Love and Information - Program

april 10 - 29, 2018 berkeley street Theatre

love and information

by Caryl Churchill

A Canadian Stage Production in collaboration with the Department of Theatre in the School of the Arts, Media Production and Design at York University 17.18 Season Sponsor

Proud Sponsor 17.18 Berkeley Season

This production has been generously underwritten

by Sylvia Soyka

Media Sponsor

p e r fo r m e r s

D i r ec to r s

Jason Cadieux Sarah Deller Peter Fernandes Maggie Huculak Sheila Ingabire-Isaro David Jansen Reid Millar Ngozi Paul

Tanja Jacobs Alistair Newton S e t + Cos t u m e D e s i g n e r

Eo Sharp Li g hti n g D e s i g n e r

AndrĂŠ Du Toit So u n d D e s i g n e r

Jennifer Gillmor Stag e M a n ag e r

Laura Baxter A s s i s ta nt Stag e M a n ag e r

Victoria Wang HE a d o f Wa r d ro b e

This performance runs approximately 90 minutes, There is no intermission A special thank you to Peter Hinton, dedicated mentor of the York University Canadian Stage MFA Program.

Love and Information was first presented by The English Stage Company at The Royal Court Theatre in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, London, England on 6 September 2012. The US premiere was presented at New York Theatre Workshop, New York on 19 February 2014, directed by James McDonald.

Love and Information is presented by special arrangement with SAMUEL FRENCH, INC. The videotaping or making of electronic or other audio and/or visual recordings of this production or distributing recordings on any meduim including the internet, is strictly prohibited, a violation of the author’s rights and actionable under United States copyright law. For more information, please visit: www.samuelfrench.com/whitepaper

Natalie Voorn

engage Pre Show Chats

Friday, April 13th/20th/27th @ 6:15PM

Post Show Talk Backs Matinees

Wednesday, April 18th/25th Evenings

Thursday, April 19th/26th

Relaxed Performance Saturday, April 21st @ 1:00PM

Jason Cadieux

Sarah Deller

Peter Fernandes

Maggie Huculak

Sheila Ingabire-Isaro

David Jansen

Reid Millar

Ngozi Paul

Tanja Jacobs

Alistair Newton

Eo Sharp

Jennifer Gillmor

Laura Baxter

Victoria Wang

cast + creative

AndrĂŠ Du Toit

directors’ notes How do we live? The question can reflect how we actually live, like an X-ray, and it can ask us how we might live. Not only as a map of our ideals, but also how we might live if we do not question the status quo.

As we find more and more ways to instantly, secretly, mysteriously and silently dissolve what shields us from complete commodification, are we not interfering with our ability to detect what should be preserved? Can we even tell what it is we are giving up?

Once our privacy is gone, who will remember it?

Caryl Churchill’s delicate and subversive play exposes the continual hyper-erosion of boundaries in all our relations. It asks us to consider love, as perhaps the only remedy.

Shocking revelations about government’s illegal surveillance of the public had a brief, powerful impact, but I have somehow already gotten used to the idea that evidence of everything I do and everyone I contact is being mined, collected, stored and sold as data.

We have never been more perfectly poised to be utterly controlled by a totalitarian state, we are told. Can you feel yourself drifting away from this dangerous idea? Will this be washed away by another media tsunami? Will we continue to live in the constant lowgrade body-stone that is the fog of contemporary life?

The difference between getting the facts and experiencing the representation of history through poetry, metaphor and music is that the aspect of us that makes meaning from symbols, that aspect -- when it is activated – might make us resistant to our acclimatization to catastrophe. Northrop Frye said “Literature, then, is not a dream world: it’s two dreams, a wish fulfillment dream and an anxiety dream, that are focussed together, like a pair of glasses, and become a fully conscious vision.”

TanJa Jacobs With Love and Information Caryl Churchill may have achieved apotheosis, having seemingly distilled her razor-sharp insights down to their most potent formulations.

Given its multitude of possible interpretations, the play serves as a theatrical Rorschach test for both its audience and its creators. Part of the great power of this series of Churchillian ink blots is the way it constantly demands we re-examine things we think we recognize in surprisingly (or, indeed, alarmingly) revelatory ways; like a Cubist Hockney photo collage, Churchill shows us ourselves from many angles at once. Her characters participate in a struggle that will be familiar to all, a struggle to form intimate connections in a contemporary moment where intimacy is often much more easily achieved with increasingly shrinking electronic screens, than with our friends, family, or lovers.

I have often been accused of being overly analytical, of being too “in my head.”

