By Evie Marcotullio, May 9th, 2023

Taylor Marie Graham is an award-winning playwright, librettist, director, theatre researcher, and educator.

The Cambridge native has two shows premiering this year with Here For Now Theatre: “Frog Song,” a libretto that runs July 26 – August 12, and “Corporate Finch,” a play that runs Jul 20 – Jul 22.

Graham, who is currently teaching Theatre Studies classes at Western University sat down with me to discuss her two shows opening this summer.

5 QUESTIONS

1) You recently taught a course at Western University called Reviewing Performance, how do you deal with reviews of your own shows?

I love this question. When you create theatre, you really put yourself out there, don’t you?

Okay, this is probably going to sound a little cheesy, but it really means a lot to me to have people review my work. I mean, it’s incredible to have audiences sit down and engage with something you developed from your imagination, see them laugh, see them cry, go along for the ride.

It’s one of those magical parts of the creative process that makes it all worthwhile. For me, reviewers take this to the next level.

They spend their careers publicly telling you what they connected with, what they felt while watching, what references they clocked, whether or not they thought the structure fully came together, if any lines stood out to them, whether they thought the whole ordeal was worthwhile, and if things are going really well –how they think your work connects with larger societal matters going on in the world today.

It can feel like someone wading around in your soul a little to see what they find. It’s terrifying, sure, but exhilarating too.

Reception is an important part of the cycle of theatre creation. It’s easy to forget that generally speaking reviewers start reviewing because they love theatre and want to help this live, ephemeral art last for years to come.

Watch, after writing all that, I’ll get a string of bad reviews and I’ll have to eat my words, haha.

I remember one of my very first professional productions I had downtown Toronto ran the gamut in terms of criticism.

I remember one reviewer calling the opera “exceedingly campy” but when I think about it now, it was very camp. That was kind of the point.

Some reviewers, like some audiences, are gonna love that and others won’t. And that’s okay.

Trying to please everyone is just impossible. Thankfully other reviewers of that show really seemed to need a little camp in their lives and let themselves be transported to where we wanted them to go. Beautiful.

I was very fortunate in 2021 to get some very thoughtful reviews of my last Here For Now play “Post Alice.” Sure, yes, it was nice to get the praise. A little ego boost can do wonders for your mood, but more than that it was validating to have felt seen by the reviewers.

You work away on a play for years sometimes and it can feel truly wonderful when a group of artists bring it to life so beautifully that a reviewer can see what you were trying to do, let alone like it.

Reviewers do important work for the larger theatre ecology and we need more of them in Southwestern Ontario.

Taylor Marie Graham. Photo Ahmet Yildirim

2) What was your libretto writing process and did it differ from a typical play you would write?

“Frog Song” came to me first in images.

I saw a wall of glistening frogs singing in unison and a girl sitting below them reading a book of fairy tales. This isn’t new for me. Most of my plays and operas start with an image or situation and I go from there.

It becomes a metaphor or the playground that I use to develop the rest of the story. The wall of frogs, the girl, yeah, it’s an odd image for sure, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts when it comes to these things.

I embrace my weirdo self because she often takes the audience on a fun, wild ride. “Frog Song” is no exception –it’s a beautifully bizarre and magical time! I used to teach a class in folk and fairy tales at Sheridan on the Brampton campus, and unpacking the stories with the fabulous students there certainly inspired parts of “Frog Song” too.

I learned a lot from the people in my classes and I love applying what I discover in my academic life to my writing. I had questions about identity and women and representation in fairy tales that all seeped into this new opera in different ways.

The actual writing of the “Frog Song” libretto happened in a little cottage in the Kawarthas. With support from the Ontario Arts Council, I stayed there for four a week and wrote most of what you’ll see this summer.

I didn’t have any wifi or electricity, so it was probably my most romantic writing experience to date. I had a wood stove, a gas lantern, and a little notebook to write in longhand. The libretto came out very unfiltered because of this process, I think.

I love the freedom of opera as an art form. You can explore high intensity moments and gloriously raw emotion that you can’t often get away with in a more traditional play.

For “Frog Song,” I specifically let the voice quality of opera singers help mould the characters in the piece too. I love being able to imagine specific voices inhabiting the characters in my head.

When I had a draft, I brought the libretto to William Rowson, who came on as the composer. Another opera of ours The Virgin Charlie was being remounted at the Hamilton Philharmonic at the time, so we reconnected there.

With support from the Waterloo Regional Arts Fund we had an extremely helpful workshop version of “Frog Song” at the IMPACT Festival in Kitchener in 2019 with a great team. Pam Patel, Artistic Director of MT Space, played the lead Navdeep for the workshop and I’m forever grateful to her support of the project in its development.

After the workshop, I wrote a few more drafts and Bill kept working on the music which is so magical and beautiful by the way. He’s got such a sensitive and multi-layered approach to the work. His voice as a composer is so specific and unique. Some Stratford folks will know him well as the Stratford Symphony’s conductor, and now you get to hear his music too.

And now here we are, a couple months away from the premiere! Bill and I are really lucky to have such a strong co-producing team between the Stratford Symphony and Here For Now –not to mention a truly terrific cast and creative team. I can’t wait for rehearsals to get started.

3) “Frog Song” is about facing your inner fears and discovering your inner song. What’s your biggest fear?

Fears? Who me? Yes, okay. I have them too.

One big one for me is small spaces. I don’t like feeling like I won’t be able to get out of a place if I need to. Crawling through an underground tunnel? No thanks. Shuffling through a narrow passageway? Not for me. Give me a wide open space any day.

I’m really easy to startle too. I’m usually wandering around in my own little world, so basically you just have to say hello to me in the street for me to jump out of my skin.

