A SEASON FOR CHANGE
Social issues take centre stage at GCTC
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The Great Canadian Theatre Company ’s 2018-19 season will feature six plays that cover top-of-mind social issues from gender equity to the #MeToo movement to civil rights.
“What happened as I selected one play after another was that things were really aligning with current events,” says artistic director Eric Coates.
“Every year, we provide topical, provocative theatre and our audience responds to the challenge. It is so gratifying to produce art that spawns a meaningful response from our patrons,” Coates says.
Opening the season and running from Sept. 11 to 30 is Kate Hennig ’s play The Virgin Trial, which debuted last year at the Stratford Festival.
While the play takes its inspiration from the Tudor era and the life of Queen Elizabeth I, it grapples with contemporary issues including victim shaming and sexual consent.
The play “takes the form of a modern crime drama with an interrogation room and flashbacks,” Coates says.
“It’s a real potboiler.”
The Virgin Trial is a sequel to Hennig’s work The Last Wife, which the GCTC presented in the fall of 2016.
“Our audience was completely engaged by that piece, and I determined right away we were going to commit to the trilogy that Kate is writing,” Coates says.
Just in time for Halloween, The Drowning Girls, a ghost story by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson and Daniela Vlaskalic, will run Oct. 23 to Nov. 11
Set in the Victorian era, the play concerns three women who were married in turn to the same man, who happened to be the serial killer who took their lives.
“It’s entirely recounted from fact. The characters’ voices have been invented, but their stories of their marriages are all absolutely factual,” says Coates, who saw the play première in Calgary several years ago.
“It’s a really gripping ghost story and a very poignant record of violence against women.”
The tone of things will take a turn toward comedy with Mark Crawford’s Bed and Breakfast, which runs Dec. 4 to 22.
With his story about a gay Toronto couple that moves to a small Ontario town, playwright Crawford “is really finding the sweet spot in terms of comedy with substance,” says Coates.
The play’s lead characters are “alarmed that they bump up against all sorts of homophobia, and they deal with this in all sorts of interesting ways,” he says.
“It’s a very funny and compassionate look at what happens when you try to go home.”
The Mountaintop, a production from Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop, runs at the GCTC from Jan. 22 to Feb. 19 next year.
Katori Hall’s play centres on civil rights icon Martin Luther King and his legacy.
This play, set on the last night of King’s life, “allows people to look beneath the public veneer of who Martin Luther King was,” and gives insight into “great internal struggle and the roots of his passions,” says Coates.
He adds that when the play was produced in Montreal, it became the top-selling production in the history of the Black Theatre Workshop.
The season’s most Ottawa-centric play, Behaviour, will première at the GCTC with its run from March 12 to 31 next year.
Penned by Ottawa playwright Darrah Teitel, the play “is on the surface a story of a woman who appears to have the perfect Ottawa life — she works on the Hill, has a child, has a partner, they have a very vibrant life,” says Coates.
“As the play progresses it peels away the layers of systemic abuse … it really examines what happens when a woman starts to understand how her own silence has exacerbated her situation. Eventually, she takes action,” Coates continues, calling the play “extremely current and potent … a very provocative piece.”
Closing the season with its run from April 30 to May 17, 2019, is Rose Napoli’s Lo (or Dear Mr. Wells), which Coates regards as a companion piece to Behaviour.
Produced by Nightwood Theatre in Toronto, a feminist theatre company, the challenging work deals with the relationship between a 15-year-old high school student and her English teacher, a man in mid-40s.
While the story is presented by the woman as an adult, the play invites viewers to assess how reliable a storyteller she is, says Coates.
“Sometimes people tell stories in a way to protect themselves,” he says.
The play raises very provocative questions about abusive relationships, he says.
Coates says he’s excited to be presenting so many plays by female playwrights who are in relatively early stages of their careers.
“As a company, we’re really committing to supporting these artists,” he says.
It’s a really gripping ghost story and a very poignant record of violence against women.