In 1939, Indigenous students bring their living culture to one of the Bard’s problem plays

iPhoto caption: Photo by Dahlia Katz.

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/By Nathaniel Hanula-James / Sep 19, 2024

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Content warning: This article includes descriptions of residential schools.

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What happens when an artistic collaboration isn’t just a collision of styles, but of languages, cultures, and histories?

1939, a Canadian Stage and Belfry Theatre joint production in association with the Stratford Festival (where it premiered in 2022), has this question written into its DNA. In a fictional residential school in northern Ontario, an ambitious English teacher enlists a group of Indigenous students to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well for a visiting King George VI. It isn’t long before the students start to question their teacher’s Victorian vision for the production. In the students’ hands, Shakespeare becomes less rigid and more collaborative: A vehicle for reforging bonds of family, land, and language that the residential school system has done its utmost to shatter.

The play, which opens September 19 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, was co-written by multidisciplinary artists Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan, and is directed by Lauzon. Neither artist is a stranger to collaboration. Lauzon — who is of Métis, French, and Finnish ancestry — co-founded the Indigenous theatre collective Turtle Gals in 1998. Riordan — who is of Irish and French descent — co-led Shakespeare in the Ruff, an outdoor Shakespeare company in Toronto’s east end, from 2017-2021. (Full discloser: I’m a current member of the Shakespeare in the Ruff leadership collective.)

“I’m not a director, and I wanted to work with outside directors [at Shakespeare in the Ruff], so [playwright and director] Keith Barker suggested I speak to Jani,” said Riordan in an interview at the Berkeley Street Theatre. “It began a conversation about how we both loved Shakespeare, especially doing it outdoors: Connecting with the elements, being grounded by the earth, the language and the muscularity of it.”

“My foster father was a lover of Shakespeare,” said Lauzon. “We would read Shakespeare plays together out loud as a family. When I was running the Centre for Indigenous Theatre in the early 2000s, I was trying to engage my students and get them to fall in love with Shakespeare like I did. There was — rightly so — a fair amount of resistance.”

Then Lauzon read an interview with the late English theatre director Peter Brook, known for his multicultural casting of Shakespeare productions. “The question was, ‘How do you work with your multicultural casts?’” recalled Lauzon. “[Brook] said, ‘I ask them to bring their living culture to the work.’ I spent the next 20 years trying to — I’m still trying to — explore what that is, not only for me, but for how I direct and how I teach.”

When the pair began work on 1939, “Jani pointed me in the direction of a lot of research around residential schools,” said Riordan. For her, a crucial learning was that “there’s no monolithic experience of residential school.” However, she continued, “one of the things that came up again and again is how there was such a meticulous effort to separate siblings: To break the familial bonds, and to prevent language, communication, love, and comfort.” 

This research led Lauzon and Riordan to place a brother-sister relationship at the centre of 1939: Ojibwe siblings Beth and Joseph Summers, played by Grace Lamarche and Richard Comeau. “We were curious about what it would be like if these two siblings had a different experience and learned to cope in different ways,” Riordan explained.

Why did Riordan and Lauzon decide to have 1939’s students take on All’s Well That Ends Well? Often called a problem play, All’s Well is a not-quite-comedy in which the protagonist, a young woman named Helena, uses her late father’s knowledge of medicine to cure an ailing king.

“The first intersection for us was that Helena has a father who is a medicine man. The colonial establishment [in All’s Well] doesn’t recognize the gift that he has, and that Helena has, as a viable way of helping people,” said Lauzon. “We could see Helena from an Indigenous perspective, and we went from there.”  

Audience members will likely enter 1939 knowing that the play takes place in a residential school. What they may not expect is just how chock full of humour the play is, from Shakespeare Easter eggs to fart jokes.

“Jani said to me, ‘I think it’s important that we bring a different approach and that we find humour,’” said Riordan. “I was nervous — and I knew she was right. That was reinforced time and again by the survivors and elders who worked closely and guided us in this process… Consistently, those who heard the play or read it reinforced how relieved they were that there was humour, how it reflected their experience. Not always — but there was humour, and humour was often a coping mechanism.”

“There are some really extraordinary plays already written about residential schools that deal with that [more tragic] lens,” added Lauzon. “Kaitlyn and I set out to write a different kind of play, with a different gaze.”

That gaze invites audiences to run the gamut in their responses to 1939, just as the play’s characters run the gamut in their responses to Shakespeare and their own circumstances. At the end of each performance, Canadian Stage will offer a reflection space, in the form of a post-show discussion guided by an Indigenous facilitator.

“It’s different than a talkback,” said Riordan. “Having an opportunity right after seeing the play to listen, to sit, to ask a question, to smudge, to be in the community — we felt it was really important. It’s been vital for each of the iterations. It’s an opportunity for people to ask the things they would maybe not ever say out loud [otherwise].” 

“There are medicines there too,” said Lauzon, “because we hope that survivors will come, and we know and understand that they may need that support.”

Both artists were open about the joys and challenges of collaboration. For Lauzon, the process is a miniature version of a larger process of reckoning.

“The beautiful thing about how quickly Kaitlyn and I hit it off in our first conversation, was that it gave me the confidence of knowing that this process could be really beautiful,” said Lauzon. “Collaboration is tough. It’s really hard. It’s the core of what we call reconciliation. It’s not easy work, for sure. There’s a lot of give and take, there’s a lot of compassion, empathy, there’s a lot of listening, and we do that really well together. I feel that we could write the play, because we have that in our relationship.”

1939 opens on September 19 at the Berkeley Street Theatre and runs until October 6. Tickets are available here. 

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The National Residential School Crisis Line provides 24-hour crisis support to former Indian Residential School students and their families toll-free at 1 (866) 925-4419.

WRITTEN BY

Nathaniel Hanula-James

Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.

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