New local theatre production ‘Glory!’ defies categorization

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A groundbreaking children’s album about gender roles and a nudity-laden magazine promising “entertainment for men” collide in Glory!, the latest — and largest-ever — performance piece by We Quit Theatre, a scrappy, do-it-ourselves local theatre collective.

Described as a “contemporary dance docu-drama,” Glory! opens tonight at Théâtre Cercle Molière.

We Quit, led by Gislina Patterson and Dasha Plett, was sent down a research rabbit hole by actor Arne MacPherson and dance artist Emma Beech, who had been thinking for the better part of five years about how to explore the ideals of the 1972 album, Free to Be … You and Me, on stage.

Free to Be was a staple of Patterson’s childhood, with his parents MacPherson and Debbie Patterson playing it loudly and proudly. For Patterson, 31, the album represented a beautiful vision of 1970s idealism, liberation and utopianism. Created by actor Marlo Thomas, featuring contributions from Diana Ross, Harry Belafonte and NFL star Rosy Grier (author of the how-to handbook Needlepoint for Men), Free To Be is a landmark of both children’s entertainment and gender education.

“It’s all about this idea of a place that doesn’t exist yet, where we can achieve a level of freedom we don’t know how to get in the place where we are, and I think that’s a really beautiful, powerful message,” says Patterson, who is trans and uses he/him pronouns.

The ideology is contrasted in Glory! with a different type of utopian ideal promised by Playboy, he adds.

In recent years, Free to Be’s idealistic message, Patterson says, has been warped and weaponized by right-wing politics determined to undermine trans rights and freedoms.

“There’s a piece in this show that’s choreographed around the comment section of an opinion piece in the New York Times about Free to Be that twists the message to suggest that the idea of transition is somehow contrary to, or a betrayal of, the ideas of liberation from gender roles on (the album). To see something that was so influential for me and so many people used in that way now is so heartbreaking,” says Patterson, who directs Glory!.

Though their work defies categorization, Patterson and Plett, a sound designer and electronic musician who performs as Princess Dasha, write that a uniting force of We Quit’s output has been a “destructive impulse… fuelled by our desire for a better genre, a better gender, a better politics, a better performance.”

Glory! is no different, say MacPherson and Beech, who perform as Hugh Hefner, Shel Silverstein (who worked on both the album and the magazine), a playful bunny and a lonesome deer roaming the grounds of the Playboy Mansion.

“It’s slippery,” says Beech of the work, co-created by MacPherson, Beech, Patterson, Plett and Toronto’s Dhanu Chinniah.

“Esthetically in terms of its form, it’s something that I’ve never seen before,” adds MacPherson. “It’s definitely not a play, for sure. It’s definitely not just a dance piece, although there is a lot of dance and movement in it. It doesn’t follow any kind of rules of dramaturgy of theatre that I’ve heard of anyway. I feel like Gislina and Dasha have invented something really unique and really cool. Like Emma said, it’s slippery.”

That elusive form was key to the show’s development, the artists say, with each bringing their personal experience to the table.

“We workshopped really collaboratively, learning from each other because we all had kind of special skills of our own. Being beginners at some things was really important creatively for us,” says Beech, who first worked with MacPherson in 2017.

“That became almost our credo. This idea that what you bring to a process as a beginner can be really valuable and illuminating,” MacPherson says.

It’s the first time that Patterson and Plett — whose previous works include the trans coming-out story 805-4821, the Shakespearian commentary i am your spaniel and the erotic biblical storytelling of Passion Play — have worked with such a large cast and crew, which includes four performers, a stage manager and people to work on sets and costumes.

“The last time we did a show in Winnipeg, Dasha and I acted in it but also ran the bar and the box office, so this is a really big step for us as a company. It’s been really valuable to welcome other people into our process and it’s helped the way we work grow, change, evolve and open. It’s also just a lot more fun to have other people around,” says Patterson.

Creating theatre independently as trans artists is a way to ensure that he can lean into his creative impulses without the stress, pressure or rigidity of working within an established, institutional structure, Patterson says.

“It’s a lot of work to do everything ourselves, but I think it’s worth it because we can have more control over how we make things,” says Patterson.

Last year, We Quit enjoyed a successful three-show run at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times, a queer-led theatre founded in 1979. That experience inspired Patterson and Plett to not quit, but to instead expand the scope of their work with Glory!.

“It can be really hard to generate momentum doing independent theatre here. We really want to build that up for ourselves but also find the other people who are interested in working in this way, not just to bring them into what we’re doing, but to create space for people to be doing their own things,” says Patterson.

“I really want to see more stuff like this.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca