Female directors take the spotlight at Stratford
Next year’s festival aims to boost its diversity programs, focus on Canadian identity Eight of 14 productions at the Stratford Festival in 2017 will be directed by women.
It’s the most female-led works ever at the theatre festival, which will also include its first Inuit director, Reneltta Arluk.
The diversity is part of a shift that includes artistic director Antoni Cimolino taking a step back from directing himself.
Over the past few years, Cimolino has directed the opening Shakespeare production, this year succeeding with Macbeth. But next year it will be Stratford veteran actor Scott Wentworth (seen this year as Banquo in Macbeth and the title role in John Gabriel Borkman) directing Romeo and Juliet.
In fact, Cimolino is directing only one production in 2017 instead of the usual two: Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. Instead, Cimolino plans to spend more energy behind the scenes than on the stage, building networks between Stratford and the rest of Canada, and increasing the festival’s new work and diversity programs.
“Next year is my 30th year at the festival; everything I’m doing now is about the future,” he says.
That future includes a new play by Colleen Murphy commissioned by the festival, The Breathing Hole, which tells 500 years of Canadian history from a polar bear’s perspective. It will be directed by Arluk, an Inuvialuit-Dene who studied in Toronto at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre; was the first aboriginal and Inuk woman to graduate from the University of Alberta’s acting program; and was part of the first indigenous play on the National Arts Centre mainstage in 18 years, Copper Thunderbird in 2007.
The Breathing Hole will run in the festival’s studio space along with works by two more female playwrights, The Virgin Trial by Kate Hennig (a followup to last year’s sold-out The Last Wife), directed by Alan Dilworth, and a revisioning of The Komagata Maru Incident by Sharon Pollock, directed by Keira Loughran.
Overall, Cimolino says the 2017 season is built around questions of identity: how it’s built, and how and why it’s sometimes repressed.
“I began thinking about what it means to be Canadian,” he told the Star. “What makes up our identity? And how do we reconcile ourselves within the world around us?”
The season will open with Shake- speare’s famous love story about inner desires that throw the status quo into turmoil, Romeo and Juliet.
Joining it on the Festival Theatre stage is Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, led by another Stratford actor-turned-director, Martha Henry, who is behind this season’s beautiful and sombre production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.
Director Donna Feore returns to the Festival Theatre with Guys and Dolls (a highlight for Cimolino, it’s his favourite musical) and is taking on a second production: Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot at the Tom Patterson Theatre.
Chris Abraham also returns to the festival after a year away with Molière’s mistaken identity comedy, Tartuffe.
Other Tom Patterson productions include Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, directed by Stephen Ouimette, and Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling, directed by Jackie Maxwell, who ends her tenure as Shaw Festival artistic director this season.
Rounding out the Tom Patterson selections is Jillian Keiley’s unique approach to Euripides’ The Bacchae, which will tap into next year’s girl power programming with an investigation of the liberation of female, rather than male, sexuality.
Finally, at the Avon Theatre will be H.M.S. Pinafore directed by Stratford newcomer Lezlie Wade and Treasure Island (2017’s Schulich Children’s Play offering), directed by Mitchell Cushman, as well as Cimolino’s The School for Scandal.