Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Theatre Network, that storied company in the beautiful new theatre on 124th Street, turns 51 this season. And it’s with reduced programming that invites shows by diverse artistic creators onto its two stages — and news of a dramatic transition in artistic leadership after 30 years.
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“The timing is perfect for change,” says Bradley Moss, who’s leaving the artistic directorship of the company in December after a three-decade association with Theatre Network that includes 27 years in the top artistic position. “Across the country it happens constantly to companies who run new facilities. … Our company is going through an evolution; it’s a new company now. It needs new ideas, new ways of doing things, new and fresh energy … like I had when I came in.”
“I owe a lot to Theatre Network … to do the things I got to do, the people I got to work with, the artists we got to support,” says Moss. It’s the moment “for me to return to being an independent individual artist. And I look forward to that,” an anticipation that for him is both professional and personal (his long-time partner lives in Calgary).
The two mainstage shows of season 51, neither produced by Theatre Network, are a new Christmas show, Girl Brain, Actually, a parody of the celebrated seasonal film Love, Actually by the sketch comedy trio Girl Brain. Moss himself directs the production that runs Dec. 11 to 21. Batrabbit Productions’ original Rat Academy, a hit bouffon show birthed at Nextfest, returns, this time to the Nancy Power mainstage (April 9 to 12) to chronicle the outsider fortunes of the last two rats in a rat-free province. And the capper, as usual, is Nextfest, returning for a 31st annual edition in June.
Before that, Theatre Network curates a February weekend “best of Fringe” festival (Feb. 20 to 22) of five indie shows, four of them culled from this past summer’s Fringe festival: Ready Go Theatre’s Where Foxes Lie, a solo thriller by and starring Jezec Sanders; Elon Muskrat by and starring Josh Languedoc; Viva Dance Company’s It’s Just You And Me, and Chris Bullough’s solo show Undiscovered Country, held over by the Fringe. Joining them in the weekend lineup at the festival is Shivamanohari Company’s Dvaita / Duality, a show that explores, in two dance forms, the colonial constructs of gender.
The season also includes the Phoenix Series, a TN initiative to showcase the work of indie companies. So far the lineup includes Alberta Musical Theatre Company’s Pinocchio (running through Sunday at the Roxy), Andrew Ritchie’s Thou Art Here production of Cycle (Oct. 15 to 26), and Brian Webb Dance Company’s Action At A Distance/ BLOT – Body Line of Thought (Nov. 13 and 14). More announcements to follow.
The mainstage performance schedule, in all, which usually runs to nine weeks of performances, has been reduced to 16 days. The struggle, as Moss puts it, is to run a new facility “and make our own work.” And that will be the challenge for the new artistic leadership at Theatre Network, which will, as he advises, include a both an artistic director and an executive director (Moss currently has both jobs).
Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss
When Theatre Network’s long-time ex-cinema home, a 124th St. landmark, burned to the ground Jan. 13, 2015, the company, determined to return to that storefront footprint. It took six years, spent in “exile” from their ‘hood in Strathcona at the (now) Gateway Theatre. But under Moss the new $12 million Roxy opened in 2022, an amazingly compact theatre on three levels that somehow feels spacious inside (two stages, an airy second floor rehearsal hall, a green room, a set-building shop, the works…. It was an achievement, in construction, logistics, government participation at all levels, fund-raising.
“What I learned, in hindsight, was that raising the money, getting government support, getting people excited, to build a building wasn’t that hard,” he says and pauses, laughing, “well, OK, it was hard, and it took 10 years of my life.”
“But then, it changes the company. Running the facility becomes the focus, and you don’t get any increase in support and funding to do that…. Theatre Network is still funded at 2012 levels.” And that’s a disappointment to Moss. “Bricks and mortar get supported. But running it at the level that got you there” is a challenge faced by by theatre companies across the country, as he points out. The lesson is that “with running a facility changes the company, it changes the focus, it becomes about running the facility.”
Since his arrival from Quebec to study directing at the U of A (he has an MFA and counts the late Jim DeFelice and Tom Peacocke as his most important mentors), Moss has championed new work by such Edmonton playwrights as Beth Graham, Collin Doyle, Darrin Hagen, Kenneth T. Williams, among many others. And he’s forged working relationships with star national artists too, Hannah Moscovitch, Mump and Smoot, Colleen Murphy, Ronnie Burkett, Daniel MacIvor, Karen Hines, Eugene Stickland among them. From the beginning Moss made a point of producing important Quebec playwrights, like Michel Tremblay, Dominique Champagne, François Archembault. Last season, in honour of TN’s 50th anniversary, Moss assembled productions by a trio of celebrated artists from across the country who have had long-standing relationships with the company under his leadership: Burkett, Murphy, Mump and Smoot.
Moss’s proudest achievement in a Sterling Award-studded three decades at Theatre Network, he figures, might well be the company’s legacy in nurturing emerging artists (12,000 and counting) and their work. He founded Nextfest in 1996. And the multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists, a bright Moss idea that caught on, has grown in both size and influence exponentially since birth. It has a national profile, and it takes some doing to find theatre artists creating in the scene here, both newcomers and veterans who don’t have a Nextfest credit somewhere in their resumés.
All that and a snazzy new theatre…. “I’m grateful that I got to help the Edmonton community, its playwrights, actors, designers,” says Moss. “The positive story here is that we have a beautiful facility. And it’s perfect timing for new energy to come in, new ways of doing things. …. It happens in new facilities constantly. And that’s OK.”
