Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic voices shaping Canadian theatre today. Through a mixture of lighthearted banter and deep dives into artistic practice, this column invites artists to share nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of a glorious, frustrating art form.
When I spoke to Derek Kwan via Zoom, on one of his days off from performing at the Stratford Festival, his mind was on Musical Bridges, an upcoming concert co-created with fellow festival artist Terry McKenna. Slated for August 18 as part of Stratford’s 2025 Meighen Forum series, Bridges is a cross-cultural fusion of genres blending traditional Chinese music, European baroque, and more — a synthesis reflective of Kwan’s broader creative ethos.
A multihyphenate among multihyphenates, Kwan organized Bridges in his spare time, between turns as a charmingly corrupt police inspector in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and a suave butler in Annie. On top of this, he has been artistic director of the Toronto-based Common Boots Theatre since 2002. As an actor, his varied and international career has found him performing music theatre in Prague, adaptations of Symbolist short stories in Taipei, and therapeutic clown acts for patients in Toronto hospitals.
Though my conversation with Kwan was as wide-ranging as you’d expect, some unifying themes emerged. Similar to past Speaking in Draft interviewee Justin Miller, Kwan spoke with passion about the importance of comedy and community in theatre; for him, our art form is most vital when it breaks out of the proscenium and returns to the public square.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You are a multihyphenate among multihyphenates.
I’ve always done everything. I remember, growing up, I’d hear the idiom ‘Jack of all trades, but master of none.’ Then later, I learned the actual phrase is ‘Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.’
When did you first realize you wanted to do theatre professionally?
Being a second-generation immigrant, so much was about survival. For my parents’ generation, they valued getting a decent job that was steady. I struggled with that for a long time.
Music was actually my first love. I went to University of Toronto for music, and from there I fell in love with theatre — but at first I wanted to be an opera singer. My career in [classical] music has been parallel to my career in theatre. I’m always missing the thing that I’m not doing, which is nice. In [Bridges], I get to do some of the stuff that I’m secretly passionate about.
What was your first professional play?
In 2000, I was still in university, and I remember coming across the Canadian Actors’ Equity Association’s audition mailing list. I decided I would do as many auditions as I could because I didn’t like them, so I could fall on my face and figure it out. Of course, that’s not exactly what happened, particularly at that time when you were racialized.
The first audition I ended up doing was for this fledgling company called fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company.
Oh wow.
They were casting for a workshop, and that show ended up being Banana Boys, by Leon Aureus.
That show was a landmark for Asian representation in Canadian theatre. I wish I’d been in Toronto to see its 2004 premiere at the Factory Studio Theatre; and I’d love to get my hands on the book that inspired the play, Banana Boys by Terry Woo.
The original boys are all still around doing stuff more than 20 years after the premiere of the play. The cast was [me], Ins Choi, David Yee, Richard Lee, and Dale Yim. Nina Lee Aquino directed. Michelle Ramsay was the lighting designer. It was Romeo Candido’s first sound design, and Camellia Koo designed the set and costumes. Even our stage manager, Isaac Thomas, ended up being general manager at Native Earth [Performing Arts], and he’s now the executive director at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria. It was Leon Aureus’ first play as well. We were all just trying to make it happen.
I felt totally like a fish out of water, because I was the youngest of the five boys, and the only one who didn’t go to theatre school. I had huge imposter syndrome for a long time. I think one of the things that drives me is that I’m constantly going, ‘What can I learn? Who’s around me that I can learn from?’ in my life as well as my career.
Have you ever experienced a moment of ‘Aha! I get it now!’ in your practice?
Things started to make more sense when I moved back to Toronto in 2010. I’d been living in Asia for a while. My parents had passed away. I felt like I was too old for theatre school, but I wanted to develop my skills, and that’s when I started getting into physical theatre. I worked with Adam Paolazza and Ravi Jain and that crew, learning about Lecoq and physical theatre and clown.
My journey with clown is what’s helped frame my larger journey in a way that makes sense to me. I also find a lot of connection between clown and Buddhism: both are about being in the present moment, letting go, and receiving the universe as it is.
