did it feel like everything was aligning to have you in Hamilton?
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
I think, looking back, yeah, everything was aligning. Everything was bringing me back to Hamilton for a reason. Even over the next several years, I continued to commute back and forth.
I would audition or do week-long workshops or whatever. I was in Toronto multiple times a week, but over time, I just sort of, by happenstance, maybe started to plant some roots here. I feel more comfortable taking agency over the work that I want to do and being a little bit less interested in auditioning for projects that I wasn’t 100% sold on, but felt like I had to audition for if I wanted to be a certain kind of artist or a certain kind of actor.
I think, maybe not for everybody, but certainly for me, there came a time where that became way less fun. It became way less fun to schlep into Toronto to audition for a 40-second TV spot with 50 girls wearing the exact same dress. It was just a little soul-crushing.
I thought, well, there are so many cool people to collaborate with, and they’re making kick-ass work. Why can’t I do it?
[Phil Rickaby]
There is something about the creation of your own work and being involved and invested in that which feels so much more rewarding and gives you an ownership of the work. Just like being a person who shows up, I sign a contract, I do the work, I go home, and I’m done. I so much prefer to be invested in the work in a way that is like, this is mine.
I’ve written it, or I’ve had my hands all over this thing to build it up. I feel like that’s so much more rewarding as a career in the theatre.
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
Listen, I think there’s a time and place for both, for sure. There’s such an ease that comes with somebody else producing a piece of theatre that you just get to act in. There’s something really beautiful about that.
When the stars align and it’s a production you’re excited to work on with a team that is wonderful, that you really connect with at a theatre, that you really love, then beautiful, that’s so fantastic. But yeah, it lacks that excitement about making the artistic choices that lead you to whatever production you’re doing.
[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. Let’s not pretend that one tends to be more financially lucrative than the other. It’s a different kind of rewarding.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
If anybody ever wants to hand me a bag to do one job on a show, I will take it all the way. Happy to do it. Yeah.
[Phil Rickaby]
Aaron, I want to ask you about the bookstore. Anybody who’s watching this on YouTube could see that you have a wall of books behind you. You have this bookstore, you’re showing Dracula as part of your Halloween series tonight.
How does the bookstore relate to your work and to the art scene in Hamilton?
[Aaron Joel Craig]
I work at this bookstore on James Street North, at 148 James Street North, called Last Supper Books. Matt, who is the owner, comes out of a music industry situation. Obviously, my background is in theatre.
We both moved to Hamilton 15 plus years ago, in a time where it was very DIY, pull up your socks and figure out a way to do something. The city has changed a lot. A lot of our music venues are gone.
All but one of our theatre venues are gone. We have The Staircase, we have Aquarius, and that’s it. A lot of our DIY spaces, we’ve been priced out of them, all those kinds of things.
Standard story, right? Artist says the tip of the spear for gentrification and then get priced out. But what we wanted to do with the bookstore is to have a used bookstore because that’s fun to have, but also to have it function as a clubhouse for that kind of DIY mindset.
We do a lot of different things in the space. We’ve had concerts and comedy shows. Same boat, our company hosts a play reading series here, where we give playwrights the opportunity to read a thing in public, which just is not a thing that is very available anywhere, I think.
Certainly in this city, there’s not a ton of opportunities. We don’t have funding. It’s not lucrative by any means.
It’s very past the hat kind of model. We wanted to remember the beginnings of James Street especially as a very DIY, kind of art-crawly, from the ground up place. That’s kind of the ethos of the store, is that we just want to…
The kind of subtitle for the store is Books for the End of the World, because it kind of always feels like the world is ending these days. If we can offer a place that feels like a reprieve from that, but also that the thing that gets us through the apocalypse is always creativity and art. If we can be a good incubator for those things as well, then that’s about as good as it gets, I think.
[Phil Rickaby]
You also alluded to something that… I noticed this when I was in Hamilton for the French Festival in 2016 or 2017. At that point, they were still pursuing the art is the new steel mantra, which I thought…
It was a little dropped. Of course.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
It was crazy.
