Passion, Commitment, and the Word: A Portrait of Ann Lambert

by Patrick McDonagh

Ann Lambert believes that being a playwright is courageous. While a successful example of the species herself, here she means to refer to the students whose apprenticeship she has overseen since becoming coordinator of the NTS Playwriting Program last September. “I’m inspired by how dedicated and passionate they are. There are certainly easier ways to make money and still get stories told — there are other media to pursue, after all. To be a playwright, you really have to love theatre.”

Lambert loves theatre: her own passion and commitment become evident as she talks enthusiastically about the creation of characters and stories, and their eventual embodiment on the stage. Lambert’s plays have been gathering local and international audiences for almost twenty years: from the success of her first play, The Wall, which was produced at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa, to 1999’s Very Heaven, produced at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, remounted in Oklahoma, and published by Blizzard Press. Very Heaven and her latest play, The Mary Project, co-written with Laura Mitchell, were featured in 2000 at the Fifth International Women Playwrights Conference in Athens, Greece, with The Mary Project also enjoying a sold-out run in Montreal in 2001 and similar critical and popular success in Melbourne, Australia.

When recounting her first year at the School, Lambert throws up her hands and laughs, “It’s really been a ride, just learning the new job. But I’ve completely fallen in love with the students.” She describes much of her work as “coaching, handholding, cheerleading, and coordinating,” but this formulation belies the true range of activities carried out in the program. The School hires playwrights and teachers from across the country to teach courses in everything from theatre history to narrative structure to character development, complemented by workshops exploring various aspects of the art of playwriting. Lambert coordinates the program and oversees most of the dramaturgy. “Right now I’m working on a specific project with first-year playwrights,” she says in a March interview. “They write a play that I dramaturge based on criteria I set up for them, in this case classical Aristotelian rules of unity of time and place,” she explains. Meanwhile, the second-year students work on projects with other dramaturges, and those in the third and final year of the program focus on the New Words Festival.

Held in February, the New Words Festival showcases the full range of talent in the School’s graduating class. Scripts written by third-year playwrights are brought to life by graduating actors, designers, technical production crews, and directors. But while all the graduating students are involved once the play moves into production, the festival is the culmination of a year-long process for the playwrights. In the preceding spring, toward the end of their second year in the program, students submit a rough draft of their final project: a script for a full-length play. Throughout the summer and fall, they work with a dramaturge, while taking some courses in the fall session. But after the winter break, the piece goes into production and the students think of little else. “They write on the fly and do rewrites daily,” Lambert says. “They’re given quite a bit of maneuverability…”

The role of the dramaturge is critical in developing new works. When students come to Lambert with drafts of plays, she asks questions that will prompt them to think through the direction of the script. “I walk a pretty fine line, gauging when to back off, or when to really push. I can’t say ‘Well this is how you fix it’ — I have to come up with questions that will help them to find their own answers.” Eda Holmes (Directing, 1996) worked as the dramaturge with graduating playwright Stephanie Alexander on her play Hemlock until December, then passed the baton to Lambert and graduating directing student Anthony Black, who was able to learn a bit about the dramaturgical process. Graduating playwright Ivana Shein’s play, Vita, followed a similar trajectory. Shein worked with dramaturge Judith Thompson (Acting, 1979) who went on to confer with Lambert and Emma Tibaldo, the student director, all providing her with feedback as the piece approached the performance dates. “I just deal with the broad strokes, not the details,” says Lambert of her role in the process. But she also brings hefty doses of empathy. “I’ve been to some of the places these students are going: the absolute depths of despair, where you think ‘I can’t write, this is a piece of garbage,’ to ‘This is the best thing anyone’s ever seen, I’m a genius.’ You always operate somewhere within that spectrum.”

Writers travel a landscape of treacherous peaks and valleys, but all the same, the students survive and eventually the plays blossom forth. “It has been amazing,” says Lambert. “These writers are working with student directors and actors, which is a lot to ask of a young work. But whatever they don’t have in experience, they totally make up for in passion and talent. The productions turned out really well: both stories took risks and had beautifully evoked moments on stage. As a teacher and an audience member, I found it really exciting.”

This year Lambert is playwright-in-residence at the Centaur, and she anticipates that her interaction with students at the School will feed her own creative work. “My students take risks — that’s exciting and inspiring, because sometimes you get too comfortable.” And, she insists, the relationship is symbiotic. “I learn a lot from them — sometimes things I already knew, but which writers have to be reminded of, again and again: like how does one craft a play?” But if the creative process remains a mystery, one to be approached with each new script, each solution brings a fresh new play. And fresh new playwrights.

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