Director
Neil Munro Director’s Project
Shaw Festival
September 2021
As a participant in the Neil Munro Director’s Program at the Shaw Festival, you conclude your internship by directing a short piece using designers and actors from the company. Because of the pandemic pivots, Brenly Charkow and I were lucky to be able to present our productions at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre.
When approaching my play selection, I was committed to the expression of queer stories told by queer bodies. Throughout the nearly sixty-year production history of the Shaw Festival, there have been only two explicitly queer plays in the season, despite numerous queer artists working within the company. And queer writers have always been at the centre of this institution. Often, they bury their queerness in coded language, but if you dig a little deeper there is a catalogue of LGBTQ+ stories that has been suppressed throughout theatre history. In reading these plays, I recognized a common theme: most queer characters were killed as a major plot point of these stories. The internalized homophobia present in these plays is heartbreaking; while the writers might have been out, their characters suffered at the expense of the world around them.
So I showcased a “gay murder play” featuring queer artists, and written by a closeted queer man who took his own life. But it is followed by an unapologetic portrayal of queerness by an out-and-proud artist: still dark and difficult, but very much alive. A kind of phoenix in the landscape of queer theatre. I hope we might question why we’ve kept these plays hidden for so long.
Written by William Inge and Lanford Wilson
Music Direction by Rachel O’Brien
Featuring Jay Turvey, Andrew Broderick, Julie Lumsden, and Alex Grant (cello)
Design by Kara Pankiw
Lighting Design by Jeff Pybus