Posted January 22, 2024

The Interview – Leanna Brodie

Leanna, you are such a theatrical powerhouse that I hardly know where to start! But let’s begin with the project you’re working on now, which is getting a lot of buzz: Salesman in China, which you co-wrote with your husband Jovanni Sy, and which will be playing at Stratford this summer and fall. This is a huge project, based on Arthur Miller’s 1983 trip to China to direct a production of Death of a Salesman. Tell us how things are shaping up.

It is beyond exciting. You still have to do the work and put one foot in front of the other. And every project, no matter how large in scale or how big the stakes are, the work is the same. So how is it shaping up? We have a beautiful cast of… I’m trying not to think how many people because it scares me a little bit, but it’s something like 17 people. (And we have understudies, of course, because this is 2024.) We have a beautiful design team, and it is the largest Asian Canadian contingent and creative team in Stratford’s history. We continue to work on the actual script, and the designs are coming along apace. Jovanni is in the other room on Zoom with Joanna Yu, our set designer, going over preliminary designs. We had a meeting with the brass yesterday about securing some additional [outside] funding. So we’re still pitching, believe it or not, because, as you say, it’s big. But it is really, at its core, a simple story about fathers and sons and about crossing cultures. And as long as we hang on to that, I hang on to my lunch.

Is this the first time that you’ve co-written something with Jovanni?

It’s the first time we have collaborated with each other in any way, and it is the first time either of us has co-written with anybody. So.

Wow, that’s fantastic. How did you get the idea?

A battered old used bookstore copy of Salesman in Beijing, Arthur Miller’s memoir of the experience, was sitting on Jovanni’s shelf for years. I remember seeing it in Toronto, but I didn’t get around to reading it until we were living in Richmond, BC, which is a majority Asian – I believe majority Chinese – city, and a city where a majority of people were born outside of Canada. And Jovanni was running a theatre which had something like a 95% white audience base when he moved there, in a city where white folks were the minority. So he came in with the mission of honouring the audience that had supported the theatre for many years and also bringing in an audience of the people in the place where we lived. So, cross-cultural, intercultural issues were very much on our minds. Of course, they are part of our experience as a couple, so they’ve been part of our lives for longer than Richmond has. But I was living in a place where I would see really exciting kind of day-to-day collaborations and also a lot of anger and fear around the Chinese diaspora and around immigration and around real estate investments. I’d see fantastic initiatives like Todd Wong’s “Gung Haggis Fat Choy,” which was his Robbie Burns and Chinese New Year annual celebration. So there’s all that kind of fabulous stuff going on… and there was also racist graffiti coming up all over. So it was a fraught, exciting place with a lot of potential and a lot of fear. And I read this memoir that took place in the height of the Cold War; it took place after a period of almost 50 years where China was cut off from the West for one reason or another, since the revolution, really. And before that there had always been geographic, linguistic and cultural barriers between China and the West. Those were intensified during the Cultural Revolution, where you could go to jail for knowing English, basically: for being seen as a decadent Western imperialist stooge. And I read this account and on the one level, it’s just, “Let’s put on a show!” And on the other level, these people have pretty much all been in jail, been in re-education camps, been in struggle groups less than ten years earlier where this would not have been possible. And they bring over this guy. And often there are only two people in the room who speak English: Arthur Miller and this incredible figure of the Chinese theatre, Ying Ruocheng, who was his translator, his cultural interpreter, and his Willy Loman. So I mean, what’s not to love about that story? There’s drama, there are stakes. What I really loved was, it’s a conflict, but it’s not the way a lot of Chinese/Western stories are positioned, as a clash of civilizations, from M. Butterfly to Chinglish to Chimerica. This was something very different. This was around collaboration. It was trying to build a bridge across a huge chasm. And that was, to me, just as dramatic. I’m giving you a very long answer to your question, but, yeah, it was a document of a moment of hope between two societies that have often been at odds. And beyond Miller’s memoir, we discovered that Ying had written a memoir in English, with an American academic and theatre scholar. So we discovered multiple points of view about this event: through Chinese theatre scholars, through journalists, through Inge Morath’s photos—Arthur Miller’s wife, an amazing photographer in her own right. So we had this incredible incident and we had so many viewpoints on it, and that was really exciting to us.

Are any of the principal figures still alive? Did you speak to any of them?

