Tanya Marie Lee: according to one young fan, “Her book taste cannot be questioned.”
1. ONE OF MY FAVOURITE MOMENTS
IN MY LIFE IN GENERAL
When Tanya Marie Lee was growing up in Toronto, she knew she could be safe at the library, if not at home. The librarians were kind to the six-year-old who came in all by herself. They called her by her name. And they gave her books that opened new possibilities.
Now, Lee is creating that kind of welcome for teen girls all across Canada. In 2017, she established the A Room of Your Own book club, which is the subject of this CBC radio documentary. The club is for girls who are at risk of being ignored — maybe because they’re experiencing poverty, violence, or housing insecurity. Basically, they’re kids who remind Lee of herself. “Teen girls are always treated as second-class citizens,” she says. “I hate that.”
When she approached Canadian publishers for free young-adult books, every one of them said yes.
Listening to the doc, it’s intoxicating to hear the giddy voices of book club members. “Meeting an author is, like, wow!” Vivian says. And Ivy remembers the club’s first meeting at the Grand Library in downtown Toronto. “It was a really beautiful library,” she says, laughing. “I was like, ‘This is a library? I couldn’t believe it. It had something magical in it.”
Lee chooses books that speak to the complexities of growing up. Their subjects include racism, homophobia, bullying, and sexual assault.
In the documentary, one of the girls shares: “One of my favourite moments in my life in general is when Tanya gave us this book to read called Breaking Faith … I shed many, many tears reading it.”
E. Graziani’s novel is about a girl named Faith who’s having trouble at home. She starts using and, at one point, she’s suicidal and on the street.
Breaking Faith’s fan says, “I developed a stutter during grade seven, I believe, because there was so much going on in my life. Like I had just lost a major friend of mine. Like she kind of just left me for others. And then my family, they started, um, fighting and there were so many problems.” Her voice starts to break. “So I was alone for a lot.”
Those family problems were shared. That girl’s sister, who’s also a club member, became so depressed that she was staying in bed until 9 p.m., unable to shower or eat. “It was really scary because I didn’t want to live.” Then she read Breaking Faith, and “I realized, ‘Oh my! That is very similar to me! I think, I think I need to start doing something.’ And when Tanya brought in Skylark’s mental health team, I decided, ‘You know what? I don’t really have anything to lose. Right?’”
Mental health support for girls in the club has always been part of Lee’s plan. The girl who was struggling with suicidal thoughts says it was hard to ask a public question of the mental health team, “But I asked anyway and they responded with no judgment and … I got all the answers that I needed. And it’s all free … You know, there are people there for you. And this is how I got into getting help for my mental health.”
Lee faces down controversy. When she invited Marie Henein, Jian Ghomeshi’s defence lawyer, to talk to the club about her memoir Nothing But the Truth, the Toronto District School Board, which had been an early supporter, said that Toronto students and teachers could not attend. Lee went ahead anyway and the documentary’s clips from that session are lessons in feminist strength and legal procedure.
When Lee programmed Girl Mans Up, which is about a queer girl’s fight for acceptance, some readers balked. But author M-E Girard was so generous in her presentation that, by the end of it, every reader wanted a selfie with her.
Near the end of the documentary, which is artfully crafted by producer Alisa Siegel and editor Alison Cook, a club member says of Lee, “I hope she keeps pushing girls to keep reading. She’s doing wonders in my opinion. She’s changing lives. And I hope that she knows this and she just keeps doing what she’s doing.”
I second that.
+ In response to Covid, A Room of Your Own book club has moved online. There are 200 members and two meetings per month. If you or somebody you know is interested in joining, you can contact Tanya Marie Lee at aroomofyourownbookclub@gmail.com.
+ Full disclosure: back when I had a sideline in story editing, I worked with Lee on a couple of projects and I like her a lot.
Here’s a quote from the doc that illustrates why she’s the perfect person to be doing this work: “I grew up in a dysfunctional family. My mom worked very, very hard to support us and my dad was a dysfunctional parent. We walked on eggshells all the time. We didn’t know whether my dad was going to be in a good mood, whether he was going to be in a bad mood, what we were going to experience that day — and neither did my mother. And she couldn’t protect us from his wrath. And we were scared out of our minds.
“When I was about ten years old, I just couldn’t take it anymore and I remember telling my mother, ‘If you’re not going to leave Daddy, can you please send me away? I don’t want to live here anymore.’ Within a few months, my mom got the courage.” ...
