Televangelists by Mika Boutin, Nextfest 2025. Photo supplied.
By Liz Nicholls,
Televangelists, Nextfest’s biggest mainstage production — cast of eight, huge tech team, the festival’s longest list of warnings — found its way to the stage via an original route. One that’s not well marked on any theatre GPS.
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Playwright Mika Boutin, at 23 a drummer, a singer, a poet, a director with a specialty in intimacy coaching, a theatre school grad — and now playwright — knows the punk scene and its people, from the inside out. “And I grew up in a church,” she explains. “I wanted to see how these things intersect.”
Her first play, an insight into the dark and dangerous labyrinth of youth culture, has a title that reflects this cross-hatching. Televangelists is the name of the punk band at the centre of the play. The boys are in the band; the girls are ‘girlfriends’ or hook-ups, fan/groupies. And we see the Canadian punk rock scene and its cultural surround in all its viciousness, trauma, drug- and porn-fuelled darkness, through the experiences of naive Seven who has her eyes opened the hard way.
“It started from a collection of poetry,” says Boutin who was a poet and short story writer before she was a playwright (“this is my first venture into something live”). “The first poem was a love letter — to myself.” And a play was seeded in the thought that “it sounds more like a character than it does me…. Then I thought about what her friends might be like, then what her community might be like, how she came to be.”
Televangelists by Mika Boutin, Nextfest 2025. Photo supplied
There’s startling poetry woven into the layers of language of this highly unusual, impressively accomplished play, set in the Canadian punk scene of 1997. In the first scene, four girls are summoning their childhood experiences, in a weave of memories joined by a chorus borrowed from a Boutin poem: “we were girls together” And the play is bookended by a memorably visceral blood-soaked last supper scene, Jacobean in vigour and with its own ritualistic poetry. It’ll make you gasp (as I know from first-hand experience at the opening performance this past weekend).
Boutin was struck, she says, by “what childhood looks like for four different girls, who grew up in the same place, doing the same things, but how differently they all experienced it.” And how they stepped into very different lives.
The setting, 28 years ago, is intriguingly historical for Boutin, a Concordia U theatre grad, with an English minor (“English class was where I flourished in school”). She went to theatre school “thinking I wanted to be an actor, and then … wait, I don’t like acting! I love directing, playwriting, intimacy directing. That’s my jam.” Punk rock is her music, and she’s engaging and articulate about explaining. The activism and feminist potential of punk are attractions. “It’s been such an outlet for people, especially women, to have their thoughts heard by people who wouldn’t usually hear them. And it lets their voices be heard really really loud!”
She chose the ‘90s for being the heyday of the Riot Girls movement, an inspiration for the play. “Riot Girls wasn’t super-introspective,” she says, “which was its downfall.” But it came at a timely moment: rock was focused on “men and boys and what they wanted to say…. Besides, I wanted an excuse to do research,” Boutin laughs. “And what a good way to inject the music I love, the music I listen to….” A period favourite? Bikini Kill. And the sound of more recent bands she likes is heavily influenced by ‘90s punk, among them Die Spitz and Amyl and the Sniffers.
Televangelists by Mika Boutin, Nextfest 2025. Photo supplied
The males of Televangelists are pretty nasty. Seven’s boyfriend/hook-up, for example is “gross and racists and creepy.” The new bassist, a “major major douche,” has just moved from Vancouver, a pattern that is commonplace in the music world, says Boutin. “When they get outed for doing something terrible in a city, they just jump a city over.” The third guy, the girls’ childhood friend, “is the only one on their side.”
“The worst thing is that these characters are based on real people,” says Boutin. “This is very close to reality, people I’ve interacted with, people my friends have interacted with.” Their awfulness is, as she describes with a smile, a challenge for the actors who play them, “the nicest people, people I know and love.”
In fact, “a lot of the play is really close to reality,” Boutin says. “It’s not all personal experience, but “things that have happened to a friend or I’ve heard about. Things I’ve been around.”
Televangelists by Mika Boutin, Nextfest 2025. Photo supplied
The play turns on a double-axis. On the one hand, the grunge reality, and the chronic abuse that goes with it “and makes you angry,” as she puts it. On the other, what she describes as “another world, a heaven-like place called Elsewhere” with its own poetry and lyrical movement pieces devised by director Nicole Maloney. “I couldn’t imagine anyone better to direct this,” says Boutin of Maloney, whose directorial work Fringe audiences have seen in two original festival hits Let’s Not Turn On Each Other and OnPOINT, a clown spin-off from Swan Lake.
Boutin and Nextfest have a history together. Last year she directed Dog Bite Theatre Company’s inaugural production, the premiere of Tori Kibblewhite’s Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender. This year, for her playwright’s debut, Nextfest and festival director Ellen Chorley have “let us go crazy,” Boutin says appreciatively. “They’ve let us build a whole set, with walls and beds and couches. They’ve let us have a team of 19, and so much tech time. So much support!”
“Really wonderful,” sats Boutin. “They’ve rolled out the red carpet. They’ll do whatever it takes to make whatever is in your head happen. And we’re so grateful.”
And hey, Boutin and friends like Michael Watt and Jacquelin Walters (Let’s Not Turn On Each Other) and Spenser Kells (Brother Rat) have recorded an original song. Purple Sun has a satirical edge: “it’s made to be sung by a shitty boy band, the kind with fake-deep lyrics,” Boutin laughs. You can catch it on streaming services.
Televangelists runs Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday on the Nancy Power stage at Nextfest. Check the times, and get tickets at nextfest.ca.
