Liam Fair, Gil Anderson & Katerina Bakolias
Matchstick Theatre is bringing Michael Ross Albert’s play The Huns to the Neptune Theatre Craig Boardroom as part of the Halifax Fringe. It is also the inaugural piece of programming from Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax’s new Momentum presentation series. I sat down with Matchstick’s Artistic Director and director of this production Jake Planinc at World Tea House on Argyle Street to chat about the show.
The Huns premiered at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2019, and it has been hailed “a small miracle of a play” by Aisling Murphy at Intermission Magazine. Albert has also had his plays presented at Fringe Festivals in Edinburgh, Brighton, and New York City, but he is based in Toronto, where he recently had a play commissioned by Crow’s Theatre, and coming up he has shows commissioned by the Stratford Festival, the Blyth Festival, and Vertigo Theatre, among other projects. Planinc, who lives and works between Halifax and Ontario, didn’t see The Huns in 2019, but has seen other plays that Albert wrote, and he clocked the excited buzz around his work, so he reached out and asked whether he could read the script for The Huns. “[Michael] was really lovely in that exchange and we kind of hit it off and went to see a couple plays together in Toronto,” Planinc says, “and then I read the script; I loved it, and I just knew that I wanted to do it. I was already thinking about Matchstick doing some much more contemporary [work], and bringing some writers to Halifax that had never been produced here before, but that have been making waves in other places in the country, so [this] just made perfect sense to me.”
Planinc says that while he is “really excited” to do the Haligonian premiere of this play, “it won’t be the last time [Michael’s] plays get produced in Halifax- if I had to guess. He’s a very cool guy and a brilliant [playwright].” He compares him to David French, who wrote Leaving Home; “his craftsmanship of playwriting is so good. He really understands structure, especially in sort of a crisis drama like this. He’s hitting all the right notes. It’s a beautifully built play.”
The play centres on a tech company that has just been burgled, “and the three employees who are closest to that burglary have to tell everyone else in the company over a conference call what’s happened,” says Planinc, “and they’ve gathered to do that the morning of the play. What starts out as a sort of routine hybrid meeting unfurls into their personal lives coming to the forefront and all of their entanglements getting exposed… it’s really about their three personal relationships much more so than it is about the robbery that’s happened or the work that they do… It’s about people finding meaningful connections with their jobs and with each other in the workplace, and about finding meaning in work.”
Planinc says that because of the high cost of living, and in many cases the completely prohibitive pricing of housing, Millennials and Gen Zs have a different relationship to their work than their parents and grandparents had. “A lot of things in our lives feel unattainable,” he says, “things that you might work towards: buying a house or raising a family, or saving a lot of money for retirement or a big purchase- those things aren’t so easy to grasp anymore. So, where people might have used those as motivators for working every day in a job they [didn’t] necessarily like very much, I just don’t think that people attach that to work anymore. They struggle to find: why work at all? I think that these three characters in the play are definitely staring that down.” He mentions that the characters working at this tech company even “have a difficult time articulating what it is they do… What is there for them at work?… How do you make meaning at work in the modern world? I do think Michael is very tapped into the current moment. The voices in the play are very much today’s Millennial voices, and the anxieties that are present in the play are definitely the anxieties of today.” He mentions that even though the play premiered in 2019 a core component of the play is the fact that the three characters we see are hosting a zoom meeting for their colleagues. “[The meeting] falls apart in every way you could possibly imagine. Things are not working, people [are] interrupting each other at the wrong time, people are not muting their conversations when they’re supposed to… it’s like the breakdown of the tech is a metaphor for the breakdown of [the characters’] ability to connect with each other and communicate properly in person.”
This is Planinc’s first time working with these three actors: Liam Fair, Gil Anderson, and Katerina Bakolias who Planinc says, “all fit their roles beautifully… it’s a really fun group. They all get along great, the chemistry has been really strong from the first day… they bring a lot of energy into the room and that’s made my life really easy.” Planinc also notes that this is new territory for him as he isn’t used to working on comedic plays. “To have three actors who are really gifted comedians has made the process a lot easier, and has allowed me to access things in the text that would have probably taken me a lot longer to get to.”
Gil Anderson and Liam Fair are both members of renowned Halifax improv troupe Hello City and Anderson recently won an ACTRA Maritimes Award for Outstanding Performance for her work on The Trades (Crave). Bakolias, who also is a playwright, is known for roles on television series Good Grief (OutTv) and From (MGM+).
