At Intermission, we want to tell the stories behind the stories you see on stage. Monday’s Dora Mavor Moore Awards, which celebrate excellence in theatre, give us an opportunity to look back not only at the stories we watched unfold onstage over the last year, but also at the way they got there.
To best tell these stories, we have to bring together the artists who brought them to life.
We approached actors James Graham and Sascha Cole to host a series of round table conversations with some of the 2016 Dora nominees for Outstanding Female Performance, Outstanding Male Performance, and Best New Play, in both the general and independent categories. James and Sascha created questions that would be catalysts for discussion, covering the artists’ work, the Toronto theatre industry, the issues we’re grappling with, and more.
At the Outstanding Male Performance conversation were six incredibly talented men with different backgrounds and levels of experience:
Greg Gale, nominated for The Crackwalker
Danny Ghantous, nominated for A Line in the Sand
Sina Gilani, nominated for The 20th of November
Matthew Gouveia, nominated for Killer Joe
Tony Nappo, nominated for Butcher
R.H. Thomson, nominated for You Will Remember Me
In this clip, the actors delve into the differences between big-budget and independent theatre. How does the work change when you perform it for fifty people or for a hundred and fifty? How much do promotional skills and social media savviness actually matter against talent and hard work? What happens when the industry gets in the way of the work itself?
See the Outstanding Female Performance video here, where d’bi.young anitafrika, Claire Armstrong, Valerie Buhagiar, Claire Calnan, Sarah Dodd, and Mayko Nguyen talk about cultural specificity.
See the Outstanding New Play video here, where playwrights Nicolas Billon, Anna Chatterton, Fab Filippo, Kat Sandler, and Severn Thompson talk about workshopping.
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