Bryn Kennedy is Wearing Many Hats in Toronto’s Indie Theatre Scene

About This Episode:

Bryn Kennedy returns to Stageworthy to talk about directing Riot King’s production of The Moors by Jen Silverman — a darkly comic Victorian Gothic play about isolation, power, and the cost of giving up community. Bryn shares why this unsettling tale of spinster sisters, a mysterious governess, a mastiff dog, and a moorhen feels urgently relevant in our age of individualism and loneliness.

Beyond The Moors, Bryn and Phil dig into big questions facing Canadian theatre: How do we reach audiences who aren’t already theatre people? Why do we struggle to communicate story in our marketing? And what can we learn from Hollywood, fringe festivals, and even church about building community and inviting people in? Bryn also reflects on her work as a director, actor, producer, and marketer — and what she learned about the next generation of theatre-makers while managing Musical Stage Company’s One Song Glory program.

This episode explores:

• Why The Moors speaks to our culture of isolation and individualism
• The magic of the BMO Incubator Space at the Theatre Centre
• What Riot King gets right about indie theatre community
• Why we need to stop assuming everyone knows the classics
• What Bryn learned from working with fearless theatre kids
• And much more!

Guest: 🎭 Bryn Kennedy

Bryn Kennedy (she/her) is a director, producer, sometimes actor, spreadsheet planner, community builder and life-long learner. As a director, her favourite credits include the upcoming production of The Moors with Riot King, a new interpretation of Vitals by Rosamund Small (Outstanding Solo Performance Nomination, My Entertainment Awards), Beneath the Bed by Gabriel Golin (sold out, site specific run at Toronto Fringe) and new, speculative fiction play JANE by Camille Intson (inaugural Tarragon Greenhouse Residency). She is an alumni of Director’s Lab North, Musical Stage Company‘s Apprentice Program and the Stratford Festival Langham Directors Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Jean Gascon Award for Emerging Director at the Guthrie Awards. She has also held assisting positions with prolific Canadian directors Jackie Maxwell (Withrow Park at Tarragon, Ransacking Troy at Stratford), Chris Abraham (Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 and Rogers V Rogers at Crow’s) and Peter Pasyk (Hamlet at Stratford). She is currently the Assistant to the Artistic Director at Crow’s Theatre and Associate Artistic Director at Directors Lab North.

Connect with Bryn Kennedy

🌐 Website: brynkennedy.com

📸 Instagram: @brynkennedy

Get tickets to the Moors: https://theatrecentre.org/tickets/?eid=188037

The Moors runs until April 19 at The Theatre Centre.

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Transcript

[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast, and on Stageworthy, I talk to theatre makers of all kinds, from directors to actors, to playwrights, stage managers, producers.

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So if you could do that, that would be greatly appreciated. Speaking of greatly appreciated, I have a Patreon, and I will go into a little bit more detail about that at the end of the show before I tell you about who my guest is next week. But if you want to be one of the people who helps me to make this show, and the patrons who back me on Patreon certainly are the people who helped me to make this show, I could not do it without them.

Please go to patreon.com/ stageworthy, and become a patron. My guest this week is Bryn Kennedy. Bryn is a director, a producer, sometimes an actor, marketing person.

Bryn wears many hats, and we are going to talk about a few of those on this episode. But primarily, we are going to be talking about her role as director of Riot King’s The Moors, which and as a fan of Riot King, I was really excited to talk to Bryn about this production and about Riot King in general. So now here is my conversation with Bryn Kennedy.

Bryn Kennedy, thank you so much for joining me again. We were just saying before we started, you were on the podcast in May of 2019. We were just talking about the show that you were going to be doing.

It wasn’t YTA. You had another term for it. Age-appropriate, I think, was the term.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah. Age-accessible. Age-accessible.

That’s what we called it.

[Phil Rickaby]
That’s right. Age-accessible theatre as opposed to theatre for young audiences.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. We were really curious about making something at the time that worked for everybody. And where often with TYA Theatre, they talk about the, of course, there’s an adult audience because you have to bring your kids to the theatre.

Someone has to bring them to the theatre. But we often talk about the adult audience as the secondary audience. So we were really curious about whether we could make something where both kids and adults could be the primary audience.

So that was kind of where that was going.

[Phil Rickaby]
I’m curious how that worked out because we didn’t have to have a chance to talk after.

[Bryn Kennedy]
I think it went well. We did have some kids and we did have a lot of adults. And it did feel like a lot of people were moved by it.

We did have kids in the audience who were loving it, who were standing on their chairs and responding actively to the show. And then we also had things like my 80-year-old grandfather who’s got a doctorate of philosophy came to see it. And he got, I think, just as much out of it as the eight-year-old.

So I do think that we can all enjoy the same content if it’s done correctly.

[Phil Rickaby]
I think that they’re, I mean, the fact that, and I’m going to nerd out for a second, the fact that a show like The Muppets can make a return. And The Muppets were always for children and adults. Like kids could watch it.

Yeah. And it was, kids could watch it, but it was for adults. Like there were things in it that were absolutely not for kids.

But they flew over the children’s heads. And so the adults could enjoy. And I think that we don’t do enough of that in the theatre.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah, I agree. I agree. Absolutely.

I think we underestimate what kids can handle in theatre. I think we give them a lot of things like existing intellectual property. We stay in a lot of stories that we know work for kids already.

And I would love it if we took more risks with what kids can handle. I think that they can handle new stories that are a little edgier.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I mean, those old stories become new. They were one-time new stories, right?

So a story has to start somewhere. But I think that we underestimate the parents who are the ones who are buying the tickets. So we have to give the parents like, your kid will like this.

They already know the story.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How do we counteract it in the marketing for the adults who have to buy the tickets?

[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, the whole question of marketing, that’s a whole, there’s a lot to be said about that. And I do want to talk about that because you have a lot of knowledge about marketing and things like that, where theatre goes. But for now, let’s start out by talking about The Moors, which you are directing, which is presented by Riot King.

