Drew Douris-O'Hara Photo by James MacLean
This year Shakespeare By the Sea is celebrating its 30th Anniversary Season. On August 17th the theatre company held a Celebratory Gala at the Cambridge Battery along with the Postponed Opening Night Party for their production of Romeo and Juliet, which has been playing in repertory with Pinocchio: The Musical Adventure at Point Pleasant Park this summer. Romeo and Juliet closes this Friday, September 1st, 2023, and Pinocchio closes on Saturday, September 2nd, 2023. Their One Night Only Unrehearsed Dream (a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream without any rehearsal) is on Sunday, September 3rd.
Once the summer season ends Shakespeare By the Sea offers classes for young people between the ages of eight and eighteen in their Studio space at the Park Place Theatre. Drew Douris-O’Hara is Shakespeare By the Sea’s Associate Artistic Director and Jade Douris-O’Hara is a Resident Artist and the Studio Director. For both of them working with a company that presents theatre for young audiences, and provides theatre classes allows them to help foster Halifax’s future theatregoers and theatre makers, and to cultivate a unique community with the audiences who attend their shows every summer in Point Pleasant Park.
Both Drew and Jade began acting as children, and both performed in a Shakespeare play before having the chance to attend one as an audience member. This year is Drew’s 20th Anniversary Season; he cut his teeth in the company at twelve years old playing Coriolanus’ son in Coriolanus. Drew maintains that he was “in the right place at the right time,” as his father heard that the company was looking for a young actor, and Drew had done some theatre camps, and that’s how he ended up having a meeting with two of Shakespeare By the Sea’s Founding Artistic Directors the Late Patrick Christopher Carter and Elizabeth Murphy, “They gave me the biggest book I had ever seen,” Drew remembers, “It was Riverside Shakespeare, and they flipped open to a page and picked out Puck’s speech from Midsummer Night’s Dream and said, ‘Okay, learn this and come back in three days.’ I had never learned any bit of text or anything [before], and so I did, and I came back for, what I found out when I got there, was my audition.” At this point the rest of the cast of the production had been assembled and they had started rehearsals, so Drew’s audition wasn’t just for Carter and Murphy, it was in front of the entire company. “They put me in the middle of a circle of adult actors and were like, ‘Okay, this is Drew. He is going to audition now.’ So my very first audition ever was with Puck’s speech, ‘the King doth keep his revels here to-night…’ I’ll never forget it, for a circle full of professional actors.” “That’s a moment that rewires your brain for sure,” adds Jade, who has been performing at Shakespeare By the Sea since 2016.
The “beautiful symmetry” is that twenty years later this is the first year that Shakespeare By the Sea has had another teenager in the full-time company in a leading role. Studio Alumna Siya Ajay plays Pinocchio in the play of the same name. “She’s a little older than I was,” says Drew, “Siya is sixteen, much wiser, and much more talented, and charming than I was,” he adds with a laugh.
Jade also started acting at a very young age. Her mother is also an actor, and when Jade was a child she moved to Florida for two years while her mother attended The University of Florida and got her MFA in Acting. While she was there Jade’s mother was working at the Hippodrome State Theatre in Gainesville where they did A Midsummer Night’s Dream and cast some children to play faeries. Little Jade was one of them. “That was when I started to become interested in Shakespeare, and it stayed with me. When mom moved back to Toronto she started a training program for young people, which was mostly Shakespeare-based, which we’ve stolen a lot of the ideas for the Studio [here] from. That’s what I was raised in, so it’s sort of been my whole life,” explains Jade.
While Drew was quite a bit younger than most, he is not at all an anomaly here in Halifax to have started out his career with this company. “We often joke that we are everybody’s first job, but it’s not that much of a joke,” says Drew. “Less of a joke and more of a nice observation,” adds Jade. It was also the first professional theatre job for Shakespeare By the Sea’s Managing Artistic Director Jesse MacLean. “We are such an artist-driven organization. We are truly standing on the shoulders of all those people who have been here in the park sweatin’ it out and powering through the rain, and doing the work [throughout these last thirty years],” says Drew, “[The theatre’s past artists] are all the idols I have been looking up to for my whole life. I say this to our students all the time, but theatre is so unlike every other art form, there is no way to properly record it… theatre happens, it is made before our very eyes, and so what we are left with instead of recorded evidence or proof, the real art is the legacy that you leave, and who you pass it on to.” “Especially for a scrappy company like [ours] the evidence of all the wonderful work everyone did in the 29th Season is that there is a 30th Season. That goes back and back and back. There’s no third season without the second. There’s no twelfth season without the eleventh,” says Jade.
