Sunil Kuruvilla: From Stratford to Sundance
Rice Boy / Fighting Words Author on New Hot Shot Playwrights
Aug 5, 2009
The Stratford Shakespeare Festival recently began a series of play initiatives to strengthen its commitment to new play development and production. Playwrights involved in the writing residencies and commissions, have included Leslie Arden, Florence Gibson, Colleen Murphy, Anton Piatigorsky, Jonathan Garfinkle, Alon Nashman, Jason Sherman and Canadian theatre icon Paul Thompson.
Playwrights were offered the time and space to work, and the chance to get to know each other while the Festival familiarized itself with Canada’s new class of contemporary playwrights. In an effort to the strengthen the audience base of Canadian theatre, The Studio Theatre's 2009 playbill is All Canadian, featuring the work of Morris Panych, (The Trespassers) George F. Walker (Zastrozzi) and Sunil Kuruvilla (Rice Boy).
In 2008, Sunil Kuruvilla was invited to join fellow Canadian playwrights Robert Chafe, (Tempting Providence) Marjorie Chan, (a nanking winter) Wanda R.Graham, ( Kill Zone-A Love Story) Simon Johnston, ( Running Dog, Paper Tiger) Daniel Karasik, (In Full Light) Michael O’Brien, (Mad Boy Chronicles) and Erin Shields (If We Were Birds) as part of a three-week playwrights’ retreat which included guests from the acting company and noted Canadian playwrights Judith Thompson and John Mighton.
Sunil Kuruvilla: “They had us each in our own home close to downtown. Robert Blacker, (Stratford Shakespeare Festival Dramaturge) is part of the artistic staff now. He came from the Sundance Institute, and he had a retreat that he ran in Wyoming. He brought that model to Stratford. The big part of the model is that at evening we would gather for a shared dinner at the Festival Theatre, and they would bring in these fabulous meals for us at the end of the work day. So what I remember most was the time to write, the time to think about writing, and the meals.”
Kuruvilla is very familiar with this sort of retreat. He first met Robert Blacker when he was a student in New York after Blacker saw some of his work. In 2003, Kuruvilla was invited by Blacker to the Sundance Institute Ucross Foundation playwrights' retreat with four other American writers.
The Sundance Institute also has a theatre wing?
Sunil Kuruvilla: “They have a film division (Sundance Institute was created by actor / director Robert Redford in 1981) that everyone knows about, but they also have a theatre division and Robert Blacker was head of the theatre division. I met him when I was at grad school. He was sort of a big shot around New York theatre, and with his connections, he could bring people into various programs at Sundance. I met him when I was a student and he is actually came to a reading and production of Rice Boy, and he came to some readings for Fighting Words.
"He invited me to come to a retreat that Sundance runs very much like what Stratford did where five writers are invited to come to a place called the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Other people there were Christopher Shinn, who won the Pulitzer Price two years ago for his play On the Mountain. Chris is a fantastic playwright. Jessica Hagedorn (Dogeaters) was also there and Charlayne Woodward, (The Night Watcher) who is really accomplished actress, in film and theatre. She was doing a lot of one-woman shows that got a lot of buzz and she was at Sundance working on her second one. Tracey Scott Wilson (The Good Negro) is a young hot shot New York writer who has done a lot of stuff at The Public Theater, (in New York) in addition to Victoria Stewart (Hardball) and composer Mark Bennett ( A Steady Rain).
How did you find the New York theatre scene?
Sunil Kuruvilla: "It’s like Toronto in that you have a lot of people and you do not feel as marginalized when there is theatre in a big city. There’s lots of neat things to see, other writers to talk with. You see premières of some amazing work by amazing writers. That’s always fun. I remember seeing a lot of Tony Kushner’s even at a New York theatre workshop because I knew some of the artistic staff there. I didn’t just see the play, I heard about the back story of and the process of it."
You were also on the panel for Canada's Governor General’s Awards for Drama. Nova Scotia playwright Catherine Banks won for Bone Cage...
Sunil Kuruvilla: "It is an incredible play. It deals with something that could be potentially maudlin yet it is so unique. It’s about a guy on the East coast whose job is clear-cutting forests so he works for the paper industry. At the end of the day, he goes around and rescues all the birds from the trees that he has cut down. It’s this beautifully poetic premise of a guy who clears trees, and the end of the day repairing the damage that he has done. You would think what a kind-hearted guy, but he’s not. He is really angry in his life. His girlfriend is preparing for their wedding. He is not very involved and it is just this angry guy in this beautifully poetic play. It was so interesting to read 50 or 60 plays and then come across one that is so clearly fantastic in so many ways."
Sunil Kuruvilla's Rice Boy, directed by Guillermo Verdecchia, premieres at The Stratford Shakespeare Festival Studio Theatre Aug 22. Fighting Words has been produced across North America and in parts of the UK.
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