From lousy Winnipeg student to award-nominated dramatist

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/11/2006 (7085 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IF Lisa Codrington wins the Governor General’s Award for drama this morning, there will surely be some of her former classmates from River East Collegiate wondering if that could be the same Lisa Codrington.

The Lisa Codrington they knew struggled with grammar and poor essay marks. Her writing showed none of the promise that emerged dramatically in her first play Cast Iron, one of the five finalists for the national best drama GG.

“I don’t think I was a confident writer then and I definitely wasn’t a good speller,” says Codrington by phone from England, where she is performing in ‘Da kink in My Hair in London. “I had a lot of ideas, but it takes me a long time to get them on paper.”

The now-29-year-old Torontonian is thrilled at her unexpected nomination. She knows she is in tough against higher profile playwrights like Daniel MacIvor for I Still Love You; Jason Sherman for Adapt or Die: Plays New and Used as well as Drew Hayden Taylor’s In a World Created by a Drunken God. Morwyn Brebner’s The Optimists, published by Winnipeg’s Scirocco Drama, rounds out the shortlist.

“I was very surprised by the nomination. I’m still very surprised,” says Codrington, whose Barbadian parents still reside in North Kildonan. “I’m such a green writer so it’s wonderful to be given such encouragement.”

Anyone who knew her when she was in Winnipeg would have thought if anything she might be heard of again for her acting. After graduating in 1999 from the University of Manitoba, where she performed in such Black Hole productions as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Codrington headed for Toronto’s Ryerson University to concentrate on acting.

The most important knowledge she took away from U of M was the need to be a self-starter and have her own show to work on when no one else was hiring her. At Ryerson, she submitted a story to a Write from the Hop competition and won a five-month workshop that helped developed that script into Cast Iron.

“In high school I hadn’t thought of myself as a writer,” says Codrington, who performed in Prairie Theatre Exchange’s 1999 production of Love and Anger. “At Ryerson it became a possibility and a necessity.”

Cast Iron is a one-woman memory play focusing on a 75-year-old Bajan woman living in a Winnipeg nursing home. Before Libya Atwell dies she wants to come clean about why she left her native Barbados and about her secret past. Codrington performed it herself at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2002 and later in the Barbados.

She worked at a nursing home in North Kildonan for four years where she was in contact with plenty of seniors.

“People there were locked in a moment of time and would just repeat a name or a phrase,” she recalls. “I wondered what the story was and what if I stopped to listen.”

Codrington is anxious to bring Cast Iron home to Winnipeg but has no plans yet. Her advice for Winnipeg theatre students following her is to take every opportunity to develop their craft.

“Things will never go as you planned,” she says. “Sometimes those detours will take you someplace good. If I hadn’t gone to Ryerson, I would never have written Cast Iron.”

* * *

Adhere and Deny’s latest offering is called Elegy for Khlebnikov, Grant Guy’s homage to the Russian Futurist poet.

Guy has fashioned a stage collage of Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetry and theories, which opens tonight at Adhere and Deny’s pocket theatre at 315-70 Albert St.

Khlebnikov was not a very well-known literary figure, but due to glasnost he was reborn in Russia as a major influence. That compares to 1922 when in his obituary, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote that Khlebnikov was impossible to read.

“His contribution to 20th-century art was huge,” says Guy, Adhere’s artistic director. “He inadvertently invented sound poetry. He is the unseen grandfather of the likes of James Joyce, Hugo Ball and e.e. cummings.”

Khlebnikov (1885-1922) was also tagged as a secular prophet who foresaw torture, poverty and war for the 20th century as well as the impact of technology. In a 1920 essay called The Radio of the Future, he predicted a broader use for radio that sounds today like the Internet with its audio and video streaming.

In a 1917 poem, Khlebnikov wrote about “the palaces of world trade… reduced to ash today.”

“He’s writing about the fall of capitalism and the Czar, but reading it in 2006 you have to think about Sept. 11.”

Elegy for Khlebnikov features Chris Sabel as the poet, with Nadin Gilroy and Carolyn Gray serving as his chorus. The 45-minute production runs nightly at 8 p.m. through Saturday. Tickets are $10 and can be reserved by calling 774-6334.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca