Introducing Brian Drader

By Christopher DiRaddo

When Brian Drader arrived in Montreal last year to take the helm of the National Theatre School’s Playwriting Program, he had three main objectives: one, to be the best NTS Playwriting Coordinator he could be; two, learn French; and three, learn how to tap dance.

“When I got here I found out that one of my third-year students is a fabulous tap dancer,” laughs Drader. “I’m starting now and that was only my joke objective.”

Brian Drader – © Kathy Clune

And what about the first one? Drader is confident that he is at the right place at the right time in his life, both for himself and for the School. “I might not have been able to say that last year, but I would be brave enough to say it now.”

“We are surrounded by this amazing creative energy that is at the freshest, newest, most vital point in the creative arc of a person’s life.”

An accomplished writer, actor, dramaturge and artistic administrator, Brian Drader has over 70 professional stage acting credits to his name and has written over a dozen critically acclaimed plays, among them LIAR, The Norbals, The Fruit Machine and PROK, which last year won the Lambda Literary Award for Drama and was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year. He took over the reigns from Ann Lambert last June as Coordinator of the School’s Playwriting Program and has been enthralled with the position ever since.

“This place blows me away on a daily basis,” says Drader. “We are surrounded by this amazing creative energy that is at the freshest, newest, most vital point in the creative arc of a person’s life. It is all so raw and immediate.”

Background story

Brian Drader, 44, was born and raised on a farm in Manitoba, moving to Winnipeg when he was 12. As a young boy, he became obsessed with books, began to read voraciously, and each time he put down a novel he wished he had written it. He wrote sporadically over the next few years but put it aside to pursue a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Manitoba while maintaining a successful career working as a food and beverage manager and assistant comptroller. But despite all of his successes in business, he began to really hate the work he was doing and ended up quitting his new career to enroll in the University of Winnipeg’s theatre program.

“It was something I had tasted a bit of in high school and knew I wanted to pursue further,” says Drader who, upon graduating, found work immediately as an actor, working professionally for most of his 20’s. On a lark, he and a friend wrote a Fringe play that turned into a runaway hit with which they toured the country. The following year, they wrote another successful play at which point Drader decided to start writing again on his own.

“My 30’s were really about that transition from full-time actor to full-time writer. I still act, but writing is my bliss.” Drader counts himself lucky that a career in the arts was always an option for him. His mother and father encouraged him to follow his passion and he already had a successful artist in the family as a role model, namely novelist and jazz singer Martha Brooks.

“I knew that I had the potential to have a career in the arts as soon as I started training at university,” says Drader. “I think it takes a lot of young people a while to accept that this might actually be a career for them, that this might actually work as something they can do for the rest of their lives. That’s because they are coming from an environment where they don’t have any models in their own life who can say, ‘Yes, this is absolutely viable, doable and supportable.’”

Role model

It is Drader’s turn now to be such a model. With 13 years of experience as facilitator and dramaturge for the Young Emerging Playwrights Program and Playblitz (both programs co-sponsored by Manitoba Association of Playwrights and Prairie Theatre Exchange), Drader is now responsible for nurturing the talents of the School’s young playwrights, helping them to develop their craft.

“It was a good time to test and develop some of my assumptions about what a young writer needs to continue to develop and what better place to test and challenge those ideas than here.”

Before he arrived, Drader was already quite familiar with the NTS, having been a writer-in-residence at the School in 2000. Now, being on the inside, he finds that his impression of the School hasn’t so much changed, as it has deepened. It has also taught him a lot.

“It’s amazing what you learn when you try to explain to someone what you think you already know,” he says. “As you watch the writers develop and work on their own artistry and craft, you objectify the lessons you’ve already learned, or think you’ve learned, and in the course of objectifying them, they go to a deeper level.”

Drader finds the students in his program “fabulous” and is impressed by how fiercely individualistic each one is. “It’s the students who make this place live. All we’re doing is dusting off the road for them, helping them make the right choices, introducing them to new ideas. They’re the ones who are the heart of the place.”

Personal projects

One of the unique things about Drader’s position at the School is that he is also encouraged to work on his own personal projects. “What better person to be talking to young writers about writing then someone who is out there, writing and making a living doing it.” The result is a harmonious and symbiotic relationship between teacher and pupil. “The more I write, the more I can give them. The more they do, the more I can take back to my writing, and it works gorgeously in partnership.”

Set Design for LIAR by Yvan Morrissette – © Craig Koshyk

Drader is often surprised at how much energy he has to write after a long, hard day at the School. “There is absolutely no conceivable reason why I should get home at 9 or 10 at night and find the energy to write, but I do. It comes from the energy that is here and the things that have awakened in me on that particular day, things that one of my students is going through, or something that I tried to articulate that became clear to me as I articulated it.”

At present, Drader is juggling several personal projects. An original screenplay of his, Wooing Wyoming (a romantic comedy about a cynical and bitter single mother who writes popular romance novels), is currently in the final stages of development and is scheduled to begin shooting this summer. His most recent play, Dissecting Homo, has just completed a series of workshops at Playwrights Workshop Montreal and will be part of On the Verge at Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Ottawa. And he is currently dramaturge on two upcoming Canadian productions: Molly’s Veil, by Sharon Bajer at the Prairie Theatre Exchange in February and Head, by Deb Patterson, scheduled to run this fall at Winnipeg’s Shakespeare in the Ruins.

There are also a number of other plans in the pipeline as well. This leaves little time for Drader’s last objective: to learn French, which he is resolute to do. “I like the act of learning French. I like what it’s doing to my mind,” he says. The School’s (and the city’s) bilingual environment is fascinating to him. “When you have two languages whipping around, all of a sudden everything people talk about goes to a much deeper level because it’s not anchored in a word any more, it’s anchored in the real meaning of the thing. So, by the simple nature of two cultures co-existing in such an intimate way, everything deepens because it unhinges from the word and becomes about the thing being described instead of the description of the thing.”

Drader is unsure yet how being around French has affected his work as someone who uses the English language as his main tool. He has noticed that it has affected the silence in his work. “I’m suddenly very much aware of the silence that exists between things here,” he says, and it has to do largely with this unhinging from language. “Certainly in that sense, something is waking up there. I don’t know what it is yet but I find it interesting.”

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