'We're all here together': Montreal English theatre shows its resilience with award ceremony

Every year, the Montreal English Theatre Awards gathers the city's tight-knit community to celebrate its accomplishments and, in many ways, its resilience. 

For lighting designer Tim Rodrigues, it almost feels like attending a large class reunion. 

"There are a lot of friendships in the community, but to see everybody it's usually very celebratory," he said, looking forward to the 12th annual METAs ceremony taking place at Le Gesù theatre this evening.

"We're all here together. We're still doing the thing."

In a city that churns out new talent year after year and whose performing arts sector is still reeling from the pandemic, getting consistent work in theatre here — about two or three shows a year — has been a blessing for Rodrigues, he says.

He's been at it for the better part of 18 years, raking up several accolades on the way. Tonight, he's up for a double nomination and will present a couple of awards as well.

Despite his success, Rodrigues, like many of his peers, still has to supplement his income with other work.

He says most theatre production companies have had to reduce their seasons, especially the independent ones that have the additional hurdle of having to rent out performance spaces. 

Just this summer, they temporary lost a critical home for English theatre: MainLine Theatre was forced to close due to flooding and its roof caving in. Coming out of the pandemic, the Centaur Theatre has only been able to offer the smaller of its two theatre spaces as it undergoes major renovations. 

That production company was putting on five shows annually before the pandemic and it's been slowly building itself up to that number again. This year its season is four-shows strong.

"But we have to rebuild the audience. A lot of our audience is older and so through the pandemic many of them were unable to continue coming out," said Centaur Theatre artistic and executive director Eda Holmes. 

She hopes a new "pay your age" model will help entice more people under 25 years old to come out to the shows.

Centaur is up for an award along with two other companies for their production of Thy Woman's Weeds by Toronto-based playwright Erin Shields.

Orlando Lopez, the Chair of the METAs committee, has also heard of theatre companies not garnering as many subscriptions as before and wonders if it's a symptom of all the entertainment options people have at their disposal. 

"You can stay at home and watch a TV show or a movie, or even theatre," he says. 

Funding not keeping up with inflation

If theatre companies charged audience members the true cost of staging a production, nobody would be able to afford it, says Holmes.

That's why public and private funding is so crucial to the operations of even the biggest theatre companies that consistently sell out their shows, she says. 

"What we need is a funding structure from the federal and provincial governments that reflects the realities that the entire economy is facing around inflation and fair pay," she says.

And she says this isn't just because of the pandemic. According to her, some operational grants have been stagnant for 20 years. 

"What would have 20 years ago paid for, you know, five people in the office, now pays for two," she said.

As funding from other bodies has dropped, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, for example, has been "a rock" for the METAs. But, even its support hasn't been enough for the non-profit to host its award ceremony at its usual venue, the Monument-National theatre, says Lopez.

"And we're just a ceremony that happens once a year," he said.

Why theatre? Emerging artists explain

Georges Michael Fanfan's career as a costume designer technically spans five years but he jokingly says two of those don't count because of the pandemic.

Fanfan is a first-time META nominee for his work on Every Day She Rose, produced by the Black Theatre Workshop (BTW).

It's a play about two friends finding out they're not as aligned with each other as they thought following the Black Lives Matter protest at the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade. He's been able to work on three back-to-back theatre shows supplementing his income with TV and film costume design work. 

"I just want to put beautiful clothes on beautiful people," he says. "It's like creating the psyche of a character."

Fanfan was a fashion designer before making the professional leap into theatre in 2018 when he entered the BTW mentorship program. He then spent the entire pandemic panicking and second-guessing his career shift.

"It's still hard and you still have to kind of dig in and claw your way into these spaces," he says about what it's like working in theatre today, adding that his mentors have been invaluable.

"I just want to be a part of the machine that tells the story,"

The reality is that despite the challenges people continue to dive into theatre head first. 

Julie d'Entremont graduated from her theatre acting program at Concordia University in 2021 when prospects couldn't have seemed bleaker. 

Three years later she's a second-time META nominee.  

"The harder that things are in your life, the more that people want distractions and art to kind of inspire them," she says. "That's a lot of what it is for me."

She says what keeps her in theatre is the possibility to tell stories and maybe change someone's worldview on issues that might be considered too sensitive or difficult to tackle in real life.

That's what motivated her while completing her last year of studies over Zoom.

"I knew people would be so desperate for theatre opening up again so I knew that when it did it would be worth it."

And, she says, it is.