| Goddesses and aboriginal playwrights break stereotypes
As drama teachers Leanne Padmos and Ro Montgomery sat in the audience at the Betty Mitchell awards last summer, they were among many who were caught up in the excitement of the event. All those theatre people in one room – it’s a positive orgy of theatre celebration, one that’s virtually irresistible. Of course, many in attendance manifested their excitement by getting plastered and telling everyone in sight that they were "simply beautiful," but Padmos and Montgomery had a different reaction. They decided to write a play.
Montgomery had been doing some reading about polytheistic religions, and before they knew it, she and Padmos had a concept in mind for what became 1,2,3 - Goddess: A Celebration of the Maid, Mother and Crone in Everywoman, part of Ground Zero Theatre’s Aftershock 2001 festival.
"It was one of those chances that you just can’t pass up," says Padmos. "So you say ‘yes!’ and you go and you book the space. It was time to jump off the edge of the cliff again and take a chance."
Both are teachers with the Calgary Board of Education, but Padmos had been on maternity leave, contemplating her future.
"I had gotten to the point where I basically knew what I was doing as a mum – I felt like I had a handle on it, so I thought that it would be a great time to get back to my acting roots and explore that again," she says. So they booked themselves a slot at the Pumphouse Theatres for June, found a director (in the lobby at the Bettys) and started writing.
As a teacher, Padmos had already written five full-length plays for her junior high students, and she says that the experience taught her a great deal about the writing process.
"That’s a hard audience to please," she laughs. "They want to be involved in the process, or at least have their voices heard, and I think that that experience that Ro and I both brought to this allowed us to hear each other better."
Padmos compares the show to The Vagina Monologues, staged recently by Ground Zero. Like the Eve Ensler hit, 1,2,3 - Goddess is a series of scenes and monologues revolving around similar themes: in this case, the stages of a woman’s life.
"The subject matter is very close to our own experiences – we delve deeply into our own fears and insecurities in the play," Padmos says. "We incorporate some feminist ideals, in that we are very pro-female, without resorting to negative ideas being tossed at men. It is political, but it’s very subtly political. It’s done with such a sense of fun and adventure, and a lot of it is done tongue-in-cheek."
The writers pared the show to one act when they were accepted for the Aftershock festival (the play runs at the Pumphouse Theatres from May 22 to June 2), but will stage the full-length version in June.
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When the artistic minds behind Crazy Horse Theatre tried to come up with a follow-up to last season’s successful run of Drew Hayden Taylor’s Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, they were a bit surprised by what they found. They had heard about aboriginal writers slaving away somewhere out there on new scripts for theatre, but where were they all hiding? The modern classics by Taylor and Tomson Highway will only last so long.
"I could do Drew Hayden Taylor until the cows come home," says artistic director Shane Cunningham with a laugh. "I just think he’s a great writer. But we had to find new material to work with."
So Cunningham and Crazy Horse executive director Robin Melting Tallow hatched a wild idea: hold a festival of new aboriginal plays.
"There are great plays out there – and this isn’t just within the aboriginal world – great plays that sit on somebody’s desk and never get published," he says. "We’re missing out on some really great little stuff."
Cunningham credits Melting Tallow as the driving force behind the plan to build a script library out of the festival offerings, and to make them available on the Internet so that other companies can take advantage of the archive.
The festival features 10 plays from writers across Canada, and finishes up with a gala performance of Misty Lake by Darrell Racine and Dale Lakevold, starring Tantoo Cardinal and Tina Keeper. The artistic director points out that it’s not just aboriginal artists who have a hard time finding publishers for their theatre work.
When they sent out the call for new plays, Cunningham and Melting Tallow were looking for stories that offered a glimpse of real life – not the media-filtered stereotype of native characters. They found such things as Terry Ivins’s Time Stands Still, about life in prison, and Shifting Savage Moods by Michelle Thrush and Sherida Crane, which blends traditional legends with modern characters.
"The plays look at native people in contemporary environments. They deal with us as people," the U of C-trained actor explains. "They talk about love and humour. In a nutshell, it’s just looking at aboriginal people the way we would like to be seen, as opposed to the stoic native."
While native characters seem relatively absent from the stage, their portrayal on film and television is frustratingly narrow, according to Cunningham. He cites Bruce McDonald’s Dance Me Outside as an example of a good contemporary portrayal of aboriginal experience, and Dances With Wolves as an example of the way Hollywood continues to want to see native people.
"We don’t live like that anymore," he says. "We’re very proud of our traditions and our heritage, but when you look at someone who is native, they’re a human being and they have reactions just like anyone else. We’re being brought up in a contemporary society. We don’t have to be stereotypes anymore."
The new plays will be workshopped May 20 to 26, and public performances will take place at the Emerald Café (422 Memorial Dr. N.E.) May 23 to 26. |
