By Keith Tomasek, Aug. 21, 2024

Yvette Nolan is a playwright, director and dramaturg. Born to an Algonquin mother and an Irish immigrant father, she has lived and worked all over Turtle Island. 

Nolan once described herself as “a halfbreed theatre rat” in Winnipeg whose life was changed when she saw Tomson Highway’s “The Rez Sisters.'”

An innovative creator for both the stage and virtual reality, Nolan’s most recent work as a director at the Stratford Festival was the critically acclaimed “Women of the Fur Trade.”

This season, Nolan returned to Stratford on “The Diviners,” based on Margaret Laurence’s classic 1974 novel, which she adapted with Vern Thiessen.

Irene Poole. Photo David Hou

1) You and I first met many decades ago in Winnipeg when I was performing at the Fringe Festival. Since then, your work has taken you across Turtle Island. Where do you call home these days?

I keep my wardrobe in Saskatoon, and sometimes it feels like I am only home to switch seasons, trade my parka for a rain jacket, jeans for shorts.

In the first three months of 2024, I was on the road for 78 days – Montreal, Toronto, Kelowna, Banff… I am not complaining; I am grateful for the abundance of work and grateful for the opportunities to spend time in different parts of this grand land.

But as the world becomes more – fraught, I guess – I have become more anxious about being separated from my partner for extended periods of time. The pandemic, climate change, war and rumours of war, all these things could strand us in different parts of the country, or the world.

2) As I reminisce about the Yvette I knew back in Winnipeg and all the work you have since created, my heart sees a virtuous and good caretaker, a benevolent creator who also possesses the skill to be mischievous and humorous.

How kind of you to say so. Can you speak at my funeral and say so? I would love to be remembered as this.

Do you recall who, or what made you laugh in your early childhood?

Our household was hilarious when I was a child. My mother was a terrible punster, she loved words and made up word games that we all played incessantly.

My brother Michael was and still is hilarious. He loved to prank our younger brother Patrick, once somehow getting a purloined grocery cart into his bedroom while he slept.

My uncle Tony was a huge, hilarious presence in our lives. And at school, my pal Rob Klein kept me laughing from elementary through high school.

Dan Chameroy with company members. Photo David Hou

3) Under your direction, “Women of the Fur Trade” at the Stratford Festival embodied some of the abovementioned characteristics.

Do you seek that kind of work, or does it find you?

I am so grateful to have been asked to direct “Women of the Fur Trade” last year, because it is so funny, so clever.

As an Indigenous director, I have been offered a lot of work that is pretty dark, as Indigenous artists grapple with our history here on this land, with the ongoing gifts of colonization, with the legacy of residential schools.

But if we are to heal, we have to laugh, we have to seek joy.

Lots of Indigenous artists are making work that is complicated, multifaceted, funny and poignant at the same time- which I think is true of Fur Trade – and I think maybe Canadian audiences are ready to receive this kind of work, these more complicated narratives, as we move forward.

I think of Ian Cusson and Royce Vavrek’s new opera “Indians on Vacation,” adapted from Tom King’s novel, of Falen Johnson’s “Salt Baby” and of Kent Monkman’s Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. All funny, all joyful, but without denying or erasing our histories. 

So I guess it is a combo – when that kind of work arrives, it seeks me and I am happy to be found.

4) You and Vern Thiessen worked on adapting “The Diviners,” Margaret Laurence’s classic 1974 novel, for several years. What element of the adaptation or discovery during the creative process was most rewarding?

There have been so many joyful, surprising and satisfying discoveries in the process of adapting “The Diviners.” Vern has been a generous and open-hearted collaborator.

We were really committed to foregrounding the Métis elements of the novel, giving the stories of Jules and Lazarus and Piquette Tonnerre more attention and focus, really putting flesh on the bones that Laurence had given us.

The participation of the entire creative team, from directors and designers to the cast and ensemble, in the animation of the Métis story has been so rewarding. 

Jesse Gervais, Josue Laboucane, Caleigh Crow and Irene Poole. Photo David Hou

5) In the 1970s, multiple efforts were made to ban “The Diviners” from some schools; the organizer of one such campaign claimed the book “reeked of sordidness.” As late as 1985, a second attempt was made to have “The Diviners” banned. 

Sheila Turcon, at McMaster University, wrote that the toll on Laurence herself was heavy. Laurence died just over a year following the second attempt to ban her book. Writer Timothy Findley observed: “No other writer in Canadian history suffered more at the hands of these professional naysayers, book-banners and censors than Laurence.” 

How did the gravitas of such a work of fiction impact a pair of playwrights who must discover a singular vision to honour Laurence’s work?

Yeah, the sordidness of a strong woman, a sexual woman, a woman who loved someone who did not look like her, who dared to self-actualize.

Irene Poole and Jesse Gervais. Photo David Hou

A woman who dared write about real things that real woman faced – pregnancy and abortion and abuse, class and racism and misogyny.

I am afraid we are dangerously close to those days, between Roe v Wade, femicide, intimate partner violence. It’s all a little too close to Handmaid’s Tale, innit?

They tried to ban Margaret Laurence because she told the truth about women’s lives, in clear and unambiguous terms.

It is Laurence’s courage that made us want to be brave too, in honouring her work. In bringing it to the stage in a way that illuminates the the things she was only able to hint at, as a white woman writing in that time.

To use her structure and her metaphors – the river, time, “Memorybank Movies” – in a theatrical way that makes an audience go, “Yes! That’s what the novel feels like!”

To introduce a next generation, perhaps, to a writer who paid so dearly for unapologetically being herself.

Irene Poole and Julie Lumsden. Photo David Hou

DETAILS DETAILS
The Diviners
Through Aug. 24
Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford Festival
111 Lakeside Dr, Stratford, ON N5A 7S3
Book Online: https://www.stratfordfestival.ca/WhatsOn/PlaysAndEvents/Production/The-Diviners#ScheduleTickets
Call the box office: 1 800 567 1600

Student matinée performances for this show are at 2 p.m. on the following dates:

Thursday, September 12
Tuesday, September 17
Thursday, September 19
Wednesday, September 25
Friday, September 27
Tuesday, October 1
Wednesday, October 2

Please note Stratford’s Tools for Teachers webpage sponsored by Canada Life has some excellent resources including:
Music Andrina Turenne – Musician and Composer for 2024 World Première of The Diviners.
Film Margaret Laurence, First Lady of Manawaka, from the National Film Board, featuring Margaret Laurence’s prose read by Jane Eastwood.
TikTok Mikey Harris – traditional Métis Jigging and hip hop.
Once the show officially opens and the reviews are published, I collect them all for you at this link. In the meantime, feel free to add a comment at this link.