Category: Lead Article

1. You’re quite a force in the theatre world, staging something like 17 original plays in under a decade! And you wear many hats — artistic director, screenwriter, playwright — how does your directorial eye inform your writing?

I always think of writing and directing as one job – to shepherd an idea (rather than a script or a show) from conception to production, so I never really take off either hat. When I’m writing I try to think ahead to what “director me” will be staging/what the audience will be seeing/feeling at that moment and write towards that. For instance, if there’s a very talk-y scene, I think, what could this use physically? A fight? A spill? A moment of physical tension? – and then try to write it in. When I’m directing, I can always use my writer brain to shift the script to help me give a moment more impact or change a line because an actor ad-libbed something great or is struggling with a word or a moment.

 I was struck by three things: the imagery of her chicken hut and preferred method of travel and bone grinding (mortar and pestle); her ambiguous moral code; and the fact that she had a name.

2. What was your fascination with Baba Yaga? What made you write a play about her?

I’ve always been fascinated by legends and myths, and the villains at the heart of them. I was raised on a steady diet of cookie-cutter fairy tales and prince-rescues-princess-from-wicked-witch narratives. So, when I first came across Baba Yaga, I was struck by three things: the imagery of her chicken hut and preferred method of travel and bone grinding (mortar and pestle); her ambiguous moral code; and the fact that she had a name. Witches are so often defined vaguely by colours, geography or their protagonists (i.e., “White” or “of the West” or “the one from Hansel and Gretel”) but here was a witch powerful enough to be remembered for how she operated, how she lived, not just how she got shoved into an oven or poisoned an apple that one time. I thought that was cool.

I also was fascinated by what was actually written about her; she’s usually described as old and ugly, and sometimes she kills people, but she helps them too, when she wants to.

Across the globe she’s seen as everything from monster to a quest donor, wise woman to a goddess, trickster to a saviour and everything in between. To me, she’s a compelling, morally ambiguous, complex female character – a villain and a protagonist, an antishero who does what she wants and refuses to be defined or labelled as one thing. I loved the idea of updating her to a modern woman, and wanted to write something that came at the story of a female villain from her POV, rather than a male-driven hero’s journey. I wanted to re-envision her as a sexy, powerful academic, who refuses to take shit from anyone. After all, historically what we call a witch is just someone society has decided it’s scared of, and what could be scarier than a powerful, sexual, brilliant older woman living by her own rules?

3. The female characters in Yaga are surprising, full of complexities, and not always ethical. How do you create such dynamic characters? Where does your inspiration come from?

I spent much of my early career trying to write in a style that appealed primarily to straight me, modelling my work on violent and sexy male-driven television shows, trying to shy away from writing funny, powerful women because I thought it would intimidate audiences. Now, I really love creating complex female characters, especially older ones, because I think that subsect of society and culture is woefully unexplored. A mentor said once to me, “There’s a period of time in a woman’s life when you just become invisible -you’re not a mother, or a sexual object, so what are you, a crone?”. That became a line in Yaga. My inspiration also comes from the incredible women in my life and in our industry. There are so many brilliant “older” female actors, who have such an epic wealth of experience, both professional and lived, and as I get older myself, I want to focus more on their (and my!) stories!

My son, Elijah Julian Moscovitch Barry, was born in June of 2015.  In September, the small body of Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach. The photograph of the drowned Syrian toddler made international headlines. Less hyped on international news outlets was the fact that Alan Kurdi’s aunt (who is Canadian) had been applying for him and his family to immigrate to Canada. But their application was stalled because of severe new immigration restrictions that were pushed through by Stephen Harper’s conservative government. To us, Alan Kurdi was a lost Canadian citizen. His death was our shame. “Shame” was the word I saw on social media the most in the days following the release of that photograph: Canadians were collectively enraged. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals took power, a couple of months later, he invited 25,000 Syrian refugees to become Canadians.

In that moment, I was standing where Chaim and Chaya had stood when they first arrived in Canada. For them, this place was their point of safety. There was a line between life and death and there, at Pier 21, was where they crossed it.

