» Katrina Dunn

Interview with Katrina Dunn, conducted by Joerg Esleben, Vancouver, 5 June 2019

Transcript prepared from audio recording by Ecem Yucel and edited by Joerg Esleben

Joerg Esleben (JE): Joerg Esleben here at the Loafe Café on the UBC Campus with Katrina Dunn on 5^th of June 2019 for an interview in the context of the Brecht in Canada research project. Thank you very much, Katrina, for agreeing to do this.

Katrina Dunn (KD): You’re welcome.

JE: To the best of your knowledge, how and why was the “Brecht in the Park” series created here in Vancouver in the mid 1990s?

KD: Well, the people that were the leaders of that project were just graduating from Simon Fraser University when the project started to come to fruition. And so, we had encountered Brecht in an educational context, which is how most people in Canada encounter Brecht, I would say. The very first production we did, which was Mother Courage and Her Children, really came out of a directing class that we did with a guest teacher at Simon Fraser University named Vincent Murphy, who is an American director. And it was a directing class in which several students staged scenes from Mother Courage and Her Children. I wasn’t one of them. Some of those scenes went on to be presented in various alternative theatre settings around Vancouver. And in one of those, directed by Norman Armour, who eventually played the priest in Mother Courage and Her Children, I played Kattrin. So, this whole group of people explored the play from various vantage points, as directors and actors, and eventually producers.

It was 1994 when we did Mother Courage and Her Children. One of the directors who directed scenes in that particular directing class, Sharon LeBlanc, came to me and said that she wanted to do a full production of Mother Courage and Her Children, and asked me if I would collaborate on it. And I was interested. We had originally thought to do it indoors, but at that point we were very young in our theatrical careers, we couldn’t afford theatres, we applied for grants and got a bit of money. But it’s a large production. We decided to go after free space. Sharon, at that time, had some solid community centre and parks and rec kind of connections. We used those to conceptualize this idea of a touring production that would play outdoors in Vancouver parks. So, what became really core to that project, which was its outdoor spectacular public facing quality … I want to say that that was conceptually primary, but in fact it wasn’t. It sort of grew out of necessity and then became a core facet of that production.                    

JE: So, you were involved in the conception of the “Brecht in the Park” series from its start.

KD: Yes.

JE: So far, I had only known that Touchstone Theatre joined with the third production of the series, The Good Person of Setzuan. But I suppose that you took over Touchstone Theatre, that’s why they joined, or…?

KD: Yes. So, at the time that we created the first “Brecht in the Park”, I was running Ruby Slippers Theatre with Diane Brown. Ruby Slippers Theatre was a theatre company that Diane and I created with several other women, upon graduation from Simon Fraser University. When Sharon and I originally were formulating this idea around how to produce Mother Courage and Her Children, we also brought on board a company called Public Dreams. And Public Dreams is very much like a Bread & Puppet Theatre. They do large outdoor community participatory spectacles. We brought them on board, and that’s how we created the producing concept for “Brecht in the Park”. So, when I moved from Ruby Slippers to Touchstone, I decided to bring the “Brecht in the Park” project with me. Obviously, Ruby Slippers was always at the core of that. Because the project as it evolved over the years got more and more expensive, we needed more partners. And we needed partners with money. Touchstone was a much more resourced company than Ruby Slippers was at the time. So, while Touchstone’s involvement with “Brecht in the Park” is only The Good Person of Setzuan and Sucker Falls, I was involved with the series from the very beginning.

JE: There was The Threepenny Opera as well.

KD: There was The Threepenny Opera … So, what I recall was that it went Mother Courage and Her Children, The Threepenny Opera, Good Person of Setzuan, and Sucker Falls.

JE: Yes.

KD: I also had studied while at Simon Fraser University with Jerry Zaslove, who was a scholar at the university. I think he was widely seen as the Brecht scholar in Vancouver. He influenced me a lot, and his brother, Arne Zaslove, ran a theatre company in Seattle for a long time that also did a lot of Brecht productions, so just interesting ties from there. Does that give you some perspective?

