Speaking in Draft: Marcia Johnson

Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic visionaries shaping Canadian theatre today. In a mixture of lighthearted banter and deep dives into artistic practice, this column invites artists to voice nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of a glorious, frustrating artform. 

Sometimes, in the thick of the hustle, I forget that I’m not the first person to stare with dread at a blank page, or to lament how siloed Canadian theatre can be, all of us in our own creative corners. Whenever I get like this, a reliable antidote is to have a conversation with someone who’s been in the game far longer than I have — someone like playwright, librettist, and actor Marcia Johnson, who I interviewed for this latest installment of Speaking in Draft. 

Johnson’s 2020 play Serving Elizabeth, which offers an anti-colonial perspective on Queen Elizabeth II’s 1952 visit to Kenya, has been a smash hit: to date, it’s received six productions, including one at the Stratford Festival in 2021 — a rare feat on multiple levels for a new Canadian work. At the end of January, Barrie’s Talk is Free Theatre will remount Johnson’s first full-length play, Perfect on Paper, about a Black woman whose feminist politics clash with her secret career as a romance novelist. It felt like the perfect time to talk to Johnson about the evolution of her career and craft, the advice she’s received and given along the way, and her vision for a more united theatre community.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

You were born in Jamaica, and you’ve lived in Canada since you were six years old. How did you find storytelling, or how did storytelling find you?

I learned how to read really young. In fact, I don’t remember not knowing how to read. I loved books. Then, when I saw my first play at school, just a touring kids show, I was gone. It was like everything disappeared around me, and I was actually in the forest, or whatever it was. It blew me away. When I was in grade four — I was nine — I got cast in a play, and that was even more amazing because I was given the words to say and how to say them, and everyone had to be quiet and listen to me.

It’s something I just kept in my heart for a long time, because I didn’t want to be mistaken for the people who said they wanted to be movie stars. I meant that I wanted to act when I grew up, not that I wanted to be famous or a celebrity. I knew that I wanted to tell stories on stage.

Your role in that play was a fairy god-robot. Is that correct?

Yep. A fairy god-robot in Space Cinderella. 

You started your career as an actor. How did you get bitten by the writing bug? 

It started with collaborating. It felt really good to come up with a story with a bunch of other people. At that early stage I thought that was the only way I’d be able to write. Then I had a really bad breakup. At night, when I was trying to figure out the things that I should have said, or the things that would have made it work out differently, I realized I was writing a play. Ever since then I’ve looked at playwriting as going back in time and fixing things, or telling a story in the way that I would have preferred it to work out. 

That play was done at the Rhubarb Festival in 1995. It was called You Look Great Too. It was just a half-hour play, a comedy, and it did really well. So I thought, well, now I’ll write another one — and nothing came. I thought, do I have to have a horrific experience in order for a story to come to me? So I went to study with Natalie Goldberg in Taos, New Mexico. She was doing a one week workshop called Walking in Memory, and it was about writing memoir and writing from the heart. What I learned from her is that you can’t force things — when the story is ready to come it will come — but in the meantime you have to get ready for it, which means writing every day, even if it’s terrible. So that’s where my practice started. 

That was 1997. Three years later I had my first full length play, Perfect on Paper, which is having its first remount this month, 24 years later. I’m very grown up. I’m not in the rehearsal hall. I’m trusting the process.

Is that hard for you as a playwright, not to be there all the time?

I’m learning when the right time is to be there. I sat in on the first day of rehearsal, and I was there for the second half of the second day, and I feel that everyone in the room really respected the work. In other circumstances, I’ve learned to honour a feeling in my stomach that I should stick around, because there were times when I didn’t stick around and I just didn’t recognize my own play. But the team that’s working on Perfect on Paper now, they’re so respectful. They get all the jokes, they get all the cultural messages. I’m really pleased.

I read that Perfect on Paper started as a fringe show, and then it was commissioned for a Sunday Showcase on CBC radio in 2003. You’ve done quite a bit of work for radio. Has working in that medium shaped your writing practice?

It really did. When [the radio version of] Perfect on Paper was commissioned, I thought my hands would be tied, because so much of it was visual, with the romance novel characters ripping bodices and tearing off shirts. But I was completely wrong. When there is no visual element, you have an unlimited budget! All of a sudden I had a scene in a convent in Italy. I had quick costume changes. It was liberating. After the radio drama, I combined the two versions of the play. This production at Talk is Free Theatre is the very first production of that hybrid.

You often perform in your own work. You played the lead role in Perfect on Paper in the first stage and radio versions. You played Mercy, the lead in Serving Elizabeth, in that play’s world premiere production at Western Canada Theatre. How do you balance your actor brain and your playwright brain on the same project? 

The whole reason I started writing was to give myself work, because I just wasn’t getting lead roles, I wasn’t getting interesting roles, and I knew that I could carry them off. My goal when I wrote You Look Great Too was for people to say, ‘Oh my gosh, yes, she can play a lead’ — and then I would never have to write again. Then it turned out that writers were more in demand. I thought ‘OK, maybe I’ll write a few more plays.’

I love them both, acting and writing. When I’m not in the show it can actually be a bit more stressful, because all I want to do is make changes. If I’m acting in a show I’ve written, if I’m trying to remember my blocking and my lines, it’s easier to feel that the play is finished. 

I wanted to congratulate you on the success of Serving Elizabeth — especially given that most Canadian plays only ever receive one production.