And you know, the big stuff too, those existential questions about life and the universe, those keep me up at night.

The fears in “Frog Song” have a lot to do with coming of age I think. Taking on new responsibilities, becoming yourself. That never really goes away, I don’t think. In a way, we’re all endlessly coming of age.

It’s funny because this question could fit for “Corporate Finch” too. As a thriller, exploring fears is what it’s all about too.

4) “Corporate Finch” is about two teenagers breaking into an old factory trying to get out alive, is that in any way based on something you have experienced or is it an idea that just came to you?

“Corporate Finch’s” story is inspired by a personal experience, but not in the way you might think.

Last summer, I was working on another play at an incredible international playwright residency at the Lyth Arts Centre in Caithness, Scotland, supported by the Canada Council and the Waterloo Regional Arts Fund. Get there if you ever have the chance because it’s gorgeous!

I had such a wonderful time at this residency and had a draft of my new script when I came home, but then I started to get an enormous case of writer’s block.

I knew I needed to try something different to get me out of my funk.

A friend of mine posted on social media about “Write or Flight” run by Flush Ink Performing Arts in Kitchener. All I knew when I signed up was that this company sent playwrights to spooky locations to write for 22 hours.

At the time I remember thinking that sounds like a good way to shake up my writing routine. I had no idea what I was really in for and the writing process for “Corporate Finch” was, well, one of a kind.

Company of Corporate Finch

So I arrived at Flush Ink and the artistic director introduced herself to me, introduced me to the other people involved in the experiment, and told me to get back in my car to follow her to where I was going to write for the night.

She didn’t tell me where I was going, and as I was getting in my car I realized all the other playwrights were going to other locations because we were all supposed to write alone.

I got in my car, followed this woman I just met into the country for 30 minutes, and yeah, I was starting to feel a little creeped out, haha. She took me out to St Jacobs, Ontario, to an old factory.

She left me with a few snacks for my night and a story about the factory being haunted before going on her way. I tried my best to settle in, but as you can imagine, I was a little uneasy.

Eventually, I calmed myself down, reminded myself why I was there –to write something in a new form, to shake up my writing routine– and I started to imagine two teenagers breaking into the old factory.

Again, I trusted my gut with this opening image and kept writing. By dinner time the next day, I had an extremely creepy new little one act play. I remember thinking, hey, I did it! I wrote a full one act thriller in one night.

That in itself was a win in my books. Writer’s block was officially over and so then it was icing on the cake that Flush Ink declared it one of three winners of “Write or Flight” and produced a workshop version as part of their Unhinged Festival last December.

I ended up directing the play too which was a lot of fun. In preparation for Unhinged, I met my two awesome actor-collaborators Rainbow Kester and Matthew Ivanoff. They are so incredibly funny, nuanced, and extremely smart.

The content of the play is pretty creepy, so we worked to find a lot of joy in the rehearsal room to counteract all the terror, haha. I’m very excited to share their talents with audiences in Toronto, Stratford, and Sault Ste Marie this summer.

5) How has teaching theatre studies courses affected your process for writing plays?

One thing that comes to mind is that I read a lot of plays and see a lot of plays for my job as an educator.

My first goal is to better understand how a play might fulfill a theoretical perspective or what it means in relation to a moment in history, but while I’m doing that, the plays teach me a lot about the craft of writing too.

I pick up tips and tricks of structure and character. If you think about it, I get to spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how some of my favourite plays get from point A to point B. How could that not positively affect my writing?

And my students teach me a lot too. I spend a lot of time in my own head, so when I have a class to connect with it really helps me understand more about what’s going on in the world today. It’s really interesting to learn about what they are passionate about and what drives them.

What I am seeing in my classes is a hunger for story that engages with the students’ understanding of what it means to be human in this complex world we live in today.

They are curious, bold, aware of the complexities of modern society, willing to ask big questions as well as find joy in everyday life.

I think we all want to feel seen, heard, connected to larger societal issues, feel a range of human emotions, and build a better future together.

Ultimately, I hope my plays can help do a little bitty amount of that, put some of those sentiments out in the world. What my students are interested in, passionate about helps fuel my writing, gives it purpose, helps me hope for big conversations and change.

IMPACT Festival Workshop of Frog Song. Photo Ahmet Yildirim

EITHER / OR

1) You recently taught Post Pandemic Theatre or Reviewing Performance at Western University, which do you prefer?

That’s a tough one, Evie, come on, haha. You were in both of those classes, I guess I should be asking you! (For context, Evie the interviewer was a student in two classes I taught at Western in the last couple of years.)

In some ways, both courses were asking the same question –one that I find endlessly fascinating: what makes theatre important now and why should we care about it today?

The answer is complicated and layered, but I love thinking through all the ways theatre can teach us something important about what it means to be human and make our way through this wild old world today.

2) Musicals or plays?

Is a play with music an option? If so, that’s my pick!

3) Directing or playwriting?

Playwriting, I think. It’s my first artistic passion for sure.

I love following those initial writerly impulses to build complex characters, their unique point of view of the world, and develop a specific rhythm to the story. That always feels incredible.

But there’s something undeniably electrifying about being in a rehearsal room with the actors as a director too. It can feel like magic when you get a stage picture just right or find an important moment between two actors that you know the audience is going to love.

4) Article reviews or Twitter reviews?

Article reviews. I can appreciate the skill of a well crafted tweet, but I love a good long form thoughtful review.

Details Details:

Corporate Finch
Runs July 20 – July 22
Book now
Frog Song
July 26 – August 12
Book now
Call the box office: (519-272-4368)