Precocious truancy, theatrical fluency

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This article was published 28/02/2024 (609 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a teenage truant, Canadian playwright Donna-Michelle St. Bernard didn’t simply opt for an afternoon spent at the movies or the mall while her teachers called her name during roll call — too predictable.

Instead, at 15 years old, St. Bernard embarked on a three-hour round-trip to York University, ponying up the cash for a varsity sweater from the campus store and silently planting herself in a lecture hall, listening in as theatre students dissected A Streetcar Named Desire.

“I was cosplaying,” says the 45-year-old MC, actor and three-time Governor General’s Award nominee for playwriting. “It was an installation performance, but I don’t know if they understood.

“That was the first place I saw people talking about the meaning of a piece of literature in a way that didn’t presume there was a single correct answer.”

That openness to possibility excited St. Bernard, who flitted from high school to high school, struggling to fit her thoughts — informed by her Blackness and queerness — into a system seemingly designed to iron them down into conformity.

Before she knew how to express them, St. Bernard — whose latest work, Diggers, opens at PTE tonight — knew she had stories to tell.

Once she earned her high school equivalency, St. Bernard became a real-life university student, enrolling at the University of Toronto to study Latin and religion before switching over to English. She started working at Toronto’s Native Earth, the country’s longest-running Indigenous performing arts company.

“I knew if I was going to give away my working hours, I wouldn’t give them to anything that I didn’t believe in,” she says. “That was a place where no matter what kind of work I did, I felt I was contributing to something purposeful.”

It was there that St. Bernard built an understanding of values-based theatre-making, using performance to “stand up for people and fight the good fight.”

The 54ology project — currently 15 years and 16 completed countries, or stories, deep — became an avenue for St. Bernard to combat the “single-story effect,” a concept popularized in a 2009 TED Talk by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

“My shorthand of it is that the one thing everybody thinks they know about Africa is that the countries are poor and the governments are corrupt, but there isn’t one story about that many nations. The continent is full of distinct cultures, languages and processes,” says St. Bernard, whose family is Grenadian.

“There are the stories that we’re allowed to tell over and over again, and then there are all of these stories that we don’t regard. I felt like if I was going to look at Zimbabwe, I was going to keep looking.”

Written in 2020, produced for the first time last fall at Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop in a co-production with Prairie Theatre Exchange, Diggers tells the story of three graveyard labourers in Sierra Leone.

With any of her 54ology plays, St. Bernard says she begins with an interrogation of her own obligations as a storyteller.

I begin with the understanding that I am likely to have poor understanding of septic tanks or farming, so information is not what I am contributing to this work. I have to look at the story and say, ‘What is something I can illuminate that I do understand?’ For me, that is human interaction,” she says.

“In the process of staging these pieces, I take care not to purport that this is a play set in a place, only that the story is drawn from that place. I am not going to familiarize you with the specific accents, because I don’t think that’s the best way to spend our time. I don’t want accent coaching. I’m going to instead invest in trying to understand the context of certain decisions being made, and the options these people have available to them.”

St. Bernard strives to understand her characters, so for Diggers, the playwright put down her pen and picked up a shovel.

First, she dug up her backyard, much to her roommate’s shock and chagrin. Then, she stopped by an active construction site and asked if she could tap in for five minutes.

“I was like, ‘Can I get in here?’ Ask anybody who’s driving with me down any road. I will just yell out, ‘Digger! Pull over,’” she says.

She’s also dug on farms and in a cemetery — though not a full grave — to understand the rhythms and the motions of the work, which to her was gruelling but to her characters is de rigueur.

“I learned I’m in the right job,” she says. “But I also learned something about the meditative quality of repetitive action, and the satisfaction that comes with a job you can look at and say, with certainty, that it is complete.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com