While Shakespeare By the Sea wasn’t Jade’s first professional acting job, it was her first time being hired as a choreographer. She has now been nominated in the Choreography category three times at the Robert Merritt Awards. “That to me is what is really special about Shakespeare By the Sea. We are a place where artists can take on more than they thought they could do,” says Drew. Jade agrees saying that the company members are cast not just on the skills they currently have, but they are also given the chance to learn new skills for each season. “It’s such a beautiful gambit of skills,” explains Drew, “The beautiful thing about the repertory company is that everyone is here for a very specific reason. There are people here for whom doing a musical where you sing and dance is the most scary thing that they’ve ever done, but playing King Lear is nothing to them. And the opposite is true as well. There are actors in our company every year doing their first Shakespeare play who could do ten pirouettes in a row without even thinking about it. Even as a company, a collective, we share resources and skills and the leadership in the group shifts depending on the project. It’s really a beautiful coming together of really different artists with really different backgrounds, and every summer I find it so inspiring, and also just astounding, how capable we all are of learning new skills.”
Many of the cast members this year in Pinocchio have learned a new instrument. Jade says, “I don’t play anything, and I play four instruments in that show!” “That’s always been the spirit,” says Drew, “You CAN do it… and we are here to support you doing this thing that you didn’t know you could do. …That’s why as a twelve year old, because it was my first ever theatre experience, I didn’t know to be afraid. No one taught me that I was doing anything that I should be scared of, or intimidated by. It was like ‘This is what we’re doing- get in there!’ And I did. And I don’t remember ever having any fear or worry or self consciousness, it was just everyone was doing it and so was I. I’m sure I was not as good as everyone, but I was there. I try to hold onto that senseless naivety.”
This year Drew harnessed some of that spirit as the director of Romeo and Juliet, which plays only until September 1st, 2023. This is a dream come true for Drew who has described himself as being “obsessed” with the play, having seen over thirty different productions of it over the last thirteen years. “I find it absolutely masterful,” says Drew, “I had a life-changing experience watching it when I was Romeo and Juliet’s age. I saw it when I was seventeen and it absolutely rocked me how much I believed in their love, how true it was to me. How I knew where it was going, but still couldn’t believe it. Surely she was going to wake up. Surely he is going to get the message. This is not how this ends. I think it’s by far Shakespeare’s best play.”
Drew and Jade lived in Toronto during a recent Golden Age of Independent Theatre there that blossomed when the Equity Collective Agreement came into effect which resulted in a boom of new work. “It was risky, and it was dirty, but it was exhilarating,” says Drew, “We were very much in the thick of that, we were in that movement.” “We did Shakespeare BASH’d, I did Dauntless City Theatre, [Drew] did Driftwood Theatre and Humber, and we both did the Spur of the Moment Shakespeare Showdown every year. We got to do so much. So much practice. It really shaped me. You had to be scrappy. Everyone was producing and so I learned how to produce. I learned how to do the multi-hat thing. I learned everything that I know during that time,” said Jade.
Then Halifax called to them. “I’d been going back and forth between Toronto and Halifax for about ten years,” said Drew, “but in that time Halifax just pulled us more and more.” “I remember going home from my second season at Shakespeare By the Sea and being like, ‘So, we’re moving to Halifax,’ remembers Jade. “It started to feel like more and more silly that we were leaving,” adds Drew. “I was very sad every time we had to leave. This feels like where I belong right now. I don’t like to use the word “successful” because that’s such a hard word for most artists to feel like they’re measuring themselves against, but I think that having personal success in the arts is a little bit about listening to where [it is that] wants you. Where does there feel like there’s a space for you? Where can you create in the way you want to create and practice in the way that you want to practice?” says Jade. She says that it became clear that Halifax and Shakespeare By the Sea was where she could see herself making the theatre she wanted to make, teaching, and having the opportunity to move into some kind of leadership role.
Drew and Jade are integral to the community of Haligonian theatregoers that are being cultivated every summer in Point Pleasant Park. “Jesse calls us an Open Kitchen Theatre, which I’ve always really liked,” says Drew, “You come to Shakespeare By the Sea and you see the actors warming up, and you see them setting up, and touching up their makeup. None of it is hidden. You can go chat with the actors at intermission, and so, the more you are here, as company members, the more individual connections you’re going to make with the audience.” Jade, who often plays Princesses and Faeries in the Family Shows, often takes photos with children during the Intermission, and says she remembers the kids she sees summer after summer, and folks will come up to her and show her pictures they have of her with their children from summers past.
