For playwright Erin Shields, the future is female – but what about the past? | Canada Voices

For feminist playwright Erin Shields, there’s no question that the future is female.

But throughout her canon of work, the Governor-General’s Award-winning writer has made a compelling case that the past was female, too – even the myths and epics that have historically spotlighted men. Her plays regularly confront classic texts – Shakespeare, Ovid, even the Bible – and dare to wonder aloud how those stories as we know them might be fundamentally incomplete.

Ransacking Troy, which opens at the Stratford Festival on Aug. 21, is no exception. The work, directed by former Shaw Festival artistic director Jackie Maxwell, wrestles with the Trojan War, asking questions of that legendary tale and coming up with answers which differ from those you might have heard in school.

It’s the first in a string of coming world premieres for Shields. Later this fall, You, Always, a more contemporary work about sisters, will open at Canadian Stage. Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary takes the stage at Crow’s Theatre next spring; Medusa hits Soulpepper a month later.

“My leads will always be female, or potentially non-binary or female-identifying people, characters who have historically been neglected from the dominant narrative,” says Shields of the connective tissue between her forthcoming plays. “That will always be central for me.”

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With Ransacking Troy, Shields is ready to embark on a jam-packed year of discovery, creative friction and collaboration, with a collection of plays that promises to ask in chorus: Where are the women?

“I’ve always been interested in canonical works,” she says. “I’m in awe of the poetry and the characters and the journeys and the big stories. But as a modern woman, I feel kind of left out, and in the margins of these stories. I’m missing that larger perspective.”

At the Stratford Festival – a place that’s all but synonymous with the English-language theatrical canon – Shields works in immediate proximity to a collection of texts whose portrayal of women is, well, a touch uneven. “Shakespeare’s plays were written at a time when women couldn’t even be onstage,” she muses. “It’s really interesting being in Stratford, and creating alongside that collection of work.”

There’s no mistaking Shields’s dramatic voice when you hear it. The playwright has a knack for using heightened language in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing while still being accessible – her rhythm and syntax are carefully fine-tuned, closer to a piece of music than a traditional play.

“There’s always humour. There’s always wit,” says actor Maev Beaty, who appears opposite Irene Poole in Ransacking Troy in the roles of Penelope and Odysseus. Beaty’s working relationship with Shields spans decades – she’ll also appear in You, Always later this year.

“Erin has this very particular poetic voice, with very specific uses of similes and metaphors and alliteration – it’s the same pleasure we get from working on classical texts that ask for rigorous text work,” she continues. “Sometimes Erin’s work can be deceptive because there’s so much contemporary flavour. But she has this deep love of poetic, heightened text. Her language is so uniquely hers.”

“We were running lines recently, and had to ask ourselves if a line in Ransacking Troy said ‘went to war’ or ‘left for war,’” agrees Poole, who plays Clytemnestra, Iphigenia and Agamemnon. “And we checked: Of course, it’s ‘went to war.’ Of course she chose the alliteration. Nothing is by accident. There is nothing casual about Erin’s work.”

That specificity extends beyond the minutiae of war-going. Creating a new play is often, but not always, a collaborative process – sometimes actors will ask questions of a line, or make suggestions for a character, that wind up being written into subsequent drafts.

In the rehearsal room, Shields is open to that input – but she’ll seldom make an adjustment to her work right away. Not without thinking on it deeply.

“She doesn’t rush to make changes,” says Poole. “She thinks about how changing one line affects the rhythm of what’s around it.”

“The further the writing process goes, the more collaborative the work becomes,” explains Shields, who shares that she hand-writes many of her drafts in Moleskine notebooks. “The first bit is diving into my own obsession. Then the circle gets bigger – the director is a really key person for me, for instance. But in terms of what the words are, I know that’s my job. That’s the thing I feel like I’m in charge of.”

Ransacking Troy, finally on the cusp of its world premiere, has been in development for more than five years. Shields has written and read aloud new drafts across Canada, from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2019 to the screen-sized black boxes of pandemic-era Zoom.

“It’s been surprising and affirming to see exactly how this play works,” says Shields of the workshop process. “There’s something about this play that invites people to really work together to solve problems and find their way through it.”

As with most of Shields’s work, there are a few potential audiences for this latest historical remix: those whose obsession with ancient history approximates Shields’s, and those whose knowledge of the Trojan War starts and ends with a giant horse. Either is fine, the playwright assures – she’s a pro at introducing newbies to the lore without boring the experts taking notes in the front row.

“If you have no knowledge of this material, you’re going to have a great time,” she says. “But if you have even a moderate idea of The Iliad and The Odyssey … it’s almost like the Marvel universe. It’s all connected, and it’s really fun to get really nerdy about it. There’s Easter eggs for people who know a lot.”

“But it’s important for me, when I work on these plays, to really think about what’s in the water – what we all kind of know through osmosis,” she continues. “When I was working on Paradise Lost, and the story of Adam and Eve … almost everybody knows the basics there. Almost everybody has some concept of a Christian God. But I’m trying to tell a new story, too. A new story about the characters we barely hear from.”