Shedding light on Huronia with Wildfire
Cast with Down syndrome shares hospital’s dark history in Soulpepper’s latest show
The cast of Wildfire break from running lines at an upstairs rehearsal space in the Annex, but the passion among this theatre troupe is still running high. The seven actors, all with Down syndrome, are vocally disgusted by the legacy of the Huronia Regional Centre, where people like them were once institutionalized and forgotten. It was closed in 2009 but its dark history is recounted in their upcoming Soulpepper production, opening May 2.
“The way that we were treated back then was not the right thing at all,” Dylan Harman says. “Huronia is a scary place,” actor Andreas Prinz adds. “People go in there well, and they die in there! I don’t think it’s fair.”
The play, developed by award-winning playwright Judith Thompson and based on conversations with the cast, exorcises the human rights abuses committed at the Orillia hospital, which first opened in 1876 as Orillia Asylum for Idiots.
Current events have informed how the cast has engaged with the material. “Donald Trump believes that everyone is in different categories,” Harman says. “And that is not fair to everyone else who is different, because we are special in our own ways.”
“Police are killing people who are mentally ill,” Krystal Hope Nausbaum adds. “Yeah, it’s true,” Sarah Carney agrees. “I saw that on the news.”
The story of Huronia is deeply personal for this cast. “In every case, someone suggested when they were babies that they be sent to this institution,” Thompson says. “They became politically engaged through this (production). “They know that their human rights are violated again and again. They are looked at as something less.
“They want to speak to this. To articulate it. Not just say that didn’t feel good when someone called me an alien or treated me like I was four years old.”
Thompson first worked with Nausbaum on 2011’s Sick: The Grace Project, about youth who live with chronic illness or disability. That partnership was so successful that the director and Nausbaum reteamed for the Toronto Fringe Festival hit Rare, which featured an ensemble of nine actors with Down syndrome. Wildfire was inspired by something Nausbaum said while workshopping Rare: “I want to have a boyfriend who doesn’t have Down syndrome.”
“It was awkward in some ways,” Thompson recalls. “But in other ways, it opened up another conversation.
“As a parent, I would be terrified of exploitation, which does happen, and we say that in the play. But maybe sometimes it’s fine.
“That’s what the American Down syndrome association says. Glee did an episode about it. But somehow it’s more potent onstage. It’s a little more frightening.”
What began under the working title The Love Project grew in scope as the cast became more engaged with the dark history of Huronia. However, love remains at the core of the story as the cast plays inmates of Huronia, who protest their living conditions by staging a production of Romeo & Juliet, reimagined as same-sex couple Romeo and Jazz.
Thompson says the performances between Harman and Nicholas Herd as the lovers are especially powerful. After four decades in theatre, Thompson has now found herself a student of the cast’s work.
“They teach us so much as actors,” she says. “Sarah is incapable of an inauthentic moment. Dylan won’t say something until he is inside it.” Wildfire opens at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts on May 2. More details can be found at soulpepper.ca.