JE: Oh yes, absolutely. So, it’s interesting to know that you were basically involved in all the productions of the “Brecht in the Park” series. It is beyond the scope of this interview to explore all of them in detail, but do you have any notes on individual productions aside from Sucker Falls? Can you say anything about how and why the particular Brecht plays were chosen for each of the productions?

KD: Sure. I think that Mother Courage was chosen just because we had a history with it from that class. We also had people in our working group. We had a Mother Courage, Gina Stockdale, who was an actress that we worked with a lot, who was older than us. Because she’d gone to theatre school later in life. But we knew that she was the one. And because we played various roles – Diane ended up playing Yvette in that production, she had played Yvette in several versions of those scenes that we’d staged – the casting fell into place as well. So, I think that’s why we chose Mother Courage. We chose The Threepenny Opera because at the time, through Public Dreams, we’d been getting involved with some jazz musicians in Vancouver, who were often a part of Public Dreams events, and eventually became a big part of Ruby Slippers practice as well. They worked on several of the “Brecht in the Park” productions, and several of our other shows as well. And the lead among them was an electric guitarist and composer named Ron Samworth. When we did Mother Courage and Her Children, I hired a musical director, Dorothy Dittrich, to help with the music. And she looked at the music and she went, “You can’t do this music, it’s way too hard.” The music – it’s Eisler, I believe – and it’s very atonal, it’s very complex. So, in Mother Courage and Her Children, we had a Balkan women’s choir named Razom Sestre, which was phenomenal and was affiliated with Public Dreams. They sang various traditional pieces throughout that production. We used their voices and the community orchestra – which is literally a community orchestra, non-professional musicians with some skill, but not Eisler skill – , and so, our musical director lightly redrafted some of those pieces to make them more doable for the musicians that we had. But the musical element of it in live performance in that outdoor setting was, I think, really powerful. And we wanted to explore it further. I think that’s what led to The Threepenny Opera, the iconic nature of it. When we did Mother Courage and Her Children, we didn’t know who was going to come, and we were floored by the size of the audiences that we got. So, I think what we understood was that we have this huge public audience for this, and we want to be able to talk to them in ways that they somewhat recognize. Doing Mother Courage, I remember sitting there on opening night thinking, “Is anybody going to get this?” I mean, this is Catholic and Protestant jokes, who’s …? But somehow that play really lifted off, at least in that setting. And so, I think this desire to continue to engage this large public audience that we had stumbled upon was some of the rationale for choosing The Threepenny Opera.

JE: And then Setzuan?

KD: Setzuan was an adaptation, a Canadian adaptation that John Lazarus did. John Lazarus is a very well-known Vancouver-based playwright, who now teaches at Queen’s University. I don’t actually remember why we wanted to adapt that piece … Oh, it was because I was with Touchstone, and Touchstone’s mandate is Canadian. And so, in order to facilitate Touchstone’s involvement, there had to be a Canadian component. John had written several plays for Touchstone, very well-known, and so he took on the task of adapting that work. We were always looking for pieces, because a big part of “Brecht in the Park” was that it was spectacular. We used fireworks. There were huge casts, there were big ensemble elements, there were stilt-walkers. We incorporated the Public Dreams aesthetic, which really incorporated stilt-walking, giant masks, fireworks, and large musical elements into these productions. So, we were looking for plays that could support those large visual elements. When we did The Good Person, the three gods were on stilts. We hired actors that were also stilt-walkers. We had a giant shadow play that Savannah Walling choreographed, and fireworks that went off at the end when the gods went back to the heavens.

JE: How does the Vancouver Moving Theatre play a role? They joined for the Setzuan production, right?