Tell me about The Moors.

[Bryn Kennedy]
The Moors is another crazy play. It’s my favorite kind of play. It plays with the Victorian Gothic genre.

So novels like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, it really works off of those tropes, but tries to find a way to bring them into the 21st century for a modern audience to make them kind of relevant and accessible today. And so the play is about, it takes place out on the moors of England, which are very beautiful and also very scary and dangerous. And in this big old, and the play takes place in this big old manor house out on the moors.

And the play begins when a young governess arrives. She thinks she’s been hired by the man of the house to look after a child. But when she arrives, the only people there are his spinster sisters and maybe several maids, or maybe it’s only one maid.

And also they have a giant Mastiff dog who seems to be in love with a bird. And so that is a world that Emily, our governess, is thrust into. And then she has to figure out how this world works.

Who are these people and why is she here? And that’s kind of, that’s where the play begins. And for me, it speaks a lot to, I think the play is really trying to comment on isolation, on loneliness, on the community that we give up to access power and status and the cost of giving up community in favor of those things.

And so that’s, for me, what makes this play feel so relevant and timely.

[Phil Rickaby]
Well, I mean, in a way, I mean, we are living in a post-pandemic world and we all gave up things and that changed us. How do you see the moors as it relates to, like you mentioned that it speaks to the modern time. Like, how do you see that specifically?

[Bryn Kennedy]
I think it’s in like, we have this sort of culture of individualism right now that I find really scary and really sad. And we can get very technical about it and analyze it came from capitalism and pitting people against each other and relying on things like, oh, there’s finite resources, having scarcity mindset. So it’s you, it’s me against you and we can’t possibly all survive.

Putting that kind of like business model brain on interpersonal relationships. And that’s something that I find really horrifying and really scary because community is sort of a central tenant to me in the way that I view the world and the way that I hope I interact with people as an artist. Community is so important.

And I think it’s, we’ve lost the value of it. We’ve traded community away in favor of only one of us can do well and who’s it going to be. And so we’re all against each other.

And so, and I think that’s really present in this play. And I hope that’s what audiences come away from it with is this exploration of what we lose when we isolate ourselves and what we could gain in community.

[Phil Rickaby]
I really like the idea of community because again, theatre is a form of community, right? We sit in a room together while a group of actors, which makes it different from a movie, the actors are there and they are performing in the same room and it’s very immediate and real and we’re all sort of breathing together. It’s a great thing.

I think because we don’t go to church anymore and I’m a former church person like for a long, long time, and there are plenty of reasons not to go to church, but church was something that gave you like a community, people that you saw every week, people that you spoke to every week. It connected people and in a way theatre can replace that by, you know, we can go to the theatre and like be in community with our fellow audience goers.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah. It’s so funny that you say that because I often do talk about community as far as theatre as community. Oh my gosh, sorry.

I know I often do talk about theatre as similar to church because and that sounds a little cheesy and like, oh, theatre is my religion and all of that, but it’s more about this, what you’re speaking about, the fact that you gain a lot of the same things from church as you can from theatre. And I think that I would be more like, I’m not particularly religious, but I think I would be more of a church goer if I didn’t have theatre because theatre gives us community. It gives us a shared set of values the same way that a lot of religions do.

It gives us engagement with tradition and a set of an etiquette and a kind of rules that sort of transcend time and place. And, you know, we all, we go to the theatre and sort of similarly to church, we all know where to sit and we know how to respond to what we’re receiving. There’s a lot of kind of the similar sort of ritualistic aspects of church also appear in theatre.

And so, and I completely agree that I think the way that religion has kind of, or access to religion, people are sort of less interested in religion now. And I think we lose something in that. It’s not about one specific religion being better than another.

I’m not particularly religious, but it’s about having that community, having that shared set of values and having that ritualistic time to be together is really powerful. Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
I’ve had religious experiences in the theatre. You know, we’ve all, I’ve had those moments where it just like, it feels like that same thing. But also the thing about being in the theatre is that unlike a movie where we are separated from the performers by a screen, we are fully engaged in that space.

We can’t look at it. We cannot. I think that’s why it becomes such a magical place because we are forced to take in what’s on the stage.

And that’s why it’s more immediate and more real. We can’t disengage from it in a way we can from a movie.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. There’s something about theatre.

I mean, it’s why we’ve been doing it for thousands of years, which I know is a bit of a cliche, like, oh, we’ve always been doing it. We always will do it. But I do think it’s true.

It’s lasted for a reason. And, you know, there’s something that is irreplaceable about gathering together and being caught in this moment together and unable to look away.

[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. For sure. And it’s also interesting how, you know, the death knell has been rung about theatre many times in its history.

Movies were the end of theatre and then radio was the end of theatre and then TV and so on and so on and so on. And yet it’s still here, you know?

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And well, it’s funny because a very smart person once said to me, yes, I’m sure that photography was also the death of painting. And yet we still Yeah, for sure.

[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. Yeah. About the Moors, you know, we’ve talked about community.

Is that what drew you to the play or was it the work of Jen Silverman? Like, what was it that made this something you wanted to direct?

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah, it’s a good question because I don’t know that I immediately saw those those themes in it of isolation and community. I think it took me a little while to figure out why does this play matter to me and to come to those conclusions. What I initially saw was, I mean, look, I’m a big history nerd.

And so I’m a sucker for anything set in another time period. I love the Victorians because they are so weird. And so, you know, we often have this picture of people from other times as being like, very proper, very etiquette based, very rigid in their rules and their their way of interacting with each other.

And I love when you kind of discover time periods where it’s just so not that. Victorians were so weird. They’re so modern in the way that they relate to each other because they’re so weird.

It’s a strange pastimes and interests. And yes, it’s a type of repression, but that also created huge transgression and coming out in other ways. So I love the time period.

I love that it’s historical. And for me, the historical aspect is also not just that I love history, but I think I love history and I love theatre for similar reasons, which is that they’re both ways that I process the current world around me. I need that separation from what’s going on currently.