Russia’s attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol has been internationally condemned. (Photo by Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
2. PICTURE THIS
Journalists are cultural workers: they shape our narratives. The bravest risk their lives to share the truth.
This harrowing and illuminating article in AP News is an account by video journalist Mysyslav Chernov, as told to reporter Lori Hinnant.
It begins: “The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.
“We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs as camouflage.
“Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: ‘Where are the journalists for fuck’s sake?’”
While telling a hair-raising story, Chernov makes important points: “The absence of information in a blockade accomplishes two goals.
“Chaos is the first. People don’t know what’s going on, and they panic. At first, I couldn’t understand why Mariupol fell apart so quickly. Now I know it was because of the lack of communication.
“Impunity is the second goal. With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolished buildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted. If not for us, there would be nothing.
“… I have never, ever felt that breaking the silence was so important.”
While in Mariupol, Chernov and his AP colleague, photojournalist Evgeniy Maloletka, documented many things, including the aftermath of Russia’s bombing of a maternity hospital: “When we arrived, emergency workers were still pulling bloodied pregnant women from the ruins.”
A police officer heard them strategizing about how to get their images out to the world. “’This will change the course of the war’, he said. He took us to a power source and an internet connection.
“We had recorded so many dead people and dead children, an endless line. I didn’t understand why he thought still more deaths would change anything.
“But I was wrong.”
Those images have become some of the most damning indictments of Russian atrocities in Ukraine.
+ On March 16, Russia bombed the Drama Theatre, where 1,300 had sought refuge. (CNN)
+ This Sunday, Ukrainian officials accused Russia of bombing Art School No. 12 in Mariupol, where 400 women, children, and elderly people were reportedly sheltering. (Washington Post)
+ On Monday, Ukraine refused to surrender Mariupol in exchange for citizens’ safe passage out of the city. (Aljazeera)
+ Also on Monday, this article in The Atlantic argued, “The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant.” ...
In Bunny, Emma Slipp is an actor in full, glorious bloom. (Photo by Emily Cooper)
3. SEEING THINGS
New Theatre
I am so grateful for the attention that playwright Hannah Moscovitch pays to female lust in Bunny. Moscovitch’s script is about the sexual hunger of a woman named Sorrel. We meet her when she’s in her last year of high school and follow her into her thirties. When late puberty endows Sorrel with a spectacular set of boobs, boys start wanting her — and she wants them: describing one guy, she says she loved the way his sweat smelled like grass. Because our culture shames female desire, Sorrel struggles, but she remains innocent. When she remembers mean high-school girls cornering her and demanding to know if she was trading blowjobs for cigarettes, she also recalls her reply: “I don’t smoke.” Emma Slipp flawlessly inhabits every crease and corner of the role — all of the intelligence, humour, desire, and vulnerability. Playing Angel, a young guy on the make, Nathan Kay is also outstanding. Directed by Mindy Parfitt, Bunny is wall-to-wall excellence.
Produced by The Search Party, Bunny is running at the Vancity Culture Lab as part of The Cultch’s Femme Series until March 27. Here’s my full RAVE review and here’s where to get tickets.
Munish Sharma, IshanSandhu, and Quinn Churchill in a replay from Men Express Their Feelings (Photo by Tina Krueger Kulic)
When’s the last time you were in an audience that was rolling with laughter? For me, it was last Saturday night, when I was watching Men Express Their Feelings. Sunny Drake’s play is about two father/son pairs. Because Mr. Bacon punched Mr. Sharma in the nose after a hockey game, even though their teenage boys are on the same team, they’ve all been sentenced to a sharing circle — in a locker room — to work things out. Drake has structured his play like a hockey game, so we get three periods and, best of all, replays. That means we get flashbacks of an erotically tinged encounter between the two boys — both the innocence of the real thing and the full-on, faggy musical extravaganza one of the dads imagines. Directed by Cameron Mackenzie, the evening has the careening energy of a farce, and, as it explores the traps of racism, misogyny, and stereotypical masculinity, it’s also insightful and touching. All four players are excellent: Munish Sharma (Mr. Sharma), Ishan Sandhu (Raj), Jeff Gladstone (Mr. Bacon), and Quinn Churchill (Brad).
A Zee Zee Theatre production, Men Express Their Feelings is running at the Firehall Arts Centre until April 3. There’s an ASL-interpreted performance on March 24 and a relaxed matinee performance on March 26. Yes, this full review is also a RAVE. (What’s in the air these days?) And here’s the link to tickets.
