From Dromore Crescent to Stratford
Erin Shields’ Festival hit ‘Paradise Lost’ reflects love for theatre that started here
BORN
AND RAISED in Hamilton, 41-year-old playwright Erin Shields isn’t interested in the things that make money in the world of commercial theatre. True, she’s written at least a dozen plays, some performed at such prestigious spots as The Segal Centre In Montreal, Niagara-on-theLake’s Shaw Festival and Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. But money isn’t what it’s all about.
Shields walks into Stratford’s Revel Coffee Shop, her incredible eyes shining, her warm smile intact after weeks of rewrites and rehearsals. Her glow belies the fact her play “Paradise Lost” opens at Stratford’s Studio Theatre in just a few short hours.
The parts for young women were awful. I’m not really an ingénue type. So, I started making my own work. That’s the gateway for many of us. It’s a way of being in charge.” ERIN SHIELDS Playwright, ‘Paradise Lost’ “Guys wrote the stories, but I wrote this play. My Satan here suggests jealousy, rage, humour and infidelity. I get to question anything I want.”
“HOW DO I FEEL?”
she laughs. “I’m terrified of course. I just might throw up. This is Stratford after all, so I’m trying not to think about the audience filing in and the curtain going up.
“I feel good about the play, but you know, at the same time I feel awful. Curious I suppose. I sat watching a preview the other day expecting it to be a house full of tourists and playgoers. But no, there was Martha Henry and Antoni Cimolino looking on. How’s that for stirring your stomach?”
Shields grew up on Dromore Crescent in Hamilton. She went to school at Dalewood Middle School and Westdale Secondary. She credits drama teachers Willard Boudreau and David Dayler with her passion for theatre.
“I wanted to be an actress. Well, I was one for a time, but writing just took over. I mean, I wasn’t getting parts. The parts for young women were awful. I’m not really an ingénue type. So, I started making my own work. That’s the gateway for many of us. It’s a way of being in charge.”
For Shields, being in charge meant winning the Governor General’s Literary Award for English Language Drama in 2011 for her play “If We Were Birds.” That didn’t, of course happen overnight.
“There were a lot of dead plays on the way there,” she grins.
After high school, Shields went to England to study at the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. Later, in 2008, she graduated with an English degree from the University of Toronto feeling she needed a more literary background.
“Being in Stratford with a play of my own is amazing. My parents brought me here to the Festival Theatre when I was 11. There are mythic connections for me because of that experience. The first play I saw here was ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ And before we went to see it my father and I read the play aloud in our living room. That opened the play up to me. I found later, when I watched it unfold on the stage, I just understood it so well. I fell in love with theatre because of that experience. I was dazzled by the hugeness of the Festival Theatre and the way the play came alive. I suppose that was a defining moment for me.”
Later at Dalewood, Shields was in the musicals “Little Shop of Horrors” and “The Roar of the Greasepaint.” At Westdale she was involved in some award-winning Sears Festival productions. The seeds had been planted in that Dromore living room and they grew, oh how they grew.
During her years at the University of Toronto, Shields studied “Paradise Lost” with professor Paul Stevens. Here was another defining moment. Her fascination with the epic poem never left her.
“Stevens was funny and irreverent,” she says. “I was enthralled with Milton’s language and the religious implications of his poem. I even made a one-woman show about it, but it didn’t really work.”
THE STRATFORD
VERSION of “Paradise Lost” came as the result of a pitch Shields made to The Festival. “I was told to write a draft. They eventually programmed it and here I am.
“My play is contemporary, yet Miltonian. I mean don’t come in with the poem open and try to follow along. You’ll get very lost.”
Shields laughs and gobbles a big piece of muffin. “Is my play feminist? Of course,” she grins, “Everything I do is feminist. But the play isn’t all feminist, you know. That would reduce its scope. It’s about good and evil really, and terrorism. That’s there too.”
Shields made Satan a woman in her play. “And why not?” she says. “Satan is a mythical creature. I got to change whatever I wanted to change in Milton’s poem. Guys wrote the stories, but I wrote this play. My Satan here suggests jealousy, rage, humour and infidelity. I get to question anything I want. Take Adam and Eve. I never have been tied to that stupid story. So I play with it because I can.”
In creating a contemporary play of Milton’s poem, Shields says she had to see the work through a female lens. She also had to have long conversations with a long dead poet. She had to transmogrify some of his thoughts. The Garden of Eden was an English garden for Milton. For me it became the Canadian wilderness, the rocks and lakes and those sky-touching trees where I spent my childhood. My Adam and Eve had to become a reflection of my own time. I created an equality between them. After all, why should Eve have to bear the weight of all that so-called original sin alone?”
“Stratford and ‘Paradise Lost’ have been a positive experience for me. It’s been a real kick. I’ve been a sort of directing dramaturge along the way, and of course part of the journey is knowing what is out of my hands and just trusting the people I’m working with; especially the director who is steering this massive ship.
These days Erin Shields lives in Montreal with her husband Gideon Arthurs, CEO of The National Theatre School. They have two children, Olive and Tallulah. She thinks fondly of Hamilton and its influence on both her art and her life. She’s the real thing: a playwright who just might provoke you. And to think it all began on Dromore Crescent.