Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
In the new Canadian play that premieres this week, on the gallop at Workshop West, we meet two best friends, as close as brothers, closer maybe. At heart these two love nothing better than hanging out together, having fun. One is a horse (named Horse); one is a jockey (named Jacques).
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And then in Horseplay, by actor/playwright Kole Durnford, pressure is applied by the world, and the stakes of love and friendship are raised by the dream of success. “They’re trying to win the Kentucky Derby,” says Durnford of his unusual pair of dreamer buddies. “And they have to win in order to keep Horse around. Which puts a big strain on their relationship.”
A Métis artist originally from Stony Plain, Durnford, who’s thoughtful and funny in conversation, traces Horseplay back to an unexpected starting gate in 2024: a 24-hour playwriting contest at the Toronto Fringe, and the idea of “a horse who breaks his leg.”
Horseplay playwright Kole Durnford, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo supplied
It was right after a third production in 2023 of his first play ECHO — a reimagining of the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus — at Toronto’s Next Stage Festival. That production, directed by Durnford’s best friend Robert Morrison, a theatre school classmate at TMU (Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly Ryerson), came loaded with stress for the pair. “It felt like a really big deal, my biggest playwriting thing I’d done, a big step for the whole team…. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves,” says Durnford, “and I was extremely burnt out.”
“I wanted some low-stakes fun,” he says, acknowledging with a laugh that 24-hour playwriting contests wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of an antidote to stress. “I knew I had to unpack what my last artistic experience was.” At some point in that 24 hours, Horseplay “turned into this piece about me and my best friend and main creative collaborator,” muses Durnford. “A piece about us following our dreams , trying for success, feeling the pressures of the world, finding a career doing something you love.”
“And it’s also about brotherhood. My friend Robert is my brother in a lot of ways…. We are family. All I kept coming back to as I was writing Horseplay was how much I love my friend.”
He remembers the escalating pressures of working on ECHO for its Next Stage opening night. “We began to lose sight of why we were doing it in the first place…. When you’re an artist, you never do (art) — or at least I think it’s wrong to do it — for success. You have to do it because you love the work and you love the community it creates. And I think I lost sight of that.”
Lee Boyes and Alexander Ariate in Horseplay, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin
“I feel like Horseplay was my desire to return to the reason I wanted to make art,” Durnford says. “The reason I cared, and tried to do this … and (laughter) become a broke person.” He’d set aside the “ultra-serious thriller” he’d been struggling with for two years for a play that happened in a 24-hour burst of creative energy. “Objectively,” he says of Horseplay, “it’s so much better. In every single way.”
Durnford describes growing up on an acreage outside Stony Plain — he went to Blueberry school “which is a real place,” he laughs — as a kid who didn’t fit in with the male sensibility of the community. “It was so terrible for me; I hated it so much…. I was a sensitive person; I didn’t understand masculinity in a lot of ways; I didn’t understand why all these people around me pretended not to feel their emotions, care about things. I really struggled.”
By the time he Durnford was in Grade 8, his parents rescued him from Blueberry. Vic, the arts school in Edmonton, was his salvation. “My parents drove me to Spruce Grove and I caught the bus every day…. And it was a game-changer for me!” He’d found his people, and himself. “I’m a person who cares and wants to devote time in my life to feeling my emotions and thinking about the world. And I feel that carries through Horseplay in some ways.”
Horse “doesn’t understand the constraints of the human world. He doesn’t know what money is. Or why best friends don’t spend their whole lives together. Or why you’d go off and get married or anything like that.”
Durnford, who’s in his mid-20s, went to TMU (he graduated in 2022) as an actor. “But I always deep down thought I should be a writer/ director,” he thinks now. It started at Vic, where playwright/director Vern Thiessen ran a program called Theatre Blitz, “a sort of after-school writing club.” Durnford and his 16-year-old classmates wrote plays and read them. “ I’m so lucky to have gotten some of the early writing out of my system,” he thinks. “An early getting-the- kinks-out….”
He works as an actor in Toronto, where he lives at least for the time being, with reservations about “the hustle culture” there. His first Dora Award nomination in 2022 was for Mixtape Productions’ “super-fun camp new musical” Killing Time: A Game Show Musical. Its playfulness and lightness of touch have been “a huge inspiration.” The second, an ensemble nomination in 2023, was for Niizh at Native Earth, “an Indigenous coming-of-age romance” as he describes. Both were happy experiences.
But it’s revealing that one of most memorable classes for Durnford at TMU theatre school was “creative performance studies,” devising theatre in tandem with dancers. And the COVID shutdown year, his third at university, in which acting classes suddenly got transferred to digital platforms — “an online version of The Three Sisters?” he laughs an eye-roll of a laugh — was an impetus to “focus on all the (non-acting) opportunities I had, to direct a film, or write…. I’m honestly grateful. That year forced me to think about my artistry beyond acting.”
Durnford the playwright came fully into being in the course of that year. ECHO happened right after that (it played the Edmonton Fringe in 2022), then Horseplay. Horse and Jacques caught the eye of Workshop West’s artistic director Heather Inglis and resident dramaturg Darrin Hagen when he submitted the script to the theatre’s play reading service. And he’s so delighted with Inglis’s cast, Alexander Ariate and Lee Boyes, that he can’t imagine being in the play himself.
He credits the Edmonton Fringe with underlining the essence of theatre, its live-ness, a quality he’s often found missing in Toronto. “If you don’t give people a reason to be there, live, with you, no one cares….”
“I feel like the Edmonton Fringe is my home base,” he says. “I think when I wrote Horseplay I wanted to write something that’s like an 11 p.m. Fringe show. Very weird and also very alive.”
PREVIEW
Horseplay
Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre
Written by: Kole Durnford
Directed by: Heather Inglis
Starring: Alexander Ariate, Lee Boyes
Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.
Running: Friday through June 1
Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will, suggested price $40).
