Actor, playwright, and director Graeme Gillis takes it all in. By day, this member of the Actor’s Studio can be found busily inspiring young dramatists as the Artistic Director of Youngblood, the company of emerging, under-30 playwrights at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City. By night, he’s probably channelling his experiences into a new play. Gillis is someone who has grown comfortable with being away from home, while developing his imagination on what he has left behind.

^{Graeme Gillis}

One could almost call Ensemble Studios Theatre home for this Cape Breton native. When he was finishing theatre school in New York, his student visa was expiring. The founder of Ensemble Studio Theatre, Curt Dempster (who passed away in 2007), actually helped to sponsor Gillis to remain in America. The theatre continues to facilitate Gillis’s presence in the New York theatre scene, where he has been conspicuously well-received (a few favourable reviews in the NY Times will do that). Not that he’s chained to the Theatre itself.

Taking stock of his accomplishments, you see someone who has worked a playwright at theatres all over Canada and the US, including: Epic Rep at the Daryl Roth Theater, Rattlestick Theater, Cherry Lane Theater, the 52nd Street Project, Brick Theater, Vampire Cowboys Theater, HERE Arts Center in New York, the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massacheusetts, Mulgrave Road Theatre in Nova Scotia, the Summerworks Festival in Toronto, and the Source Theater in Washington, DC. A published author and critic, Gillis is Program Director of the EST Sloan Project, and a teacher at the Lexington Center. His Youngblood play “Charlie Blake’s Boat” (“Fast, funny, and emotionally powerful...a delight” – NY Times) was published by Dramatists Play Service in the US and in the Applause Books Anthology Best New American Plays.

From March 26-April 11, Gillis’s play “A Boy Called Newfoundland” will have its world premiere in a production by Theatre Smash, a Dora-award nominated, Toronto-based theatre company. Produced by Sarah Baumann and directed by Ashlie Corcoran, this play stages the drama of family separation, and growing up away from one’s loved ones. According to the company’s press material, the play is about “the bravery it takes – at any age – to accept yourself while growing and changing at the same time. Newfoundland Willow, called Flounder by his family, is an awkward fifteen-year-old cadet. A loner who is scared of being alone, Newfoundland thrives on stability, order and rules. When his mother returns home from her second honeymoon without her husband, Newfoundland and his sisters Brigid and Arley-Rose struggle to recreate the home and family they once knew.”

ECC’s Alex Willis spoke with Graeme Gillis in January.

Alex Willis: You’ve lived in New York for ten years now. How has this influenced you as a writer?

Graeme Gillis: Moving here was a way of making sure that I had no way of backing out of what I had decided to do. I had come to New York to do theatre. It’s human nature to wiggle out of difficult situations, and moving to New York was a way of slamming the trap door on my decision. And it’s affected my writing in a couple of ways. When I moved here, I started writing about where I was from. When I lived at home in Nova Scotia, I didn’t want to write about it because I was living in it! When I moved to New York, one of my teachers took me to task about my history in Atlantic Canada, about how it was something unique about me in our circle. I’d always resisted writing about that because I never wanted to become a cliché. But I discovered it could be more than that.

The other thing that I discovered is a perspective on Canadian theatre. When I moved here, I didn’t know much about American playwrights other than Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams. And I knew about as much about Canadian theatre. But all of a sudden, and I’m sure you at ECC hear this a lot, you start to cherish what you left behind, and investigate it more. When you’re younger, you have maybe a knee-jerk reaction to the generation ahead of you. When you get some perspective, you think a little more broadly.

So when I was a resident at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2003 and 2004, I really learned a lot about Canadian theatre. I found so much to love and be interested in there, and discovered so many plays and playwrights that I didn’t know existed. That exposure really ramps up your ambition.

AW: What kind of perspective do you bring to writing about New York?

GG: Well, it’s only been recently that I’ve been comfortable writing about New York. I recently wrote a little Christmas play about the guys who come down from Quebec and sell Christmas trees. So I imagined that he was from the Maritimes, working in New York, and wondering what kind of life he was living, selling trees in Manhattan.

AW: Did you actually participate in any theatres in Halifax and Cape Breton?