I need to kind of see it through another lens of another time period or story in sort of a parallel world. I need that distance so that I can fully understand something better. So I love a play that gives me that distance that kind of puts us in a different world.

I say I often say that my my work sort of lives in the past, the future or the parallel. And for me, this play is both past and parallel, which makes me really excited about it because it’s a historical world, but it’s also kind of a weird world that’s a little off kilter, a little slanted. The rules, we are new rules that we kind of have to learn about time and space and how people function in this play.

And so all of that’s very exciting to me.

[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, the Victorians, like you say, they’re so interesting because I remember years ago doing a doll’s house, which is not specifically Victorian, but it’s close enough. And I remember looking at it being like, why this is so everybody’s so polite. It’s so this everything is everybody’s so buttoned up and we had conversations about why do people do this?

Everybody’s so boring. And somebody said there’s what they say and what they’re feeling, because, like you said, there there’s all of these rules about behavior and it’s very repressed. But as soon as you repress things, it just it bubbles under the surface and strange things are totally.

Yeah. So like all the emotions are heightened because you’re not allowed to show them. And so eventually they come out and it becomes about like, when is this going to come out?

And then you have you layer onto that. The English moors, which, you know, in English literature, the moors are a haunted place that I can think of, you know, not only Sherlock Holmes, but even like an American werewolf in London starts in the moor, you know, it’s like all this is this place where the mists come and strange things happen. So, yeah, what a what an exciting place to set a play.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Absolutely. Absolutely. They they have strange, beautiful, thorny flowers and also quicksand and also poisonous snake and also peat moss that perfectly preserves bodies if you die out there.

Such a strange world. And yet people chose to live out there. It’s where they had their country homes for relaxation.

And so I love all the contrast that that kind of world set up allows us to play in.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, I’m thinking about about the fact that you have the people of their country homes or the country manners and the moor and their their neighbor is like the dirty farmer who’s like, you know, for us, an unintelligible dialect, you know, or is this like it’s it’s it’s so like the the neighbors and the upstairs, downstairs, but like neighbors. It’s such a such a fascinating thing. Now, you actually you actually alluded to your thesis of of directing, which is making theatre about other worlds past, parallel and future.

You’ve directed plays in the past. So this one, you’ve directed speculative fiction, Jane.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
And also historical drama because you did a play about Mary Stewart. Is there a world you haven’t visit visited yet that you are dying to explore?

[Bryn Kennedy]
That’s a good question. I think maybe something that I haven’t spent as much time in that I would love to explore more is is some of the classics, is some of the stories that we know really well. But how do we kind of twist them in a new way?

I think that’s something that I’m I’m really interested in. And it just hasn’t quite come my way yet. I sort of worked on them in smaller ways, like the Hamlet that I worked on as an assistant director at Stratford.

That was that’s very classic. But that’s the stuff that when I think about being a kid and seeing theatre, that was the stuff that was sort of most exciting to me was I was like, oh, it’s cabaret, but it’s weird cabaret. And it’s like those kinds of realizations of going like, oh, you can do that with cabaret.

So or you could take, you know, a story like Cyrano de Bergerac and do it with all these different ways. So I think that’s kind of like a parallel for me that works as like a parallel world or maybe it’s sort of past and parallel. But I think I would love to play around in stories that we know and what what’s new that could be gleaned from them.

[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. Yeah, I think it’s really interesting about the stories that we know. You mentioned Hamlet.

And I was thinking also about about Macbeth. I remember years ago I was writing a post on Facebook, as you did back in the day, and I was talking about the end of Macbeth and somebody was like, excuse me, I’m watching that right now. No spoilers.

And I was like, hold on. They weren’t joking. This is a person who did not know the story as well as I did.

And I think sometimes those of us in theatre assume everybody knows all the ins and outs of the stories the way we do. But this is a person who maybe they looked at the play in high school and they forgot everything.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Totally, totally.

[Phil Rickaby]
And we can’t rob them of that. And I’m not saying like when we when we just knocked my microphone when we explore a play in that way. We can’t ignore the fact that we are also presenting it for an audience that also needs the story points like you can you can do anything with Shakespeare, for example.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
But you can also be so high concept that you bump into the story and it doesn’t work anymore. There’s absolutely fascinating little things. Is there a is there a play, a classic play that you feel like you like that’s the one that’s like secretly or maybe not so secretly because you’re going to tell me that you kind of want to do?

[Bryn Kennedy]
Oh, that’s a good question. I mean, I think I love the Shakespearean tragedies. I have to say it’s a little embarrassing, but I am like a tragedy girl at heart.

I love comedy. And, you know, the Moors have a significant amount of comedy in it. But you think because theatre was so much a part of like how I processed emotions as a kid or there’s something about getting to live in the tragic worlds that is the most exciting to me.

So, you know, I do love Hamlet. I do love a Macbeth. I do love, you know, like some of his bloodier stuff, too.

I kind of have like a secret love for. So I would love to kind of get to play around in some of those worlds because they are so free, like there’s so much that you can do with them. But as you say, story is still paramount.

And that is still even when we’re making those. So I’m not I’m not so big on just like, oh, I’ll just set it in a different period. I’m more interested in like what what does it actually say no matter the time period about that is that is universally true.

And how does that relate to what we’re going through as people today?

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Shakespeare was great at that, of like like being able to like be so universal that we can take a play from the 1500s, do it now and we can relate to it. The tragedies are also brilliant because he also knew what would keep an audience’s attention.

You can’t just hit them with tragedy over and over and throw in like some brilliant comedy in there just to like spice it up. And he knows that like you can’t sustain tragedy constantly. Yeah.

And you need to break it up with different things. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s the stuff that we need to like sometimes remind ourselves, I think, about what makes audiences work.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s a good story.

I mean, that’s the thing. We we can’t go, you know, making a lot of theatre these days and it’s a totally natural response to what we’re going through, the social reckonings that we’re going through. But I feel like we’re making a lot of theatre these days that is that is about like things that we should know or views of the world that we should have.