In September 2015—the same September when I’d curled up and cried over the photograph of Alan Kurdi—I went to the museum at Pier 21 in Halifax with my two-month-old son Elijah. Pier 21 is the Canadian version of Ellis Island: it was the port of entry for most immigrants and refugees who came by boat into Canada. In a small office at the front of the museum, staff helped me to locate the dates when my great-grandparents arrived in Canada. They found Chaim Moscovitch first, my great-grandfather, and then Chaya Yankovitch, my great-grandmother. They found the dates they arrived, and the names of the boats they came on.

In that moment, I was standing where Chaim and Chaya had stood when they first arrived in Canada. For them, this place was their point of safety. There was a line between life and death and there, at Pier 21, was where they crossed it. Without this place, there would have been nothing: no family and no generations to come. And I was standing there, in that place, holding my infant son in my arms.

Hannah Moscovitch, December 17, 2018

PHOTO – PIER 2 (W.R. MacAskill, Nova Scotia Archives)

BY JAMIE-LEIGH GONZALES / PHOTO BY MEGAN POSNIKOFF

“The greatest distance a human will ever travel is the distance between their mind and their heart. When they can make that journey, they will discover what is needed to do the work needed in the world — the work of truth and justice”  

Dr. John Borrows, Anishinaabe/Ojibway and a member of the Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario, Professor of Law

While the world around us may not exactly reflect the post-apocalyptic world written by Yvette Nolan in The Unplugging, it is safe to say that humanity is currently experiencing a time of collective disaster and chaos. Pandemic, climate crisis and war continue to fuel global grief. Not unlike what the characters in Nolan’s play experience, political and societal fractures across the world isolate us from each other, allowing division and even hate to flourish.  

And yet, I have hope. 

Many of us have been encouraged to live our lives separate from each other and disconnected from the natural world around us. As a single mother with a young kid, I see the urgency to close these divides in a new way. In my lifetime I have seen destruction at the hands of governments and corporations. I have seen attempted erasure of whole cultures and communities. I have seen racism and white supremacy reignite hatred in the western world.  

I have also seen people come together to take care of each other. I have seen mutual aid flourish amongst disaster and chaos. I have seen young people emboldened to reconnect to their cultures and uplift wisdom and knowledge held by elders.  

Indigenous culture does not disappear if traditional knowledge is lost. Indigenous peoples are here and they continue to resist despite the apocalypse of the Indian Act, colonization, and the attempted eradication of Indigenous peoples, culture and ways of being.  

As John Borrows expresses, the language of the land and the lessons it teaches us are also still here. If we listen, the lessons are still available to all of us whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous. These ancestral ways of being are rooted in good relations. We cannot go back and undo colonialism, or undo the destruction humanity has inflicted upon the planet. But, we can listen and we can change. The teachings from the land are here for all of us. They can be adapted to what the world needs most now. And, we all have to do the work. 

So, how do we close the distance between our heads and our hearts? And between ourselves and the land? In The Unplugging, Nolan explores this for us: an Indigenous woman and a white woman come together to care for the next generation, despite how the community has exiled them. Can we begin to forgive? Can we change our relationships with each other and to the land? Could intergenerational healing be possible?  

I believe we can. But it will take a lot of trust.  

Amongst all this chaos I have often panicked about my choice to have a kid in these times — but it is actually his enthusiasm and creativity that ignites my hope that he and his generation will find solutions or ways that we haven’t even considered yet. We will have to let go of our own expectations and allow the generation that is here now and coming next to shape culture and ways of being — but we have to give them the tools to thrive and to be able to listen to the land.  

This is where my hope is rooted. When we do come together in this new way, we can move toward a more just and sustainable future. 

Jamie-Leigh Gonzales is a Portuguese and Sḵwxwú7mesh mother living on the stolen lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ People. She is a co-founder at Grounded Futures: a media production and mentorship collaborative, and a Communications Manager at RAVEN. As an artist, she roots her work in storytelling, collaboration, and trust. She is a mentor and mentee across many disciplines, but most notably is learning from her 3-year-old on how to be a rad human. 

