Dreaming of bigger stages

Daniela Smith-Fernandez has had an eventful summer.

Her debut play, the verbose sex comedy Jean-François: plus que parfait premièred at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival in July (earning 4/12 stars in the Free Press).

And just a week before, in early July, Smith-Fernandez joined the Manitoba Association of Playwrights as its new company manager.

“I don’t want inclusion to be tokenism anymore. I want people to be including Manitoba plays because they’re amazing, not because they feel like they should support local,” says the 41-year-old trilingual Chilean-Canadian artist. “(At MAP) I feel like I get to be myself in a way that definitely didn’t happen when I was working in insurance.”

Despite the sometimes raunchy flavour of her playwriting, Smith-Fernandez thinks deeply about a subject, Manitoba theatre, that arts patrons might not think much about after fringe season.

It’s a primary subject of her lively bilingual (French and English) blog, Curtains Up, which is unique in its scope of reviews of local theatre, posted alongside more reflective pieces on multiculturalism and the arts, bilingualism and opera subtitles. (She’s currently seeking writers to replace her at Curtains Up, so she can focus on her new MAP role.)

Working alongside MAP’s executive director Daniel Thau-Eleff, Smith-Fernandez joins the city’s only organization devoted exclusively to the creation of new theatre, with a focus on dramaturgy (like editing, but for theatre), public readings and other opportunities.

It’s clear that as an artist, critic and administrator, Smith-Fernandez has impressive ambitions for Manitoba theatre generally. “I want it to be a problem to decide which local play they’re going to be producing at the theatres because there’s just so many good options out there,” she says.

Her ambition raises a larger question: what kind of theatre tradition is she trying to build on — or diversify from — in Manitoba?

MAP’s now retired founding manager Rory Runnells, adopting a phrase from Alf Silver, argued in a 2024 piece for Prairie Fire that Manitoba’s theatre canon “sings the Winnipeg blues,” fixated on the city’s isolation and North End-South End divide.

Plays from Ann Henry’s Lulu Street, directed by John Hirsch at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in 1967, about the 1919 General Strike to the late Ian Ross’s 2001 The Gap, whose Indigenous protagonist tells his white, middle-class lover: “You guys over on that side of the river with all the nice stuff and we’re stuck on this side with all the shit.”

Smith-Fernandez is no less mindful of how Winnipeg’s famous rivers divide its communities.

“I feel like some of the best playwriting in Manitoba is from the Indigenous community, and I think that has something to do with that sense of fearlessness. So I would like to have that sense of fearlessness spread throughout the Manitoba playwrighting community,” she says.

Her play Jean-François also explores the subtle exclusions non-native francophones sometimes feel, including those living east of the Red River in St. Boniface. The play was born from Smith-Fernandez’ experience working in French in an insurance call centre, where she was frequently told by people on the other line that they wanted to speak to a “real francophone.”

This inspired her to dream up Jean-François, the “ideal francophone,” who seamlessly conjugates all of French’s notoriously knotty tenses, even mid-coital. He’ll be the first to tell you why “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir” isn’t just cliché, but awkward French.

With the play’s “pénis magique” (which allows Jean-François to automatically transform lovers into francophones), X-rated French grammar book and many double entendres around words like “langue” (tongue/language), Smith-Fernandez’ work may be blue comedically. But it doesn’t exactly sing the blues. Tonally somewhere between South Park and Isabel Allende, the play’s also a magical realist celebration of linguistic difference and all the confusion it sows in Canada and Winnipeg.

One section of the play focuses on an imaginary federal government department in Gatineau called the “Secret Division of Bilingualism.” Recruiting Jean-François to rejuvenate Canada’s promotion of French — breaching the boundary between the state and the nation’s bedrooms — it inadvertently produces too many Canadian francophones and fosters expectations of dizzying new cultural and linguistic accommodations.

At times, the playwright seems torn between parodying the bureaucratization or rule-ification of inclusivity and dreaming of a genuinely more accommodating society, beyond the Eurocentric limitations of official bilingualism.

“I’ve actually read the Official Languages Act as part of working on this play, and it mainly focuses on the fact that in government you’re supposed to be bilingual,” she says.

“But if you keep reading, it actually says that Canada is supposed to protect other languages. It also has a large section about how we’re supposed to protect Indigenous languages … (but) Indigenous rights and Indigenous language rights get a way worse deal.”

Smith-Fernandez — who studied anthropology in Montreal and is also a skilled handicraft artist — hardly expects other playwrights to share her peculiar interests in the intersecting forces of language, culture and worldview. But as she assumes her own role within the city’s cultural bureaucracy at MAP, it’s clear she’s thinking carefully about the social fabric of the city, including and beyond traditional north-south divisions, and what it means for theatre.

“(Going beyond tokenism) has a lot to do with respecting people’s right to to tell their own stories,” she says. “I want there to be a rich enough community that there are real choices for playwrights.”

conrad.sweatman@winnipegfreepress.com