With his new play, Jordan Tannahill adapts Greta Thunberg's words into a confrontational chorus

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

Way back in the dramatically distant-feeling year of 2019, Ottawa-born novelist and playwright Jordan Tannahill was among the thousands who were arrested in the Extinction/Rebellion protests in London, U.K. 

"It was one of the largest mass arrests in modern U.K. history," Tannahill tells me via a Zoom call from London. "And when I was arrested, there were so many people being arrested that we were in police vans for hours, just waiting for them to find jail cells for us. There were just not enough jail cells to put us all in." 

For Tannahill, this moment marked a major turning point for him personally where he began to move from writing politically to actually engaging in direct action. 

"I'd been involved other direct actions over the years, but increasingly in 2019, it feel like so many years of political trauma coming to a head. A couple of days after I was arrested, Greta Thunberg addressed the U.K. Parliament with the speech that the title of the show comes for, which is Is My Microphone On?. It's a phrase that she used throughout the piece. It's kind of rhetorical question... 'Is my microphone on? Is my English okay? And if that's the case, why weren't you listening if we're continuing to appeal to you and plead and offer you statistics and bombard you with with evidence? Why still the inaction?'"

The show Tannahill references is currently running at Toronto's Dream In High Park through September 19th. It turns the outdoor theatre into a site of intergenerational reckoning, with a chorus of actors aged 12-17 demanding the audience to consider: how do we move forward from here? Urgent, confrontational and ultimately quite moving, Is My Microphone On? is a collaboration between Tannahill, who adapted several speeches by Thunberg into the text, and director Erin Brubacher, who developed the piece with the young cast.

"I feel like there is a sort of breakdown in generational communication that's happened in the last few years — this kind of generational warfare, if you will," Tannahill says. "And it's happened around some pretty major political events, from Trump to Brexit to the rise of the right in Europe. These events are primarily the result of older generations forcing a future on unwilling younger generations. I mean, Brexit was decided primarily by an elderly voting public, many of whom will not even be alive to live through the repercussions of this. And I wonder how many voters might have been swayed had they had heart-to-heart conversations with their children or their grandchildren or even their great-grandchildren, asking them what they needed or wanted for the future."

While these are huge macro topics, Tannahill thinks that "one of the strengths of the power of art is to render on a human scale."

"So then rather than being overwhelmed or broken down by the scale of these issues, we can allow them to live within the bodies of 17 young people and try to generate a kind of spiritual and emotional relationship with these with these things. Just looking at these 17 young people in the eye and really having to contend very seriously with their future and their needs."

Is My Microphone On?  manages to do something (at least for me) that feels increasingly rare these days: it offers hope, which is something Tannahill says he ultimately has himself. 

"I mean, I think I'm naturally an optimist," he says. "I think when you look at the grand sweep of time and history, quality of life is improving on the whole for more and more people, although there's, of course, many, many setbacks along the way, quite large ones. And certainly climate seems like more than just a setback — it seems like a watershed crisis for all of us. We're going to have to adapt to it and our hand will be forced. But I remain hopeful. I think there's going to a lot of suffering before we get a handle on the climate crisis."

"In all that, I do somewhere believe in our human capacity for empathy and for collaboration. I think I wouldn't necessarily be making theatre if I didn't believe in the power of collective experience or collaboration. And it seems maybe a little bit of a cliché to say, but I do think that theatre offers us models for how we work together, how we can envision future, and how we can reckon with things together as a collective." 

Theatre isn't the only thing Tannahill is offering us this summer. His acclaimed (and, as of this week, Giller Prize-longlisted) novel The Listeners was released last month, which seems like superhuman productivity during a pandemic, though Tannahill assures me that's not exactly the case.

"Largely both these projects began pre-lockdown and have been a number of years in the making," he says. "Because a number of projects have been delayed, they're all kind of happening at the same time, so there's just this perception that they've all been made at the same time. The book took four years or so to write. I started working as a play for a couple of years and then workshopped it with the National Theater here in the U.K., and that was an amazing experience and super informative, but ultimately [it became clear it] would have had to be like a four-hour play."

At that running time, Tannahill would have had to cut the play into two, but instead decided the best vehicle was a novel. 

"It took me a couple years to figure out what the story was and how I'd tell it," he says. "It's true that in lockdown I did have uninterrupted time to actually finish it, which was really great. I think a lot of people — and by a lot of people I guess I at least mean me and Charli XCX — the early stages of lockdown were super productive, and then the longer it contained you the less and less productive in became." 

Tannahill says he actually has a lot of nostalgia for early lockdown days, where "we did feel like we were all in this together as a global community."

"It felt very scary and also very tragic for many people, but it was exciting to pause the world — to pause productivity and to have time to yourself, and I used that time to to write. And it became certainly way less productive as things kind of continued. Like, last summer, I was just spending time in parks, doing drugs with friends and hanging out and having sex, which was great, but it was a super unproductive time for me."

Thankfully, you can witness the results of the days when Tannahill was feeling productive by getting tickets to Is My Microphone On? or by reading The Listeners.