And those are totally valid and important. And we should be hearing those views. But also we have to wrap it all up in a good story because there’s we know we’re not going to get new people out to the theatre unless it is just an enjoyable experience at the very core of it.

And that that enjoyment doesn’t have to be candy coated. It doesn’t have to be soft. It can be.

I felt innately changed by that. And it was enjoyable. And that’s what I think is is I’m hoping to do with theatre at all times.

[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. I mean, I think sometimes in some some of our theatres, there’s the attitude of like, come to the theatre. It’s good for you.

Like it’s it’s like taking your vitamins, you know, instead of like. Exactly. I call it cough syrup.

Oh, my God. It’s so it’s so correct because it’s like you’re like you should want to go to the theatre because you want to go to the theatre, not because it’s good. Like it could be good for you, but you have to drip all the audience in with something.

Right.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Which is why these plays where the kind of issue at the heart of it are a little disguised, I think are really interesting to me because it’s like, how do we tell the really good story and bring out the themes that can we trust that people are smart enough that they will pick up on it and they will have that experience if we just tell the really good story?

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Rather than kind of overtly put our opinion forward for them or tell them what they should be thinking about this issue.

[Phil Rickaby]
People don’t exactly like being told what to think about an issue. You know, it’s like if you tell me what to think, they kind of bristle at it. But you can also like slide that under by giving them the good story.

They don’t have to look at them over the head with it.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Exactly. As somebody who did door to door political campaigning in the last provincial and federal election, I can tell you people do not like being told.

[Phil Rickaby]
There you go. Absolutely. You know, Riot King, I’m a fan of theirs.

I saw there, I think it was Suddenly last summer, last year, which is just brilliant. Or was it last year, two years ago? I don’t know what time is.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Couple of years ago.

[Phil Rickaby]
I know. Crazy.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
What is it that excites you about working with Riot King?

[Bryn Kennedy]
Oh, so much. So much. I mean, the project started because Lindsey, who was in Suddenly Last Summer, came to me about a year ago.

She sent me a voice note. She said, I’m scheming and I want you to direct me in something. I don’t know what, I don’t know how, but I want it to happen.

And I love Lindsey. We’ve known each other for a long time. Not very well because it’s always sort of in passing, but she’s so brilliant.

She’s so outgoing. And she’s such a fierce talent. She’s so fearless as a performer.

And so I said, absolutely, of course. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know how either, but let’s find something. So we tossed some plays around back and forth, and we ended up on the Moors.

And we invited Brendan, who’s the founder of Riot King, to just a kitchen table read with some friends to just try out the script. And Brendan loved it, which was really exciting and said, I think this is a Riot King project. And what I love about them is Brendan has built something that I think people recognize is really exciting, that the work that they’re doing is exciting, and they’ve been awarded and recognized based on that.

But it’s also quite flexible. It allows for finding different work. I think the Moors is quite different than anything people have seen from Riot King, but also really aligns with what Brendan’s trying to do, which is just give indie artists in this city the most exciting vehicle possible to share with audiences who want to see theatre that is immediate, and quick and dirty, and gives you an experience, a close-up-ness that you don’t necessarily get at bigger theatres, a high-quality close-up experience. And so working with them has been really fun because it’s sort of all in favor of that.

And the three of them, because Riot King is now Brendan, Katherine Cappellacci, and Lindsey as well, and the three of them, their focus is also on community, which is really on brand for this show, as we’ve talked about. But they’re so supportive of the other indie artists in the city. They’re so supportive of creating a strong indie community.

They’re really supportive of supporting other arts orgs. They did a fundraiser for this show, and they also fundraised for another arts org while we were at it. They do such incredible things to support maintaining a lively, vibrant Toronto, even within their limited means and resources.

And people who are accomplishing that much within limited means and resources are always interesting and exciting to me.

[Phil Rickaby]
That kind of lives up to one of my favorite just theories about theatre, not even mine. I borrowed it from an artist. Cameron Moore is a theatre artist and was doing stuff at the Montreal Frames like 10 years ago, and just reminded everybody there’s audience enough for everyone.

And so I kind of operate with that. If people come to see your show, they’ll come to see my show, my show, your audience. We don’t have to hide them.

We can work together on all of these things, and nobody loses out because we all win. I think that that’s sort of the Riot King way. If you’re lifting other people up, then everybody comes up with you.

It’s a great way to be.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Absolutely. A thriving indie theatre community with support beyond just theatre makers, but into regular audience goers, that benefits everybody. And I think the Riot King does a really amazing job of working hard for the benefit of all of us.

[Phil Rickaby]
Now, The Morris is being presented at the Theatre Centre’s BMO Incubator Space, which is, I sometimes think of it as a modular space because it could be whatever you need it to be. It could kind of be a proscenium. It can be a black box.

It can be in the round. It can be so many things. And Riot King has a history of doing plays in interesting spaces.

Like suddenly last summer was in this garden, greenhouse-y type venue. What is it about the incubator space that works and is perfect for this show?

[Bryn Kennedy]
It’s interesting because we looked at a lot of spaces when we were preparing for this show. It wasn’t kind of an immediate choice. We considered site-specific.

We considered a bunch of different site-specific venues. We looked at churches. We looked at some kind of community venues.

We looked at things that were kind of more industrial. So we went a lot of different ways with it. And Brendan and I toured a lot of different venues.

And then we went to the theatre centre, to the BMO Incubator Space. And believe it or not, and this is terrible, but I’ve actually never seen a show in there, which I don’t even know how that’s possible. But I actually hadn’t.

So I hadn’t really been in there. And we walked in and suddenly the show sort of appeared for me. I’d kind of been struggling with a staging problem, which is that for reasons that I won’t reveal in the script, the show takes place in kind of several different locations, but always has to have the same set.

It’s baked right into the script. The set has to be the same for the whole show. But there’s scenes inside the house, there’s scenes outside the house, and there’s also a bunch of scenes between two animals who are not humans in the house.

