City playwright MacKenzie wins national theatre award
Edmonton’s Matthew MacKenzie has won the prestigious Carol Bolt Award for his new play, Bears.
The national award, which comes with a $5,000 cash prize, comes from the Playwrights Guild of Canada and is awarded to a member of the organization who has premiered a new work in the past year.
“To get the win was definitely a surprise,” MacKenzie said in a phone interview after being honoured in Toronto Sunday. “Just to be nominated along with Colleen Murphy and Kat Sandler, that was a pretty big honour in itself.”
A former student of Victoria School of Performing and Visual Arts, MacKenzie is a graduate of the playwriting program at the National Theatre School of Canada, where he won the Quebec Lieutenant Governor’s award. He joins Edmonton playwrights Vern Thiessen and Meiko Ouchi in receiving the award.
Bears was a hit in Toronto last January, winning two Dora awards (presented by the Toronto Theatre Critics) for outstanding production and outstanding new play in the independent theatre division. Later that same month, Bears came to Edmonton, playing at Backstage Theatre. Local audiences also had the opportunity to see an earlier version of the play in 2015.
The production stars Sheldon Elter as Floyd, a Métis oilfield worker on the lam after an industrial accident in which he may have played a key role. The RCMP are in pursuit, and Floyd flees through the Rockies toward Burnaby, B.C., where the proposed Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline is set to surface.
As Floyd journeys by foot, he begins a transformation that may (or may not) see him turn into a grizzly bear.
Co-produced by two local companies, Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts and Punctuate! Theatre, Bears is a dark comedy infused with dance. The central character’s mother (played by Edmonton’s Christine Sokaymoh Frederick) is from Fort Chipewyan and has died, MacKenzie said, “of one of those cancers they get up there at a very high rate.”
Unapologetically political, Bears examines the cost of industrial activity on the land, and on Canada’s Indigenous people.
“So you could say it’s pretty critical of continuing massive (northern) development. But it was really important to me, and to Sheldon, that I not tell a story that damns the working man.”
MacKenzie, who is of Métis, Cree and Ojibway heritage, is giving the prize money to two local emerging Indigenous artists, Theresa Cutknife and Eve Saint.
“My parents were like, ‘What?’” MacKenzie said with a chuckle. “The money would be nice, but I have benefited enormously working with Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts and Sheldon and Christine, and Christine’s parents, who are Cree elders. It was a nobrainer for me.”
Bears travels to Victoria’s Belfry Theatre next January and will be back in Toronto at the Factory Theatre in February.