This phrase always causes me no small amount of annoyance, given that the head contains the brain which controls both the intellect and the emotional landscape, rendering this distinction a false and unhelpful one (and, sure, I appreciate the irony that the preceding pedantry is fuel for my accusers…). Personally, I have always felt a slave to “the heart”, and the chance to live inside Caryl Churchill’s theatrical universe — rigorous as it always is in intellection, emotion, and intuition — has proved the catalyst to reexamine, reaffirm, or reverse many of the truths I thought I knew, both about myself, and my art practice.

Alistair Newton

artistic & general director’s note What you are about to see may feel like a play, in the watching of it. In the reading of it, it is an offering, a gathering of the material - and the immaterial - of life into seven little heaps, which playwright par excellence Caryl Churchill invites actors and directors to delve into, arrange, rearrange, assemble, disassemble as they see fit.

Much like the makings of our own lives - the ingredients are all there, it’s what we choose to do with them or how we choose to mix them that makes the difference.

Love and information - are they one and the same? are they the polar opposite of each other? are they inexorably attracted into the spheres one of the other?

With her ever dexterous, ever sly hand, Caryl Churchill has penned a labyrinth in which we might forever get lost, or through which we might indeed find a clarity, a poignancy, a release.

We are proud to welcome Tanja Jacobs and Alistair Newton - the two most recent MFA directing graduates from our program with York University - and their teams to bring this stupendous fresco of 21st Century truths to our stage. Enjoy.

Matthew Jocelyn

cast Jason Cadieux Jason Cadieux is an actor and playwright. Recent theatre credits include: Jerusalem (Outside the March/ The Company Theatre), The Wedding Party (Crow’s Theatre), King Lear & Twelfth Night (Canadian Stage), Hosanna (Soulpepper), Wrong For Each Other (Public Theatre, Maine), The Valley (Essential Collective Theatre). Film & TV: Reign (CW), Law & Order SVU (NBC), Blue Bloods (CBS). Other: Jason is the Co-founder of The Essential Collective Theatre (ECT), a St. Catharines based co. mandated to produce contemporary Canadian work. While at ECT Jason wrote and produced many new works, including touring productions of 17.5 directed by Sarah Garton Stanley (4 stars - Time Out Magazine UK) and Hardways (“a rich and fascinating piece of work” - The Ottawa Citizen). He currently splits his time between Toronto, New York & Niagara. Watch for Jason this summer at High Park in the Canadian Stage productions of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Sarah Deller Sarah Deller is an actor with an MA in English from Dalhousie University.

Recent credits include Shakespeare by the Sea’s Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Sleeping Beauty; the Villain’s Theatre’s The Spanish Tragedy (Bel-Imperia), Women Beware Women (Hippolito), and TYRANT (Govianus); and a cameo appearance in Zuppa Theatre’s Pop-Up Love Party. At the Fountain School of Performing Arts, Deller played Nina in The Seagull, Liz Morden in Our Country’s Good, and Euelpides (“Eck”) in The Birds. Up next, Sarah will be traveling the UK with her brother. She thanks her family, her mentors — especially Tanja — and former professors for their immense support, and the Gallagher-Doucettes for their love and hospitality. Online: sarahdeller.com

Peter Fernandes Training: Soulpepper Academy, University of Alberta (BFA Acting).

Selected credits: Jerusalem (Outside the March/Company Theatre); Charlie Brown Double Bill (MTYP); Onegin

(Musical Stage Company/ NAC); King Lear, Twelfth Night (Canadian Stage); Peter and the Starcatcher (Citadel Theatre); Passing Strange (Obsidian/ Musical Stage Company); Alligator Pie, Father Comes Home From The Wars, The Just, Incident at Vichy, Marat/Sade, The Dybbuk, Spoon River, Tartuffe, Idiot’s Delight, The Crucible (Soulpepper); Are We There Yet? (Concrete); Work Plays (AWHC); Evil Dead (Ground Zero, Hit & Myth); Last Tree of Rapa Nui (MTYP); Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing (Freewill). Upcoming: Romeo and Juliet/A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Canadian Stage); Vietgone (Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre).

Maggie Huculak Cherished artistic collaborations over 35 years include Necessary Angel (with writers Michael Ondaatje, Colleen Murphy and John Mighton/directors Richard Rose and Daniel Brooks), the late great Theatre Columbus (Martha Ross/Leah Cherniak), Soulpepper and Globe Theatre. Co-creator of four plays: Mein, Hysterica, The Betrayal and Lonely Nights and Other Stories.

