Who should run Soulpepper and Canadian Stage?

Both Canadian Stage and Soulpepper, the two biggest not-for-profit theatre companies in Toronto, are on the hunt for new artistic directors (and administrative heads, too) as we speak – and the new leaders they pick will shape theatre in Canada’s English-theatre capital for years to come.

Canadian Stage has hired Heather Ring of Caldwell Partners to run its search – which comes after Matthew Jocelyn, who transformed the company from a run-of-the-mill regional into an interdisciplinary company that curates as much as it creates over nine years, stepped down after no drama whatsoever. (He just thought it was time to move on.)

Open this photo in gallery:

If you’re hoping that someone will come along and return the theatre company to its more populist “CanStage” mandate of a decade ago, you’re out of luck.

The board of directors of the company is entirely different from the one that hired Jocelyn then – the term of membership being three years, renewable a maximum of two times.

The current coterie cultivated by Jocelyn have let Caldwell Partners know they are committed to the vision and unique space that he carved out for the company in Toronto.

Additionally, while Jocelyn held the role of artistic and managing director, that position has now been split into two – and the board will find an artistic director first, then an executive director to help further her or his vision.

So Jocelyn’s successor won’t have the same power to remake Canadian Stage into something startlingly different – which, to my mind, is a good thing. It’s easy to forget that before Jocelyn came around, Canadian performance superstars such as director Robert Lepage and choreographer Crystal Pite somehow did not have a regular home in Toronto.

The board at Canadian Stage, reading the tenor of the times, is being very transparent about its process to replace Jocelyn – which is refreshing. Covering theatre in this country, it’s more difficult than you’d expect to get a board member to talk – contributing to the idea that they are shadowy cabals making decisions for which they are accountable to no one.

Sara Angel, a board member and Canadian Stage’s search-committee chair, got on the phone with me to talk about who they were hoping to find through an “international search” – someone who has experience with multidisciplinary work; who has an understanding of international theatre; and who has experience working in a theatre setting “that is comparable to Canadian Stage in terms of budget and scope of work.”

That’s all good – but I was slightly dismayed that I had to prompt Angel to also get her to note the candidate must know a thing or two about Canadian theatre, as well. “It’s easier to spot the international superstar, but what the person has to do is also [know] who is the next [playwright and director] Jordan Tannahill,” she admits. “That’s something Matthew was able to spot.”

If I could give one piece of advice to Caldwell Partners and the search committee, it would be to not overestimate Canadian Stage’s size or stature just because it happens to be in Toronto, and not worry too much about the size of the budget of a candidate’s previous employer.

Western Canadian companies such as the Arts Club and the Citadel Theatre are bigger-budget outfits than Canadian Stage – and they recently hired Canadians Ashlie Corcoran and Daryl Cloran, respectively, away from theatres with significantly smaller budgets to resounding applause from local artists.

There are plenty of strong candidates in this country with the majority of the qualities Canadian Stage is seeking: Kim Collier, artistic director of Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre; Sarah Garton Stanley, director of the show Helen Lawrence that Canadian Stage toured internationally, associate director to Jillian Keiley at the National Arts Centre and a former artistic director at Buddies in Bad Times; Franco Boni, who runs a tight ship over at Toronto’s Theatre Centre, producing interdisciplinary work on a smaller scale. (Or what about Tannahill himself – before we entirely lose him to his increasing international profile?)

What Canadian Stage needs most of all, in my view, is someone with a true understanding of Toronto’s audiences – who can sell the vision Jocelyn could never entirely make sustainable to them. (Despite “right-sizing” itself around a smaller audience, the company still has a pesky accumulated deficit.)

For me, Ravi Jain of Why Not Theatre is the most obvious candidate. The director has plenty of connections to international theatre – and less Eurocentric ones than Jocelyn (who was on the end of a controversy, you may recall, called #CanStageSoWhite). He has collaborated with Simon McBurney’s Complicité in Britain – but he also once brought in Indian film star Naseeruddin Shah to do a pair of shows and sold out theatres in both Brampton, Ont., and Toronto.

To my mind, Jain’s production of David French’s Salt-Water Moon at Factory Theatre – which subsequently toured the country and was mounted in a Mirvish season – was the truly groundbreaking director-driven rethink of a Canadian theatre classic that I initially hoped Jocelyn’s tenure would produce at Canadian Stage.

If those aren’t enough points in Jain’s favour, Why Not was producing Tannahill’s work well before Jocelyn, er, spotted him.

Open this photo in gallery:

Over at Soulpepper – and I don’t think I need to go over why that theatre company is in need of a new artistic director – it’s more difficult to imagine someone without any connection to the company swooping in to run the organization.

What’s been heart-rending about the situation there is that there is a genuine, large, local artistic community around the theatre.

While there are any number of directors, actors or playwrights who could fit the bill, Soulpepper is one of the rare organizations that seemed to be taking succession planning seriously – and the company appointed two associate artistic directors in 2016: Alan Dilworth and Jain, both talented directors whose work has been seen across the country; both of whom happen to have productions up on stage at Soulpepper at this very moment.

Dilworth was still in the associate artistic director position when Albert Schultz resigned as artistic director in January – and has taken over on an interim basis until the beginning of 2019. There’s no reason he couldn’t continue – after all, Nina Lee Aquino has been running Toronto’s Factory Theatre to solid acclaim after first saving it over a crisis.

Jain, on the other hand, left his position as associate artistic director fairly quickly, and quietly, after coming against parts of the company’s culture that eventually led to Soulpepper’s current crisis. He has not been shy about talking about Soulpepper’s problems since this became public.

Choosing between them feels like a philosophical debate: Who is the best son to lead after the king has been deposed – the one who tried to make change from within, or the one who stood up and left and is a hero to the outcasts outside the walls of the city?

For me, the best choice is neither. The front-runner should be Weyni Mengesha – the director behind Soulpepper’s biggest commercial success (Ins Choi’s play-turned-TV show Kim’s Convenience), and a major critical one, Father Comes Home From the Wars, which won last year’s Dora Award for best production of a play. She’s directed (brilliantly) at the Stratford Festival and Tarragon Theatre – and had a pair of productions picked up by Mirvish (Da Kink in My Hair in 2005; and Butcher in 2017).

Soulpepper wanted to make Mengesha an associate artistic director alongside Dilworth a couple of years ago – but she declined because she splits her time between Toronto and Los Angeles these days (and, I suspect, because she was too smart to accept). If we haven’t lost her completely to the United States, perhaps she could be convinced to run the whole shebang now?