They are outside the house being animals. There’s a mastiff and a moorhen. And I never knew what to do with them.

I was like, are they on the set where the humans are? How do I accomplish all of these things in this one space? And then when we walked into the BMO incubator, I was like, oh, this is perfect, because it has that sort of sunken middle.

And so you can have the inside context of the house present all the time in the middle, but you also have that fantastic walkway all the way around that space, where you can kind of find other places and have other characters doing other things. And so suddenly the play sort of came to life for me, and I sort of saw it all play out very suddenly. And so that was it.

I was like, Brendan, I think it’s got to be this space. And Brendan agreed, and they had just done Red there, Riot King, in the previous year. And so I said, are you okay that it’s going to be the same space?

Do you want to switch it out? How are you feeling sort of branding-wise for Riot King? But the reality is that the space is going to be oriented completely different than it was that show.

The set is completely different, and that space is so flexible. It does feel like a totally new space every time you see different shows in there. So I think it’s a familiar space for audiences, but I hope also it’s used in a totally new way.

[Phil Rickaby]
But I mean, like you said, it’s been different every time I’ve gone to see something there. So I never think, oh, I know how this is going to go, because you don’t. I don’t know if they’re going to ignore that walkway.

Are they going to use it? It’s like always a surprise. So it’s a great space for that.

Yeah, you could really do anything in there. Yeah. Your website lists directing, acting, producing, facilitating, and marketing as distinct sections.

How do you introduce yourself at parties?

[Bryn Kennedy]
I try not to get into it. Yeah, I try to talk more about what the other person does. Yeah, you know what?

It’s like the reality of this industry is you got to do a lot of things. And I wrestled with that for a long time. I wrestled with like, can I be all those, all these things?

Can I be, you know, an actor and a director? Does it make me worse at one to be the other? Because I think even though this industry requires wearing so many hats, I feel like it also in weird ways sort of subtly discourages and undermines that.

Like, oh, well, if you’re one thing, you can’t possibly be that good at also being another thing. And so it took me a long time to kind of comfortably list all those things. And at the same time, I would say I am all those things.

And also, though, I would say at my core, at my deepest sort of part of myself, the thing that I that I love the most is I am a director. And I think if you told me that I couldn’t do that list of things anymore, I think the one that I would be most heartbreak broken about would be directing. And so and that was kind of someone put it to me that way once, like, what would you be?

What would you be heartbroken if you never got to do again? And I was like, oh, it really is. It’s the directing.

[Phil Rickaby]
I think it’s interesting because back in the olden days, when I went to theatre school, they basically told us you can only be an actor. Right. You know, like if you were like, yeah, I can I can be I, you know, I like like for me, I’m an actor.

I want to be a writer, too. They were like, no, no, no, you can only be one. But that very quickly was not the case.

Like that’s not the way people make careers in the theatre. Now you have to. Yeah.

Most people. There’s a few people who managed to be one thing and that’s the only thing. But that’s not the average career now.

And so you you have to be Yeah, absolutely. As you were coming to terms with like putting all of these things on your photo book resume, what was that journey like to like accept like that, like, oh, I can put directing on here and I can put acting and I can put this like, how did those things grow for you?

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah, yeah, it’s an interesting question. Some of it was out of interest and desire to grow in that way, and some of it was out of necessity. So I went to theatre school as an actor.

I did, you know, four years of acting training. But at the same time, I started directing. I directed my first show in what was then called the Sears Drama Festival in high school.

And so that was my first taste. And I sort of very brazenly did Night Mother, which is the same choice for a teenager. But so I’d started directing already, decided I wanted to continue directing while I was acting in theatre school.

A huge reason why I started doing that was because I just, I just was seeing such terrible roles for women. There was just nothing interesting for women to do in the shows that were being chosen. And so I was like, well, who gets to choose these shows with the director?

Well, then maybe I’ll be the director and I’ll choose the shows. And so it did sort of start from that place and then the love kind of very quickly followed of like, oh, I really, I really love getting to think about the whole world. And I was sort of constantly getting kind of noted for that as an actor that I was like, constantly trying to be like, but yeah, but I’m also, I’m interested in my character, but I’m also interested in what that guy over there is doing.

And can we talk about that? And so I think it goes to kind of a natural state that I was like, I want to look at the whole world. I want to be interested in the whole world.

And then I graduated from theatre school and I had to find jobs and, and money. And so I was like, what can I do that pays my rent, but keeps me also in the industry and involved in theatre in a more direct way, because I’m just somebody who, who needs that. I just, I need everything to sort of be feeding in the same direction.

I can’t have a, a sort of money job that takes me in a different direction. So, so that was how I started doing the marketing was, I was like, this is sort of bad, but I don’t actually have any marketing training. I just sort of started telling people that I knew how to market and they believed me.

And that was how I got my first spot. And then, and then the experience grew from there as it did with the directing. It was like, Oh, once I start doing it, I’ll, I’ll figure it out.

And, and that’s sort of been a big foundational tenant of my career has been, I can teach myself anything I need to know. I can learn anything I need to know. And, and so I never let not knowing how to do it, stop me from trying.

So that was kind of how I got into the marketing and, and I call it my, I don’t like the term side hustle or day job or Joe job. So I call it my complimentary career because it all feeds in the same direction and I need both to survive. I wouldn’t still be, I wouldn’t still get to be a theatre artist if I hadn’t found marketing and a way to support myself within the industry.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I definitely want, I really want to talk about marketing and I want to talk about the way that we bring people into the theatre, specifically people who are not currently regular theatre goers, because I think that’s the big challenge that, that we have in theatre for years. I remember like 10, 15 years ago, we were having like sessions and like, like summits like that.

Where is the audience going? Why aren’t they coming to the theatre? And we’re still sort of having this same conversation.