GG: Certainly in Cape Breton, the way I got into theatre was largely through when I was in junior high and high school. I would always attend the Cape Breton Summertime Revue. One of the leaders of this was the actor and director Maynard Morrison, who was also my drama teacher in high school. It was a fantastic introduction to the values and techniques of theatre. We were all fans of Kids in the Hall, and so we started our own comedy troupe. We were called The Amazing Lobster Boys.

AW: Seriously? That’s amazing.

GG: [laughs] Yeah. Discovering that you could do this fun thing called drama was an incredible discovery, like the first time a guitarist picks up a guitar. You find yourself speaking a new and more true language than you had before. Everything that came after that was a way of trying to bring those values to the next level. The guys who were in that group with me are still some of my best friends.

AW: Tell me more about your work at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and with Youngblood. They’re your “day job,” but how have they helped you develop as an artist?

GG: They’re a big part of my life. This theatre produced my plays and found a way to keep me here. And they made me a member of the company. That’s unusual, and pretty special. The writers that I know really appreciate that kind of relationship, because they don’t have to be writing for the same five actors all the time. So now you’re writing for a company, and that’s a much broader canvas.

Youngblood is a pretty sweet job. We’re just coming out of a production now. A lot of it is “up on its feet” – it’s dynamic and fun. Being in a room with that much dynamic young talent is invigorating. I mean, being a playwright is an odd career choice, so seeing so many people who are great at it, it puts some wind in your sails. I’m a believer in the program, especially in helping writers feel that they’re part of a community. That really helps someone go the extra mile, and be more daring in their work.

AW: Toronto’s Theatre Smash, which is producing “A Boy Called Newfoundland,” has a mandate to produce theatre “with a global twist.” How does your play fit into that mandate?

GG: I don’t know! [laughs] It’s universal, but it’s also pretty rooted in Canada. The geography is a little up in the air, but that’s on purpose.

AW: Reading descriptions of the play, the obvious question that has to be asked is, is your play an allegory for Newfoundland history? With all the focus on attachments to old ways of living – to a romance of place and to the past – I can’t help but wonder if the imaginative dynamic going on here is about this place’s struggle to enter into the modern world.

GG: I don’t think so. In writing the play, if that was there, it was unconscious. I wrote this play in Brooklyn, away from home, and so many of my thoughts were about being away from those places. As for the romance for the region, it’s tied to family. It’s about hopes for a life that you get at a certain age, and the challenges of maintaining those ideals into adulthood. Do your values hold up when you have a family, for example.

To me, part of the idea of Newfoundland is built up. I daydream about it. Part of that could be from a kinship to Cape Breton. But the romance, it’s very much felt.

AW: What attracted you to the family drama as a way of telling larger narratives, national or otherwise?

GG: Families are universal. We impose our experience or understanding of things in the stories that we know best. When we think about our country, it can be a very personal connection. Sometimes national stories can be seen by people as narratives of a family. I don’t plan it that way – writing is a very personal and intimate experience for me, as are most of the matters I discuss. But the family drama brings out feelings from many different arenas. I certainly don’t have a political agenda.

AW: So you feel a kinship with Newfoundland. Have you spent any time there?

GG: I’ve never been there. Sometimes I think that my imaginative vision of it is very vivid. There’s not a lot of time spent in Newfoundland in the play. But there’s a sense of longing for a place that I was trying to capture, a longing that’s there whether you’ve been there or not.

I would be interested to see the reactions of Newfoundlanders to the play. My sister lives there, and she’s definitely intrigued to see it! [laughs]

AW: Do you get back to the Maritimes at all?

GG: I’m a pretty regular “summer and Christmas” visitor. I recently went to see my friends in the Zuppa Circus Theatre Company in Halifax. They’re a great company, people who I’ve known for years, and are doing an original brand of theatre. They do things unlike I’ve ever seen in New York or anywhere else. You try not to blink so you can take it all in.

* * *

Theatre Smash’s world premiere of “A Boy Called Newfoundland” runs March 26-April 11, 2010 at Tarragon Theatre’s Extra Space. To find out more, and to buy tickets, please visit theatresmash.com.

Upcoming event anouncement: ECC members will be able to get to getup close and personal with the cast of "A Boy Called Newfoundland" Coast and Cocktails style. More information will be published soon.