Spotlight: Philip Akin
“I don’t know why it is being placed on Black people to change minds,” says Akin. “I ain’t here to pick your intellectual cotton.”
Spotlight: Maev Beaty
“I’ve really realized that those minutes that I spend on stage are minutes of my life,” says Beaty. “We’re not up there to present good, clean work — we’re up there to try and catch some truth for the listener that is shared in real time. You can’t do that if you’re just presenting your good homework; you have to live.”
Spotlight: Yvette Nolan
“I don’t believe in this world. I don’t see how we can pull ourselves back from the brink. Human beings are greedy, and not mindful, and the only way I can think about making the world better is by getting rid of a lot of it.”
Spotlight: Ann-Marie MacDonald
“This requires such a work ethic. This is not for the faint of anything.”
Spotlight: Seana McKenna
The recipient of an Order of Canada and winner of a clutch of theatre awards — not to mention a mountain of critical bouquets — during her four decades onstage, Seana McKenna is routinely referred to as one of the country’s finest actors. But she refuses to coast on her reputation.
Spotlight: Soheil Parsa
In a life already full of fascinating chapters, Soheil Parsa has turned another page. Early this summer, Parsa stepped down as co-artistic director of Modern Times, the theatre company he co-founded three decades ago with Peter Farbridge. The “dream” now for Parsa, as he characterizes it, is to work as a freelance director, liberated from fundraising and administrative responsibilities.
Spotlight: Alan Dilworth
Alan Dilworth is on a journey. An educator who became an actor who became a writer who became a director who became an artistic director, he articulates his relationship to theatre as one of continual discovery.
Spotlight: Ellie Moon
“What I see in her writing is a tremendous amount of character detail and an ability to create characters that contain contradictions, who are very much sitting inside the oppositions that exist within them. That to me is a real sign of a great writer, like a Chekhov.”
Spotlight: Hailey Gillis
For Gillis, the invitation that occurs between the show and the audience exists in the music.
Spotlight: Jani Lauzon
Had things gone differently with Soulpepper’s programming, another production entirely might have been in its place this season. And, had things gone differently in Jani’s early years as an artist, she might not have grown into the fierce matriarch of Indigenous theatre that she is.
Spotlight: Daniel Brooks
Daniel Brooks is a writer, an actor and a director, and in the course of a substantial career (he’s now sixty) he has often combined at least two of those roles on a single project.
Spotlight: Erin Shields
Shining the spotlight on Canadian playwright Erin Shields, who discusses making it in the theatre world with her play If We Were Birds and her new play Beautiful Man.
Spotlight: Walter Borden
“I am the authority on who I am,” proclaimed Walter Borden on a rainy April evening as we discussed identities and how we present ourselves to the world.
Spotlight: Peggy Baker
“Making work no longer using my own body in action as the source,” Baker says, “I’ve needed to develop new tools.”
Spotlight: Mike Ross
“It’s got to be words first, ’what’s being said here?’ Setting other people’s words to music is what I’ve always done, and this is the apex of that”
Spotlight: Weyni Mengesha
When you speak, Weyni follows your words like a map, as though she expects you to be profound, as though she believes that the next word you say might hold the key to an elusive treasure.
