Making theatre safe, culturally specific and nuanced is the job of these professionals

As the Stratford Festival returns this year to a full season of live programming, a particular role has risen to prominence — that of the consultant.

Stratford has brought more than 30 professionals on board as cultural consultants, language coaches, advocates, intimacy directors and more.

While theatrical consultants are not an entirely new phenomenon, Stratford and other theatres are turning to them frequently in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the global racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Use of consultants reflects awareness that representations of racialized people and of intimate encounters need to be handled carefully for the sake of artists and audiences alike.

“Cultural competency is vitally important for the safety of the room and for the work to be really understood,” said Stratford’s artistic director, Antoni Cimolino, “and it also leads to better art.”

The use of consultants is an “extension of the same artistic impulse that’s always been there: to do detailed work, to try to understand nuance, to drill down and make things specific, and to try to understand viewpoints within a script,” he said.

What does such consultancy work look like in practice? The Star connected with three of Stratford’s consultants to learn about their work.

Wolé Oguntokun is the dramaturge, cultural consultant and dialect coach for “Death and the King’s Horseman” by Nobel Prize-winning playwright, novelist, poet and activist Wole Soyinka. (A dramaturge is someone with expert knowledge who helps develop plays, and advises the cast and creative team about the history, context and nuances of the script.)

The play is set in British-occupied Nigeria and is based on a real-life event in which a king’s horseman prepares to join the king in the afterlife in keeping with Yoruba tradition but is delayed from doing so, with tragic consequences.

Oguntokun, who also works as a playwright and director, is not only Yoruba but from Oyo, the area in Nigeria where the events that inspired the play took place. He knows Soyinka and considers him a mentor. Tawiah M’Carthy, the Ghana-born director of the Stratford production, invited Oguntokun to consult on the project about five years ago.

“For a play as culturally specific as ‘Death and the King’s Horseman,’ it was the wisest thing to have someone who could relate to the play, who understood the play,” said Oguntokun.

His work as dramaturge involved discussing the script’s context and references with cast and crew, while as cultural consultant he advised on aspects of the staging. For example, he told the creative team that the ritual suicide at the centre of the play should not take the form of a hanging because in his culture that is taboo for royalty.

Why do this play outside Nigeria when there’s so much danger of misrepresentation? “This might be one of the best plays ever written,” said Oguntokun. “I’ve been to Denmark and other places, and they do not know who Soyinka is. And I wonder, so how’s your education complete?”

Actor and director Debbie Patterson is a disability consultant and dramaturge for Cimolino’s production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” in which the title character self-describes as “deformed” and historically has been played having a hunchback.

Patterson has multiple sclerosis, uses a wheelchair and knows the play well: in 2016, she became the first disabled actor in Canada to play Richard III in a production by the Winnipeg company Shakespeare in the Ruins (she played the character as male).

“So much representation of disability in our culture is created by people without disabilities for people without disabilities,” said Patterson. “I wanted to bring to the project the cultural competence of the lived experience; how it feels inside versus how you are perceived,” she said.

As dramaturge, she first sent Cimolino notes on the text “and talked about what it left out for me in terms of disability,” she said. There are moments where Richard urges characters to depart before him or arrives late to a scene, which Patterson recognized as the experience of a disabled person. “You’ll ask people to leave ahead of you, so they don’t see you struggling, or you show up late because you are on crip time. All those little things just in the stage directions, they’re clues,” she said.

Richard, as played by able-bodied actor Colm Feore, has curvature of the spine, a leg that twists inwards and a withered hand. Patterson did not advise Feore how to embody the role. “They have movement coaches to do that,” she said. “His physical representation of disability was entirely his own.”

Rather, she offered her perspective on how Richard might respond to challenges such as his coronation scene in which he climbs stairs wearing regalia. Feore initially focused on Richard’s disability in the scene, but Patterson steered him in another direction.

“The problem is the stairs and the robe and the crown and all the people watching you like idiots, staring at you while you’re trying to do this hard thing,” she said. “The disability is not novel. It’s the given circumstances.”

During the pandemic, choreographer Aria Evans trained as an intimacy director and brought both those skill sets to their work on Stratford’s “Every Little Nookie,” for which they were credited as intimacy choreographer and movement director. Sunny Drake’s world premiere comedy, directed by ted witzel, is about swinger culture and polyamory, and includes simulated sex acts and nudity. The work around intimacy began during a pre-rehearsal orientation period, which is now standard practice at Stratford.

“I spoke with every single person in the cast independently and asked them, ‘How are you feeling about the play? Is there anything coming up for you? Is there anything you’re uncomfortable with? Where are your limits on showing intimacy onstage?’” said Evans. “Because we can’t assume that the actors playing the roles have the experience of the characters they’re playing.”

Evans’ work is focused on the actors’ safety and mental health. “They’re going to have to perform this play for four months. So we want to make sustainable choices that they’re confident in … especially coming out of a pandemic where we haven’t been touching each other and the way that we talk about intimacy has changed,” they said.

The work of consultants and other Stratford initiatives is leading to art that is “more examined,” said Cimolino. “There’s an ability now to be more frank and honest with each other … we can make the work more specific and better.”

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