Curtain rises on a dream
After years of teaching, Gabrielle Soskin puts her dramatic flair on stage
by DONNA NEBENZAHL
Gabrielle Soskin arrived in Montreal in 1970, a 20-something transplant from London who knew one thing for certain: with her training at the Bristol Old Vic and her love of drama, she would make a life in theatre.
That's just what she's done. She has taught drama for 30 years, taking her experience and love for the adventure of acting to children of all ages.
For 10 years, Soskin taught an after-school drama program at Roslyn School in Westmount, and spun off from that a theatre group for youngsters. For more than 20 years, she has taught acting in the theatre department at John Abbott College, where she also directs plays.
But all this summer, you would have found Soskin with a group of dedicated actors, many of them ex-drama students, as she honed the current production of Anna Karenina, her take on Helen Edmundson's dramatization of the novel by Leo Tolstoy.
The play opened on Thursday night at the Calixa Lavallee Theatre in Lafontaine Park.
"It's a dream," she says of her decision to create her theatre company, Persephone Productions. A dream she has realized now that her children are independent teens.
Soskin is slender as a reed, sharp-eyed, full of almost girlish enthusiasm about her craft.
She leans close when she speaks; with her English accent, her gestures, she's so -theatrical.
She describes theatre as her "spiritual life."
"I think that theatre is magic," she says. "Nothing can replace live interaction on the stage. It's risky. You're vulnerable. It can evoke such enormous emotion and response."
The actors, all young professionals, have volunteered their talent for the production. She's invested a bit of her own money in the project, with the hope that ticket sales and a grant will sustain them.
For Soskin, the struggle is part of the experience, like the hard work she put in to become a drama teacher. Persephone, after all, in the Greek myth, spends part of her life in the darkness of the underworld, and the other part among the gods on high.
She hopes in particular that her work is a lesson to young women, who need to be encouraged, she believes, to take on positions in the theatre like artistic director and stage manager.
Life, when she was growing up, was totally gender-structured, she says. She met her husband, also English, on a flight back to England, when she was in her mid-30s.
"I told my husband," she says, 'I can't marry you and be a traditional wife. We can be partners, but I cannot subjugate myself!' "
Reprinted from The Gazette, Saturday, September 9, 2000
Gabrielle Soskin arrived in Montreal in 1970, a 20-something transplant from London who knew one thing for certain: with her training at the Bristol Old Vic and her love of drama, she would make a life in theatre.
That's just what she's done. She has taught drama for 30 years, taking her experience and love for the adventure of acting to children of all ages.
For 10 years, Soskin taught an after-school drama program at Roslyn School in Westmount, and spun off from that a theatre group for youngsters. For more than 20 years, she has taught acting in the theatre department at John Abbott College, where she also directs plays.
But all this summer, you would have found Soskin with a group of dedicated actors, many of them ex-drama students, as she honed the current production of Anna Karenina, her take on Helen Edmundson's dramatization of the novel by Leo Tolstoy.
The play opened on Thursday night at the Calixa Lavallee Theatre in Lafontaine Park.
"It's a dream," she says of her decision to create her theatre company, Persephone Productions. A dream she has realized now that her children are independent teens.
Soskin is slender as a reed, sharp-eyed, full of almost girlish enthusiasm about her craft.
She leans close when she speaks; with her English accent, her gestures, she's so -theatrical.
She describes theatre as her "spiritual life."
"I think that theatre is magic," she says. "Nothing can replace live interaction on the stage. It's risky. You're vulnerable. It can evoke such enormous emotion and response."
The actors, all young professionals, have volunteered their talent for the production. She's invested a bit of her own money in the project, with the hope that ticket sales and a grant will sustain them.
For Soskin, the struggle is part of the experience, like the hard work she put in to become a drama teacher. Persephone, after all, in the Greek myth, spends part of her life in the darkness of the underworld, and the other part among the gods on high.
She hopes in particular that her work is a lesson to young women, who need to be encouraged, she believes, to take on positions in the theatre like artistic director and stage manager.
Life, when she was growing up, was totally gender-structured, she says. She met her husband, also English, on a flight back to England, when she was in her mid-30s.
"I told my husband," she says, 'I can't marry you and be a traditional wife. We can be partners, but I cannot subjugate myself!' "
Reprinted from The Gazette, Saturday, September 9, 2000
