CREATURE COMFORTS
PERSEPHONE THEATRE'S GABRIELLE SOSKIN MAKES EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT
by GAËTAN L. CHARLEBOIS
When I was an acting student at John Abbott College I was, for the most part, terrified of my teachers partly because I didn't understand them.
At least two of them seemed to make it their job to break our will. In the guise of showing us what the real world to theatre was like, they heaped abuse on us like we were their bitches. This had a culling effect: we began first year with over 30 students, finished it with about a dozen (and, in passing, only two actually, got their DEC at the end of three years). It was, by and large, an awful experience and made many of us, including me, sick.
In one memorable incident one teacher took me aside on opening night to tell me he wanted to make further cuts in my role. As his pencil slashed across the script he added, "I'd like to cut your whole character but the play wouldn't make sense."
But in second year, along came dance coach Gabrielle Soskin. She had been educated at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and had had a career as an actor in Great Britain but came to the New World to teach. I was deeply suspicious of her (as were most of us) because her heart seemed to be as big as all outdoors. She, together with movement coach Jon Torel and interpretation teacher Jill Nassivera, realized that we were a wounded group and decided that they would make us healthy again.
Now, 26 years later, Soskin is still at Abbott. Her groundbreaking production of Peter Pan last season, which used actual, flying mechanisms, was, astoundingly, sold out for most of its 30-performance run. But Soskin realized something about her students: they needed to work after they left school. Says Soskin, "So many were floating around after graduation, not getting many chances, not working in the first ten years or so of their careers." In her typically good-sense way, she has done something about that. Last year she formed Persephone Theatre. "It's open to anybody, but they have to have some professional experience or training;' Soskin says. Persephone's first outing, Anna Karenina, played to sold-out houses.
This time out, with April de Angelis's Playhouse Creature, Soskin is not just mounting a showcase for her students, she is also doing something extraordinary. De Angelis is one of the British squadron of pre-and-post- Thatcherite feminist writers, an army that includes Pam Gems and Garyl Churchill, whose works are wholly theatrical, only seeming inadvertently polemical. Churchill's Serious Money, for instance, is simply awesome. In de Angelis's play, we are in the Restoration, when women, for the first time, were allowed on the stage. After that battle was won, however, these women had to fight the continuing little wars in order to be recognized as more than baubles in their respective companies. "They were not seen as artists in their own right; nobody of 'decent breeding' would be an actress;' says Soskin. "They were drawn from the working class, like Nell Gwynn who was an orange seller and went on to become a star, or they were the daughters of fathers who had died suddenly and who had left them no dowry; to be on the stage was better than being a prostitute."
Things changed because the women happened to be good and playwrights responded by writing them some of the best - and strongest - roles in world theatre. "That's the joy of this play; says Soskin. "We get the sense, at the beginning, that they are fighting a losing battle for recognition, but we know, by the end, that they have won."
Soskin has been there, done that. "I had precisely the same struggle myself. The power of women in the theatre is relatively recent. In my day, there were virtually no women directors and very few women playwrights. So when I read this piece, I felt a very strong affinity for it."
So here's Gabby, as we called her, with one production, filling several needs - for her students and, apparently, for herself. But there is another need she is filling: the great gaping hole in this city when it comes to any kind of political theatre, particularly feminist theatre.
As we talk about this, and laugh about the tyranny of some of my old teachers, and her colleagues, who, as it happens, were all men, I realize one thing: her heart is still as big as all outdoors.
Reprinted from THE MONTREAL MIRROR
When I was an acting student at John Abbott College I was, for the most part, terrified of my teachers partly because I didn't understand them.
At least two of them seemed to make it their job to break our will. In the guise of showing us what the real world to theatre was like, they heaped abuse on us like we were their bitches. This had a culling effect: we began first year with over 30 students, finished it with about a dozen (and, in passing, only two actually, got their DEC at the end of three years). It was, by and large, an awful experience and made many of us, including me, sick.
In one memorable incident one teacher took me aside on opening night to tell me he wanted to make further cuts in my role. As his pencil slashed across the script he added, "I'd like to cut your whole character but the play wouldn't make sense."
But in second year, along came dance coach Gabrielle Soskin. She had been educated at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and had had a career as an actor in Great Britain but came to the New World to teach. I was deeply suspicious of her (as were most of us) because her heart seemed to be as big as all outdoors. She, together with movement coach Jon Torel and interpretation teacher Jill Nassivera, realized that we were a wounded group and decided that they would make us healthy again.
Now, 26 years later, Soskin is still at Abbott. Her groundbreaking production of Peter Pan last season, which used actual, flying mechanisms, was, astoundingly, sold out for most of its 30-performance run. But Soskin realized something about her students: they needed to work after they left school. Says Soskin, "So many were floating around after graduation, not getting many chances, not working in the first ten years or so of their careers." In her typically good-sense way, she has done something about that. Last year she formed Persephone Theatre. "It's open to anybody, but they have to have some professional experience or training;' Soskin says. Persephone's first outing, Anna Karenina, played to sold-out houses.
This time out, with April de Angelis's Playhouse Creature, Soskin is not just mounting a showcase for her students, she is also doing something extraordinary. De Angelis is one of the British squadron of pre-and-post- Thatcherite feminist writers, an army that includes Pam Gems and Garyl Churchill, whose works are wholly theatrical, only seeming inadvertently polemical. Churchill's Serious Money, for instance, is simply awesome. In de Angelis's play, we are in the Restoration, when women, for the first time, were allowed on the stage. After that battle was won, however, these women had to fight the continuing little wars in order to be recognized as more than baubles in their respective companies. "They were not seen as artists in their own right; nobody of 'decent breeding' would be an actress;' says Soskin. "They were drawn from the working class, like Nell Gwynn who was an orange seller and went on to become a star, or they were the daughters of fathers who had died suddenly and who had left them no dowry; to be on the stage was better than being a prostitute."
Things changed because the women happened to be good and playwrights responded by writing them some of the best - and strongest - roles in world theatre. "That's the joy of this play; says Soskin. "We get the sense, at the beginning, that they are fighting a losing battle for recognition, but we know, by the end, that they have won."
Soskin has been there, done that. "I had precisely the same struggle myself. The power of women in the theatre is relatively recent. In my day, there were virtually no women directors and very few women playwrights. So when I read this piece, I felt a very strong affinity for it."
So here's Gabby, as we called her, with one production, filling several needs - for her students and, apparently, for herself. But there is another need she is filling: the great gaping hole in this city when it comes to any kind of political theatre, particularly feminist theatre.
As we talk about this, and laugh about the tyranny of some of my old teachers, and her colleagues, who, as it happens, were all men, I realize one thing: her heart is still as big as all outdoors.
Reprinted from THE MONTREAL MIRROR