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.
A couple years ago, I went to a performance at a major Toronto theatre company where a technical issue repeatedly delayed the start of the show. The auditorium would dim, the opening music would play — but then the house lights would come back on and an apologetic voice on the god mic would announce that the difficulties were still ongoing. The first time this happened, the audience was understanding. The second time, we were exasperated. By the third malfunction, we thought this was freaking hilarious, and greeted the voice’s apology with a round of applause. Once the show finally began, that first streak of failure had united us — and delighted us — as a flawless performance never could.
I wish Veronica Hortigüela and Annie Luján could’ve been there to offer commentary. An acclaimed clown duo, they know that acknowledging and embracing failure onstage can often lead to the biggest laughs. Their hit show MONKS, which premiered last year at the Toronto Fringe Festival, sold out its run and garnered rave reviews. After a brief remount as part of Crow’s Cabaret in October, MONKS is returning for another run at The Theatre Centre starting February 26. (Tickets are again sold out, but you can join an in-person waitlist an hour before each performance.)
If you read the word “clown” just now and pictured Ronald McDonald, or Pennywise from Stephen King’s It, have no fear: those characters have little to do with MONKS. Although many different styles exist, at its core, clown is a type of comic performance that prizes direct connection to an audience, and a performer’s authentic response to whatever chaos happens in the moment.
Over coffee, I listened to Luján and Hortigüela discuss the origins of MONKS, their clown heroes, and the beauty of wiping out onstage. I left convinced that Toronto theatre could benefit from a healthy dose of clown logic.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
This might be a silly question, given your sold-out run, but how would you pitch MONKS to someone who knows nothing about the show?
Annie Luján (AL): We’re just two monks who might have misplaced our donkey, and we’re going to find out what’s important to us in life. MONKS is very non-narrative, and we like it that way. There’s a lot of simplicity.
Veronica Hortigüela (VH): And also it’s so stupid.
AL: It’s so stupid! We’re so passionate about that.
VH: It’s studied, it’s researched, it’s rigorous, and also it’s stupid. We don’t take it too seriously. We hope you don’t take it too seriously. You will probably feel uncomfortable at some point. But we promise that we’re taking care of you.
How did you first find theatre, or how did theatre find you?
AL: My mom put me in a basement church theatre program. None of my family was religious. I didn’t even go to church. We did Narnia, and after that I was hooked.
VH: I would come from half-day kindergarten, and all I’d want to do is put on my church shoes — I grew up going every Sunday — and dance to ABBA Gold in the basement for hours. Then Mamma Mia! came to town and my parents took me, and my aspiration became to sing ABBA for a living. Then I realized I couldn’t sing. Instead, I would do community theatre, and they would give me the biggest part they could that involved the least amount of singing.
AL: I love how we’ve both already touched on religion. It’s going to seem like MONKS was born out of this shared religious upbringing, but it’s not.
VH: Annie and I met on our first day at a Catholic arts high school.
AL: I remember the first moment I met Veronica. I was walking behind her in the orientation line. She was wearing bright red skinny jeans, and she walked into a door. I was like, ‘Are you OK?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah.’ And I was like, ‘Wow. She’s great.’
VH: I don’t remember the skinny jeans, but it’s possible that I’ve suppressed that fashion choice.
When did this friendship turn into an artistic collaboration?
AL: We were both passionate about theatre. We did drama class every single day for four years. We spent all our afternoons writing and dreaming up ideas, and going to see shows. We became collaborators, without even talking about it that way.
VH: We were super lucky in that our high school teachers provided us with tons of opportunities to write. We’d sit at Annie’s desktop after school, or at the Sheppard Centre mall eating a lot of pizza, and we’d write plays line by line together. Looking back, I can’t decide whether that’s an insane way to work, or perfect.
Do you remember the first play you wrote together?
VH: It was a Disney murder mystery.
AL: It was called After Ever After. We created a large-scale murder mystery farce with all these Disney characters. Veronica was Maleficent and I was the Queen of Hearts.
VH: To this day, a brilliant crowning achievement, truly.
Fast-forward to the success of MONKS. How did this show come to be?
