In a Word..Kelly Thornton, Artistic Director at Nightwood Theatre

[ED: Today we're  inaugurating a new weekly feature at The Charlebois Post - Toronto: In a Word... Each week, on Wednesday, you'll be treated to a short-form interview with someone in the Toronto theatre. Some will be talking about their upcoming productions, some about their lives, some just addressing questions about their work or the world around them. Enjoy!]


I'd love audiences to be astonished by the power of women's voice in theatre.
Kelly Thornton faces a new season and looks again at Penelopiad
by Jasmine Chen

CHARPO: As Nightwood enters its 33rd season, what challenges did you face when planning the programming? Did you have themes you knew you wanted to explore, or were you surprised with the season you eventually arrived at?

KELLY: Well, it's very interesting, having launched the New Groundswell Festival last year, the mandate of this festival is to fortify new work before it hits the Mainstage,  before it's open to critics and audiences at large. The idea of the workshop production is to lay seed for a Mainstage production. So, certainly Between the Sheets revealed so much in the Groundswell Festival. It was very appealing to audiences, and we knew right after the festival that we would go forward with it. 

And then The Penelopiad was such a raging hit! I mean people were so passionate, sometimes angry about not getting a ticket that we knew we had to bring it back. The Penelopiad is one of those plays that just doesn't happen every day. For us as a company it was such a huge ambitious show, we were mavericks to take it on, I think. With the alchemy of the Company, the characters, the cast and the whole design and production team, we really had a gift of a show on our hands. That was an obvious choice to bring back. So in terms of themes, I think the Fates really brought those two pieces of the puzzle together. 

The New Groundswell Festival is premiering a work by Judith Thompson [Who Killed Snow White?], which was also just coming up the pipes. Judith was playwright-in-residence last year with OAC, and she came to us with a monologue in Femcab about the disconnect between young women and feminism. It's a subject matter that has been very personal to her, so she really wanted to take it on. She came to us with this super provocative anti-feminist teenager, a first year University student taking an elective in Women's Studies and really having a clash with her teacher. It's comic but then goes very dark, in the way that Thompson does. 

Odelah Creations with La Memoire Du Corps|Body Memory is a Company that I have been watching. Their explorations come from a very Québecois - very physical perspective. They research into personal stories from women and body memory. I want to continue to stretch the boundaries of what theatre can be and I'm interested in the Quebec voice. And then The Oracle at Gros Morne is a totally different kettle of fish coming out of Newfoundland! The New Groundswell festival with its touring productions, is trying to reveal to the Toronto audience what's happening in other regions of the country.

There's no real theme that I hung the season on. My desire as the Artistic Director of Nightwood, is to interpret 'What's my job as the AD of a feminist theatre company in the 21st century'? For me, it's to look at women in all directions, to look deeply and excavate the women's experience, in the most flawed of women to the most heroic of women. I'm not necessarily just looking at women's success, but also the struggle that they have.

Review: The Happy Woman

(L-R) Maria Vacratsis, Martin Happer, Maev Beaty, Ingrid Rae Doucet and Barbara Gordon in The Happy Woman. Photo Credit: Guntar Kravis

Story Time

Happy Woman has a strong plot...but other problems

by Dave Ross

“Happy, happy, happy…” These words open the production of Rose Cullis's The Happy Woman from Nightwood Theatre. The play is billed as a “darkly comic exploration of what happens when bliss gets in the way of truth and threatens to destroy the very foundation we rely on.”  The play gives us exactly that, a darkly comic story with tragic elements dispersed throughout. Unfortunately, the production itself lacks in several regards.