Maggie has worked extensively in radio, film and television: sole narrator of epic CBC series Canada: A People’s History. Recipient of a Dora Award, a Chalmers Award; sixtime Dora nominee. Upcoming: Now You See Her – a collective creation with QuoteUnquoteCollective on the theme of women who disappear.

Sheila Ingabire-Isaro Sheila Ingabire-Isaro is a Rwandan Canadian actress who moved to Toronto at the age of 4. Her love of storytelling led her to pursue a theatre diploma at George Brown Theatre School.

Since graduating from the 3 year Conservatory program in 2016, Sheila has worked in a number of television, film and theatre projects in Canada. Her most notable credits include: Baroness

Von Sketch Show (CBC); the Dora Mavor Moore Award Nominee Les Zinspiré Puissance 5 (TFT); The Unending (Convergence Theatre); Liv Stein (Canadian Stage). She is extremely proud and excited to be joining the cast of Love and Information on this exciting and timely piece of theatre.

David Jansen David is an actor, director, and teacher.

As an actor he has performed leading and supporting roles in theatres throughout Canada and the U.K., including Canadian Stage, Tarragon, Mirvish Productions, Soulpepper, VideoCabaret, Stratford, Shaw, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, The Citadel, Prairie Theatre Exchange, and The Peter Hall Company in the U.K., among others. Most recently he performed in Ubuntu, a play he co-wrote, at The Citadel and PTE. And this fall, he’ll be returning to Winnipeg to perform in RMTC’s production of Sense and Sensibility. He is very happy to be returning to Canadian Stage. David lives with his wife Fiona and their kids Molly and Nora in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Reid Millar Reid Millar is a nineteen-year-old musician and actor from Toronto, Ontario. He attended Etobicoke School of the Arts for drama from 2012-2016, and is currently completing a BFA in acting from York University. While at ESA he participated in three mainstage productions, including The Three Musketeers, A Doll’s House, and Love and Information. He was also a cast member of the 2015 Paprika Festival production, That’s So Meta!, and has acted in many independent short films. He is a member of Toronto punk bands BBQ Pope, Transit Cops, Dodds and Limewire. He would like to thank Tanja Jacobs, Alistair Newton, Lynanne Sparrow and all the cast and crew for their wonderful work.

Ngozi Paul Ngozi Paul is an award-winning actress and creator. Most recently her play The Emancipation of Ms. Lovely, which she penned and starred in, was nominated for 6 Dora awards and won Outstanding New Play. Some acting highlights include the wide-eyed beauty Starr in the hit series ‘da Kink in my Hair, which she also co-created; Her in Crow’s Theatre’s A&R Angels and Julia in Canadian Stage’s Fernando Krapp Wrote Me This Letter: An Attempt at the Truth. Her new play The 1st Time Project focuses on intergenerational and intercultural conversations exploring women’s relationship with sexuality and is a proud member of Crow’s Theatre’s docu-playwrights unit. Ngozi is passionate about human rights, particularly girls’ rights, and is a proud ambassador of Plan International’s Because I am a Girl initiative. www.ngozipaul.com

creative Tanja Jacobs

Director Tanja Jacobs is an award-winning actress and director. Most recently she directed Twelfth Night for Canadian Stage’s Shakespeare in High Park. In 2016 she directed The Model Apartment for Harold Green Jewish Theatre.

As an actress she appeared most recently in Seeds at the Neptune, and The Watershed at Tarragon and at Centaur, both by Annabel Soutar and created with Porte Parole. Upcoming: Directing La Bête for Soulpepper Theatre; directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in High Park for Canadian Stage; appearing in The Assembly, the newest documentary theatre work from Porte Parole. For her work as an actress in Toronto, Tanja has received eleven Dora nominations and three awards. This past summer Tanja completed her MFA in Stage Direction at York University in collaboration with Canadian Stage.

Alistair Newton Director

Alistair Newton is a director of theatre and opera, Dora Award nominated playwright, and founding Artistic Director of Ecce Homo Theatre.

Selected credits include: King Lear (Canadian Stage), Three Short Plays

by Samuel Beckett (Shaw Festival Directors’ Project); Of a Monstrous Child: a gaga musical (Ecce Homo/ Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, writer/ director); Bella: The Colour of Love (World Premiere at the Philadelphia Theater Company/Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts); La Serva Padrona (Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio); and multiple projects for the SummerWorks Performance Festival. Alistair is a member of the Directors’ Lab of Lincoln Centre Theater, and an alumnus of Canadian Stage and York University’s joint MFA program in stage direction. www.eccehomotheatre.com

Eo Sharp

Set and Costume Designer Eo Sharp is a set and costume designer.

