Featured Playwright — Marie Beath Badian
Each month we interview member playwrights to share their work, stories and inspiration with the community. We recently spoke with Marie Beath Badian [pronounced Maribeth], an award-winning Filipino-Canadian playwright, writer, and theatre maker. Her work has been presented across Canada and internationally. She is best known for her plays Prairie Nurse and The Waltz. They are part of The Prairie Trilogy, a multi-generational triptych of plays spanning fifty-years, set in rural Saskatchewan. The third play, The Cottage Guest, is in development.
She was the 2024 Senior-Playwright-in-Residence and is a two-time alumnus of The Playwrights Lab at The Banff Centre For Arts and Creativity. She was also part of the 2024 Slaight Theatre Creator Residency at The Banff Centre, and the 2023 Stratford Festival’s Foerster Bernstein New Play Development Program Retreat.
Marie Beath has developed work in the playwright units of Cahoots Theatre Company, Tarragon Theatre, Soulpepper Playwrights Circle and The Factory Theatre. She was the Playwright-in-Residence at fu-GEN Asian-Canadian Theatre Company, Project:Humanity and The Blyth Festival.
She has been commissioned by Prairie Theatre Exchange, The Blyth Festival, Young People’s Theatre and The Stratford Festival. She is published by Playwrights’ Canada Press and Scirocco Drama.
She is the 2022 PGC Recipient of the Tom Hendry Award for New Drama for her play Common.
mariebeath.com
Tell us how you got your start writing plays.
My entry point to writing plays is not unique. I trained as an actor. When I graduated from theatre school I quickly learned that there was both a lack of roles that felt representative or reflective of my lived experience and a deficit of imagination for casting outside the default or the expected. My first play was kind of a self-dare: I entered the Toronto Fringe lottery and told myself I would write a one-woman show if I was selected. That was over twenty years ago.
You are a multi-year alumnus of The Banff Playwrights Lab, most recently as Senior Playwright in Residence. What impact has your participation in the program had on your writing and career as a playwright?
The impact of being part of the Playwrights’ Lab at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is immeasurable. As playwrights, my experience has been that we are more introverted than not. We do most of our creation in solitude and have very little opportunity to be in community with each other. The energy of The Lab is singular — honouring both the need for playwrights to have a balance of solitude and community.
My experience of The Lab, under the stewardship of Brian Quirt, along with Jenna Rogers, was the first time in my career where I felt that whatever process a playwright had was not only honoured, but given all the resources to thrive and grow. Beyond the two-weeks in residency, the relationships that Brian built with other theatres and organizations extended opportunities for my work to be read, shared and selected internationally, including The National New Play Development Network in the US, and The Bruntwood Prize in the UK.
The most significant impact of The Lab for me has been not just professional, but personal. There are people I’ve met over the years at The Lab who are now not only trusted colleagues but some of my closest friends. And because of these relationships my work has deepened one-hundred fold.
You’ve written several plays on commission from theatres such as the Blyth Festival, Prairie Theatre Exchange, and the Stratford Festival. What are the challenges of working on commission, and what do you enjoy most about it? Is there any advice you’d offer to a playwright embarking on their first commissioned piece?
I am very grateful for the honour and privilege of being a commissioned playwright. I enjoy the challenge of being invited to play in a particular sandbox. The invitation comes with the trust of a theatre in your work, and your capacity to understand what their audience needs to feel included and entertained.
I think the advice I would give a playwright embarking on their first commission is to invest the time in understanding who the audience is. Each theatre’s audience is unique and comes to that theatre with a certain amount of trust. I feel like it is our responsibility in a commission to respect that trust and treat it as the rare commodity that it is and learn how to be our authentic artistic voice within those specific boundaries. I liken it to writing for TV — no matter what your artistic voice is, how would your play be different if the theatre was like HBO vs TVO Kids?
Some of your plays, such as Praire Nurse and The Waltz, are parts of a trilogy. Was writing a trilogy always your plan for telling these stories, and how is writing a series of plays different than writing a standalone piece?
Hahahah. Yes, it appears that I think in trilogies! I never set out to write in triologies/cycles. For The Prairie Trilogy — Prairie Nurse, The Waltz and The Cottage Guest [premiere tbd] — the impulse came as a reaction to how Prairie Nurse was being received. So much of the discussion and media around it called it an “immigration” play, as if the story of immigration was finite. I was deeply inspired by David French’s Mercer cycle. Similarly, I looked to tell this story over generations.
Different from writing a stand alone play, there is a certain amount of calculus involved in ensuring that all the lore matches up. I’ve tried to write these plays to be both stand alone and in conversation with each other — so that they don’t necessarily have to be consumed in order or as a series. My hope is that individually they speak for themselves, but delight an audience with easter eggs if they have experienced the other plays.
The Waltz recently went on tour with the Factory Theatre across Canada. Can you share a highlight or two from that experience, and is there anything you learned?
I’m super grateful for the mini-tour of The Factory production of The Waltz; it ran at The Factory Theatre in Toronto, Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg and Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa. There are so many memorable moments it’s hard to distill them to a few. I am constantly surprised and moved when a stranger reaches out to me to write about their experiences of growing up here as a Filipino Canadian.
I think one of the most special and unexpected things about the tour is that it was also a sort of family reunion of fictional characters. At any given show of The Waltz there would be people in the audience who were in the cast of different productions of Prairie Nurse. They would tell me afterwards that watching The Waltz was like a homecoming of sorts — to learn what happened to their family twenty years in the future. I even have a collection of “family portraits” of the different cast members together!
What are you working on next?
I just completed the final play of the trilogy, The Cottage Guest. I did significant work on it both in the Slaight Creators Residency and The Playwrights Lab — both at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. I am looking forward to having an extended workshop to play in the sandbox with actors. Beyond that, I am in input and research mode for a couple of new projects: I am deeply invested around the theme of grace and how it intersects with rage. It feels exciting to start from scratch again.
Do you have any favourite Canadian plays and/or which artists are currently inspiring you?
Oh my goodness, SO many inspirations: Yvette Nolan, the incredible duo of Amanda Cordner and David di Giovanni, Kareem Fahmy, Bianca Miranda, Augusto Bitter, Santiago Guzman, Hazel Venzon, Thomas Morgan Jones, David Yee, Norman Yeung, Jeff Ho, Audrey Dwyer. Tara Beagan’s Rise, Red River absolutely destroyed me when I read it. I can’t wait for Keith Barker’s one person show Raised by Women premiering at PTE next season. What an incredible time in Canadian Theatre — the spectrum of stories and styles is so delicious.
Keep up with Marie Beath through her website, mariebeath.com!
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.