But I also think that sometimes we’re like doing the same thing that we’re doing then, as far as like sometimes production, sometimes plays, sometimes like the way that we approach an audience, like what, in your mind, what’s, what’s the thing or what are some of the things that theatres, when they’re trying to reach out to an audience and bring them in, how do you talk to them about, about that process?

[Bryn Kennedy]
I mean, it’s, it’s so hard. The, the, there’s so many factors at play, I think, in why we don’t have a strong, you know, non-artist theatre going community in Toronto. And I think Toronto sort of has its own issues, separate from other places.

I’m sure other places have their own challenges with that as well. But I mean, there’s, you know, the, the issues are like, there’s the cost prohibitiveness, there’s the, we seem to have a hard time striking a balance between theatre that is sort of too high-brow, too intellectual, too hard to access. And then the, and then swinging, we go, okay, people don’t like that.

And we swing really far the other way towards like candy-coated musical fun. And so, and so it’s like finding the middle ground in what are people actually interested in seeing, I think is something that theatres that we’re still like figuring out is, we know what artists are interested in seeing, is it the same thing as what non-theatre artist audiences want to see? Because I’m not a hundred percent sure.

I think we make the mistake of making theatre a lot that makes sense to other artists, but doesn’t necessarily make sense to audiences who don’t spend a lot of time in the theatre. And so that’s something that I’m kind of thinking a lot about is why we program what we program. And then there’s kind of the very like basic, simple stuff of like, are we communicating the story in the marketing?

And I’m sort of always surprised by like how much that gets missed in the marketing is different ways to communicate story. And so, so I’m, I’m, that’s something that I was always trying to focus on with art, with clients as a, as a marketer. And I think one of the reasons why marketing was so interesting to me was because I was like, oh, it’s telling a story, which is also directing.

So I could approach it like a director and go, okay, how do we tell that story with different tools? And so that’s a factor and helping people even figure out that we’re there, that we exist. I have so many family members who aren’t regular theatre goers who come up to me at like our once a year reunion and go, how about, how do I know about what theatre is happening?

Like, where do I look for it? What do I do? And so too, I think finding out like where, like, you know, how do we reach these people directly?

If they’re not following us on Instagram, if they’re not like our, our newsletter subscribers, you know, how, how do we let these people know, um, the ones who kind of only know what Mirvish is doing? What, where do we find them? How do they find out about Mirvish?

Where do we find them? And how do we convince them that there’s other theatre that’s worthwhile that they may not know about? They may not know the title, but they, they might find huge value in it.

Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
So that’s kind of, those are huge questions. We, especially in indie theatre, but even some of the smaller theatres, we don’t have Mirvish money. So we can’t, we can’t put our poster on the side of a streetcar or a bus, or even in the subway.

Sometimes I get that, that stuff costs a lot of money. And so we have to find other ways to, to, to do it. And for sure, it’s difficult to figure that out.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Um, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I’m not saying that I have the answer, so I’m not saying that I’m perfect at all of this, but there are the things that keep me up at night about theatre 100%.

[Phil Rickaby]
You know, I, it’s funny, you were talking about, you know, you have to be able to communicate the story and it’s a pet peeve of mine. Cause a lot of times, every so often somebody comes on this podcast and I start to ask them questions about the show and they don’t want to tell me anything. Like they’ll be like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to give anything away.

And it’s like, this is the premise of the show. You have to be able to tell me something. You have to, I think in some ways we have to give up our snobbery about Hollywood and the way that they communicate stories.

And like, cause they’ll have a trailer and you’re like, they might not tell you how the story ends. Although sometimes they do, but at least they give you like, you’re going to like this. This is up your alley.

You’re going to get this, you’re going to get this and you’re going to like this. And we have to find a way to do that too.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah. They work really hard. I feel like at, imparting what it will feel like to watch the movie.

And I think that’s kind of the secret ingredient is like what you watch a trailer and you get a little snippet of like, Oh, I’m going to feel like this, but for like two hours and I want to do that.

[Phil Rickaby]
But I mean, feeling the way that something makes you feel is a huge part of what brings people to events. Now people want experiences. They want to have that, the uniqueness of it.

And we need to be able to communicate that to them for sure. Because, you know, if people, I say this like so often, like people will pay and we’re paying money to go and see giant projections of Van Gogh paintings on walls for $50. I see it.

Most plays are by far better than that. Like you’ll feel something like you should do it. Like, but we need to communicate what that feels like.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Like I don’t, I think there’s a lot of people because of the kind of theatre that’s sort of most commercially accessible.

I think there’s a lot of people who don’t understand the way that you can be intrinsically changed by theatre. And that, that is the experience that you’re chasing show after show that that is why you go and see something where you don’t know what the experience is going to be. You don’t know what the story is.

You, you know, you go in hoping for the absolute best and, and finding out if you’re going to be changed by it. Because, you know, like I love musicals and, and so there’s no shade to musicals, but the biggest sort of most commercial ones that most people are exposed to, I don’t know that they are going to be intrinsically changed by, you know, by some of those shows. And, and I was, I mean, I also find it funny that, you know, theatre seems to be like the only genre where you see one show that isn’t up your alley and you go, oh, I don’t, I don’t like theatre.

Whereas like we don’t read one book or watch one movie that we don’t like and then go, oh, I’m not a movie person.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Imagine, imagine saying, I don’t, I, I saw a television show. I didn’t like once.

I don’t, I don’t like television. Like it doesn’t make any sense. And yet theatre people do that all the time.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah, absolutely. Or, and, and so it’s also like finding, helping the right people find the right kind of theatre because, you know, my, my partner, when I met him, he’s in film, he’s not a theatre person. When I met, when we met, I asked him, you know, what, what, what shows have you seen?

What do you like theatre? And he was like, yeah, you know, I’ve seen Jersey boys on, on Broadway. And I saw Phantom of the Opera.

I think could, yeah, they’re okay. I’m not sure how big I am on theatre. And then I was like, okay, I think we can work with this.

I think you like movies. You like stories. You like being changed by what you’re seeing.

