Featured Playwright — Leahdawn Helena
Each month we interview member playwrights to share their work, stories and inspiration with the community. We recently spoke with Leahdawn Helena (she/they/nekm). Leahdawn was born and raised on the west coast of Ktaqmkuk (the island now known as Newfoundland), and is trained as an actor, writer, director, and dramaturge. They hold degrees in both Theatre and Sociocultural Studies from Memorial University Grenfell Campus.
Their first full-length screenplay, Ruthless, was selected for a Newfoundland Arts and Letters prize in 2020. In 2021 they directed Petrina Bromley in Elizabeth Hicks’ one-woman short play, Hearty at Eighty, for PerSIStence Theatre. In 2021 they performed in Stephenville Theatre Festival in Meghan Greeley’s To the Girls, as well as the tour production in 2023. Their play, Stolen Sisters, which premiered in 2022, features Order of Canada member Deantha Edmunds, and is historically grounded in the colonial experiences of Beothuk and Mi’kmaw women and girls. Stolen Sisters toured across Newfoundland in 2023, Labrador in January 2024, and New Brunswick in April 2024.
Their most recent theatrical work, 2024’s Precariously Placed: Pandemic Monologues From The Edge, was researched and created with support from PerSIStence Theatre and York University. Also in 2024, they directed their first short film, Sandy Point Pirates, for College of the North Atlantic’s Digital Filmmaking program. They work as a freelance Dramaturg and as an Indigenous Sociocultural Consultant for the St John’s and Avalon Arts community, working with Artistic Fraud, St John’s Shorts, PerSIStence Theatre, and the Cupids Legacy Project, among others.
L’nuit. Tleiawit Nujio’qonik. (They are L’nu. They have family roots in the Bay St George region.)
Tell us how you got your start writing plays.
I have been storytelling since I was a child — though some in the family might have called it lying. Either way, I was encouraged to channel the urge to tell tales into writing. Before I learned to write, I would scribble long loops of nonsense into an exercise book and call it a storybook. As a teenager I wrote fanfiction (I believe that a lot more of us did than would like to admit to it) and, like many weird, sensitive kids, I joined the drama club at my high school. After I finished my first Bachelors degree I was directionless and floundering. I bounced around between jobs and eventually joined a community theatre group in my hometown, which led me to applying for a Theatre degree. At that point it made the most sense to me to start writing plays, since that was the main kind of text I was interacting with. In our industry it sometimes feels like you can’t always be just one thing — an actor, a director, a writer. I think it made sense to build a breadth of skills.
You are the 2024 recipient of the John Palmer Award, an award given to a playwright who reflects innovative writer and director John Palmer’s ideals of challenging the mainstream and fostering intergenerational friendships. Can you tell us what winning this award means to you, and why it’s important to you to “challenge the mainstream”?
It was a huge honour to receive the John Palmer Award, and a bit of a shock, because I never set out to “challenge the mainstream,” as such. I’ve always just done what has come naturally to me, and, apparently, that makes a statement to people. My parents tell me that I constantly asked “why?” as a child. Maybe that curiosity, and the need to understand, is what people see as challenging convention — “just because” was never a good enough answer for me for the way things are, and if the answer seemed unfair or didn’t serve me, I would look for new ways to do those things.
Your play Stolen Sisters toured earlier this year with PerSIStence Theatre. Can you tell us about the creation of this piece, and what the experience of having it tour was like for you?
Stolen Sisters was created out of real anger at the misrepresentation and misappropriation of indigenous people and communities. Here were the Beothuk — a group of people subjected to genocide by colonialism — and their story was being used to serve political agendas and boost tourism. And when I looked at current events, it felt like so little had changed for indigenous people today, who are still living with the fallout of colonialism as an everyday reality. So I wanted to really dig down into history and give these women and girls back the agency that had been taken from them.
Having the show tour was exciting, but also terrifying. You never know how people are going to respond to hearing difficult truths, especially when you’re coming into their space and really laying everything out for them to contend with. I’ve been so lucky to work with such fantastic teams that really love and support the work we do, and to have had the chance to connect with audiences that really seem to embrace the messages we’re putting out there.
You have already served in a number of different roles, including as an actor, director, writer, and consultant. Is there any advice you’d offer to fellow emerging artists that may also face the challenges and rewards of this type of career?
I know that I am incredibly privileged to be able to work in my chosen career. It took me until my 30s to really own the fact that this was what I wanted to do with my life, because it isn’t an easy industry to thrive in. I have been very lucky to connect with some incredible, talented people, both established and emerging, and that has made all the difference in building the kind of supportive network that allows me to keep doing the work I do. It’s also been important to be open to taking on roles that might be outside of my comfort zone — I would love to focus on just writing, but the experiences I have directing different media, acting, taking classes, doing workshops, being active in the arts community, are what make the work sustainable long term.
Is there an artistic practice you haven’t tried yet that you might like to some day?
One of my other great loves is singing. I have played around with composing songs, but I’ve never had the confidence to perform my own work in public. Maybe that’s something I’ll take on a little further down the road.
What are you working on next?
Right now I’m working on research for a script about Mattie Mitchell — a Mi’kmaw guide who is something of a folk hero in the region of Newfoundland that I grew up in. I’m also in the middle of the first draft for a play called The Most Beautiful Woman in the World in which Elizabeth Siddal, Marylin Monroe, and Princess Diana sit down for a conversation over tea.
Do you have any favourite Canadian plays and/or which artists are currently inspiring you?
Of course there are the prolific and nationally recognized playwrights who have inspired me — Tomson Highway, Yvette Nolan, Catherine Banks, Bernardine Stapleton, Robert Chafe, each of whom I have had the pleasure of meeting and some of whom I have had the fortune to work with. Others like Jordan Tannahill, Hannah Moscovitch, and Daniel MacIvor I haven’t met, but their work has been a huge influence on my own. And then there are the people I am lucky enough to call my peers, whose talent is mindblowing to me — shalan joudry, Santiago Guzmán, Robyn Vivian, Dan Bray, Benton Hartley, Elizabeth Hicks, Xaiver Michael Campbell, Natalie Meisner, francesca ekwuyasi, Anthony Bryan, Jody Stephens, Riley Reign… I know there are at least two dozen others who are on that list. There are too many people to name who I’m proud of and inspired by.
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.
