Download RARE: My Story of Breaking Free Playwrights` POV

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Volume 2 Issue 1 June 10, 2013
RARE: My Story of Breaking Free
Nada Marie Christiane Mayla, Krystal Nausbaum, James Hazlett, Mike Liu, and Andreas Prinz in an ensemble shot of
Soulpepper’s production of Rare. On right, Krystal Nausbaum and James Hazlett share a hug. Photos: John Gundy.
By JUDITH THOMPSON
My experience in creating the play Rare with nine
brilliant performers with Down Syndrome was
the most enlightening, humbling, and gratifying
theatre experience of my life.
few months to talk about her writing and career
path as a theatre artist. Krystal is an astonishing
performer, but her writing was unformed and I
was having trouble helping her with it.
It all began on a Tuesday afternoon in November
2011, in the Second Cup on the south side of
Bloor street near Bathurst. The grimy café was
packed with high school students, screenwriters,
and street involved folk, all talking at the top of
their voices. I was meeting with Krystal, a young
actress with neon pink hair and Down Syndrome,
and her mother, Madeleine. Krystal had been part
of my devised play SICK, which premiered at the
Next Stage Festival in Toronto in January 2010.
Krystal was hungering to continue her creative
practice, and so the three of us would meet every
On that Tuesday afternoon I looked at her
organized, dynamic mother and made a proposal:
“if you are willing to apply to the Fringe, and if we
actually make it, I would be happy to volunteer my
time to create a play with a full cast of performers,
all with Down Syndrome.” Madeleine wondered
if they all needed to have Down Syndrome, and I
was clear: all of them, and a nice big cast.
Madeleine agreed, we got in, and though a
newbie, she pulled off producing a Fringe show
with the expertise of a veteran. Through the
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Actors in Judith Thompson’s Rare. Photo: boomersinfokiosk.blogspot.ca
Down Syndrome society she put the word out
and she secured us affordable space through the
Fringe.
script and throwing themselves on the floor
screaming, while somebody else would declare
their unrequited romantic love for another
member of the cast, who would go rigid with fury
or embarrassment and hide for the rest of the
rehearsal.
Our auditions attracted about forty performers
with Down Syndrome. I chose the nine most
unique performers, an orchestra of distinctive
tones and physical types. I knew we would need
a very long time to create a polished play, so I
asked for a commitment of six months. We met
twice in January, three times in March, four in
April and then by May it was four or five times
a week, from eleven to five, with an hour-long
lunch that always became two and a half hours
of revelry and mad eating of junky lunch food,
like poutine and cheeseburgers, followed by
the healthy packed lunch their parents had
prepared. After a while, we had to institute a
‘healthy lunch contest’. It didn’t really work…
it was always somebody’s birthday and they
always had to have cake.
It seemed they could never remember either the
order of speaking or what they wanted to say.
More than once, Madeleine gently suggested that
I had better give my notice to the Fringe that this
show was not going to happen. I laughed, because
I had heard this before, during the eight years
that I directed and abridged Shakespeare with a
cast of seventy at Palmerston Public school. As
late as five days before opening, some of the kids’
parents would shake their heads and tell me that
this was a mess, and we had better just say the
performance was cancelled. I laughed at them
while I reassured them: it was going to be fine.
Not just fine, but amazing. And it always was.
Over the top amazing - the kids just rose to the
theatrical standard that had been prepared for
them.
The food issues were only a small example of
the novel challenges we faced. Every rehearsal
would feature somebody ripping up their
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I knew that Rare would be the same (although
to be honest, I did have a few panicky moments,
followed by calm confidence) and I promised
Madeleine that all would be fine, and I carried on.
Oh, and the golden key to success? Lots and lots
of help from hugely talented and energetic young
theatre artists: our gifted singer and songwriter
Victoria Carr, our tireless a.s.m.s Llyandra Jones,
Suzanne Roberts Smith, Emily Kedar, Rosamund
Small, and Grace Campbell. It would have been
very wobbly indeed without these incredible
talents. On the opening night of Hannah
Moscovitch’s The Children’s Republic, I was
lucky enough to persuade Nicholas Hutcheson,
who was her script supervisor and had been my
student years before at University of Guelph, to
assist me with the script. He said yes!
months in, I informed the cast that 97 percent
of parents choose to terminate when told that
their baby would have Down Syndrome. I
asked them what they thought of that choice.