Photo Caption – Margaret Barton and Alan Williams in the original 1995 production of Vigil. Written and directed by Morris Panych / Photo by Bruce Stotesbury / Set & Costume Designer – Ken MacDonald / Lighting Designer – Marsha Sibthorpe / Sound Designer – Ian Rye

Interview conducted by MK Piatkowski for BC Bookworld, 2011

Morris graduated from Creative Writing at UBC in 1977 and had his first professional production in 1982 with Last Call for Tamahnous Theatre in Vancouver. Since that time, he has written over twenty plays and adapted half a dozen others. He has twice won the Governor General Literary Award for Drama, is the recipient of five of Toronto’s Dora Awards, and has won so many Jessie Awards that the Vancouver theatre community joke about changing their name to the Morrie Awards. Morris has directed close to one hundred plays, in addition to film, music video, and opera—including Pacific Opera’s Macbeth, The Barber of Seville and Flight. His acclaimed film The Overcoat won an honourable mention at the Prix Italia.

Who would direct the coolest production of one of your plays?

The coolest person would be the person who loved and understood my work and wanted an audience to love and understand it in the same way.

What scares you?  What can’t you write about?

I am scared to write non-comedic material because I fear it will come across as melodramatic. But I have to try. I am scared of success and failure in equal measure, but what scares me the most is writing that’s irrelevant. 

What do you want to write about that you haven’t yet?

Sin. What it is. I don’t know, but when I figure it out, I want to write about it. And love; I would like to write a love story—it would be sad, I think, and a little bit funny…I guess Vigil is a kind of love story.

How do you deal with praise? With criticism?

I take both too seriously. A crazy woman came up to me at the corner of Queen and Parliament and said ‘you; you’re ugly.’ For a long time after I thought, what did she mean? Am I really ugly? Is she telling me something nobody else will? Does she have some special insight into my soul? Or is she just crazy? Criticism sticks. I’m pretty sure she was insane but there is a small part of me, still, that is carrying around this feeling that I might be just a little bit ugly.

Where do you write?  Pen or keyboard?

I hate to admit it, but I have almost no penmanship left. I lack the coordination even to write my own name. I believe that writing will move more and more to the keyboard. Committing to pen and paper is very different than committing to computer, which is not so much a commitment as a first date. I can change my writing on a computer, and nobody has to ever know just how shitty it was. I don’t have to take responsibility for what I write nearly as much as when I used to have to use whiteout. When I was first in Creative Writing at UBC, we copied our scripts on Gestetner machines, which were like a kind of printing press. There were a lot more steps, so I thought more carefully about what I was writing.

What would you like academics to write about your work in 50 years?

I would like them to say, these academics, that I existed. The worst fate for an artist is to have not been heard; that’s my idea of eternal damnation.

What inspires you?

To say what inspires me, sort of implies that I’m inspired, which I’m often not. But I am often moved, particularly by acts of kindness; even somebody opening a door for me and smiling can bring me to tears, of late. I feel pretty emotional when somebody displays their humanity, even in passing. The thing that most deeply moves me is music; say, for instance, Prokofiev’s cello concerto. To think how somebody could be such a genius to construct and interweave those harmonies and to do it with such apparent ease and wit, but more than that how this man has reached out a hundred years and somehow known what was in my heart. How his music speaks to me; that is moving. For art to reverberate through space in wonderful, but through time is awe-inspiring.

MK Piatkowski was the artistic director of one big umbrella at the time of this interview. obu is now a personal and corporate transformation company, with MK using her theatre experience as a corporate trainer and life coach. She still occasionally directs, mostly working with storytellers.

BY DR. RACHEL CLEVES

NEW YORK IN 1905 WAS A CITY FULL OF WOMEN LIKE ESTHER, THE HEROINE OF LYNN NOTTAGE’S PLAY INTIMATE APPAREL. At the turn of the century, young single Black women, born in the U.S. South after the Civil War, pulled up stakes and travelled north by the thousands looking to escape violence, overwork, and closed horizons. Between 1890 and 1900, the city’s Black population doubled. Many of the women, like Esther, were illiterate and left behind only photographs as records of their lives, like Nottage’s own grandmother who inspired her play. It takes imagination to recapture their stories, but not as much imagination as it took for these young women to invent new lives and stories for themselves.