KD: That’s right. Threepenny Opera was wildly successful but massive. So, after we did Threepenny Opera, Public Dreams said, “You know what, theatre isn’t really what we do, scripted stuff isn’t really what we do. And this is really draining a lot of our resources, and we’re not going to keep doing it.” So, there was nothing ugly about it, that is just as it is when you’re running a theatre company. You always have to counter “What is it taking from you?” versus “What are you getting?” And so, we lost Public Dreams as a partner after Threepenny Opera. We reached out to Vancouver Moving Theatre because they were doing some of the same aesthetic things. And they were also really looking at working with public facing in their works, they were doing a lot of work in the Downtown Eastside. We always played Oppenheimer Park, and Oppenheimer Park is a very special place in Vancouver, right in the Downtown Eastside. It’s a site of a lot of drug use, it has been a squatter site various times in its history. We were going into and performing in those kinds of communities. We wanted a partner that had a history of interfacing with those communities in a way that was responsible, and that could even heighten that aspect of our work. And so, they came on board for those final two plays.

JE: So, maybe that can bring us to Sucker Falls then. I’ll leave it fairly open for now, maybe you can tell me the story of how the Sucker Falls project came about. How and why was that particular Brecht and Weill piece chosen?

KD: We wanted to do another adaptation, because again, Touchstone was on board. I believe that we wanted to work with an Indigenous playwright. We picked Drew Hayden Taylor because of his very accessible style. His shows are hilarious and political at the same time. And we felt like it would be a really good match with the kind of audience dynamic that we were creating. I believe what happened was, we wrote to the Brecht estate, “Can we do this?” and they said no. But by then we had talked with Drew about which play to adapt. And he had really latched on to Mahagonny as a way to explore this casino environment of Indigenous culture, and he was very excited about it. And so, what we decided to do was to go very far away from the original, create an original play inspired by but not in any way a formulaic adaptation of the piece. So, this kind of took on its own life out of that inspiration.

And so, we commissioned Drew to write that adaptation, and we cast it. We did a cross country casting call, to find Indigenous actors who were interested in the piece and interested in what we were doing with it, who were singers as well, and who wanted to come and do this crazy thing with us. And we put together a really phenomenal ensemble of performers. It was amazing. We rehearsed it and did it. And it was pretty wild. That year was tough because we got rained out several times. And so, it kind of felt like it was a struggle. It was a struggle against the elements, literally.

JE: Did you rehearse in the parks already or rehearse indoors?

KD: We did both. It was always a combination of some outdoor and some indoor. Our tech would be completely outdoor for a week before we actually opened. And I don’t think it started to rain until we actually got into performance. So, I think during the run of Sucker Falls, for the first time we actually had to cancel a performance for rain. And that was really hard.

JE: So, this wish to create an Indigenous piece was there from the start? That was the idea for this particular project?

KD: Yes.

JE: May I ask why? What the rationale was at that point in time?

KD: This is a good question. Vancouver Moving Theatre was working with a lot of Indigenous artists. They are working in the Downtown Eastside, where there’s a lot of Indigenous people. In some of the parks we played, a good solid portion of our audience would be Indigenous. Drew was just a hot ticket at the time, he was really garnering a lot of success, and still is with a lot of his work. And we were inspired by his work.

JE: The fact that he is particularly well-known for using humor, did that factor in?

KD: Absolutely, totally. And, we felt we had to put somebody together with the Brecht material that’s not oil to water. We had to find a way, like a pairing, where there’s some kind of match. And, I think he felt it immediately and was excited. So we felt that was great.

JE: So, the critical, political nature of his work, but also the humorous – I’d call it sardonic humor maybe, or somewhat dark humor at times – those are the links you see between his work and Brecht? 

KD: Yes. And, especially in some of his early work the non-naturalistic elements, where he is doing some bold stylistic things. Some of his later works are more like, “Oh, okay, we’re in a room and two people are talking to each other.” But certainly, his early works, he was doing stylistic things that were imaginative and kind of wild. We felt that, while not specifically Brechtian in aesthetic, it was at least some kind of a link, and would also support the spectacular nature of this event.