Bad eggsis ambitious. It plucks Persephone and Hades from their myth and Eve from hers, then drops them into a contemporary story. The point this time around seems to that Persephone is a people pleaser, always trying to accommodate her mom and especially her husband. But playwright Jessica Hood’s Persephone is so passive, and she accumulates insight so slowly that bad eggs quickly gets boring. Director Pedro Chamale’s online production is neither thoroughly filmic nor thoroughly theatrical. But there is one excellent element, Emily Pickering’s animation, which often appears as bright, squiggly lines on top of the bodies of the characters: Hades sprouts orange horns and a waggling forked tongue.
Bad eggs, which is a production of a new company called unladylike co., is streaming until March 27. Here’s my full review and here’s where to buy tickets.
Ongoing Theatre
Tonight, Neworld Theatre’s Clean/Espejos opens its Kamloops run. Written by Christine Quintana, with translation and adaptation by Paula Zelaya-Cervantes, Clean/Espejos is about two women. Vancouverite Sarah is at the Paradise resort in Cancun for her younger sister’s destination wedding. Adriana is a manager on the housekeeping staff. In their intertwined monologues, we can follow Adriana’s Spanish and Sarah’s English thanks to Andie Lloyd’s surtitling genius. These surtitles aren’t just functional, they’re expressive. When Adriana describes flickering candlelight, for instance, they waver. And Lloyd tosses the text all over the set in various scales and rhythms. This is all in service of a daring script. Unlike most plays, Clean/Espejos isn’t primarily driven by external events; because the characters are narrating their own experiences, we have access to their inner lives — like in a novel — so our satisfaction comes from our increasingly rich understanding of their perspectives. Under the direction of Chelsea Haberlin and Daniela Atiencia, Alexandra Lainfiesta (Adriana) and Genevieve Fleming (Sarah) deliver astonishingly nuanced performances that match the complexity of the script.
Produced by Neworld Theatre in association with Western Canada Theatre, Clean/Espejos is running at the Western Canada Theatre until April 2. Here’s my full review and here's where to get tickets. It’s also streaming online from April 5 to 10. Here’s where to gettickets for the online run.
Hey Viola! is about Black Nova Scotian Viola Desmond who refused to give up her seat in the whites-only main floor of a cinema in 1946. (To honour her courage, Desmond’s face is on our ten-dollar bill.) I saw Hey Viola! when it premiered in 2020 and my remarks are based on that experience. To make her story into a musical, creators Krystle Dos Santos and Tracey Power have turned Desmond into a singer in a Harlem nightclub, which she never was in real life. Too often, the existing songs they draw upon merely illustrate things we already know: Desmond sings “On the Sunny Side of the Street” when her cosmetics business is going well, for instance. Sometimes, the songs are more resonant and co-writer Dos Santos, who performs this show with a band, is humbly charming. I mostly found the writing disjointed and generic, however. Mind you, that’s my response as a white guy — and that has to be taken into account.
Produced by TheatreWorks in association with Western Canada Theatre, Hello Viola! is running until March 27 at the Anvil Theatre. Here’s my review from 2020 and here’s where to get tickets.
Ins Choi’s play Kim’s Convenience is, of course, the inspiration for the TV series about a Korean-Canadian family running a corner store. In my review of the 2018 production, which this mounting is based on, I wrote, “I’ve never seen James Yi (Appa) [the dad] onstage before but this guy’s got unbelievable chops. Yi nails every moment of the humour without ever losing touch with Appa’s deep internal life.”
This Arts Club production, which is based on an interpretation by Pacific Theatre, is running at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage until March 27. There are VocalEye (described) performances on March 20 at 2 p.m. and March 25 at 8 p.m., a relaxed performance on March 20 at 7 p.m., and an ASL-interpreted performance on March 23 at 7:30 p.m. Here’s my review of the original production. And here’s where to get tickets.
Theatre This Week
Tonight, I’ll be seeing Made in Italyat the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage. I’ll post that review on my blog late tomorrow afternoon. Tickets
Friday night, I will be at Pacific Theatre’s production ofA Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney. It’s by Lucas Hnath, one of my favourite playwrights. That review will be on my blog Saturday. Tickets
Saturday night, I’ll be attending Pacific Theatre’s production of How the World Began. I’ll be posting late Sunday. Here’s the ticket link. ...
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