They arrived in New York by steamer, by train, and on foot. Some had family to stay with or had lined up domestic jobs in advance that came with room and board. Others had nowhere to stay. The unlucky were preyed upon by the hustlers who stalked the docks and train stations, looking for newcomers to recruit to the city’s sex trade. Doing battle with the procurers were do-gooders like Victoria Earle Matthews, who ran the White Rose Mission, a “Christian, nonsectarian Home for Colored Girls and Women.” Matthews and her volunteers waited at train platforms for new arrivals and invited them to stay at the Mission, where they received training as seamstresses, hatmakers, and cooks. From this safe landing place, the young women might secure lodgings in a respectable boarding house, like Esther finds in the home of Mrs. Dickinson.

Coming north might have saved migrants from the debt peonage of the Jim Crow South, but it didn’t free anyone from the burden of hard labour. Making ends meet as a single Black woman in turn of the century New York required constant toil. Most jobs were closed to Black workers. The majority of Black women worked as domestics. Even a skilled seamstress, like Esther, had to work nonstop to earn enough to pay rent. But Black women migrants refused to be limited to a life of labour. They came to New York for something more. The historian Saidiya Hartman writes that “at the turn of the twentieth century, young black women were in open rebellion.” They were chasing after love, pleasure, and excitement. “A small rented room was a laboratory for trying to live free in a world where freedom was thwarted.” Their intimate acts were acts of revolution.

Esther takes a risk on a man she doesn’t know, George, a Barbadian labourer who writes her letters from Panama, where he works on a crew digging a canal to cross the continent. Other women found lovers closer to home, not only men but other women and genderqueer folk as well. But if love was an act of resistance, it was not a panacea. Through such acts of rebellion as leaving home and taking lovers, Esther and her sisters imagined the modern world into being.

To learn more about Black women like Esther in turn-of-the-century New York, I recommend Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2019).

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COVER PHOTO COURTESY OF WWW.HISTORY101.NYC

I wanted to tell a Story about Land Claims from the perspective of snk’y’ép, Coyote, our sacred profane Trickster, as told in the Nlaka’pamux Story Traditions. Not to adhere to any kind of ethnographic accuracy, but to write a play imbued with the spirit of those Coyote Stories. 

Coyote Stories are a part of our sptékwł Stories, about animal beings with human aspects who are presented in our Creation or Foundational Stories. These characters represent all of the animals within Nlaka’pamux cultural knowledge and the specific fauna found on our Lands, Coyote being the most powerful and consequential of them. Other animals like Rabbit are also Tricksters, but they have traits that differentiate them from snk’y’ép. The Coyote character in Nlaka’pamux culture is vain, selfish in the extreme, cunning, lustful, arrogant, foolish, greedy, and vengeful. He embodies the worst of human character. And that makes him funny.  But he is also a powerful transformer, a shape-shifter, a conjurer, and a lover. 

In the Coyote Stories there is Old Man Coyote, who is malevolent and often trying to sleep with the three gorgeous duck wives of his son, the younger Coyote. Old Man Coyote tricks his son into going on a trans-dimensional journey into the Sky Nation that takes eight years to return from. All so that he can sleep with his son’s wives. And through his triumphs and follies on the journey back home, Coyote transforms the world into the reality we recognize today. In other adventures, Coyote has conversations with combs and blankets, deep philosophical conversations with his own asshole, and transforms his feces into various desirable objects in order to trick a cannibal or some other unsuspecting powerful being out of their possessions. 

This play is inspired by these ancient, hilarious, absurd Stories that on closer investigation reveal a rich narrative imbued with absolutely deliberate cultural memes, reflecting the Beliefs and laws of the people. The Trickster behaves in ways counter to the Customs and Beliefs of the people, thereby provoking them not to live by his example but to enjoy and understand his faults in relation to their Values and laws. His misdeeds shape the world around us. 

I wanted to explore that kind of contrary Trickster dramaturgy in the context of a Land Claim. What would Coyote do if his Lands were being threatened? Yet no character in this play is named Coyote or snk’y’ép; rather, the Trickster is the universe of this play. Transformation is possible, nothing is certain, and everyone is suspect. In Trickster Stories, no one walks away unscathed. 

Kevin Loring