Featured Playwright — Kelley Jo Burke

Each month we interview member playwrights to share their work, stories and inspiration with the community. We recently spoke with Kelley Jo Burke, an award-winning Regina playwright, creative nonfiction writer and documentarian, and for many years host of CBC Radio’s SoundXchange.

In 2017, she and composer Jeffery Straker won the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s national Tom Hendry Award for Best New Musical Award for Us, which premiered at the Globe Theatre 2018. Kelley Jo’s other plays include The Lucky Ones, Somewhere, Sask., Ducks on the Moon, The Selkie Wife, Jane’s Thumb, Charming and Rose: True Love, The Curst, and Greensleep. She’s also written three books, and eight creative nonfiction documentaries for CBC Radio’s IDEAS. Kelley Jo was the 2009 winner of the Sask. Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Leadership in the Arts, the 2008 Saskatoon and Area Theatre Award for Playwriting, and has received the City of Regina Writing Award four times, the last in 2023 for her newest play, Rigby.

Tell us how you got your start writing plays.

I may have come out of the womb writing plays. Certainly playing pretend with back and forth conversations was something I have done as long as I have had speech speed and I started speaking at nine months old.

My first attempt at a production was Grade 2. I had difficulties maintaining my cast, as they wanted to go outside for recess instead of staying in to rehearse — and the project had to be abandoned. But by high school, I was in a young company with the Manitoba Theatre Workshop and was writing plays for that company. Meanwhile, I was also the theatre teacher for my high school. They didn’t have an actual drama teacher so they gave me credit for teaching Grade 11 drama based what I was studying at MTW — which included improv and script writing.

I got addicted to playwriting on the opening night of Goddessness which I wrote for the first Curtain Razors’ Fringe tour. (Curtain Razors is a Regina theatre company that I was fortunate to be a founding member of when I was in university, that is still going strong and doing remarkable work quite apart from anything we did 30 years ago.) I was calling the show which I had written and directed. And as the opening joke rang out in the theatre, and the audience laughed, I grabbed the arm of the person running the lights and whispered, “they laughed!” Another exchange. Another laugh. Another really ill advised seizure of the lighting tech’s slide arm. He finally grabbed me just as I was lunging at him after the third time and said “It’s a comedy Kelley Jo. Get a grip.”

That was it. I was lost. Are having a room full of people share humor with me, and later in the play, share tears. Absolutely addictive. No looking back.

You’ve described your work as “traumedy”, as your material “teeters between howling with laughter and just howling”. Are there any factors that influence the tone of a play for you, and is tone something you are consciously keeping in mind as you’re writing?

I grew up in a home where the organizing principle was if you could laugh you could get through a thing. And a kind of very British Isles-based verbal humor that was ironic, absurd, understated and transgressive was sort of the norm. I really didn’t have a lot of coping skills beyond finding the funny for trauma. For better for worse. So rather than the dark comedy being a technical choice, I think it is my language and the clearest expression of my worldview.

I gave an interview about my book Wreck which is a memoir about, among other things, how my grandfather sort of killed my grandmother. I had an interviewer come at me hard, on air, saying I could not write comedy about that subject. And my response was simply, “how else do you get through it? I have no idea how else you survive the big stuff, unless you laugh.” And so my plays are “about” tragic things sometimes, abuse and self harm and loss and fear — and they are all comedies. That make people laugh. And then make people cry. Often in the same breath. Which people seem to find a little surprising but I’m OK with it. I like to think of it as the audience and I “getting through it” together.

You were the winner of the 2023 City of Regina Writing Award for your play Rigby! Can you tell us about the creation of this piece and what receiving this award (for the fourth time!) means to you.

I wrote Rigby during the pandemic — during which time my disabilities became acute, and I lost my mobility permanently. I did not write it as a commission, or because any particular theatre was interested in doing a piece with me. It was just for me — and it was because of someone I saw, through a window, during shutdown, winter of 2021.

I was driving down a street in Regina. There was a figure, sitting in a rolling walker chair at a bus stop, hunkered inside a heavy coat, grim in the wind. I had three thoughts:

1. Poor thing.

2. That looks exactly like my walker.

3. Oh. That poor thing is me. Now.

Fortunately, I had another thought (one I would never have had before moving into my walker) i.e. screw that. I am not a poor thing. I live an amazing life. The person at the bus stop is not a poor thing. That is my ableism telling a story. Neither of us is any one thing and in fact no one knows what we are or what “hearth-fires and holocausts” are cocooned inside us. It was pretty easy, at least for a magic realist writer, to leap to imagining this magnificent burning winged thing erupting from the cocoon of that heavy coat and startling the world.

So, I went home and started to sketch out Rigby— about a little girl was supposed to die. And instead was invited to join the ranks of extraordinary beings who give the dying their story — before they pass on. Her name becomes Rigby — and, after a promising beginning, her after-life career, goes seriously sideways. That seemed to me like exactly the sort of thing that could be hiding in the coat.

And I had no idea whether it was for anyone except me and my mental health.

