2001 Gascon-Thomas Winner Ann-Marie MacDonald: The Alchemical Muse

by Patrick McDonagh

"What’s Alchemy?" a chorus asks at the beginning of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). In terms of theatrical magic, Ann-Marie MacDonald is a master alchemist. Her close familiarity with the alchemical muse has made her the eleventh Anglophone recipient of the Gascon-Thomas Award for her contributions to Canadian theatre, awarded on October 26^th in a celebration at the School’s theatre, the Monument-National.

"It doesn’t take long to attain the status of éminence grise in English-Canadian theatre," MacDonald joked before the assembly. "It’s like dog years." Since graduating from the School’s Acting Program in 1980, MacDonald has established herself as a performer, playwright, librettist and novelist. Her play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) won the 1990 Governor General’s Award for drama; she received a Genie nomination for her role in the film I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing; and her 1996 novel Fall on Your Knees has been translated into fourteen languages, won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel, and is the latest pick for Oprah Winfrey’s influential Book Club. She also collaborated with composer Allen Cole to create the musical Anything That Moves, which won a Dora Award in 2000. Perhaps MacDonald marks the passage of time in Canadian theatre in dog years because she produces seven years’ worth of art between New Year celebrations.

Canadian theatre is still young, history happens quickly, and tradition is something that is molded almost without one perceiving one’s role in it. "Originally I looked askance at old traditions," she told the audience. "I didn’t see my place in it." And if the School at times seemed to her younger, rebellious self a bastion of the old and musty, where one was taught to act Shakespeare and wear period clothing gracefully, it was also, she stressed, a vital hothouse of knowledge, craft and culture — primarily because of the calibre of the faculty and the vitality of her fellow students. And eventually, she said, the importance of history, and even of wearing period costume gracefully, became evident. Plus, she emphasized, the School benefits greatly from its location in that broader cultural hothouse, Montreal. "With its lively, culturally diverse environment, Montreal is the best town imaginable for a young artist," she said. "When I graduated from the School, I was hung over," she told the assembly, "but Toronto was sobering."

While MacDonald may have been speaking literally, a metaphorical reading was also possible. Layers of meaning are a feature of her art; MacDonald considers herself an artist who tells stories in different ways. Those stories are consistently engaging, nuanced, and multi-faceted. "I always try to tell them as simply as possible, but sometimes it gets out of hand," she confesses. While never preachy, her stories force her audience to think. "Obviously I have a point of view," she says. "I am the stealth border collie, dashing about, saying ‘Whether you know it or not, you’re actually all going through this gate,’ but I’m not going to put a sign on the gate. So you have to read the whole thing, or see the whole play, before something emerges which resembles a point of view." In part, that is because her stories encompass many points of view: "Each character has got to think that he’s the good guy. That’s the key to empathy." It is also, she points out, the key to engaging the audience on a moral and intellectual level.

MacDonald’s respect for her audience is evident in everything she puts forth, as a writer or performer. "When the curtain goes up, the audience is in a state of innocent receptiveness," she told the assembly, "which has to do with open-heartedness, a readiness to take something on its merits. That’s what I try to remember as a writer, an actor or a novelist: the person who opens that long novel or sits down in that seat believes that you’re really going to take him somewhere."

Sometimes the objective is to upset the audience, to stimulate them to run out of the theatre and do something, she notes, but that is contingent upon their willingness to be open in the first place. "Ultimately, you want to entertain, provoke, or shock them… but always engage them."

MacDonald is currently in the final stages of completing her second novel, a cold-war tale set in the sixties. She has clearly hit upon an effective way of dealing with the idea of "tradition": confronting and reinventing it through her own historical recreation. As she told the Gascon-Thomas assembly, she has reconciled herself to tradition and the past: "History is embedded in us. So we kick it over, pick it up, and carry it within." And in so doing, we change history, and, in a wondrous feat of alchemy, ourselves as well.

The National Theatre School awards its Gascon-Thomas Award every year to two artists who have made an exceptional contribution to Canadian theatre. Author, actor, director, and Théâtre du Nouveau Monde Director, Lorraine Pintal, is the Francophone recipient of the award.

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