Winnipeg actor Lumsden doing double at Stratford

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This article was published 15/11/2023 (1042 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba will be well-represented at the 2024 Stratford Festival.

The prestigious theatre organization has announced the actors cast for its upcoming year, with Winnipeg actor Julie Lumsden slated to appear in two productions by North America’s largest classical repertory company: a staging of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and a world première adaptation of Neepawa-born author Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners.

But the local connections go further than that.

The Diviners, which will run in Stratford from Aug. 24 to Oct. 2, was adapted for the stage by Vern Thiessen and Yvette Nolan, and will be directed by Krista Jackson and Geneviève Pelletier. All four have roots in Winnipeg, as do folk singer Andrina Turenne and multi-instrumentalist MJ Dandeneau, who will serve as composer and sound designer respectively.

Published in 1974, Laurence’s Governor General award-winning novel tells the story of Morag Gunn, a single mother and novelist living in Manawaka, a fictionalized version of Neepawa. The Diviners faced backlash over its depiction of a romantic relationship between the settler Morag and a Métis man named Jules, along with calls for censorship over its use of profanity along with its depiction of sex, abortion and race.

Thiessen and Nolan’s adaptation is in English, French and Michif. Jackson, who now serves as artistic and creative director of Montreal’s Imago Theatre, says that now felt like an important time to revisit the novel, which tells a compelling Manitoban, Métis and feminist story.

“Margaret Laurence was ahead of her time writing about women and women’s desire,” she told the Free Press in September.

Nolan was most recently at Stratford to direct this year’s production of Manitoban playwright Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade. Pelletier is the artistic director at Theatre Cercle Moliere. Thiessen is a Governor General award-winning playwright and the former school director at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People.

Elsewhere at Stratford, Prairie Theatre Exchange artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones will direct the North American première of Ella Hickson’s Wendy and Peter Pan, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

His latest directorial effort, choreographed by Jera Wolfe (the creator of Bare at the RWB), opens June 15.

And after directing the Stratford production of Jonathan Larson’s Rent this year, Winnipeg-born Thom Allison will take charge of La Cage aux Folles, the drag comedy-musical from Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman.

The Stratford season runs from mid-April through October.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com