[Phil Rickaby]
Because it was always going to be dropped as soon as the property values went up. It was always going to be like art is the new steel until real estate becomes the new steel, and then fuck art.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
Art never was the new steel because it’s not a growth industry. And the truth is, is that med tech is the new steel in Hamilton, and McMaster University is new steel. And actually, that’s good.
All the push on art is the new steel, and I’m sure that you feel the same way about this stuff. I actually don’t. I’m not interested in it being the new steel.
It’s not a commodity. It’s not a thing to raise prices on or any of that kind of stuff. It’s not a slogan that I ever particularly jived with.
[Phil Rickaby]
And how can you? Because it’s kind of cynical. Like you said, art will never be the new steel.
It’s just something that you’re trying to say to make the city cool to the artists who are going to make it cool so that the property values will go up. Well, and it’s also just a really good real estate slogan. 100 percent.
100 percent. Yeah, absolutely. Just as we sort of come to a close here, I’m curious for each of you, this show, you’re in the middle of rehearsals for it, but so far, what is the thing that you are most looking forward to audiences discovering about this show?
[Stephanie Hope Lawlor]
I think the play is often touted as the first feminist piece of theatre. This feminist touchpoint in theatre. But ultimately, Ibsen, while he was writing manifestos about feminism, he was just taking women seriously.
He was taking the inner lives of women seriously at a time when people didn’t. And are they perfect depictions of women? But are they are they valuable?
Are they hugely resonant? Yeah, 100 percent. So I think thinking about the audience coming to see our production, I’m so excited for them to, yes, see this piece that we hold up as a feminist touchpoint for the beginnings of theatre, and also to view Nora as a human being who I think feminism is so far off of her radar at the stage she’s at.
This play is not woman discovers feminism. The play is woman discovers she’s a human being, and the steps she will take forward to eventually take ownership of her femininity. And understand what it means to be a woman in the world.
But at the top of the show, she doesn’t even realize she’s a human being. She doesn’t realize that she is beyond somebody’s play toy. And so that, to me, I think is going to feel quite resonant.
It certainly resonates with me. It certainly lives in a very deep place in me. And in this world where so much of the media that we’re consuming is about female rage and women reclaiming their power.
I think there’s something very interesting and very prescient about that.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
I think the thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about, and I’ve been stealing this from a company in New York called Sea Dog theatre. Chris Domeg runs that company, and he’s a pal of mine. But he recently got a review that referred to the show that they’re doing right now, it’s called Awakensing, as small-scale large ambition.
And when I read that, it hit for me in such a distinct way. Because that, I think, has always been kind of our ethos, especially in these co-productions, is to be like, okay, so our first co-production is Hamlet. And then after Hamlet, we do a doll’s house.
And then I won’t tell you on air what we’re talking about next, but it’s also a swing. And I think there is something about saying, you don’t have to be an equity house to do work that is interesting. You don’t have to have funding all the time to do work that is interesting.
We made Hamlet on $800, and we sold 800 seats. It’s not impossible to do these things. And so I think that ambition aspect of it is what I’m hoping we’ll be catching for audience members, that they’ll come and see something and say, oh, we could do that.
And I think especially in a post-pandemic or late pandemic, or however you want to frame that world, especially in this city, there’s a lot of dismay about the state of things, and a lot of feeling like, well, if we don’t have money, we can’t. And let me be clear, yes, let’s pay artists all the time as much as we’re able to, but also, I don’t know. Anna Chatterton once said that every time she does a show, she says, this is the last one, and then she wakes up the day after it closes and says, what’s next?
And there is that compulsive reality that certainly lives inside of me that I hope will be that catching thing. Nice.
[Phil Rickaby]
Well, Aaron, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you giving me some time today and looking forward to hearing more about Doll’s House.
[Aaron Joel Craig]
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us.
[Phil Rickaby]
Thanks for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I’m going to tell you about next week’s guest in just a minute.
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