We have. Yes. Through Playwrights Theatre Centre, and I think they got support from the Canada Council, we were able to take a research trip to Beijing with our dramaturg at PTC, Kathleen Flaherty. And – we could write a book about writing this play – we got in touch with Ying Ruocheng’s co-autobiographer, the American academic Claire Conceison, who has become a friend and a huge supporter. And through her, we were able to go to the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, meet two of the original cast members, and colleagues of Ying Ruocheng, and see one of the plays that Ying Ruocheng had been in, back in the day: Lao She’s Teahouse. So we have had access to people from the original production, and… Claire Conceison has just been a huge, huge help. And she put us in touch with our translator, Fang Zhang – who, incidentally, is the person who translated Ying’s memoirs into Chinese.

Synchronicity all over the place! That’s fantastic. We should all get our tickets now! On to the next topic… your plays, The Vic, Schoolhouse, The Book of Esther and others have been produced to acclaim across North America. Do you think that there are certain themes that run through your work? And if so, what are they?

I didn’t think so, but I just had a brilliant conversation with Sarah Kitz at Great Canadian Theatre Company, and – after ten years in the west, I couldn’t take it for granted that people here had read or seen my plays – but Sarah demonstrated a breadth of knowledge of my plays and translations that left me babbling slightly incoherently and saying very clever things like “Gosh!” and “Golly!” because that’s all I could think of that was fit to be broadcast on the podcast that they do! The theme that she identified—I certainly wouldn’t have found it—was around outsiders, people who don’t fit in, and that kind of perspective that you get when you are slightly outside of society. And she said it and I thought, “I’m stealing that.” Frequently, I’m telling “fish out of water” stories, and also intercultural stories—and the cultures can be rural vs. urban. I also think my work is defined by centring the stories of women. Salesman in China is the only thing I’ve ever written where I’m not doing that. But still, there are women in that story, and—it wasn’t like I had to fight my co-writer at all—but certainly a watchword for me was making sure that the women who are in the story in supporting roles are interesting and complex people in their own right.

Your own plays are very successful, and you’ve written award-winning opera libretti and radio drama. But you’re also a brilliant translator and you’ve brought some of the most exciting new work by Québécois playwrights to English-Canadian stages. Can you tell us a little about the challenges and joys of translation?

Translation, of course, plays a huge role in the play that I’m writing. So the work does all come together! The joys of translation are the joys of getting privileged access to another writer’s consciousness. I only work with living writers. (You can have a dialogue with dead guys, but that doesn’t interest me so much.) My translations are always a collaboration, and we can go into intention and technique and method, but also you have to go into the heart of the play. You get a certain access as an actor, but as a translator, it’s almost like being led into the back room of the house, the one with all the treasures that Grandma locked away. So that is exciting to me as a writer, to have this incredible look inside some of the best minds in Canadian theatre. And that’s an unending joy.

The challenges are many. My linguistic knowledge has limits. I now live in Montreal, as of this year, but I’ve never lived in a francophone environment before. So there are certain things about the society that I have to go hat-in-hand to the author and say, “What is this about? Tell me about this.” There are challenges inside the work because Québec has a very different history than the rest of the country, and often a different outlook. And sometimes the challenges are around, how much are you trying to transmit of that original culture, and how much are you trying to transmute? How much are you trying to bring it fully into your own culture? Is that a form of cultural cross-pollination or is it erasure? (And I’m not the only one to talk about this, God knows.) But do you want to exoticize and foreignize the original culture? Or do you run the risk of disrespecting it by erasing it? There are films I absolutely loathe, like Chocolat, that I think kind of go, “Oh, we’re French, isn’t it fun?” at the lowest, basest level of quiz show, Eiffel Tower cultural tourism. And yet there are also American versions of stories from around the world that completely erase the original culture. And the implication is that Americans are completely uninterested in anyone else, which for most of the Americans I know is not true. 

So those are the bigger challenges. Then there are the specific challenges. Quebec swearing, which is… You can have arias of swearing, and you feel just so impoverished with your three four-letter words that you can choose from! Puns. I mean, puns to me are a challenge, but also a joy.

I sometimes take heart in in one of the best lyric translations I think I’ve ever seen, which is Charles Aznavour’s “Tous les visages de l’amour” [English title: “She,” written with Herbert Kretzmer,]which retains not a word of the original song, but conveys all of the feeling.

I mean, I was in awe at I Am William, for example, where you’ve got rhyming lyrics that are just absolutely chock-full of wordplay in a different language than the one you started with. I have no idea how you could even begin to do that!