Based in Montreal, recent productions Eo has designed include The Mountaintop for Black Theatre Workshop (Segal Centre and Neptune Theatre); The Baklawa Recipe, You Will Remember (Centaur Theatre). This past year Angelique (BTW), and An Intractable Woman were each nominated for a Meta Best Set Design Award. Past productions include Alice in Wonderland, Pygmalion (Shaw Festival); King Lear, Mary Stuart, The Swanne (Stratford Festival); girls! girls! girls!, Human Collison/Atomic Reaction (Festival Transamérique).

Eo has received design awards for Looking for Romeo (Sin 4 Productions), Human Collision/Atomic Reaction (the other theatre), Saint Carmen of the Main (National Arts Centre of Canada/ Canadian Stage) and Red (Segal Centre).

André Du Toit

Laura Baxter

André du Toit is a lighting designer for live performance based in Toronto.

Recent designs include Prince Hamlet (Why Not Theatre); Jerusalem (Outside the March/Company Theatre); Animal Farm, A Delicate Balance, Vimy, The 39 Steps (Soulpepper); Mouthpiece (Quote Unquote Collective); Italian Mime Suicide, Three Red Days, Paolozzapedia, The Double (Bad New Days); The Assholes, As I Lay Dying (Theatre Smith-Gilmour); Asking For It (In Association); Watching Glory Die, Tideline (Canadian Rep Theatre); FLORENCE (The Dietrich Group); Oraltorio (MotionLive Collective); This is The Point, Ralph + Lina (Ahuri Theatre). André has won two Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Outstanding Lighting Design and has been nominated for nine.

Stage Manager Venus in Fur; Shakespeare in High Park: 6 seasons (Canadian Stage); My Name is Asher Lev, My Night With Reg, You Will Remember Me, NSFW, God of Carnage, Clybourne Park (Studio 180 Theatre); Black Boys, The 20th of November, Arigato Tokyo, Obaaberima, The Maids, The Silicone Diaries, Breakfast, Neon Nightz (Buddies in Bad Times Theatre); Tails From the City, The Public Servant, The Story, Happy Days (Common Boots Theatre); Little Pretty and The Exceptional, Age of Arousal (Factory Theatre); Elle (Theatre Passe Muraille); Soliciting Temptation, More Fine Girls (Tarragon Theatre); The Berlin Blues, Ipperwash (Blyth Festival); Speaking in Tongues, Festen (The Company Theatre); A Sleigh Ride Christmas Carol, Everyone, The Story, Macbeth (Caravan Farm Theatre).

Jennifer Gillmor

Victoria Wang

Lighting Designer

Sound Designer

Jennifer Gillmor’s musical exploration has covered rich and varied territory.

Jennifer has composed and recorded for film, video, dance, theatre and multimedia projects. She has played everything from funk to folk, rock to reggae, music influenced by traditions of African and Celtic cultures and experimental projects. She is a multiinstrumentalist with a musical family that includes bass guitar, cello, kamel n’goni, didgeridoo, flutes, various percussion, berimbau, musical saw, voice, jaw harp, found and made objects and sample-based sequencing.

Gravitating to music from many years of acting, Jen is always delighted to return to the heady creative alchemy that is the magic of the theatre.

Previous main stage theatrical productions: Wild Dogs, 2008 and HER2, 2015 both for Nightwood Theatre. www.jengillmormusic.ca

Assistant Stage Manager For Canadian Stage: Hamlet, All’s Well That Ends Well, Julius Caesar, The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare in High Park). Selected credits: The Hockey Sweater: A Musical (Segal Centre); The Story (Common Boots), Othello (Driftwood Theatre); Binti’s Journey (Theatre Direct); HROSES (It Could Still Happen); Like There’s No Tomorrow (Architect Theatre); The Misanthrope and The Importance of Being Earnest (Guild Festival Theatre).

Outside of theatre, Victoria is the creator of memorypalaceproject. com, a community project that collects memories from the public in the form of personal objects. Victoria is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the National Theatre School of Canada.

#csLoveInfo

In residence at the Berkeley Street Theatre

Njo Kong Kie (Music Picnic)

★★★★★

picnic ın the cemetery

“(A) euphoric assault on the senses... must experience” - British Theatre Guide

17.18 Berkeley Season Sponsor

Luisa Ferreira

Presented in partnership with Canadian Stage

A whimsical concert-theatre performance combining the original music of Toronto composer Njo Kong Kie (Mr. Shi and His Lover) and an evocative journey through the passage of time.

APR 26 – MAY 6 Berkeley Street Theatre canadianstage.com 416.368.3110