I started clown because I was afraid of it. I was afraid of what I was going to learn about myself and about failure. I don’t feel like I’m an accomplished clown, but it’s the beginner’s mind of the practice that, for me, has been key: in life, in clown, and in all forms of theatre. I try to aspire to that every day.
That’s beautiful.
Comedy is hard. Comedy is serious. Comedy is very technical. It’s a gift to be doing Dirty Rotten Scoundrels because actors don’t often get opportunities to play such complete comedies. Every line is a laugh line. And it’s a gift to have so many goes at it [as part of a recently extended half-year run], to try to land every moment, every show. Actors don’t get opportunities like that very often.
You and I have spoken about this in other contexts: the need to practice, and the difficulty of doing that when you’re not part of a long show run or a repertory system.
I think it’s the same for writers. We have so few Canadian comedy writers. How can you put up a comedy in two weeks? [Comedy in particular] you have to workshop in front of an audience. A writer needs to have many kicks at the can to finetune comic delivery — to figure out what they find funny, what the audience finds funny. Play development readings can be funny, but comedy lives and dies on its feet. And because it’s physical and earthy, and often not lofty or high-minded, we also tend to look down on it.
That’s your philosophy of comedy. How would you articulate your artistic philosophy as a whole?
I remember taking a music history class in university about the Romantic movement: roughly from Beethoven until the early 20th century. The professor had us look up different definitions of Romantic music. The one that stuck with me asks you to imagine a park. A Classicist stays on the park’s path. Then you have the avante-garde composer, who will go anywhere but the path. Romantics will meander: They’ll take the path sometimes, but sometimes when the view is great somewhere else they’ll wander off. I think that Romantic approach is how I view my own artistic work: I like rules, and I flourish under a lot of discipline, because it gives me a structure from which to play.
Being culturally Chinese, context is very important. ‘What are the rules of engagement here?’ Then I can play in and around those. When I transgress a rule as an artist, I want to do it knowingly.
When was the first time you wanted to make theatre that was more responsive to a local community, for instance Common Boots’ InstaShow installations?
I think the desire has been there from the beginning. Because I didn’t study theatre in an institution or a conservatory environment, theatre for me has always been boundless. I’ve always loved the idea of art happening everywhere, from street art to yarn bombing. We’re in a society right now that keeps dehumanizing us in so many ways. Art is a necessity in that it keeps us human.
I’m not so much interested in innovation [so much as] going backwards: literally bringing art back to the marketplace, to the town square. We have this construct of theatre as hoity-toity, white collar, and upper class, which is a Victorian legacy. Don’t get me wrong — The Importance of Being Earnest is my favourite play, and it’s born of that Victorian culture.
But I’m interested in bringing theatre back to its roots — for instance, clown as satire for taking obnoxious people down a peg. There are lots of cultures in which forms like mask and clown were, and are, used as social tools to say, ‘You’re a little out of line here. Let’s make fun of you’ — and also as broader, intergenerational, accessible entertainment.
Can you talk a little about ‘Clownsultation,’ and how that practice came to be?
Clownsultation came around through my work in therapeutic clown with artist Andrew Gaboury.
We got asked by Leah Houston, who runs Mabelle Arts [in central Etobicoke] and is an incredible community leader, to do arts-based research as clowns, because the organization was building a new pavilion for the community. During the consultation phase — which I wasn’t a part of — clowns would show up to ask the community what they wanted out of a park and this new building. It was a way to discover underlying needs and wants for the community, through play and fun interactions.
Then, while the pavilion was being built, we came back as clown reporters. We were researching what the community thought was being built there and what the usage would be — again in a playful way, a beating-around-the-bush way. Sometimes, we can’t articulate directly what we need or want, and so to elicit a response we need that meandering and building context.
What advice would you give to an emerging artist today?
Don’t forget to live. As someone who’s lived internationally, who’s had multiple disasters in my life, those things have led me to the theatre, because it is life. All of that is grist for the mill.
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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