JE: And so then, when those pieces were in place, playwright chosen, ensemble put together, directors, what was the process of developing the piece and the production in the cooperation between those players? Because from what I know so far, I don’t think he delivered a finished script and said, “Here you go, put it on,” right?

KD: No. Often the playwright commissioning contract takes you through a variety of steps. You deliver a first draft, and then a company gives you back notes, so then you’re expected to deliver a series of drafts. What I noticed about Drew, working with him, is that he is a really fast writer. So he spat out a first draft pretty fast. We workshopped it and then gave him notes. And whereas some playwrights would go off with those notes for a year, he would just spit it right back. And so, it was a cool process of really getting a lot of change. And what I also noticed about him is, a good idea would come up in the room and rather than mulling it over for a while, he’d just immediately incorporate it. One of the things that we struggled with was placement of songs. And because we were collaborating with Ron, he had some influence in that. I believe that all the music was original in that particular show.

JE: Yes. It sounds to me like there was an idea of maybe using Weill, but then you moved away from that towards original pieces.

KD: Yes, I can’t imagine that there weren’t hints or inspirational wafts of it. But I believe all the music was original. And so, that process of creating the songs was a whole other thing. And I don’t think Drew had ever written music before.

JE: No, he hadn’t.

KD: And he seemed totally jazzed by that, too.

JE: Yes. So, what he told me was that, at first, he was reluctant because he had neither dealt with Brecht much before, nor had he ever done musical theatre. But then, it turned into a project that he got really excited about, that he still refers to as one of the most enjoyable he’s worked on.

KD: Once we had our cast in the room … the cast included Monique Mojica, some of the leaders in Indigenous theatre in Canada. And they were really great at helping – from what I recall – Drew articulate exactly what he was trying to say with this piece in terms of “What is this world?” Because I think he was trying to make a comment on the question: what is a culture based on gambling? Gambling, at the core, what is it really doing? I think, going deeper about: yes, there are economic benefits, but how is it permeating? The thing that I really recall about rehearsal, there is a character in the play called the Wendigo. And, at one point in rehearsal … The Wendigo is a negative thing, it’s not a happy trickster. It’s a cannibal spirit, it’s scary … We were rehearsing over there in the new Telus Theatre, and I remember some of the Indigenous performers felt like this thing was here. This happens sometimes when you’re working in theatre, that you summon what you’re performing. And it was a production that had mishaps. I don’t know if that was what was inspiring them to play like there was this presence. But at one point, all the settler people said, “Okay. We’re going to leave, and you guys do what you need to do.” And so, we left the room for a couple of hours, and I think they did some practices that we weren’t party to, to try to get rid of it, so that we could continue to work.

JE: Okay, there is a lot of rich material for follow-up in what you said. So, let me start with this: you started talking about the messages of the adaptation, the ideas. Can you say a little bit more about what your view of that is? What the messages may have been for you?

KD: I should probably go back and look at the script again. I didn’t do that in advance of this meeting.

JE: That’s fine. I mean, you already started talking about the casino as a central idea, gambling and the capitalist greed, the connection to the Brechtian town that’s set up in Mahagonny.      

KD: Yes. 

JE: No pressure, whatever comes to mind. Maybe we can come back to that, because the other thing that I’d like to follow up on is, what were some of the cultural challenges that you faced in doing an Indigenous adaptation and working with settlers and Indigenous artists together?

KD: Well, that was an example of a challenge. There was a sense of, “Ooh, this is a bit of a plagued production.” But for us, the settler artists, we would never frame that in a spiritual way. And so, I was actually grateful that they did that, and that they named it in that way. I think it was mostly Monique who took the lead on that – she did something to clear the air a bit. Because it was tricky territory. We were kind of in unknown territory when we were doing that. Though the people were so talented, finding Indigenous performers with classical European singing training was … we had to scour. So that when we found them, they were just amazing. What I remember about the music is that it just came out and was performed beautifully; Michelle St. John, who played a big part, is just an amazing singer. She was fantastic. So, the musical element, which was the part that we were a little bit worried about, actually came off beautifully. We had a very intelligent cast, a very vocal cast. And they were really primary to making this kind of merging of Indigenous and European theatre into whatever success it was, I think their involvement, their investment, and their embodiment of it - without that it would have just been a mess.