I think we can work with it. And so I started taking him to the smaller stuff around town and, you know, it completely changed his perception of what theatre was. And I was like, well, yeah, cause you’re going to the wrong kind of theatre.

You’re not even a guy who likes like blockbuster Marvel movies. You’re not going to like, you know, the shows that have been running on Broadway for 20 years. It’s just not going to be your theatre.

So, you know, he saw like that crazy one person show buffoon at, at Tarragon with, uh, by Anoush Arani, which is so fantastic, such an incredible script so far outside of, you know, what you’re going to see in a commercial house and he loved it. And, and so that’s the other thing is, you know, I think we have platforms that we’re sort of misusing things like reviews where we could be, instead of using reviews to evaluate the so-called quality of a production or merit of a production, why are we not using reviews to help people understand, is this a production for you or not? Is this something that you would want to see or not?

You know, if you loved, you know, jukebox musicals, this is the one for you. If you don’t, here’s something else.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I think there, there, there are certain theatres that are using like the reviews as a shortcut and it’s not even, it’s not even reviews of the production that they’re, that they’re putting on. It’s like of the play and, but they don’t tell me anything about the play.

They’re just like putting the whole poster is like, here’s the guy in a chair. Here’s a bunch of quotes from a bunch of plays. And you don’t, I’m not telling you anything about the play.

Even a movie poster gives you a feeling about what that play is. Right. Right.

We’re like, here’s the guy in a chair.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Come see the play. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, you know, it’s so funny that you say we can learn something in Hollywood because I think we can learn something from the way that they’re able to distill down what something is about, you know, like we don’t really log line in theatre. And I’d be curious to like, if we had, if we thought about theatre more in that way, like what happens if we distill this down to the most immediate story that it is and communicate that, you know, but we tend to be a little, I think, and I’m so guilty of this as well, tend to be a little like, oh, but there’s so it’s so complicated.

You can’t distill it down into one line, but you can, and it could be useful.

[Phil Rickaby]
It could be useful to like give people a sense of like, is, am I interested in this? Right. I’ve seen log lines, but almost always for shows at fringe festivals.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Uh-huh. Right. Who are good at marketing because they have to be.

[Phil Rickaby]
That’s right. So you often will say, when you see a poster, there’s a log line. I understand enough about this show that I know that I want to see it.

But again, that’s not often translating to theatres outside of that particular festival.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Right.

[Phil Rickaby]
Right.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Like it’s something, it’s not complicated enough or it’s not kind of high value enough or something, even though that’s, that’s all we need is, is a little taste of what’s it going to be like. Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, really that experience that you just need that taste. Like, yeah, yeah. The Moors is being presented on, at, like I said, at the BMO incubator space, which is a smaller theatre.

We’ve directed on, on some small stages. You’ve directed on midsize stages. You’ve also assistant directed at the Stratford festival.

Do you have a favorite? Like places that you’ve, that you’ve directed or assistant directed, what’s your fave?

[Bryn Kennedy]
Oh, I don’t know. It’s so hard. They’re all so different and yeah.

And you, and you give the stories different things, but I will say, maybe I’ll answer this more as a, an audience member almost than a director, but I love the Tom Patterson theatre, the new one. I know it’s got, it’s like technical problems and it’s people feel different ways about it. And, but I, I just, I love the feeling of when you sit in that theatre.

It’s so cozy. It’s so, it feels like the original kind of idea of theatre being gathering around a hearth fire to tell stories. And I get that feeling when I sit in the audience of the Tom Pat and you know, it feels, it’s so amazing to have such a big theatre where you’re so close to the stage still.

And, and you just get that feeling of, of we’re all going to be really close into something together.

[Phil Rickaby]
There’s something about that, isn’t there? Like, that’s one of the things I like about some of our smaller theatres in the city. Like the audience and the actors are so close.

And there’s something like, talk about not being able to like disconnect from it. They’re right there. And to, to, I haven’t had the chance to be in the, the, the new Tom Patterson, but like to hear that the, the audience and the actors can be that close or it’s pretty incredible.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah. It’s literally only like five or six rows or something to the back of the house. Like, and because the stage is so long, they can still fit, you know, a couple hundred people in there, but it’s, it’s, it’s so immediate in its own way.

And yeah. And that’s, I mean, I will always have a soft spot for the small indie spaces in our city. They are so special.

They are where some of the most special, most vital work is happening. And there’s nothing like, you know, being that close to an incredible performer. Like, you know, one of my kind of party stories is being in like a two row theatre in London, England.

And this was before Cynthia Erivo got famous. She was in a tiny little musical. I happened to want to see it because I like the composing team and they, this show never gets done.

And Cynthia Erivo was the star and was singing like two feet away from me, the whole show from these cheap tickets. I got that awful high. And there is nothing like that.

There is nothing like seeing a performer at their absolute best two feet from you. I mean, what could be better?

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, absolutely. Is it, is this right? You were the program manager for musical stage companies, One Song Glory?

[Bryn Kennedy]
I was. Yeah, I did that for a year last year, which was a beautiful experience.

[Phil Rickaby]
First off, tell me about One Song Glory. I mean, aside from the song, which is from Reign. What is that program?

[Bryn Kennedy]
It’s a really, really amazing program that musical stage company runs for youth, sort of high school, late middle school to high school aged youth. And they get to, it’s free. It’s completely free for them, which is amazing.

It’s so accessible. They audition for it. And then it’s four weeks where they get to create their own musical based off of existing songs and songs that they write with the support of professional artists who come in as guests.

And the, just the, the exposure they get to working artists in Toronto is incredible. And the community also that it gives them with like-minded peers who, you know, also know all the words to La Vie Boheme and want to sing it with them on lunch. It is unparalleled.

It’s the kind of thing like I absolutely would have killed for as a teen if I had known it existed. But it is, it is such an incredible program. There’s really nothing like being surrounded by theatre kids doing what they love.

And you just see it there. They are just fearless in chasing what they’re after. Just so driven and passionate and smart.