There was a very long silence, and then Nick
Herd spoke. He said, “That’s discrimination.
That’s wrong, that’s against our right to be
who we are, what we are. We are RARE, we’re
unique.”
I looked over at Nick, who typed it in, word for
word. There was the centerpiece of the show.
They all loved to dance, especially Nick and
Suzanne. A few days later I brought in the
music of “The Dying Swan”, from Swan Lake.
I asked Nick to dance to this. He studied the
dance on YouTube and then performed a
staggering version. I brought the actress and
Things were falling into place. I knew I had
“That’s discrimination. That’s wrong, that’s
against our right to be who we are, what we
are. We are RARE, we’re unique.”
to have a script supervisor, as my method in
devising these plays is to ask simple questions.
“What do you wish?” Or “I feel like a bit of dusty
pavement today, what do you feel like?” Or
“let’s talk about falling in love.” Or “what is your
mother like?” Has anyone died in your family?”
And on and on, while the script supervisor madly
typed in every word the performers utter. And
then I woud refine and sculpt and cajole until
those perfect poetic answers emerged - the ones I
was looking for but could not, in good conscience,
impose.
I knew that the script had to be in the words
of the performers, other than the necessary
stitching that would have to be done. Each of
the performers had their own poetic sensibility,
their own way of seeing the world and expressing
themselves. They all courageously
offered
stories, responses and words.
From the beginning, the politics were part of the
piece: what is it to have Down Syndrome in a
world obsessed with perfection? One day, three
Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press. Image: Rita
Leistner. Design: Blake Sproule
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Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal
“I became visible when engaged in theatrical practice.
Before I began working in theatre I felt completely invisible.
Like a ghost. But when I was on stage, it was as if I became
real. I know it’s strange and neurotic, but there it is, and
that is why I need it.”
dance teacher Nicki Guadagni in to polish it up,
and as soon as she suggested that Nick watch his
hands, the dance blossomed.
especially Caesarian scars.” Dear body, my feet
have bunions now.” And so on and so on.
Boring. I wanted to get to the mucky, difficult
stuff of life. And so asked for two two-week
workshops. And thus my alternate playwriting
path began. And it was like creating a path out of
the woods. Listening to story after story, response
after response, and cutting and clearing and
choosing and finally creating a beautiful path,
all from their amazing courage, their exquisite
words.
He was absolutely inspirational in that dance.
Suzanne, a large young woman with an extreme
stutter, also danced like an angel. I helped her
create a dance for Dylan’s song “Out There.”
So, how was it different, as a playwright, to
work with artists with Down Syndrome? I
worked this way for the first time on Body &
Soul, a play that was commissioned by Brenda
Surminski, representing Ogilvy and Mather,
for Dove. She asked me if I would be interested
in creating a play about beauty and aging with
real women between the ages of forty-five and
eighty. I jumped at it, with the condition that no
Dove products would be mentioned, let alone
be featured on stage. They agreed and were
respectfully hands-off during the whole process.
So, how was working with fourteen powerhouse
women different than working with nine
performers with Down Syndrome? Only one way
and that is that all the performers with Down
Syndrome believed in me from the beginning,
and although most of the women in Body &
Soul also believed, there were a few doubters.
After all, I was discovering my methodology,
improvising a lot, making wrong turns and
reversing, doing loops and changing my mind
about blocking daily. But that is the way I work,
and it does work.
I basically discovered this way of working on my
feet. I did not really know what I was going to do,
going into our workshops. My only experience
with this kind of theatre was listening to war
stories about the Farm Show, and the first
day of every class I taught at the University of
Guelph, when I would ask the students to tell me
a story of transformation from their lives. These
sessions were always, always, breathtaking. I
knew that real, personal stories worked magic.
My performers in Rare brought in new ideas
every day. I would say yes to everything, but
then continue to work the way I was working.
