What’s Killing the Poets? may not have qualified for any awards, but it won the audience Dramafest
On the last night of Dramafest, I said a little prayer of thanks that the tiny American liberal arts school experience would not be lost on me at UofT. Dramafest, which took place from February 25-28 at Hart House Theatre, featured student-written plays from drama societies across all three UofT campuses. Every night, most of these plays dealt with one of the many ongoing issues in the world, be it rising totalitarianism just south of the Canadian border or the social fallout of COVID-19 on students six years later. Every playwright had something to say, and Dramafest gave everyone the stage to say it. But by the end of the last night, the constant stream of political allegories began to fade into each other. That is, until What’s Killing the Poets? took the stage.
What’s Killing the Poets?, produced by the Victoria College Drama Society and written by Vic’s own Isabella Aquino, was the final show of Dramafest and the best possible closer. The play follows two timelines: a band in 1974, fighting against their label for the right to create music about causes they believe in, and those same musicians (or those who are still alive) in 2032, trying to find purpose in a world taken over by AI music.
Poets‘ fearless expansiveness made it stand out on the Dramafest stage. Surpassing the fifty minutes allotted to a Dramafest performance (and thus disqualifying it from awards), the one-act play developed fully fleshed out characters, mobilised complex set pieces, and juggled complicated tech (which did not quite deliver), immersing the audience in its world. Although the complex staging ultimately pushed the time limit, Poets refused to sacrifice its integrity for the festival, usurping the stage for its own means. The freedom Poets displayed on stage came from Aquino’s own writing process. They told me that Poets was written merely for the practice of playwriting; without any expectations about the future of the play, they wrote from a place without bounds… and full of anger.
Poets was always going to be a play about AI, but the future Aquino was imagining for the play did not yet exist when they began writing it. Almost a year later, however, the AI-filled Billboard Hot 100 foreshadowed for 2032 is forming in 2026. Aquino, a first-year music student and jazz drummer, wrote the play to address the frustration and hopelessness they felt about the future of the music industry under the influence of AI. Struggling with the idea that the field they were dedicating their life to would eventually neglect humanity, they decided to manifest that anger into art that would call for action and provide a solution. “I want to be the voice that tells people what they need to hear when in that [despondent] mindset,” they explained.
After submitting their draft to Dramafest, AI began to creep its way up the Billboard charts, only adding urgency to the hope that Poets would be staged at Dramafest. Suddenly, the audience and the actors themselves were living within the dystopia of Poets. “I’ve never felt more desperate to get a message out there,” said Aquino.
On the precipice of losing music to AI, Poets took the stage at Dramafest, supported by a cast and crew of young artists and musicians – those most urgently feeling the doomsday of AI as they watch their passions fade into artificiality. The actors embodied the dread of every character, not because they were great actors (though they were), but because it is the same dread they feel every day. The cast of Poets was absolutely phenomenal – especially those playing the band members. There is a world where the final blackout was 20 seconds shorter, and Laurie Campbell won the Donald Sutherland Award for Best Performance.
I heard whispers of Poets from the cast for months while the play was in production. Though I did not receive any spoilers, every comment made it clear that the cast believed in the importance of the play. The cast was a true team, and you could feel their collaboration and sense of responsibility in the love between the band members, the earnestness of every connection (familial and platonic), and the raw anger behind the core of the play: the protest scene.
Somehow surpassing the sheer talent of the acting in Poets, the beating heart of the play was Mick’s (Gabriella Garvin) acoustic ballad, protesting the closing of a local music venue. Standing in front of a microphone, under the spotlight, with the rest of the musical accompaniment shadowed at her side, Garvin delivered an homage to the tradition of bards and folk protest, a heritage derived from Bob Dylan himself, with a core of poetry that brought me to tears. When Aquino told me that this was the first song they ever wrote, I was shocked. The song was not only the emotional core of the play, but also embodied the ambition that set Poets apart from every other play that premiered on the Dramafest stage. Ambition that led to an expansive universe that seeped into real life. Ambition that empowered the audience to leave Hart House Theatre angry and mobilised. Ambition that, I sincerely hope, will lead to a remount of this play in next year’s campus theatre season. In the span of just 50 minutes, the audience felt every ounce of urgency, anger, frustration, and love that the cast had been stewing in through months of production. The arts are facing an existential crisis, one that cannot be solved without mobilising art’s greatest weapon: imagination. There will never be a better time to mountWhat’s Killing the Poets?. We need art that goes beyond allegory, art that imagines a better future, and that mobilises us to fight for it. We need What’s Killing the Poets?.