Unlocking lockdown

Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s latest season begins with a play about two friends navigating a changing world, and it’s all set to take place in a brand-new performance venue inside the colourful complex at The Forks.

After several years of planning, and millions in capital investment, the Richardson Studio Theatre opens its doors for the first time this weekend for Gather, starring Sarah Flynn and Rhea Rodych-Rasidescu and directed by MTYP artistic director Pablo Felices-Luna.

Written by Toronto’s Julia Lederer and Chicago’s Julie Ritchey, Gather tells a warm story that will feel relatable to anyone who persevered through the isolation of the global pandemic.

After their hometown goes into a deep freeze, icing the whole population indoors, two friends set out to rediscover the new landscape.

To discuss the play, which was inspired by separation, Lederer, now based in Los Angeles, and Ritchey — now living in Brisbane, Australia — joined a Zoom call with the Free Press last week.

“We’ve never lived in the same city before,” says Lederer, who has spent countless hours video-chatting with her globetrotting pal. Like the characters in Gather, the two playwrights understand how rare and sacred it can be to spend time together in the same place.

Though the play, intended for audiences five and up, uses a snowstorm as a stand-in metaphor for the pandemic, the playwrights relied on real testimony from young people who’d experienced the separation of COVID-19. In 2021, ahead of Gather’s debut in 2022 as the first post-lockdown production of Chicago’s Filament Theatre, Lederer and Ritchey went straight to the source.

“I started by having some online workshops with young people to capture their experiences of what it felt to be locked down, and what they would want to celebrate when they got back together,” says Lederer. “I was totally overwhelmed with inspiration and their ideas, and I realized, ‘I can’t write this play by myself.’’

So Lederer shot a text to Ritchey, who’d directed a run of Lederer’s play Love Is a Major Organ in 2018 in Boise, Idaho, where the two artists immediately hit it off. “Do you want to write a play with me?”

From separate cities, mostly over Zoom and in some outdoor workshops, the two consulted with about a dozen youth to develop a play about togetherness that itself was inspired by distance.

“I think it was really crucial in the play for young people to not only share their feelings and thoughts about where we were in the world, but to make sure that it was reflective of their experience as well,” says Ritchey. “And I think even though the context of the writing came about in response to the pandemic, it doesn’t feel like a pandemic play. It’s bigger than that and has broader things to say about the ways we isolate and connect.”

In the play, a very close-knit town is struck by a surprise snowstorm in the middle of May, with the white stuff piling up and preventing people from leaving their houses.

That solitude affects each community member somewhat differently, but in related ways, says Lederer. There’s a chef who loses the passion for cooking without guests at the table, and a librarian who simply can’t find the words to describe her feelings.

“So much of this is about not just how we cope in those moments, but what it’s like when everything you know is suddenly taken away, what you have left and how you feel value and love,” Lederer says. “So the play is about how the community copes and is able to come together. But as hard as it is to be apart, it can also be difficult to come back together.”

The play invites audience members to participate — though not in an overwhelming fashion, the writers say. But just as they’re beginning to explain that element of the performance, the Zoom call reaches its 40-minute limit.

“This is just the way it is,” says Ritchey with a laugh, once a second call commences at 7:38 a.m., AEST, 17 hours ahead of Lederer in Los Angeles. “It is pretty cool that we’re in three countries right now.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca