How One Playwright Imagines The Audience She Writes For

“For me, thinking about this big audience makes my play bigger, because the things I’m worried about right now—getting my son into a good high school, you know, etcetera, etcetera—I’m not sure I want to be writing plays about that. I feel like the playwright is in the business of imagining bigger worlds, and by putting the audience there—especially with the class spectrum—I feel like the plays get deeper and bigger.”

Why Don’t Canadians Want To See Canadian Movies?

“With few exceptions, anglo-Canadians do not go to the theatre to see movies made by their countrymen. The market share of English-language Canadian films at the domestic box office consistently hovers in the 1-per-cent to 1.5-per-cent range of total ticket sales. Last year, it hit 2 per cent. That translated to a total box-office take for all domestic English-language films of $16.3-million – or roughly what the critically panned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot earned.”

Digital Program Books – Is Something Essential Lost When You Abandon Paper?

“We’re bringing the audience closer than ever before through new innovations like interactive program books. We are also going green by cutting back on all paper, ink and waste as a result of traditional methods. … Removing the wasted paper of printed books is the first step in our relationship with the opera-goers of the future.”

Social Media: To Blame For Literary Mediocrity?

“A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel.”

How A Theatre Season Can Come Together To Support – Or Ignore – Diversity

“There are hundreds of priorities to balance in the process of planning a season. The decisions we make reveal the hierarchy of those priorities. It is the season, not the mission statement, that expresses what we believe in, what we fight for, what we privilege right now, in this moment. A season is an expression of our values, both personally (as leaders) and institutionally. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, this is the bottom line. A season does not ‘just come together.'”