JE: Well, talking of success, then, my first question in that regard is, what’s your own view of the success of the project in hindsight, however defined? It’s a notoriously broad question, how to define success, but…     

KD: We never did another “Brecht in the Park” after that. I think, cancelling the show was really hard. Even though the series always had looked really big, the resources were very small in the beginning. As it got more well-known, we had to start paying actors equity, all the designers, and then, going into the park sites became more and more expensive. And while we were working on Sucker Falls, I remember, Workers’ Compensation came down to the site to inspect it. So, you can just imagine, we’ve got this makeshift scaffolding set that we put up in the park, we were running electrical cords to people’s backyards. I looked at those inspectors walking around the site, and I was thinking, “Okay, if we get through this, we’re never doing this again.” Because it had this kind of wild impulse that we had to do this free, politicized spectacle. Every time we did it, there were more and more regulations, it got more and more expensive, to the point where it could no longer sustain its original impulse. And so, Sucker Falls unfortunately was the breaking point; not because it wasn’t an artistic success, I think in many ways it was. And I think it was also very ahead of its time in terms of indigeneity, and rethinking the European canon in a very specific way. Not that there weren’t deeper digging that we could’ve done. I mean, we didn’t do anything like a land acknowledgment; at that time nobody was doing that. We weren’t really thinking about whose land this is. We were thinking about the imagined space that Drew had created, the imagined landscape. But of course, there was a lot more thinking to do about the actual land that we were on. So, there were many shortcomings. But I think that the show was extremely entertaining. And despite how far we went away from Mahagonny, I think it was true in spirit to what that piece is trying to say. The music was fantastic, and the musical performances were really fantastic.  

JE: So then, my next question is a multi-part question on the public reception of the production. I wanted to ask earlier about controversial aspects of Drew’s adaptation. I know there was some controversy in public responses to it. What do you remember about the audience and the audience responses, and the critical responses?

KD: I don’t remember any of the critical response. So, if you want to remind me of it, I’d certainly be happy to address any.

JE: Well, I haven’t found that many reviews, but the reviews are mixed. They laud the general idea. They said that it was musically not so strong. This is one reviewer, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. But that reviewer also hinted at the controversy by saying, “It’s a good thing that Taylor is half-Indigenous himself, otherwise, dot dot dot, there could be accusations of racism, of a racist portrayal of the Indigenous community.” And, apparently Drew got some other responses like that from the Indigenous community itself, “Why are you portraying us so negatively?”

KD: That’s a very interesting critique. I think it’s a very settler critique, in other words if we’re going to see Indigenous people on stage, we need to see them in these sympathetic, wounded portrayals.

JE: Yes, that’s right. Which is exactly what Taylor says he wants to get away from, because there’s so many plays about broken Indigenous characters…

KD: Exactly.

JE: … with all these negative, stereotypical characteristics.

KD: So, that’s a very interesting critique. I think it’s crap. And, I think that Drew and people like Tomson Highway have resisted that for so long, and really, in a very bold way, have both celebrated and critiqued their own communities, with a real incisive, useful kind of pin; in a way, that’s half of what we do with theatre, critique ourselves, right? And so, I don’t recall that critique. And, it’s interesting that somebody would call him “half-Indigenous”.

