Jani Lauzon’s production, now playing at Canadian Stage, paints a sharp portrait of a fictional residential school, but uses wide swathes of negative space to its advantage.
“There’s no monolithic experience of residential school,” says co-playwright and director Jani Lauzon. “There are some really extraordinary plays already written about residential schools that deal with that [more tragic] lens. We set out to write a different kind of play, with a different gaze.”
By Nathaniel Hanula-James /Sep 19, 2024
iPhoto caption: Beck Lloyd and Qasim Khan in Hamlet (Dream in High Park). Photo by Dahlia Katz.
On the surface, this summer’s Hamlet is elegant and mercurial, an interesting enough experiment in what happens when you adapt Shakespeare for new sensibilities and constraints.