Along with being many young actors’ first professional job, Shakespeare By the Sea is often the very first play a young Haligonian will see, and/or the first production of Shakespeare that someone here will see as well. “It’s a place where you can bring the whole family, and if the three year old has to wander around a little bit during the second half: That’s fine! All of our performances are Relaxed Performances. We really invite people to have the experience that they are ready for. So, if that’s buying a seat a month in advance and sitting in the front row and being fully in the show, that’s amazing. But if that’s bringing the whole family, and six of them have never seen a play before, and sitting on a blanket and having a picnic on the hill, that’s amazing too! There’s space for you to choose your own adventure that way. It’s a lot of pressure in some ways to be [the first theatre experience] for people. If we do a good job, they’ll go to other plays, and if we don’t, maybe they won’t be theatregoers,” says Drew. Jade mentions an article she read about the recent, controversial Wizard Franchise play that Mirvish produced in Toronto, and that 50% of folks who bought tickets to that show were brand new Mirvish accounts, they had never been to a show there before. “This thing that is built for families is an engine that is creating theatregoers in the city, and it’s probably going to really revitalize Theatre for Young Audiences,” says Jade, “We have that responsibility [here]. We are supposed to create work that is accessible enough that people will come and take a chance on it, and bring their whole family and their pizza, so they become the people who support all of the theatres eventually.”
In creating this kind of theatre with the works of Shakespeare it’s very important for Drew and Jade that the plays be easy for the audience to understand. “People have trepidation or hang ups about [Shakespeare],” says Jade, “because most people’s first exposure is in High School, where you’re coming at it from a literary perspective, and you’re being tested on your ability to understand it in a very academic way. … But for us, so much of our practice is centred on clarity, and comprehension. …If we really deeply understand everything that we are saying, then you will get it too. You don’t need to understand every word, because I do.” Jade and Drew mention that many audience members are surprised by how funny the plays are. “We actually didn’t make it funny,” laughs Jade, “it’s a funny play.” “Shakespeare made it funny,” adds Drew. “That’s a real goal achievement, that people understood it. I really appreciate when people say that,” says Jade.
“Even the most horrific [Shakespeare plays] are funny,” says Drew, “I think that is a huge contributor to his plays lasting so long. They play and flirt with genre in a way that a lot of modern playwrights are either not inspired to, or bold enough to do. Romeo and Juliet to me is the absolute best example of that. It is as funny in the first half of the play as any play he ever wrote, full of characters that are charming, and wonderful, and hopeful, and challenging, and just funny… We all have an experience of Romeo and Juliet, either from seeing something on TV where they do a parody of it, or West Side Story or Gnomeo and Juliet…Everyone knows what happens: they meet, they fall in love, and then they die. What’s interesting to me is that the play isn’t about what happens, it’s about going through the journey with them. Shakespeare also tells you what happens at the beginning of the play, so the experience of knowing the story of Romeo and Juliet is baked into the playwright’s vision of it as well. There’s a prologue where he tells you, ‘Hi these are two young people, they meet, they fall in love, they die, their families hate each other, in the end the families reconcile. Oh by the way, it’s about two hours.’ That’s the first ten lines of the play. So Shakespeare knew that this story isn’t about twists and turns. It’s not M. Night Shyamlan. It’s about watching this happen, knowing what their fate is, and [being lulled into] rooting for them, and loving them the way that we do when we watch Romantic Comedies. But that love is going hand in hand with the dread of what we know is going to happen to them.”
In a lovely full-circle moment many of the biggest fans of this production of Romeo and Juliet are teenaged students of The Studio, who keep coming back enthusiastically again and again to relive their experience of this famous story of woe. The legacy of Shakespeare By the Sea continues, their community in the park thrives, and, hopefully, a whole new generation of both theatregoers and theatre makers are born to take us all into the next thirty years.
Happy Birthday, Shakespeare By the Sea!
Romeo and Juliet plays in repertory with Pinocchio: The Musical Adventure until September 1st, 2023 at the Cambridge Battery inside Point Pleasant Park (5530 Point Pleasant Park Drive, Halifax). To see the show schedule please visit this website. Tickets are available on a sliding scale from PWYC to $50.00. $50.00 tickets include front row centre seats, all other seating that includes chairs costs $30.00, and the PWYC pricing allows you to sit where you would like in the Cambridge Battery and you can bring your own chair. Tickets are available HERE, or at the door the day of the show.
Shakespeare By the Sea is wheelchair accessible and anyone with accessibility needs can book a ride from the upper parking lot in Point Pleasant Park to the Cambridge Battery venue. Dogs are welcome, and all performances are Relaxed Performances. For more information about accessibility please visit this website or call 902.422.0295 for more information.
