Featured Playwright — Bernardine Stapleton
Each month we interview member playwrights to share their work, stories and inspiration with the community. We recently spoke with Bernardine Stapleton, a playwright, author, skit-artist, and actor. She has spent her career making beautiful theatre in unexpected places. She is a Siminovitch Playwright Prize finalist. She is a recipient of the Arts NLRhonda Payne Award for Theatre. She is the Artistic Director of Girl Power Inc. an indie feminist theatre company devoted to championing the unique landscape of NL, and to advocating queer and gender equity. Her plays include Offensive to Some, and The Antidote for Life: Memory, Madness and Beagles, an autobiographical exploration of madness in the arts. New works include the feminist queer imagining Ophelia Saves the World from Zombies, and the upcoming podcast The Haunted Doorbell. Berni was writer-in-residence at Memorial University in 2019 and has taught an Introduction to Playwrighting course there. Her books include Love, Life and This Is The Cat with Breakwater Books. She lives in St. John’s with rescue beagles Georgie Girl and Tiggy Duff.
Tell us how you got your start writing plays.
I was writing before I could speak. Even when I was being strapped by nuns for reading too fast and spoiling story time for the others in grade one, I was writing stories and plays about visiting aliens, night terrors, talking animals. I was taught to read by my maternal grandfather using Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. He worked for a fish merchant but he was also a poet and a playwright who wrote everything out long hand with an ink pen. In 1990 the Newfoundland and Labrador Provincial Advisory Council on the Status of Women commissioned me to write a one-person play in honour of their tenth anniversary. I wrote my first play: Woman in a Monkey Cage. It’s about a woman confined in an intergalactic zoo by aliens. I have no idea what they must have thought at the time, if they were expecting a sedate historical figure. To the credit of the then E.D. Kay Anonson, they embraced it and me. I performed and toured that play for many years. It had a continued life with many companies after that, and meanders along today as a source of audition material for some.
How did your experience of growing up in Newfoundland and Labrador influence the art that you create today?
I was born in North West River, Labrador, and grew up on the south coast of Newfoundland. These two completely different parts of my province are reflected in the many contradictions of my life and characters. I love my province and our arts community. This place is my struggle and my inspiration. I couldn’t wait to leave. I couldn’t wait to get back. I’ve been bouncing back and forth my entire life. This is reflected in everything I write, the source for the staples of conflict and change, the salt and pepper of building the flawed play. At this stage in my life I realize I have been writing the same thing over and over hoping for a different result (ha ha.) Characters hiding secrets, longing to transform, shed their scales, emerge seen and worthy. The most elemental, disturbing, inspiring stories are in the quietest of places where everyone knows but nobody says. There are those who know, and those who don’t. To be born here, to grow up here, is to be buffeted by beauty and tragedy in equal amounts, so much so that the two become interchangeable and often cause an inability to discern the intricacies which exist between. To not belong IS to belong in many of our crumbling places. We are often poor in the face of great industrial undertakings that laud us to the world as the friendliest place while the arts struggle for sustainability, struggle to cope with the chasm between tourism and art. My plays Offensive to Some, A Rum for the Money, Mary Magdalene and Adventures in Sobriety, on and on, exhale a sense of of place, yet, I hope, carry a common thread that binds all humans through story. I struggle daily to capture in my work the same sort of emotion I feel when I see a pair of terns diving madly into a torrential sea and I know by looking at them that they have mated for life, that they ride the wind, that even though one may disappear beneath the ocean for minutes it will always emerge and the other will always be waiting.
How do you choose the projects you work on?
I choose everything that chooses me. Sometimes I invent things to work on and hope something will sail. I am miserable at promoting myself and have to force myself to submit anything. I make a list each day to torture myself. Submit! Promote! I have good relationships with companies, people, dramaturges. These provide a framework of inspiration. I also have a list of things I want to write about and I will begin those in long hand to see if anything starts a fire. I am compelled by feminist stories, queer stories, most recently I wrote about an actor losing a line on stage, the actor being me, the result being the true story of The Antidote for Life: Memory, Madness, and Beagles. It explores memory, madness and the arts. It was born out of a terror of live performance. The scenes are prompted by pulling from a deck of cards, so the play is always out of order. I’m contemplating a play called Senior Moments about aging in the arts. It seems I have begun to write about the things I think we need to talk about in the arts.
You have experience building plays through collective creation. Can you tell us what the process looks like to you, and what are the challenges and rewards of creating theatre in this way?
I love collective creation. It really is to boldly go into the darkness, to hash and haggle, to spark and spite. As a skit maker the creation is about the laugh, the laugh is about the set up, the set up is about the characters, the characters are about the place, the place is about the topic. Collectively creating skits is the ultimate power trip. The character says they are on the moon, so they are. For me, it is always about gathering the right group of creators in the room. The ability to listen is just too rare, to listen without trying to one-up, or trump the hand. The pay off in the room is always to hear the guffaw, the gush, the spurt of response in the moment. In my early days we were bold and unencumbered by social media or distracting devices. We used our words to storm governments, expose injustices, touring the rural areas like rock stars, thinking we made a difference. The challenges come with it being a group thing. The rewards come with it being a group thing. Funding a lengthy collective creation process is difficult.
Regarding your art, you have said, “it is a life’s work, rather than a career with a finite end”. Reflecting on your professional life thus far, is there anything you wish you’d done differently, and do you have any goals for the future?
At times I wonder about my not creating a personal life separate from my writing life. Or, is there such a thing? I don’t know. I don’t have any goals, as such, other than to say that to write is to be. I believe my best work is ahead of me. My best life. Perhaps in my future I will have adventures to regret. And I will write about those.
What are you working on next?
The Woman of One Thousand Years is an audio play commission for Irresistible Neighbourhoods: Walking on Water, an NAC English Theatre/NAC orchestra/NAC Digital Experience and Design Co-production launching this month with NL composer Duane Andrews. Ophelia Saves the World from Zombies is my love letter to Ophelia. The title says it all. This is a project of mine not attached to any company yet. I also have an upcoming podcast: The Haunted Doorbell. True ghost stories.
Do you have any favourite Canadian plays and/or which artists are currently inspiring you?
Anyone who puts pen to paper wanting to tell a story. I wish I could name everyone I know in my life but to say just a few: Vanessa Cardoso Whelan. Lois Brown. Santiago Guzmán. David Yee. Kate Hennig. August Carrigan. Sharon King-Campbell. Lindsay Kyte. Newcomers Finn Deeley & Jamie Kerrigan.
Disclaimer: Playwrights Guild of Canada (“PGC”) is a national arts service mandated to engage and grow an active Canadian writing community. We promote Canadian plays around the world to advance the creative rights and interests of professional Canadian playwrights for the stage. The views of our members are their own. The opinions of PGC as an association remain neutral.