Occasionally I would try a promising idea but
usually the ideas were like this one: “I want Sarah
and I to come to the front of the stage and sing
Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will go On” from the
Titanic.” I would say it sounded WONDERFUL,
and we might consider it… in a while. And
Suzanne, in this case, was very reasonable. She
was not a good singer, in fact not one of the
cast could sing, although they could all dance (a
puzzle to me…) but they all were convinced they
were wonderful singers! I just had to change the
subject and praise the amazing work they were
The folks at Ogilvy suggested that the women
wear nude body suits and sit on chairs reading
letters to their body. I knew that would not
work, as the letters to the body we received from
hundreds of women all over the country were
pretty much all the same. “Dear body, I wish I
could get rid of those fifteen extra pounds of fat
and love my scars, because they are who I am,
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Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal
Jane Foster and Joann McIntyre in Theatre Passe Muraille’s 1980 production of The Crackwalker. Photo: Joel Benard
doing.
doing a dig and finding treasure. The treasure
has always been there, but mostly it is not visible.
Am I the playwright? The co-creator? Only the
director? In a real devised piece, everyone is
credited with the creation. I found the crediting
very difficult, but the most honest description is
that I created it as a theatre piece using (mostly)
the words and experiences of the cast, curated
over six months.
In a way, it was not so different from writing a play
at my computer. The cast were my characters,
and they spoke in their own voices only. When
I write I try to channel my characters’ voices, in
this case they were already there. I just massaged
and guided them. A fascinating process, one I
plan to continue. A parallel playwriting path for
me.
Many people in the audience assumed that the
cast had made every choice, and we did not tell
them any different, as it was important for them
to be treated as mature artists, which they are.
And Rare is a play, not a showcase. These are
complex and intelligent human beings, they are
artists. However, when they are interviewed,
to the surprise of the Soulpepper marketing
people, they are sometimes a bit incoherent, off
topic, and endearingly obsessed with a certain
aspect of things i.e. “My beautiful sister always
brought me here and I love her, and she is my
best friend,” or “My dad is the best, he just is the
best, just the best.” And so on.
I feel that I became visible when engaged in
theatrical practice. Before I began working in
theatre I felt completely invisible. Like a ghost.
But when I was on stage, it was as if I became
real. I know it’s strange and neurotic, but there
it is, and that is why I need it.
***
Theatre became my life when I was eleven years
old and I played Helen Keller in a production my
mother, Mary Thompson, directed at a university
theatre in 1966. Attempting to understand what
it might be like to be blind, deaf and unable to
communicate brought the world into focus for
My privilege was finding the brilliance
underneath the apparent incoherence. Like
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The Crackwalker turned out to be a profoundly
political play - a reveal of a suffering underclass
in our supposedly classless, cradle-to-grave
socialist utopia. I just wrote what I saw, a sort of
front-line journalistic theatre writing.
me for the first time.
At twelve, in Kingston, Ontario, I played Betty
in The Crucible, trying to fly out the window,
screaming and screaming. This was freedom,
release from the dreary and frightening
quotidian. And I believe it was when I began to
identify with the wild and untamable outsider,
yearning to be seen.
Writing theatre came easily to me, as I had
been immersed in the theatre since I was a
child. I didn’t need books. I didn’t even take the
playwriting course offered at Queen’s. Still in
the passive mode, it didn’t occur to me that I had
anything to say whatsoever.
As I joined drama classes and high school plays,
the excitement never abated, but it was clouded
by an overwhelming sense of the passivity of
an actor in traditional theatre. It was all about
hope. Hoping to be cast. Hoping to get a good
part. Hoping to be liked. Hoping to be admitted
to a theatre school. Hoping and praying not to
be kicked out. And then once I graduated from
theatre school, would they choose me? Will I be
cast in this movie of the week at CBC? (I wasn’t)
Will I be chosen? Do they want me? Why don’t
they want me? Waiting and hoping.
So: after the success of my first play, I grabbed
the excuse to step off the actor path, and onto the
playwright path. People reminded me that it was
possible to do both - witness the brilliant Linda
Griffiths and Daniel McIvor and many more but I just was not interested in performing other
people’s work, or being buffeted around the
country by a career.
The one positive thing about theatre school,
besides learning to be on time and getting several
dance classes a day, was MASK class. It was in
mask class, searching for a suitable monologue,
that I gave up and wrote it myself. An act of
desperation. But the monologue went so well
that I continued writing for my mask characters.
And then there was that weekend when my
roommate had left the city and everyone was
busy, and I was very much alone, with one
channel on the TV and absolutely nothing to
do and nowhere to go. I pulled my roommate’s
typewriter out and began to write what became
The Crackwalker, inspired by a summer job and
one of my mask characters.