AL: When we got the Fringe slot in 2024, we did not have an idea for a show. But for the past six years, we’d been training in clown in different ways, on and off. We’d been building mini-shows that we’d invite 10 people to come see. So we knew it was time to put six years of cooking into action. I brought monks to the table, and Veronica brought this idea of people who count lentils. We both immediately knew that the setting was going to be medieval.
What drew us to monks as the subject of a clown show was: A, this idea of a firm structure that can be disrupted; B, something that could hold beauty; and, C, something people could buy into without us having to explain the rules. If I go like this — my hands are clasped — you know I’m praying. Clown is great at disrupting. How can you use those familiar images to create a game or break the image?
There are so many different schools of clown. What have your influences been?
VH: My journey began in theatre school at Toronto Metropolitan University. Actor and playwright Leah Cherniak taught us clown. What I loved most about clown was that I had no choice but to be entirely present. Leah encouraged us to acknowledge failure, celebrate it, and allow that to grow, as opposed to pushing through with a smile. That attracted me right away, because it was in opposition to everything I’d known about theatre up until that point: a rigorous desire to make things perfect and repeatable.
AL: I went to theatre school in Montreal, at Concordia. There’s a huge clown scene in Montreal. I had an amazing teacher named Joe De Paul. I’ve always loved comedy, but I never felt like comedy itself was theatrical enough for me. When I found clown, I was like, this is it. When Veronica and I were both back in Toronto, we got a Canada Council Research and Creation Grant, which afforded us and one of our other collaborators, Sasha Luna, three months of paid full-time clown training. It was transformational.
Ken Hall and Isaac Kessler, who are clown comedians in Toronto, became our main mentors. I also went to Italy and trained in commedia dell’arte. All that to say, yes, lots of clown influences — but what I think Veronica and I fell in love with most during that three months was this style of clown called idiot work.
Idiot work comes from L.A., from the Idiot Workshop founded by John Gilkey. It’s a very modern style of clown that you wouldn’t know was clown. There’s no red nose, no quirky costume. Its principles are simple: audience, play, commitment, risk, and presence. We got so influenced by these amazing clowns from L.A. who practice idiot work: Natalie Palamides, Gemma Soldati, Chad Damiani. They’ll do crazy things onstage where it feels like they’ve gone past laughter, and now they’re seeing what else they can evoke in people, like disgust and rage and shock.
VH: We also spent a large portion of that three month intensive with Ken and Isaac studying how to build trust with an audience. As someone who performs for a living, this might seem counterintuitive, but I cringe at audience participation! When I get called on to do something, I feel so exposed. There’s such an art to building that relationship.
AL: I want to say a bit more about that, because we’re really passionate about it. Now, when I see theatre, it’s clear to me when a show has added audience interaction as a fun motif, but there’s been no training, no study, no deep moment-to-moment understanding of, what is looking at someone? What is putting out a hand? What are those little gestures? In creating MONKS, every single moment we were thinking, how do we involve the audience? Minute-to-minute, how do we gain their trust? How can we afford to lose it for a few minutes and then get them to love us again?
Some people in theatre would say that you can’t think about the audience, you have to just go for it. Maybe that’s true in some forms. But for us, the audience is our number one priority, and so much care goes into that.
What other parts of your training are you bringing to MONKS?
AL: Risk and presence. To me, presence is the ultimate risk. If you’re going to stand there in front of people, with a whole show behind you, with all this planning, and actually be present with someone, then you’re opening yourself up to changing the show so much. There’s nothing more risky than being open to change — but you can’t be authentically open to that change without being fully present. In clown, there are so many exercises where you go on stage and you’re just exposed with nothing to do. We try to hold on to that feeling while trying to balance this show behind us. Sometimes, there’s a clown flow state that happens.
VH: I remember in our earliest training, Annie was really insistent that we do things like Viewpoints, [a training technique developed by choreographer Mary Overlie in the 1970s, and then expanded upon by directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau]. We’d do an hour-and-a-half of just moving together and tuning into one another. I’m so flattered that one of the things people seem to appreciate in MONKS is our chemistry. Not only are Annie and I friends, but we’ve worked really hard to exercise those muscles of being able to sense and see one another without literally watching one another. It’s a workout to create these moments of chaos in one corner of the theatre, while being tuned into what Annie is doing in the opposite corner.