And so, so yeah, getting to manage the program was, was such a beautiful gift that sort of fell into my lap kind of accidentally. And it was exhausting because, you know, teens need a lot from you, but also so energizing and such a good reminder of, you know, how privileged we are to get to do what we do. That, that what we do is so special, that it means so much to people and that we’re so lucky to get to play in this world.

[Phil Rickaby]
You mentioned that you, you know, you love a musical. And you also alluded to like, if this had existed when you were younger, like you would have like, like really like loved to do it. Did you learn anything about this next generation of theatre kids when you were doing it?

[Bryn Kennedy]
I learned how much they want to take care of each other, which was really amazing to see. I think, you know, they’re really smart and they’re taking in everything that’s going on in the world right now. All our conversations about identity and how we fit together and, you know, what identity is, is valid and what is not and what opinions are valid and what is not.

And it’s such a hard world of, you know, cutting people off and, and devaluing who people are. And it was just so beautiful to see this group of kids come together who just really wanted to take care of each other, who really wanted to like support each other in the work, validate who each other were, like just the, the way that they, you know, I had a small fear going in that there would be like competitiveness or something and that they were like, oh, but a cutthroat or, you know, theatre kid kind of stereotype stuff. And it was just so the opposite of that when, when one of them would be asked to come up to sing in a workshop and none of the other kids would get to sing, but this one kid was kind of using example or something, the way that they would cheer for each other was just so amazing to see it. So it was just such a reminder of, of again, it all comes back to community and to the fact that there’s room for everybody.

And they were such beautiful examples of that.

[Phil Rickaby]
That’s so amazing because I think that is something that exists, but gets wrung out sometimes in theatre school, sometimes in early career, when you, it becomes easy to forget about, you know, how important it is to, to, to hold each other and lift each other up and that sort of thing.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Absolutely.

[Phil Rickaby]
And it’s so good that they have that. And I, as I, as I hear about some of the theatre schools changing the way that they operate, I’m, I’m hopeful that, that, that these kids, when they go through theatre school, won’t lose that.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Because, you know, I think competitiveness was a key aspect of theatre school when I went through it and, you know, that the, the con, the idea of like only some of you will make it and all of that. And so, yeah, I, I hope that this is something that they hang on to. And I have a feeling that it will be just seeing how they, how they were with each other.

And yeah, I hope we can shift some of these things, this way, these ways of thinking. I think, you know, we, we have more options now. We know better, we, we know better, you do better.

And I hope that we all start to do better on that.

[Phil Rickaby]
I agree. I think, I think we need to carry that lesson with us as we go forward and, and make theatre in the years to come. Like we need each other, right.

And that’s, that’s what we can’t, we can’t give up on. Mm-hmm. As we move to a close, I want to come back to the Moors for a second.

And I want to ask you if anything has surprised you during this rehearsal process?

[Bryn Kennedy]
I mean, we, I think something that I sort of hoped for going in, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure would happen is the way that this play has kind of revealed itself over working on it in rehearsal. The text, I think, because it’s written in sort of plain, modern-ish language, it sort of feels quite overt and sort of simple in a way. And from that first kitchen table read and from the work I was doing in advance on my own, I kind of had an inkling.

I thought, I think there’s a lot more to this actually. And I was sort of starting to uncover some of those layers. But the more we have worked on it in rehearsal, the more I have been sort of surprised again and again by how much depth is actually written into this text, by how complicated the relationships are.

I’m just, I’m, I’m kind of bowled over by it every day. Every day we’re finding something that makes me go, I just, I never thought that existed in this play. And it’s amazing to discover it.

And so that, that has been really great is, is just finding that this play contains such multitudes and far beyond what I like sort of hoped that it would. I hope that it had some, but I didn’t know that it had this many, I think is what has been surprising. And what has not been surprising, but has been amazing is, is the way that our, our cast, despite our sort of, we have a quite a short rehearsal process.

And despite that, they’ve just fearlessly dove in. And I asked them in the first couple of days to look for that depth, to find those multitudes, and they’ve just gone for it in every possible way.

[Phil Rickaby]
Sounds incredibly exciting. So I’m looking forward to this play. This sounds like a lot of fun and something to, to, to, to look forward to.

So Bryn, thank you so much for talking with me about that.

[Bryn Kennedy]
Thank you so much for having me on. It’s so lovely to chat with you and so nice to be back after several years, but a lot’s happening and, and just so fun to talk about theatre. Thank you for having me on.

[Phil Rickaby]
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Stageworthy. I am going to tell you about next week’s guest in just a second. But first, let me talk a little bit more in detail about Patreon.

Because like I said at the beginning of the show, I cannot make this show without the people who have chosen to back me on Patreon. Because even though a podcast like this is given to you for free, it costs money to make this. Some of the costs are, you know, having a website, having a place to host the files so they can be distributed to all of the podcast distribution places, editing software, and transcripts for episodes are also something that I’m working on adding to the back catalog.

And all of the future episodes will have transcripts, but that all costs money. And I don’t have advertising and I don’t have sponsors. So the only way that I am able to afford this is by having patrons.

Prior to last year, when I started the Patreon, I paid for everything on Stageworthy out of my own pocket. And that gets expensive after a while and I have loved doing it. Making Stageworthy and giving it to you is one of the joys of my life, but it does get expensive.

And because there are no sponsors and no advertising, I do have to pay for that out of my own pocket. And even with the patrons that I have, we are covering the costs that I mentioned before, but only just. I’m not covering the time that it takes to do everything involved in making the podcast.

So if you want to help me to make this podcast, please go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a patron. Patrons get early access to episodes, conversations about things that are happening in the theatre world, and more. And of course, the more patrons who join the Patreon, the more I can offer to the patrons I have.

If you want to help me to make this show, I would be so grateful. Go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a patron. My guest next week is Logan Robbins, who is the Artistic Director of the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company.

I really enjoyed that conversation, and you will too when you tune in to next week’s episode of Stageworthy.