Six-year-old’s question answered with optimistic script

A few days before the opening day of Tad & Birdy, the first of Anika Dowsett’s plays to be professionally produced, the playwright gave some dramaturgical credit to both the Barenaked Ladies and a six-year-old girl.

“OK, so the first line of the show that I ever wrote actually came directly from an interaction I had with a student when I was still teaching at (the Manitoba Theatre for Young People,” says Dowsett, who uses they/them pronouns.

“She was trying to make something with this other group of girls, and I guess they didn’t like her idea. So she was crying and we went outside to talk about it. I asked her what was going on, and she said, ‘Do you think you can still trying if your heart’s broke?’ That grammatically incorrect, earnest, lovely, between-sobs question was so big from a six-year-old and really touched a nerve for me,” remembers the 28-year-old Dowsett, who was raised in Gimli and spent over a decade learning and working at MTYP, where Tad & Birdy premières this weekend.

It was the type of question that reminded Dowsett why they loved writing theatre for young audiences, posed bravely, wisely and vulnerably, without a shred of embarrassment at either its imperfection or its uncertainty.

Dowsett’s answer was an emphatic, “‘Yes, I do.’”

The Barenaked Ladies inspiration came later, as Dowsett got started as a part of MTYP’s Sandbox playwriting unit, a program designed to help new and emerging playwrights bring their stories to the stage through professional mentorship, peer collaboration and imaginative play.

As an early idea-generating exercise, MTYP’s artistic director Pablo Felices-Luna — who will make his Stratford Festival debut this year as the director of The Hobbit — randomly assigned each playwright a children’s song, challenging each artist to pitch a show inspired by the ditty.

Dowsett, who had been struggling with writer’s block, was assigned Pollywog in a Bog, the third track on the Barenaked Ladies’ 2008 kids album Snack Time!

The bouncy rhythm and the suggestion of an amphibious creature wishing to travel between biomes gave Dowsett visions of a teensy tadpole trying to fly, which led to them imagining a conversation between the frog-in-training and a lovebird.

In 20 minutes, Dowsett developed a basic outline about the two creatures — one optimistic about the future, the other somewhat jaded by life’s disappointments — meeting in a messy bedroom.

“After pitching it, I was like, ‘I actually really love this idea,” says Dowsett, who was encouraged by Felices-Luna to give the story a full treatment.

With no pun intended, the frog-minded play was awarded funding through Leaps and Bounds, a grant program offered through Toronto’s Young Peoples’ Theatre. That funding enabled Dowsett to hold a workshop for the show at MTYP, hiring local artist Brian Longfield to consider a key question: should the play star people or puppets?

The energy of the workshop’s performers, Samuel Benson (Birdy) and Hera Nalam (Tad) — who star in the show’s world première — helped Dowsett and director Erin McGrath decide that people should play the titular characters the audience meets.

That decision helped unlock the show’s overarching sense of humour and of scale, says Dowsett.

As in Honey, I Shrunk The Kids or Toy Story, the set, prop and costume design by Denyse Karn stretches the limits of reality to inject a sense of play into Tad and Birdy’s universe.

“There’s something to me that’s so delightful about things that are larger than they’re supposed to be in real life. Remember those tiny chairs in kindergarten? As a kindergartner they’re the biggest chairs you’ve ever seen,” Dowsett says.

Throughout the play’s development, Dowsett, who now works as a sexual health educator and drop-in worker, was able to reconnect with that feeling of being plunked into an overwhelming new world.

That fish-out-of-water mindset also helped establish one of the play’s central questions, which is just as applicable to five-year-olds as it is to grown-ups.

“The question of how we support one another, I was really obsessed with that while writing,” says Dowsett. “Also, how do we find our place in the world? What makes us keep trying, even when things are really hard? At this point in my life I was really interested in asking what I wanted from my interpersonal relationships, from my friendships, from my loves.”

Dowsett, who’s currently dreaming up a play about their obsession with k.d. lang, is also “really obsessed” with movement theatre and puppet theatre.

“There are so many experimental and exciting set and movement pieces that happen (at MTYP) that I’ve seen in my life where you take one thing and add another to it, turning it into an entirely new thing,” Dowsett says, explaining the ways different forms of theatre — puppetry, clowning, dance, devised theatre and simple play — present in Tad and Birdy.

“I think a little boy’s room, especially a little boy’s messy room, has so much stuff to make magic out of.”

Even if your heart’s broke.

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