Since Albert specifies in the text that the story takes place in an unused office space in a corporate building Planinc says that he originally intended to stage the play in the “Labour Temple” on Kempt Road, which, he says, is where Mayworks once had office space. “The space that’s in that building is a glassed in conference room, and it wasn’t ultimately going to be big enough.” He had previously staged a show at the Edmonton Fringe at the Citadel Theatre’s boardroom and thought that maybe he could do something similar for Halifax Fringe with the Neptune Theatre boardroom. “Audiences [in Edmonton] really enjoyed this behind the scenes look at the Citadel. They got to go into the administrative floor, down a hallway that they’re not allowed to go down typically, into a room that they would have never seen. I liked that feel very much here. You get to go up the Neptune service elevator, pop out into the Administration Hallway, and open the door into a secret boardroom. The setting is beautifully suited to the play itself. There are only a couple of things in the text that Michael says about the space: one is that there’s a huge flat screen TV on the wall… the boardroom already has that in there… there’s a sleek little boardroom table, they already have that… it’s like all the elements of the design are inherent to the space, and then you get to play around with the practical lighting, the acoustics of the room, those are all given to you by the space. It’s very exciting… I’m really thrilled that Neptune has been really into the idea and gracious about it.”
He notes that they are renting risers and seats from the Bus Stop Theatre for their audience of thirty people to use in the boardroom. Planinc says that using “known spaces in unconventional ways” is really of interest to him as a director these days, and that the Fringe Festival feels like the perfect opportunity to present a work like this one as a BYOV (Bring Your Own Venue).
In 2022 Planinc staged a production of Annie Baker’s play The Aliens in a lot behind Propeller Brewing and Staples on Gottingen Street and he says of creating theatre in these types of spaces, “it enhances the realism. It brings out these elements of the play that wouldn’t be there otherwise because as soon as you invite an audience into a theatre they understand the relationship between them and the space and the play. If you take them into one of these unconventional spaces that relationship is totally different and they feel more immersed in the story. I think that’s really going to work with [The Huns].
Planinc says that as he is walking down the streets in Halifax, especially looking at all the empty storefronts in the downtown core, he finds himself wondering “how many seats could you fit in there?” He has even approached some real estate developers asking what the cost would be (including insurance, he notes), to “throw a play in here.” “I definitely love to look at an empty building and think, ‘could you put a theatre in there?’ We at Matchstick have aspirations to one day have our own performance space and so those thoughts have become a lot more serious recently. What would it take to have a 50 or 70 seat theatre in the city? Where could that actually live? What restaurants are close by? Can you park nearby? Getting to do a show in a non-conventional space like this just reinforces the idea to me that you can do theatre anywhere.” He references Peter Brooks’ book The Empty Space (1968) saying, “his core argument in the first page, essentially, is that a performance space is just somebody watching somebody else walk through an empty room.” Planinc says he’s had some really positive experiences just asking folks in the community about using their space in this way, referencing the relationship they built with Staples during The Aliens, and now with Neptune for The Huns.
Along with being part of Halifax Fringe The Huns is also the first piece of programming from Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax’s new Momentum presentation series. This is a new initiative that Planinc and Festival Director Sébastien LaBelle have started that aims to do Mayworks related programming outside of their annual festival each May. “Often we’ll get applications of things that we can’t program in May, and so we decided to start to look for other windows,” says Planinc, “and Labour Day is really the obvious other marquee day that makes sense for our festival.” Organized around May 1st- International Workers’ Day- the goal of Mayworks is to bring workers and artists together to “use art to explore themes of justice, solidarity, and liberation.” Planinc is Mayworks’ Assistant Festival Director. The Momentum presentation series also has a visual art exhibit of the work of Curtis Botham and Eva Grant going up in the Khyber, which is part of Nocturne. “It’s a way for us to keep the Mayworks brand very present in the off season, and to accommodate projects that we can’t fit into the festival normally. I’m really excited about it… the festival is growing and needed another outlet.”
Planinc said that he brought The Huns to LaBelle as an idea for Mayworks because it lines up well with their mandate. And so since it is centred on the workplace dynamics, and finding meaning while at work and creating and maintaining relationships between employees, it made sense to be the festival’s inaugural Momentum show. He also recommends that folks check out Noella Murphy’s play Flowerbed in the Fringe, which was part of the Mayworks programming earlier this year and he calls, “a beautiful little show.”
The Huns plays at the Neptune Theatre Craig Boardroom (1589 Argyle Street, Halifax) as part of the Halifax Fringe Festival and Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax’s Momentum series. There is a preview on August 26th, and it opens on August 27th and runs until September 7th, 2025. Performances run Tuesday to Sunday at 7:30pm with 2:00pm matinees on Saturday and Sunday. Enter the Scotiabank Studio Theatre entrance, walk to the back towards the bar and the washrooms, through the doors toward the Windsor and Imperial Studios, and there is an elevator that will take you up to the Boardroom from there. The Preview Performance on the 26th is PWYC, all other performances are $22.43. Tickets are available here. Seats are extremely limited for this production, so I suggest that you buy your tickets early. The venue is wheelchair accessible- please email matchsticktheatre@gmail.com to let them know if you need accommodation. For more information about the Halifax Fringe Festival click here, for more information about Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax click here, and for more information about Matchstick Theatre click here.