The beautiful thing about the City of Regina writing award is that it’s an award for a work in progress. It’s not something you get because you finished something good. It’s something you get because you’ve started something good, and the judges want you to finish it. I love that. I hadn’t submitted to the award competition for 10 years. (After my third win it was gently suggested that maybe I should leave the field to others for a while.) But I was dealing with plague, lack of reliable limbs and a collective societal madness and cruelty rising in the world that absolutely gobsmacked me and I decided ten years was long enough to wait for a little encouragement. Submitted the play to the competition. And I won, amidst other finalists who were really fine writers. And that was such an honor and vote of confidence that it made my dabbling in despair seem silly.

Among the many creative roles you’ve held (writer, actor, producer, director, dramaturg, and more), is there any one role that you’ve liked best? What are the challenges and rewards of wearing so many different hats? Is there any advice you’d offer to emerging artists who find themselves in a similar position?

What an interesting question! I do a lot of different things, it’s true. But I have always argued that I’m actually only doing one thing. I started out as an actor, who was writing for her company. I became a journalist who continued to be a creative writer, which led to creative nonfiction being a big part of my life. Which then led to me being documentary maker — who used elements of playmaking and theatre in her documentaries. And then to a host producer for an arts journalism program for the CBC. Which meant I had the opportunity to give other artists exactly the kind of support (editing, dramaturgy, directing, mentoring) I hoped I would get as an artist. Which made me better at my own art.

(I would argue because I was a mother of three fairly complex children during all that, that motherhood was again just another version of the same job, bringing creativity and application to making or keeping things alive.)

I think ultimately, I just make containers out of spoken language to hold bits of life — play, documentary, book, stand up, broadcast etc. And the shape of the container is determined by what kind of life I need to hold. Is it non fiction? Is it wildly imaginative? Do I feel like music is a big part of it? Would this container be less useful and complete without a specific kind of visuals?

I think if I was going to tell young writers anything about that, I would say, value everything that you bring to your art. Don’t let yourself get pigeonholed. Or disregard something because you think it’s not what other people are going to want from you. You like puppets? By all means make a puppet show. There is absolutely no excuse for not playing the bassoon if you have gotten good at the bassoon. Do you know an unreasonable amount about birds? More than anyone ever wants to listen to? That’s gold. By all means make some art about birds. All good things will get used if you bring them into the light. For something.

I am absolutely not saying that that will make you rich and famous. I believe if I had specialized more, I would perhaps have moved further in one or the other forms in which I work. But I also think I would have not been able to experiment with form and push things that I felt needed pushing as much as I did. And that’s what was right for me. It might be absolutely wrong for someone else.

You have been a longtime active member of PGC’s Women’s Caucus. What is something you’d like the rest of the PGC membership and the community at large to know about the work the WC is doing?

I have been a member of the Women’s Caucus, and in fact its chair off and on, since 1993. So I must really believe in it. The caucus exists so that women playwrights can have a place to share ideas, pool research, and advocate for themselves and each other. I really think the strongest thing we do is just create situations where women can talk, and problem-solve, around the particular challenges and joys of being a woman playwright in Canada, as if we were all in a room together, instead of scattered across a massive stretch of space

It is in those conversations, and networking that we get to find our way through the challenges that still exist for women in what is still a patriarchal culture. Really wish it wasn’t so, and really wish we still didn’t have to be talking about this — but yah. Still do.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on a book. It’s about trying to stay married and in love while dealing with terminal illness, specifically Alzheimer’s. In many ways it’s a companion piece to Rigby.

Do you have any favourite Canadian plays and/or which artists are currently inspiring you?

I am very old school in my Canadian play taste. I love Marie Clements. I love Kenneth Williams. I could watch Colleen Wagner’s The Monument every day and I would still weep each and every time. I have a particular thing for one person shows — probably my fringe background — I just love the idea of traveling with fewer moving parts. So Joey Tremblay’s Elephant Wake will always have a big place in my heart. I’m crazy about Daniel McIvor’s House, and anything by Catherine Banks — but especially for me, It is Solved By Walking.

Beyond Canadian theatre, I’m currently reading a lot of Richard Powers. My friend, the artist Louisa Ferguson, told me i had to read The Overstory which won the Pulitzer a couple of years ago. And it is just a really big book about really big trees. And a really big problem with human beings. It is one of the first books I’ve read in a long time that actually feels like a massive lofe-change experience to have read. Huge recommend.

Watch Kelley Jo’s Ted Talk on why she does what she does here!

About Rigby:

“…you’re caught. In what we call the Pocket. The thirty seconds before your heart stops supplying blood to your brain — and the thirty seconds after. Typically, in this pocket of not exactly time, someone like me shows up. And talks with you a little. Or a lot. Time is quite relative in the pocket. But however long it takes for things to resolve, that’s how long the pocket feels. … Some people would see this as a problem. But I want you to think of it as an opportunity.”

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was supposed to die. And didn’t. And was invited to join the ranks of those who come to the dying to give them their story — before they pass on.

She became a Rigby — and her after-life career may now be going seriously sideways.

Rigby is Kelley Jo Burke’s City of Regina Writing Award-winning funny, dark, irreverent, and stylistically challenging play of life and death and what’s in-between.

Kelley Jo Burke gratefully acknowledges the support of SkArts, the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and the City of Regina.

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.