It’s demonstrated to me that when people say you can’t predict what’s going to happen, or that you have to be in the right place at the right time, that’s what this all is. Serving Elizabeth would not have gone to Stratford if the pandemic hadn’t happened. The artistic director, Antoni Cimolino, was planning the 2021 season, and he knew that he couldn’t just lift the season that was supposed to have happened in 2020. He wanted to address diversity, equity, and inclusion. He wanted to address the festival’s history. Then [the Stratford Laboratory’s artistic associate at the time] ted witzel handed him Serving Elizabeth. Antoni called and told me that he thought it would be a perfect fit for this new way of looking at things at Stratford. 

This was in October 2020, and the production opened at the end of August 2021. It’s usually seven, eight years that playwrights are getting ready for [a Stratford production of a new Canadian play] and at Stratford it’s usually an adaptation. To have an original play at Stratford, and to have that turnaround time be so short, was amazing. And thank goodness, because I had to keep it a secret. If I’d had to keep it a secret for seven years, I don’t know what would have happened.

Earlier, you said you were inspired by Natalie Goldberg’s advice to write every day. Do you have a strict process you follow? 

It’s constantly changing. I land on something, it works for a while, and then it doesn’t, and then I have to think of something else. The best system for me was writing Serving Elizabeth because I was part of the playwrights’ unit at Thousand Islands Playhouse. There were three of us in the unit. Since it was 2017, and we were all writing plays that were inspired by 150 years of Confederation in Canada. That’s when I happened to see The Crown, and that second episode where the Black people in Kenya were extras instead of playing meaningful roles, and I thought, I want to change that.

We met every month, and we had to have new pages every month. Having those deadlines was amazing, so I set another goal for myself that, every month, I would have at least double the pages that I’d written before. It was great knowing that I was going to be getting feedback from the two other playwrights and the artistic leadership. Because I’m an actor first, the notes were really helpful, because I know how to take direction: You don’t just mimic what someone says. You make it your own. Having to bring material to be read aloud on a regular basis kept me writing. Plus, I was lucky in that the subject matter hit me in the gut. It just poured out of me.

You mentioned that a lot of your plays are about wanting to go back and fix something. Do you feel that with Serving Elizabeth?

Exactly right. Not only fixing The Crown, but fixing the notion about what a central story could be. Yes, there were people lining the streets when Elizabeth and Philip visited Kenya. Yes, there were people waving flags and buying commemorative portraits, but the Mau Mau uprising was stirring as well. There were death threats against Elizabeth, and how could that be ignored when the uprising happened eight months later? Colonization was so top of mind in 2015, and for The Crown to do business as usual — I just thought it was a missed opportunity.

Do you ever think of yourself having a set of responsibilities as a playwright — whether to yourself, to a community, to history, to family?

I do feel a responsibility because there are people who get their information from art. I think a lot of racism and other kinds of bigotry are coming from what’s being fed to the culture. I once heard an interview with a lawyer who specialized in family law. She says that couples are usually in agreement when it comes to child custody. But, she noticed that sometimes, when everyone is around the table, out of nowhere, things get adversarial. She chalked it up to them watching too many courtroom dramas. My favorite comment that people have said after reading or watching Serving Elizabeth is, ‘I never thought of it that way.’ 

In addition to being a playwright, you’re also a wonderful teacher of playwriting. On the level of craft or responsibility, what’s some advice you would give to writers who are just starting out in their careers?

One thing I tell them is that they are going to have to find their own style. Keep writing and it will come. With the right story and the right discipline, there’ll be this moment when it just comes together.

I just feel that writers should be encouraged. I feel that they should get up again when they fall down. And, yes, it’s good to get advice from other people, but in the end it’s your play. I know people who have drastically changed scripts because someone more experienced than them gave them advice, and I just disagree with that. 

As you were learning your craft, who were the other artists who impacted your work?

Djanet Sears was an inspiration because she took control of her career. She wasn’t getting cast either, so she wrote Afrika, Solo and Harlem Duet. When I was writing Perfect on Paper, she told me, ‘Book the theatre, hire the actors, set the date — and then you know that for that date you have to have something for the actors to read.’ I did a more cost-effective way and booked my living room, and I actually finished the draft a week early.

When I wrote You Look Great Too, about the bad breakup, I was chatting with [director and translator] John Van Burek, who at the time was the artistic director — as well as the founder — of Théâtre Français de Toronto. He asked me what I was up to, and he said, ‘when you finish your script I’d love to read it.’ So I went to his house — with a hard copy, this was before email and everything — and he read the script, and he told me to keep going. I told him, ‘I think there are a lot of guys out there who think I’ll be picking on men.’ He said, ‘Screw ‘em.’ That was a really good lesson for me to learn: that I shouldn’t go around trying to please people.

If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about Toronto theatre, what would it be?

I think we should get together and do [something similar to] what’s happening in New York: the whole Playbill thing [where a program contains a detailed listing of other plays happening in the city.] I think if we worked together that way, there would be a trickle down effect, because someone sitting in a theatre where they paid $125 for a ticket would open their program and see all these other options, like Pay-What-You-Can productions, that they probably didn’t even know existed. 

If I could wave a wand, it would be so that we would come together as a community, and all of us would benefit from it. If we did come together doing things like the Playbill idea, that’s when we’d meet each other. I’ve been to smaller theater communities where, on the opening night of a children’s show, the artistic director of the big theatre will be there. I just love that. We’re all in it together. We come at it in different ways, but we all want the audience. We all want the artists. So we should bond. Let’s do it. Let’s have a picnic.

It’s such a pleasure to speak with you!

Thanks so much. 

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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