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Photo | Hana Nikčević

An interview with Cy Macikunas and Gianni Sallese 

Every year, the University of Toronto presents a drama festival where original student works are performed. This year, two drama societies are presenting student works in their regular seasons: Cy Macikunas’s A Brand New Sky with UC Follies, and Gianni Sallese’s Invasion of the Molepeople with SMC Troubadours. The Strand sat down with Cy and Gianni to learn about their shows and to hear their thoughts on the opportunity to present original works in the mainstage season.

The Strand: Can you tell us briefly what your show is about?

CM: A Brand New Sky is a work in progress about grief, the construction of identities and identifiers, abuse and how it becomes a language, longing and how goddamn hard it can be to say what we want to say and have it mean what we want. Overall, how words are too clumsy for the incredibly vague heart, and how Canada’s “melting pot culture” ultimately feels like a band-aid on a festering wound.

GS: Invasion of the Molepeople is an homage to the horror sci-fi schlock B-movies of the 1950s and ‘60s. It’s lighthearted, zany, and a love letter to those ridiculous overdone tropes we know and love. But it also holds a pretty straightforward and topical message: the importance of knowledge, the dangers of ignorance, remembering the faults of our past, as well as a satirizing of xenophobia (which is unfortunately topical).

Where did your idea for your show begin?

CM: My only living grandfather has been in and out of hospitals and this idea came to me in the days we thought would lead to his death. I’ve been living with this work for two years now, but have lost incredible amounts of progress after some horrific things that happened to me this summer—hence why I am hesitant to call it complete. This show is primarily about my hometown and my friends there, where being a person of colour is very commodified. I’ve had hundreds of late-night phone calls with those friends about how we experience our racial identities and family relationships.

GS: The idea comes from my love of classic cinema and genre films, and the fun of easily recognizable, cartoonishly-exaggerated tropes. I wanted to play with the idea of a show where these understood tropes were heightened to an excessive degree, where things that might seem ludicrous are treated with deadly seriousness. There’s something so funny about playing the most ridiculous thing as if it’s the most serious thing.

Do you think the fact that your shows are being put on in the regular season is a step forward in getting student work out there?

CM: It feels like a next step, but it’s also a lot of pressure. There’s this expectation that student work won’t hold up against professional work, and with opportunities like this one it feels very much my job to try and subvert that expectation.

GS: I don’t really think there is anything better or worse about having a show in the festival versus the main season. I think the Drama Fest is a fabulous opportunity! The only real difference and benefit is that a main season show gets more freedom in terms of venue, budget, tech, time, and number of performances. Both are amazing means of getting student work out there, they’re just different.

Cy, your show centres on a biracial character and deals with navigating the cultures of our parents. In a media world of predominantly white-focused narratives, it is important to bring non-white-focused narratives to the forefront. Do you think that theatre is an effective medium for amplifying voices like those in your play when they are too often silenced elsewhere?

CM: I don’t think silenced is an effective word in this case—overlooked or ignored may be more accurate. Deliberately passed over as it’s often assumed those needs are being met elsewhere. For every show centred on someone explicitly written as a person of colour at UofT, I’d argue there’s at least 20 intentionally or unintentionally about white people, and if you look around a room of artists at UofT, those demographics don’t match up. As a younger artist, I made a promise to myself that I didn’t have to care about art that didn’t care about me. Think of A Brand New Sky as a follow-up to that promise. I think theatre is an effective medium to bridge the gaps of emotions and connections between groups of people, but primarily I hope that the show proves that just because it is not centred on the “common” person (i.e., a white cis het middle-class man in his mid-20s), it doesn’t lose ground with its audience. This show is explicitly not for the homegrown white people who want something relatable to the idealized Canadian experience, or a voyeuristic view into my home life. This show is for my fellow mixed kids and anyone who feels they fell into the gap where their parent’s culture ends and the Canadian one refuses to let them in. But I do hope everyone gets something out of it. I don’t know if I’d say theatre is an effective medium to amplify this kind of voice and story, and I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say the visibility that will come with it will hopefully allow for some change.

Gianni, why did you pick the specific genre and era to pay homage to in your show?

GS: I love distinct genre; I think its tropes provide a great shorthand to communicate things to the audience. Everyone recognizes the cackling villain, the wise eccentric scientist, or the plucky, naïve hero. These are familiar to audiences and can be a convenient way to get a story and message across. Also, it’s fun. Obnoxiously exaggerated tropes too distinct to be realistic are so much fun, so writing the stuff I find enjoyable was a factor. I love history, and any history student or buff can tell you how much you learn from the mistakes of our past. I use the particular era (a time revelling in its own glitz and glamour, while also a period of great prejudice, violence, corruption, and suffering) because it mirrors a lot of what society is like now. The prejudices of the past, the conflicts of the past—they’re still alarmingly real and potent, they’re just happening in different ways.

What do you think is the importance of the UofT theatre community providing this space and platform for student-written work to be produced?

CM: Student-written work has an incredible amount of relevance and connection to its audience and performers, completely unmatched by work from other sources. It’s connected to its community, location, and demographic and in tune with the culture surrounding it. We should continue creating an environment where works that can say what others can’t are supported and allowed to grow.

GS: I think a platform for student creation, and getting new student voices out there, is incredibly important in the wider university community. It should be a safe and secure space in which people can develop these ideas. It provides this great base for future creators to build on and move forward with ideas. Plus, it’s in line with what a school’s purpose should be: a place for innovative and important discussion.

A Brand New Sky will be presented in late March. Invasion of the Molepeople will be presented March 1-3 at Alumni Hall 100. See the UC Follies and the SMC Troubadours on Facebook for more information.

Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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