Perhaps, and I’m only digging from memory now, perhaps there was a sense that we were getting too far away from Brecht. In a way, if you look at the evolution of what we did with that, it was a journey farther away from the source material. And maybe some of that was because Touchstone came on board as a producer. But I think also, we worked on that material over ten years, that we evolved. Because many of the same people worked on the shows over and over again, we were evolving our own kind of aesthetic, that Drew then changed. And maybe because it didn’t look familiar as Brecht. When we did Threepenny Opera, everybody knew about “Brecht in the Park”, it was a thing. And some of the people who considered themselves Brecht experts – I remember this – at one particular performance, they were standing in a clump, and I remember looking at them and thinking, “Well, at least they’re here.” We were starting to engage that voice – “Okay, here are these people saying they’re doing Brecht. Are they doing Brecht? Are they doing it right?” And so, perhaps, and I’m just grasping here, but perhaps the sense with Sucker Falls was, “You’re not doing Brecht anymore. You’re doing something else. You’re doing new Canadian plays”.

JE: I haven’t come across it, but it’s very possible. Do you recall, anecdotally, any of the audience comments or responses? 

KD: The audience numbers were down. The audience was smaller, I think because we didn’t have name recognition of the play, and also because it was raining. In fact, people would sit on the grass and it was too soggy. You had to put down tarps. And as we were performing it, the performers were soaked and cold. 

JE: That’s the nature of outdoor performances.

KD: Exactly, it’s exactly that. And, you know, it can be frustrating. We’ve crafted these beautiful moments, and then somebody’s helicopter is landing in the middle of it. Wonderful things happened because of that, too. At Oppenheimer Park, some of the people who lived and slept in the park would just either heckle or walk on stage. And so, that was something that we dealt with all the time.

JE: So, what do you see as the potential for the piece, for the actual text? It’s out there, the script, with Canadian Playwrights, but it’s not widely distributed at all. Drew is disappointed that he hasn’t been able to find another company to put it on, indoors maybe. He’s contemplating possibly turning it into a novel.

KD: I think that’s a brilliant idea. I don’t know, as a theatre artist you put these things into the ether, and you never know what’s going to come. I don’t see a lot of Brecht in Canada, period, you know? And it’s a large-scale piece. Drew’s been really good at writing small cast pieces. They’re very marketable. And so, some of the frustration that he feels is really probably linked to cast size. Because it’s a big financial undertaking. I don’t know in what kind of situation it will find a new producer. I mean, the scale of the event was part of the reason that we did it. And it was part of the reason that people came. They wanted to see thirty people on stage, and not be indoors watching two. But to find other producing environments where that’s a priority, it’s very tricky.

The National Arts Centre English Theatre did a large-scale production of Yvette Nolan’s adaptation of Julius Caesar, The Death of a Chief. And so there’s a beginning tradition of Indigenous reinvestigation of European classics that is potentially really interesting. Maybe Drew’s piece could fit into that stream of things. With the full support to be able to pull off something of that scale. And live music, and a live band, and all the things that we did.

JE: I have a couple of more specific questions about Sucker Falls, and then maybe a broader question on Brecht. Do you remember there was, at the end of Sucker Falls, this intervention from the “god” figure, the “two-faced god” figure? The one white Mosaic stereotypical face, and the Indigenous face? Do you remember that at all in the production? It’s in the script, so I’m wondering whether it was there. Because Drew didn’t quite remember. 

KD: How we staged it, or…? 

JE: Well, or even that he put that into the script. So, I wonder if it was even staged or not. 

KD: Are you interviewing Savannah Walling?

JE: Yes.

KD: Ask her about that. Because, you know, what we started to do in Good Person of Setzuan, was these large shadow plays. So, we had a huge, really high screen, and we did these giant shadow plays. The only trigger of memory that I’m getting is that perhaps we did that. So, what Savannah would do was cut out of cardboard shapes, and then manipulate them behind lights to create these big visuals. And that was the special effect at the end of shows. Because it was dark by then. The sky would go dark over the course of the production. So, we’d start in light and end in darkness, in torch light. And we used actual road flares to light the stage, and torches, and usually had fireworks. And we had some electrical lights doing the actual shadow play from the back. So, if that was done, it may have been Savannah that staged that in shadow play.