Thank you. And I am hugely indebted to the musical director at Stratford – who is also a fine composer – Njo Kong Kie. I’d done the training at Tapestry New Opera, and I’m not a stranger to libretti, but this is something different; this is a different form. And he rigorously went through and worked with me on the musicality and the flow of those lyrics. The other challenge in that one is that in the original, the Shakespearean sections are in prose. They’re in a gorgeous, rich Rébecca Déraspe sparkling prose. But in bringing them into English—and particularly for a Shakespeare festival—I could not not put them into iambic pentameter. So I had to work with the tone and content of Rébecca’s work and the form of Shakespeare’s verse. But I felt that was a necessary cultural adaptation. I made the decision that it was what the audience would expect… and it was how she would have written it if she had written it in English and been steeped in our theatrical culture. Also, there was a potential kind of linguistic fun to be had by both actors and audience, and I wanted to see if I could make it work.

We’re very proud to have two of your recent translations in our Scirocco Drama line; we’ve been talking about I Am William by Rébecca Déraspe, and we also published David Paquet’s The Weight of Ants, which just came out in the fall. Your translation of Fanny Britt’s Benevolence, another remarkable play, had a successful run at GCTC last month. How do you choose titles to work on? Are you deluged with scripts from Québécois playwrights who want you to translate their plays, or do you seek them out?

It’s been a bit of both, and I think as I go along, people are more likely to seek me out. But also, I keep coming back to the same authors. One of my mentors is Linda Gaboriau, and she talked about the fact that she is not seeking to translate any new authors because she says, “I feel one of the responsibilities of the translator is to accompany a writer throughout their writing life. And I can’t do that for a younger writer anymore.” And I really took that to heart.

I took on Rébecca because I saw a reading of one of her early plays and thought, “I connect to that voice,” and that’s really the determining factor for me there. There are people who have sent me things and I’ve just said, “That’s great but it’s not for me; I don’t know how to do that.” There’s no one dramaturg for everybody. There’s no one director who is the greatest director—there’s the greatest director for an individual playwright. And it’s the same with translators. I need to connect to the voice. David Paquet came to me because he knew my translations of Rébecca’s work. His English is, as you know, impeccable, and he could appreciate that. He said, “If you understand her sensibility, I think you’ll understand mine.” I read his work. I connected to it very powerfully, and I did a first draft in three weeks, which never happens. (I don’t recommend it. Don’t do this at home.) But it was just that I locked into the pulse of that voice right away. You know, subsequently, there may have been 15 drafts, but that initial output was really about plugging in, as you do as a reader or an audience member. Sometimes you plug into a voice; you’re just locked into it or not.

There are works of Rébecca’s and of David’s that I’ve taken on sight unseen, that I’ve just gone, “Yep, you’re doing a thing; sure. I’m there. I’m on board.” As for other work—I’ve gone to see it, sometimes, or other people have put it in my hands and said, “I think you should look at this.” Sometimes theatres have come to me. Anything that Linda recommends me for, and she does that increasingly for me or for Bobby Theodore, or probably Alexis Diamond, but she will say, “I think this is a play for so and so.” I recently translated a kind of a comic romp based on the creation of Cyrano de Bergerac. That was completely something that that Linda sent my way, and I went, “Sure, I took on iambic pentameter—why the hell not an Alexandrine couplet?”

I just want to add that as well as Québécois work, I’ve also in recent years been translating Franco-Canadian work. So, Gilles Poulin-Denis; Anaïs Pellin – who is originally Belgian but settled in Vancouver… and most recently, I’m really excited about Joey Lespérance, his one-man show Michel(le), which is dedicated to his trans sister.

Theatre seems to be undergoing a sea change of sorts, following the shock of the closures during the pandemic. Some of the changes are challenging; it’s been hard for theatres to get audiences to come back in full force, for example. But do you see any hopeful changes happening?

Signs of hope. Yeah, all over the place. I just had the great privilege of teaching full-time for a year, teaching playwriting at UBC’s School of Creative Writing, and therefore accessing and being able to nudge along some of the voices of the next generation. Same thing at Playwrights Theatre Centre where I was leading emerging playwrights. So when I see the next generation that are coming out, that are coming out in this time of great challenge and great change and—let’s face it—contraction, I see their… not just enthusiasm and passion, but also their smarts, their new perspectives, their openness to each other and the world, their passionate determination to make a difference and to make it work. And I think, “How dare you feel jaded or tired or scared or anything when these young people are launching themselves, like luge athletes or skeleton – that’s the one that’s headfirst – they are doing the skeleton run into theatre. And that inspires me.

What an image! I love that. Finally, Leanna, do you have any advice for aspiring playwrights?

Find your time in the day and your comfortable place to write. And make that a habit, because the habit will carry you through where inspiration doesn’t.