About the Play:

In For the Winter, the search for his estranged mother brings a desperate young man to a farmhouse in Northern Ontario, where he uncovers all the dark secrets hidden underneath the corn stalks. 

About the Author:

Michael Ross Albert is the author of several one act plays including Karenin’s Anna (Standard Deviation Theatre), Starfishes (Actors Studio Drama School), The Wrong Play (Nine Fifty-Eight), and Four Sons (Paprika Festival). His full length plays include Pillars of Salt (Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company), Tough Jews (Actors Studio Drama School), Joint Custody (Wide Eyed Productions), and Chagrin. He is a candidate for an MFA in Playwriting at the Actors Studio Drama School, the founding artistic producer of Nine Fifty-Eight, and a Canadian citizen. 

Michael’s Forty Days to Forty Plays Interview:

OOB Festival (OOB): Tell us a little about your playwriting career. When did you start writing plays? What are some of your proudest accomplishments as a playwright?

Michael Ross Albert (MRA): My first one act play, Four Sons, was produced when I was sixteen years old, at a theatre festival for young playwrights hosted by Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. The play was later performed as a staged reading by some of my favourite Canadian actors, under the direction of the remarkable playwright Jason Sherman, as part of the Tarragon Theatre’s Spring Arts Fair.

The success of Four Sons inspired my high school friends and me to create Nine Fifty-Eight, a theatre collective of artists under the age of 25. We produced several plays of mine independently, while I trained as an actor at the University of Waterloo and took part in the Paper Door playwriting initiative at Toronto’s Factory Theatre.

I moved to New York City to pursue an MFA in Playwriting at the Actors Studio Drama School, where I have continued to craft plays alongside a team of actors and directors.

OOB: Talk a little more about the theatre scene in Toronto and growing up as a Canadian Playwright.  How is the theatrical community in Toronto different than in New York, and what drew you to come to school here, as opposed to Canada?

MRA: I’d say the biggest and most obvious difference between the theatre scenes in Toronto and New York is the size. Toronto has a great theatrical community, and lot of exciting new work is being developed within it, but the scene itself is really contained, really insular, really small. Because it’s such a tight community, it can be hard to break into as an emerging artist. There are less theatre spaces available, less production opportunities, and fewer devoted theatergoers to come and see the work than here in New York.  As a young playwright, this meant that I had to find creative ways to get my plays performed in front of an audience. I’d produce plays in bars, in attic lofts, in non-traditional spaces. Most the productions had free admission, to encourage a younger audience to start seeing theatre, and to try to actively broaden a very small community. In New York, it’s the opposite. The theatrical community here is enormous in comparison. The scope of the theatre scene in New York is intimidating. And that’s part of what makes it so exciting.

As to why I chose to do my Masters in the United States… I went to university in a small town in Ontario called Kitchener. There’s a great Canadian playwright named Guillermo Verdecchia, and in one of his plays he writes that in Kitchener, the only thing to do is leave. I’m happy to continue the tradition of the Canadian playwright, and run away from home for a little while.

OOB: Talk about your entry to this year’s festival. How did you come to write this play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation? What do you hope festival audience will take from your play?

MRA: I had original envisioned For the Winter as a period piece set just after World War I. The play, in my mind, felt very similar to Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. I saw an older woman surrounded by a dense jungle of plants, completely mentally deranged after her son had been killed in the war. A young man would appear on her porch, claiming to be her lost son, and a giant showdown would ensue.

The idea was cool, but I had absolutely no emotional connection to the concept, or the time period, or the characters who felt artificial even before I started writing the play. The real power of the piece I wanted to write was in the odd dynamic between this particular mother and her son. I spent the next year getting to know these characters as best as I could, and trying to ground them in an emotional truth. The result is a comedy about abandonment, a play that should make audiences laugh while empathizing with the loneliness and desperation of both characters.

 

MRA: I have had the privilege of working on this play with a cast of actors under the direction of Ellie De Amor for the last nine months. Throughout the process, the script underwent several permutations. The actors involved in this workshop, Kim Willard and Shaz Khan, grew to know the characters as well as I did, or even better. Their emotional understanding of their characters’ motivations inspired me throughout the rewriting process. I was able to tailor the script to their specific voices. I had a lengthy period of time to experiment within the text, and a dedicated team of hardworking artists who never shied away from the emotional commitment necessary to bring these characters to life both on the page and on the stage. This work culminated in a small workshop production at the Actors Studio Drama School.

OOB: You’ve been working with the actors in FOR THE WINTER for a while.  What specifically about their character portrayals has informed your writing?  Is there a particular instance where you’ve come away from a rehearsal with a totally new idea about the play?

MRA: For the Winter was developed in the Playwrights-Directors Unit at the Actors Studio Drama School.  This meant that I heard the script read aloud at least once a week for nine months. It also meant that I rewrote the script once a week, on average.

The text was (basically) finalized in January. So there were about four months of rewriting in collaboration with the actors and my director leading up to that point. Often I thought, “It’s done! I swear!” and when the actors performed it, there would be something that felt a little false,  or something startling, or something new to be discovered. I remember once, listening to thereading, the way the actress playing Ruth said one word made me realize there was a whole unexplored history underneath that particular thought. And so I explored it in the text the next week. And then, the week after that, I probably discarded most of what I found there. But I learned more about the character. And so did the actress.

For me, the most valuable part of having two such committed actors in the room all the time was the fact that they let me borrow their voices. These days when I’m writing, I feel like I’m not so much inventing dialogue but transcribing the characters’ conversation. While I was working on the play, this very cool synthesis between character and actor started to happen. As I wrote, I heard the voices of the characters as brought to life by these actors. And that’s when surprising things started happening in the script. They’d reveal information I didn’t know they were about to reveal, and hadn’t even thought of outside that moment. Sometimes, hearing their voices while I was writing added a whole new layer of emotion to the text. Often when I’d bring in new drafts that had been coloured emotionally by the way I heard their voices in my head, the actors would say the lines exactly as I’d heard them while writing, and somehow viscerally process the new material on the emotional level I’d imagined. And that has always made listening to this play as often as I do a very rich experience. I’m really very grateful for all their work.

 

MRA: The process of producing my own work has always been invigorating. I have been producing plays independently on a very small scale since I was a teenager, and have had to learn how to write plays that can be staged with almost no money being spent. The major drawback is that the artists involved (myself included) make very little money, and the design elements can never be as intricate or evocative as I’d like.

But apart from that, the process is hugely satisfying. Because everyone involved is invested in the material and the production, everyone works harder throughout the process, which (generally-speaking) is a lot of fun. There’s nothing more invigorating than being surrounded by a group of artists who respect each other’s work and the spirit of collaboration, creative people who dedicate themselves fully to the creation of a theatrical experience that will be meaningful for themselves and the audience.

OOB: Looking back over your personal history in the theatre, what emerges as your favorite memory? Is there a particular story you’d like to share?

MRA: When I was seventeen or eighteen, my friends and I were producing a one act play of mine, Hopelessly Hopeful. Before one performance, one of the actors was violently ill and couldn’t go onstage. The audience was already in their seats, and we didn’t want to cancel. So I walked out onto the set in my street clothes and tried as hard as I could to stammer through my own text.

There is one moment where this character becomes very agitated, delivers a big angry monologue and storms offstage. I made it through the entire speech without missing a line, but when I went to exit dramatically, I bumped into the wall and knocked down the entire set. Looking back on that awful embarrassing moment, I can’t help but feel a painful pang of nostalgia.

(PLEASE NOTE: Above photos are of the rehearsal of FOR THE WINTER.  Actors: Shaz Khan and Elle De Amor)