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about Toronto theatre, what would it be?
VH: Just one?
You can say more than one! Go off.
AL: MONKS was created over seven months. In rehearsal processes and creation processes, two or three months is not enough. I know it’s so hard and money is scarce, but it makes a world of difference, taking that time.
VH: I think theatres are very special places, and I appreciate how carefully we consider being careful. I also appreciate the ability to make a mess. I’ll never forget the water glasses we used onstage in theatre school being wrapped in tape. Obviously those measures are there for good reason, because at some point the glass fell and someone stepped on it and cut open their foot. I want people to be safe to explore, but I’d also love a little more license to make a mess at times.
AL: I think Toronto needs to take comedies more seriously. For me, it’s so obvious that laughter gets people breathing together. If we can get people genuinely breathing and loosened up, then imagine where we can take them after that, versus if we start in tension. I’ve also said this a lot, but comedy is not making people laugh every few minutes. In my mind, if people aren’t peeing their pants, we didn’t work hard enough. I think we can raise the bar on how out-of-control laughing we can make an audience.
VH: I wish that theatres had the ability to play more loosely with their schedules, to allow shows like MONKS — and all the other shows that I’m sure would love a space — to go up this month, and then go up again two months later when they’re trying out new material, and then go up a month later with a new audience, and continue to grow and learn, as opposed to shows existing for a wonderful one or two week run and then we never see them again. We were so lucky that MONKS got a second life at Crow’s and then a third at The Theatre Centre. I know there are so many shows that would benefit from that same opportunity.
AL: Last thing I want to say: I see artistic directors toiling away being like, how do we reach the children? (As in, people under 30.) How do we get these kids in the seats? I want to be like: clown has a young audience. Comedy, often, has a younger audience.
VH: We’ve been so overjoyed and honoured by the youth in our audiences. And what’s even more flattering is that people are coming twice, three times, four times to see the show.
AL: And we’ve only had 12 shows! [People have said that they come] back because we change night-to-night — because you’re guaranteed a different show. Even though so many theatres act as if consistency is key, maybe consistency is also the killer of repeated viewership. I think it’s an avenue Toronto theatre should explore: shows that change night-to-night, shows that are funny, and that have the principles of clown.
Can you give me an example of one of those show-to-show changes in MONKS?
VH: I have a particular moment in the show that is the most nerve-wracking part for me, where Annie is offstage. This particular show, I had gotten through this moment that I was so nervous about, and I was so genuinely happy to be done that I went to high-five an audience member. I slipped, as if on a banana peel, and fell flat on my back. It was such a stupid pratfall.
The audience, of course, laughed and laughed — then there was a moment of silence, and everyone thought I had broken my back. And I just had to make the choice to lean into it. I remember standing back up and looking that audience member in the eye and saying, “I’m never gonna forget this.” I meant it from my heart: I’ll never forget the time that I wiped out so hard on stage, and I was alone, and it was incredible.
AL: I think it’s a testament to the show that the audience was like, ‘oh yeah, that’s just part of it. That’s just the level of idiocy these performers are committed to.’
VH: I believe they were laughing because they could see that I was present in this moment of humiliation. It’s Jordan Tannahill’s idea from the book Theatre of the Unimpressed that theatre, unlike film or TV, best imitates life, in that life is full of failure and the possibility of failure. It’s why we’re all attracted to those moments in shows where someone drops their prop, or why those clips of people breaking on Saturday Night Live go viral. I think that fall was my truest moment of failure onstage.
AL: There have been moments in MONKS where people have thrown thongs on stage. There was a moment where an audience went off on their own and started chanting the name of one audience member’s dad, to the point where we were just waiting for them to stop. There was a moment where I had to pour cocoa mushroom powder all over a bunch of peoples’ objects that they gave me.
VH: Perhaps it is our greatest failure that we do not film the shows: perhaps out of a lack of organization, or perhaps in a sort of unconscious celebration of what we love about theatre, which is that it’s so different night-to-night, and if you weren’t there, you don’t see that show. But you will see tonight’s show, and it’ll be its own unique experience that only you will have had.
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.
LEARN MORE
