How light shone on Night

Christopher Morris didn’t find the impulse to write Night. It found him.

“I heard some piece of information when I was a teen that people who lived in Scandinavia in the winter time had a higher rate of suicide, and it stuck with me in a weird way.”

Morris, who grew up in Markham, Ont., wasn’t light-deprived himself, and was quite busy acting, directing and creating provocative theatre pieces such as Return: The Sarajevo Project in faraway places like the Republic of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ireland, (where he spent his third year of university studying at Trinity College) and Toronto.

Around 2003, he started to travel to Nunavut, to a town called Pond Inlet, where he discovered something interesting.

“It’s a long story,” he says, “but what it was I found out that they had a theatre company in the ’80s, and they had a few of those actors left in town around, so I found one of them.

“And then,” he adds, “while I was there, a group from the community wanted to put together a play for Drug and Awareness Week, and they knew I was in theatre and asked if I wanted to help create it and direct it with them.”

That was the start of 14 trips Morris made to Nunavut, with a few to Iceland, to research how living with light deficiency might impact suicide rates among young people.

The story got more complicated when Morris, after spending long periods with young people from the Far North, came to the conclusion that the high suicide rate among youth in the Far North wasn’t about light deprivation.

The darkness had very little to do with suicides CHRISTOPHER MORRIS

“What I kind of realized was that the darkness had very little to do with suicides,” Morris says. “It kind of just became clear to me that the more important story was the relationship the south has with the north.”

In Night, Morris tells the story of an anthropologist from the south (Toronto), who travels to the north to repatriate the remains of a young teenage girls’ grandfather.

“That’s the premise of how it starts,” says Morris, “and it looks at this relationship we have with each other. It really focuses, too, on youth up there. I feel quite strongly about youth and the situations they face up there as well.”

The show features a cast of actors who hail from both north and south.

“Two are coming from Yellowknife,” Morris says, “one’s from Manitoulin Island in Ontario, and the other actress is coming from Toronto.

“For once,” he adds, “the folks from Yellowknife are not the ones who are travelling the farthest.”