This past week, I met up with Liz Laywine—UofT theatre grad, co-founder of the Antique Fables Theatre Collective, and director and producer of the first show of their inaugural season, Medea. We discussed the process that she and her co-founder, Travis DeWolf, went through in forming the collective, as well as their goals to make theatre as diverse and accessible as possible. Liz and Travis decided to form the collective after they co-directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Trinity College’s “Shakespeare in the Quad” in 2014, and won the UofT Drama Coalition Awards that year for “Best Production” and “Best Directors.”
You can check out Antique Fables Theatre Collective online and at their next two shows later this year: Devouring Time and Macbeth.
The Strand: Let’s start with the basics. How did Antique Fables start?
Liz Laywine: Travis [DeWolf] knew that she wanted to start some kind of theatre collective that focused primarily on classical works and bringing them to a contemporary audience in a really accessible way. We outlined how we wanted the collective to run, how we would give artists freedom within the collective to do other projects on the outside—which is really important to us—and what accessibility means to us when we talk about classical theatre. Things like making it financially accessible for artists and audience members, and making stories that traditionally isolate people of colour, people from different sexual and gender identities, people of different sizes and ages, and even women…taking those stories that are quote-un-quote “timeless” and making them accessible, so that people who would normally never get to play those roles can.
That was kind of how we started, and then we got eight other people excited about it who wanted to be part of the inner circle of the collective. We’re the “Kingsmen”: we [make] all of the administrative decisions. And then we also have an outer circle of people called “The Globe” and those are primarily performers. We only audition from that group of pre-selected performers, and that way we can keep a really tight community within the collective and have a really solid idea of what our resources are.
TS: Diversity seems to be a very important goal for the collective. How do diversity and contemporary approaches function in your first show, Medea?
LL: One of the things that I get really excited about as a director and as a theatre artist is finding opportunities to cast almost-entirely-female shows. I had this original idea that I threw around with my assistant director, Margaret [Hild]: what if all of the other characters except for Jason are women, and we’re playing with a very contemporary 21st-century problem in feminism, which is woman-on-woman conflicts?
If we cast all of these roles as women, and have them all have these really differing and conflicting viewpoints, that becomes a very interesting, contemporary look [at] it. There are lots of different layers and lots of different viewpoints on feminism, too. How can you approach feminism if you don’t [subscribe] to … one gender [idea] of what feminism is? That’s been really interesting for us to explore through this text.
TS: What do you hope is next for Antique Fables?
LL: Well, we have a lot of things already going. Basically, as soon as we’re done Medea, we start the gears on our next shows—Macbeth and Devouring Time—and we’ve already put things in motion to start our education program which is going to be really cool. We’re implementing this idea of “site-general Shakespeare,” as opposed to “site-specific,” where you can basically take a scene and literally put it anywhere. We’re going to take these site-general Shakespeare scenes, market them to different high schools, and figure out how we can make something we all really love now accessible to high school students.
I didn’t like Shakespeare that much when I was in high school, to be honest. I didn’t like how the teachers approached it, in retrospect, and I think there are a lot of kids who would actually find Shakespeare really moving and enlightening if somebody could come in and say “Hey, you don’t actually have to learn it this way.” We strongly feel that Shakespeare is timeless for us and it is incredibly powerful and still totally relevant, but it doesn’t have to be just directed to specific human beings with specific viewpoints.
TS: Do you have any advice for students who are looking to get involved with the arts and theatre scene in Toronto?
LL: The one piece of advice I give to anybody coming out of a post-secondary, regardless of what field they’re in, is if you find that you’re procrastinating about something, it’s because you don’t really want to do it. I never procrastinate when it comes to Antique Fables because I love it. And I never procrastinate when it comes to theatre because I love it. Personally, my main piece of advice would be: if you’re having a hard time where you are, really evaluate what it is that you want to do and how you can actually get there in a more realistic way.
