HAPPY DAYS
Sheila Heti stages a once-unthinkable play.
It’s the kind of origin story that lends itself to legend: an up-and-coming young writer with an offbeat sensibility gets commissioned to write a play, struggles to write said play, is unceremoniously informed that her work is unproduceable, then writes a semi-autobiographical sleeper hit of a novel about the play’s troubled gestation — which ultimately leads to its production. Now Sheila Heti’s All Our Happy Days Are Stupid — the little play that could — is about to make its mainstage debut at Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage festival. From there, a six-day run at New York’s Kitchen theatre.
“I would have been surprised, certainly, if at the time the play was commissioned, I had known it would take 12 years and go through so many stages and transformations,” Heti says via email. “I remember taking the commission thinking it was a relatively simple way to make a few thousand dollars.”
By the time AOHDAS was originally mounted by the Suburban Beast theatre company in October 2013 at Videofag, an unassuming storefront theatre in Toronto’s Kensington Market that seats 35, Heti was an alt-household name. Her 2010 novel, How Should a Person Be?, had spent the past 18 months accumulating the sort of critical attention — reviews from The New Yorker, the Paris Review and The Economist — that anoints a darling. Perhaps riding on its writer’s indie cache, the play’s initial three-night run sold out in a near-instant. But the warm reception that followed owed as much to the scrappy DIY sensibility of the play’s mixed amateur and professional cast, coaxed to tragicomic effect by directors Erin Brubacher and Jordan Tannahill, as the script itself.
The original cast has been reassembled, incorporating new guest musicians from Toronto band Diana. Brubacher and recent Governor General Awardwinner Tannahill are reprising their directorial roles, as well.
“There’s definitely a lot more pressure on us than there was in 2013,” says Tannahill over the phone while riding a Toronto streetcar from one meeting to another. It’s dress rehearsal week, and the co-director is in constant transit.
Tannahill jokes that it occasionally feels as though the scaled-up production is being “held together with a bunch of tape and a prayer.” Its scaling-up for dramatically larger audiences at both World Stage and the Kitchen, respectively, is as symbolic as it is fact: “We’re definitely feeling the scrutiny.”
They’re also feeling the pressure to recapture the intimacy so easily fostered within Videofag’s cozy confines. The production’s original backdrop and blockings have been filled out but maintained, with a new costume and stage designer, Julianne Wilding, brought on to recreate the play’s original monochromatic palate and two-dimensional plane. “She’s used to making the impossible work,” Tannahill says.
With a cast of mostly untrained actors, a larger stage also brings technical challenges. “It’s a huge space,” says Naomi Skwarna, who is reprising her role as Mrs. Oddi on the Harbourfront Centre’s stage. “We went to do a tech walk-through and I could feel my voice dissolving in front of me, whereas in Videofag the walls are six feet ahead of you and everything resonates.”
Skwarna, like many others in the ensemble, had never received formal instruction on how to project her voice while maintaining a conversational subtlety. “Jordan has been working with [the actors] on our ability to be heard and understood. Sometimes when you raise volume, you can lose nuance.”
Kayla Lorette, who plays multiple roles, is an improvisor and comedian by trade. “Coming into this project, theatre was kind of a new thing for me,” she says. Yet, Lorette observes that the amateur ensemble managed to find an alchemy all their own.
“This particular play is so am- bitious, and there are so many characters, but everyone has their sniper skill that they’re good at.”
The collaborative sensibility that plays to its individual members’ strengths applies as much to the play’s co-directorial process as to its cast’s interactions, says Brubacher, who also worked with Tannahill on last fall’s Concord Floral.
“I’m driven by essence and Jordan’s driven by a visual world,” she says. “So it’s a nice compliment, that way. He has a macro vision of a piece and I’m more interested in the small acts and tiny, poignant moments of the thing.”
Although the size of a performance space — and the number of people filling it — will affect the experience of any performance, Brubacher thinks they’ve succeeded in preserving “the heart” of the original production, from the sense of intimacy to its aesthetic decisions.
“We’re still a group of friends coming together to put together a show,” Tannahill says.
I remember thinking it was a simple way to make a few thousand dollars