JE: So, can you talk a little bit about your view of Brecht in Canada in general? What the relevance might be… You say there is not that much, but I am actually finding a lot.  

KD: You’re finding quite a bit?

JE: Right. So, there is significant interest. And I’m curious about your perspective on what that interest might be.

KD: Are you finding it in regional theatres and large stages, or are you mostly finding it in alternative? Both?

JE: It’s both. It’s very mixed. NAC has done some Brecht, Stratford has done some. But then of course, many regional small-scale productions as well; both in English and in French, some in German even. So, there is a wide variety, definitely. I’m interested in your personal view of the relevance, the potential.   

KD: Let me think of what I’ve seen. What I’ve seen… I mean, as someone who is in the academy right now, Brecht is all over the academy. So, I feel like we learned about Brecht, and Brecht is a big part of training modalities. But when you get out … I guess you’re looking deeply, so you’re finding stuff, but I have not seen a lot of productions of Brecht plays in funded theatres in Canada. So, I can’t even think of one.

JE: I’m curious about Caravan Farm Theatre. You probably didn’t see those productions yourself, I imagine.

KD: I didn’t see those myself. But when I was first directing Mother Courage and Her Children, I was going to do that. I phoned up Nick Hutchinson, and said, “How do you direct a Brecht play?” And, he said, “Just don’t think about it. Just do it the way you do any old play. It’s just a play.” And, I was thinking, “Ooh, I wish you had given me some more comforting advice, but…” And that was his take on it. And, you know, I think the thing about Caravan is it’s not just those Brecht productions. It’s when you go see it, it is Brechtian at its core. In its performance style. And it’s permeated, through mixed influence, a whole performance style that’s there. And they’re not an ensemble, in that they had different people every year, but there’s a core group of people that keep coming back. The aesthetic in itself is carried on and evolved. So, I see it very clearly there. But I think it was transplanted there by an artistic director who had a big investment in it, and a core group of performers who were very invested in it, who created a specific aesthetic.

One of the things that I have noticed, and this is a generalization, but I think that the modern classics are getting more and more difficult to sell in a regional theatre or a large theatre environment. So, here’s an instance. You know the story of the Vancouver Playhouse collapsing et cetera. About five years before it collapsed, the artistic director announced that they were no longer going to do plays before 1950. So, because Bard on the Beach had taken over Shakespeare here, and they were no longer going to do Shakespeare, they were to focus on contemporary plays. A lot of people had a big problem with this. But I really think that the genesis of it is economic. They just can’t sell Ibsen anymore. The idea that your regional theatre is educating or bringing into the public these kind of plays that you should get to engage with at least once in your life no longer was economically viable.

JE: That’s interesting. A bit unexpected because often the name recognition is precisely what brings people into the theatre. I mean, Shakespeare certainly, it works with Shakespeare, maybe it’s certain names that used to be part of the canon but are no longer that; maybe not enough people know who Ibsen was anymore.

KD: I know they’re not teaching him in schools anymore. And Chekhov. How could you do a Chekhov play? Brecht has always been a challenge, because the messages of the plays are tricky, and not as psychological, with more overt political messages, it’s always been tricky to do those in the bourgeois theatre. But I think as part of a 1970s resurgence of political theatre, and interest in political theatre that trickled on for maybe fifteen years, there was a flowering. But I don’t see it now.

So, in other words, it’s a huge part of our training. But it’s not a huge part of our practice life as artists. And, in fact, any of the Brecht that I’ve directed has been self-created opportunities. I did direct a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at Studio 58 for training. So, again, a lot of these productions fall into your training institutions, and the universities as well. But in terms of directing Brecht in a professional setting, unless I produced that myself, I can’t imagine that ever happening in Canada. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

JE: Well, for now I’d like to thank you very much for your input and willingness to be interviewed.

KD: Thank you.