PTE names Ann Hodges as new artistic director By: Ben Waldman Posted: 3:20 PM CDT Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024 Last Modified: 3:59 PM CDT Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024 Updates

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Ann Hodges is the new artistic director of Prairie Theatre Exchange.

One of the most experienced professionals in Winnipeg’s theatre industry with extensive credits on national and international stages, Hodges is set to begin leading the 51-year-old company on Nov. 4, two days before the première performance of Ponderosa Pine, the second production of the PTE season.

“I’m passionate about honouring PTE’s legacy of creating clear, compelling and entertaining theatre for Prairie audiences, supporting Canadian playwrights and being an integral part of the community we live in — audience and artists,” Hodges said in a release.

A prolific freelance artist, librettist, educator and playwright for more than 30 years, Hodges — whose work is currently onstage with Manitoba Opera’s The Elixir of Love — has directed for every major Manitoba theatre company, helming 16 productions for PTE, including The Birds and the Bees, Butcher, Marion Bridge and The Rez Sisters.

The hiring of a new artistic director represents the latter half of a managerial overhaul at PTE following the joint exit of AD Thomas Morgan Jones and managing director Lisa Li after the 2023-2024 season.

Earlier this year, Katie Inverarity, a longtime marketing executive at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, was hired to replace Li, who now works at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre.

After an extensive search for a replacement for Jones, who was AD for five years before accepting the directorship of the National Theatre School’s English playwriting program, PTE announced Hodges as his successor on Wednesday.

“Through our conversations during the search process, it was abundantly clear that Ann’s care and vision for PTE is exactly what we need today and into the future,” said Ryan Palmer, chairman of the search committee and vice-president of PTE’s board of directors, in the release.

For most of her career, Hodges was a jet-setting theatre freelancer, often travelling for four to five months per year.

“About a decade ago I decided to rearrange my life,” she says in an interview, with a goal of spending more time in one place, making longer-term impacts.

That made the job at Prairie Theatre Exchange appealing; Hodges’ solid experience with the company didn’t hurt either. In the late 1980s, she was hired as a summer student at PTE by company co-founder Colin Jackson, working with longtime artistic director Kim McCaw at a time when “the company was really breaking forward and finding what it did well,” she says.

“It was abundantly clear that Ann’s care and vision for PTE is exactly what we need today and into the future.”–Ryan Palmer

Hodges also served as an artistic associate in 2014 under then-artistic director Robert Metcalfe, gaining further appreciation for the types of stories that could be told under the PTE mandate.

Hodges first decided she wanted to be a director at age 15 when she co-wrote new lyrics to existing musicals for class productions at St. Mary’s Academy under drama teacher Sally Dick. As a teenager, she saw a West End production of Godspell in London, and that was that.

After studying at the University of Winnipeg, Hodges went to the National Theatre School in Montreal to study directing.

As she established herself as a performer and director in the 1990s, Hodges became the interim artistic director of the defunct Popular Theatre Alliance of Manitoba and in 1994 directed Romeo and Juliet as the inaugural production of Shakespeare in the Ruins, a company Hodges co-founded.

Though Hodges never strayed far from Manitoba stages, she became a sought-after and successful dramaturg and director specializing in musical theatre, opera and adaptations of both genres for young audiences.

Her Cenerentola, Hansel and Gretel and The Barber of Barkerville have been produced across Canada, and she’s written English dialogue for operas such as Die Fledermaus, La Fille du Regiment and The Abduction from the Seraglio.

Hodges has taught with Calgary Opera, UBC, the National Theatre School and Sheridan College, among other institutions.

Her experiences at PTE mean she understands from a different perspective the way the theatre’s three-sided mainstage dictates how stories are communicated.

“The experience isn’t just watching that play, it’s watching each other,” she says.

Hodges technically isn’t the first woman to hold the artistic directorship of Prairie Theatre Exchange, though one has to travel back to 1980 to reach the tenure of Deborah Baer Quinn, who led the company for four years, when it was still known as the Manitoba Theatre Workshop.

While her work with PTE begins next week, Hodges is still set to direct Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s production of the Tony-winning Waitress in January starring Stephanie Sy.

“It’s my favourite musical,” says Hodges, who’s already dreaming up plans for the 2025-2026 season.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com