Kelly Thornton, Artistic Director, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

By Shauna Dobbie

“I love it!” says Kelly Thornton, the Artistic Director of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, about Winnipeg. “I love the size of the city because it’s kind of a bigcity-small-town,” she says. “I’m really happy to get out of the overly congested City of Toronto. I just think this is a healthier, happier city.”

The decision to move to Winnipeg was a major one. Thornton knew that everyone had to be on board, including her daughter Chloe and husband Josep Seras, of course, but also her exhusband, Alex Poch-Goldin, who is father to their 12-year-old. Both husband and ex have found meaningful work and daughter Chloe regularly comes home from school and says: “I love my life here!”

Thornton is enamoured with the cultural vibrancy of the city, not just with the theatre but with its symphony orchestra and top-notch ballet. “They’ve been around for a very long time and the identity of Winnipeg is really wrapped up in these cultural institutions.” The engagement, cultural literacy and sense of philanthropy have amazed her. “There’s also a huge indie scene here, which is great.”

Kelly Thornton is the Artistic Director of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

We spoke on one of the coldest days of winter, so the question of the weather had to come up. “It is really true that the dry cold is a different cold,” she says. “The great big bright blue prairie sky, it keeps us happy. The vitamin D that we get from the sunny days and the crisp cold… I love it.”

It’s no small thing to follow up a 30-year Artistic Director at Canada’s oldest regional theatre company, but Kelly Thornton is taking on the task with confidence. She started in June, receiving the helm from the esteemed Steven Schipper, who has moved to the Brampton Rose Theatre, north of Toronto.

Thornton brings with her a wealth of experience, having been the Artistic Director of Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre Company for 18 years. During her tenure, she launched festivals and special projects for young or emerging directors, writers and actors. She has similar ambitions at

RMTC, starting with a festival called The Bridge in 2021. “It will be an annual event and it will have a centrepiece production attached to it that is on the mainstage and then ancillary programming around it,” she explains. For 2021, the theme of the festival is art and reconciliation and the play will be Children of God, by Oji-Cree playwright Corey Payette. Children of God is about residential schools and has had successful runs in Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa and Montreal. During the last week of Children of God, there will be additional programming around it, like plays, concerts and panels. The idea is to discover “how artists of all disciplines are pushing the conversation forward around reconciliation.”

There is no better place than Winnipeg to have this conversation. And theatre is an excellent medium to stimulate it. “To hear a lecture is different than to see a play. Plays lurk in our minds… they let in air, into our brain, in a way that nothing else really can.”

The first season she’s planned is not all so heavy, though. Thornton has chosen The Sound of Music for December, which she will direct herself. She’s also put a couple of other really accessible plays on the bill: Network, which is an adaptation of the 1976 comedy that was a hit on Broadway; and The Three Muskateers, which promises to be fun.

The other plays are the mainstage are Calpurnia, a play that is, in part, a redressing of To Kill a Mockingbird from the maid’s point of view, written by Winnipegger Andrea Dwyer; and Burning Mom, a new play by Edmontonian Mikeo Ouchi about her mother’s first trip to the Burning Man festival at the age of 63.

For the Warehouse, three out of four plays programmed by Thornton are by Canadian writers. A new play by Winnipeg’s Pamela Mala Sinha, called New, about a group of Indian immigrants in Winnipeg in the 1970s; American Sarah DeLappe’s play The Wolves about a group of teen girls on a soccer team; Yaga, by Toronto’s Kat Sandler, a comedic murder mystery; and The Runner by Christopher Morris of Toronto about an emergency response volunteer’s decision to save the life of a Palestinian suicide bomber.

In addition to programming the season, RMTC is responsible for the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. It’s the only big theatre company in the country that takes care of a fringe festival, which is a collection of performances by small independent theatre companies, usually on a shoestring budget. This gives RMTC a closer relationship with the independent and younger theatre practitioners in Winnipeg, which Thornton is very enthusiastic about. Coming from Nightwood, she has a background of dealing with some of the best of the fringe-type groups.