So I moved out of passivity and into a real
participant in my own creative life, only
through loneliness and desperation. I was
still quite unformed when I began writing and
so the writing of the play was really a sort of
channeling of characters I had met in a make
work summer job interning with social workers
and the permanently unemployable in Kingston,
Ontario.
I had no political point of view at all, and yet
Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press. Photo: Dean Palmer.
Design: JLArt
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Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal
Theatre. White Biting Dog, I am Yours, Lion in
the Streets, followed by a long stint of writing
for film and television in order to feed my family
with radio plays and children’s plays in the mix.
However, when writing for film and television,
one falls back into passivity. The producers
and directors are the bosses and their wishes
regarding the stories must be carried out. I felt
like I had a noose around my neck.
An artist must be free, or the art is spoiled like
milk left out on a summer’s day.
So I returned to playwriting full time. My
position at the University of Guelph has allowed
me to take on true creative adventures for little
or no pay: neither SICK nor Rare put a penny
in my pocket, but they were research, which the
University not only supports but requires. I am
truly fortunate.
Hardee Lineham and Joann McIntyre in
Theatre Passe Muraille’s 1980 production of The
Crackwalker. Photo: Joel Benard
In my first year out of theatre school I did a
Northern Ontario school tour of Bus Riley’s
Back in Town. A more unsuitable play for
Northern Ontario high schoolers could not be
imagined and they let us know this by talking
so loudly to each other in the gymnasium
that we couldn’t even hear each other on
stage. And then the part of Eve in an Alan
Ayckbourn Christmas play in Winnipeg just
after my father died. On stage at the MTC, I
vowed to myself that this was the end. I was
leaving acting and writing my OWN plays. I
would no longer be a passenger in my own
career.
So, with a few grants here and there, and
the extraordinary encouragement of the late
great Urjo Kareda, I wrote play after play,
always assured of a berth at the Tarragon
These risky projects have led to a very exciting
new project: The Rare Theatre Company. Along
with my producers Brenda Surminski, Nicholas
Hutcheson and Lois Fine, we have formed a
theatre company that is devoted to bringing
the voices of disability and other marginalized
communities to the stage... in their own words,
and played by themselves and nobody else. Albert
Shultz of Soulpepper has offered us a partnership
wherein they will grant us space and the theatre
and even a lighting designer, and we provide the
rest. For three years. We are presently without
any funding, but we are over the moon with
excitement.
***
The overwhelming success of Rare and the
forming of our company have given me greater
courage and conviction as a playwright; recently
I made the difficult decision to “break up” with
Nightwood Theatre, the first time I have ever
moved away from the playwright-as-beggar
position we usually find ourselves in. I remain
“I vowed to myself that this was the end... I would no
longer be a passenger in my own career.”
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Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal
“The play is provocative, and it will piss a lot
of people off, which is true to form for me.”
very grateful to that organization for having me as playwright in residence, for giving me several short
workshops and the staged reading. I am thankful especially to the warm and tremendously gifted and
intelligent Erica Koptyo. But we both agreed that somewhow, Nightwood and I were just not suited to
one another, and it was not in the best interesrs of the play to continue. And yes, that means I do not
have a promise of production anywhere yet. But I am creatively free, and as soon as I withdrew my play
for consideration, I understood the form the play should take. A true moment of epiphany. I was true to
myself and the play, so I became a free playwright again. My voice returned.
The play is provocative, and it will piss a lot of people off, which is true to form for me. I have taken the
story back, and I know it will be produced here and all over the world, just like Palace of the End, which
was dumped by Ross Manson, turned down by Tarragon, and only slotted into CanStage because Rachel
Corrie was deemed unsuitable.
Break free, strike out, assert your voice.
I am fifty-eight years old, but I feel like I have just truly broken free of artistic passivity, and I am learning
to fly.
Judith Thompson (born September 20, 1954) is
a Canadian playwright who lives in Toronto,
Ontario.
The Globe and Mail once declared that “...a
playwright as good as Judith Thompson is
a miracle.” She has twice been awarded the
Governor General’s Award for Drama and is
the recipient of many other awards, including
the Order of Canada.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect those of Playwrights Guild of Canada.
Editing and Layout: Sarah Malik
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