Play grapples with faith

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Daniel Karasik hasn’t let success go to his head. Only 26 years old, the Toronto-based playwright, poet, fiction writer and actor – whose Haunted will première at the Chutzpah! Festival this month – already has a jealousy-inducing resumé. Not only has he created an impressive body and breadth of work, but has garnered numerous awards and nominations for the excellence of that work. Yet, he remains humble.

“I won a local writing contest, run out of the local library system (the Early Harvest contest at the Vaughan Public Libraries!), when I was 14, and that must’ve made me feel licensed to take my writing more seriously – to consider what it would mean to make writing my profession – because within year or two I was writing consistently, submitting my work often, reading much more broadly and hungrily. That contest win was for a short story called The Mirage, which was published the next year by a little literary journal out of Minneapolis,” said Karasik, who grew up in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill, about how his career began. “Still, I don’t think any of my other literary experiences compare to the thrill of winning the CBC Short Story Prize last year, when I was 25. I was totally winded by that recognition, just knocked out. Elated and shocked and terrified. If the Early Harvest win made a career as a writer seem possible, the CBC award made it conceivable that my work could reach people and be found meaningful beyond my immediate community – which is a wonderful thing, and rare. I hope it proves true of my work in a more than fleeting way – the jury’s still out, of course!”

As far as the CBC Canada Writes jury – Peter Behrens, Alison Pick and Michael Winter – was concerned, the verdict on Karasik’s winning submission was clear: “A man lies on his deathbed and begins to speak – not to his wife, who sits by his side, but to his memory of the woman with whom he had an affair. It is his wife’s response, and her voice – calm, measured, reflective – that makes Mine the story it is. Thickly imagined and expertly executed, this is the sort of writing that reminds us of the possibility of redemption and the very hard work of being human.”

Among other honors, Karasik has also won the Alta Lind Cook Prize and the Norma Epstein National

Literary Award for the manuscript of a recently completed (not yet published) novel, The Malahat Review’s Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for fiction, the Toronto Star Poetry Contest and the SummerWorks Performance Festival’s Jury Prize for outstanding new play. He’s been a finalist for the RBC Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award and a nominee for the National Magazine and the Western Magazine awards.

“My family isn’t a literary or theatrical one per se – my mom’s a speech-language therapist, my dad’s in business – but they’ve always been very supportive of my artistic life,” Karasik told the Independent about his background. “The Judaism in which I was raised was traditional, Conservative, patchily observant, more about continuity with the past and family togetherness than confessional belief or fidelity to a code of behavior. I went to extracurricular Hebrew school but public, non-parochial day school.

“My artistic training as a child was also comprised of extracurricular activities: I didn’t go to an arts school, but I acted in community musical theatre, studied piano and guitar and voice, etc. My ‘training’ as a writer, such as it was, had more to do with voracious reading and compulsive writing than any formal program of study.”

With reference to what he called in a National Post interview the “scarred remains of lousy – though completed! – drafts of novels” from his teen years, the Independent asked Karasik to what he attributed his perseverance.

“Ignorance and hubris kept me going,” he said in an e-mail. “I attribute my perseverance to my belief that it’s one of the only passably reliable predictors of any sort of success; that little is possible without it. I’d describe my creative process as groping around in the dark and trying to hear myself think.”

The artistic director of independent theatre company Tango Co., Karasik is the author of The Crossing Guard & In Full Light, two plays published in one volume by Playwrights Canada Press in 2011; The Innocents, in which he co-starred, ran at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre last year, after performances off-Broadway and in Germany. His children’s play, The Remarkable Flight of Marnie McPhee, is in repertory in Germany and The Biographer is on the agenda for Toronto.

The German connection is highlighted in Karasik’s bio on Tango Co.’s website, and he discussed it further with the Independent.

“The support for my plays in Germany has been heartening,” he said. “That connection happened via a competition the Canadian embassy and Quebec consulate run biennially, I think in coordination with the Goethe Institute. It’s called New Canadian Drama and it solicits new plays from Canadian theatres, agents, publishers and individual playwrights, with the aim of introducing a few of those plays to the German theatre market.

“In 2008, five were chosen – three English, two French – and one of them was my play In Full Light. It ended up programmed at the state theatre in Potsdam, and that production got me connected with a terrific agent there, through whose efforts a production of my play The Innocents was mounted at the state theatre in Mainz, where it had a sold-out run and would apparently still be playing in repertory had the performance space not closed and the set not proved incompatible with the replacement venue. And the same theatre in Potsdam that produced In Full Light is currently running my children’s play, The Remarkable Flight of Marnie McPhee, in repertory.

“I’ve gone over to Germany for each opening, met lots of insightful and dynamic local theatre artists. I can’t say I know why my work has proven particularly appealing over there, but I’ve found myself excited by the depth of intellectual engagement that seems to be a hallmark of that theatre culture, and maybe my excitement testifies to a sensibility in common; maybe there’s something about the intellectual syntax of my work that rhymes with habits of mind among artists there.”

In an interview with Open Book: Toronto, Karasik – whose poetry has been published in various publications, including Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry, an anthology put out in 2011 by Cormorant Books Inc., which plans to publish a collection of Karasik’s poetry this year – mentions that he is doing a bachelor of arts at the University of Toronto. For the program, he wrote a paper on the choice of genre for different story ideas.

“Yeah, that’s an endlessly knotted issue,” he acknowledged. “On a basic level, an ‘idea’ (which may or may not be an idea in a discursive sense, which may be an image, a phrase, a mood) in which music and language are the foremost elements will likely issue in a poem. That’s been my experience, anyway. And an idea which depends on interiority or a broad narrative canvas will likely issue in prose fiction. And an idea with a kind of dramatic unity or a reliance on dialogue and conflict might issue in drama. But that’s all rather schematic. More and more I’m interested in work that challenges received ideas about form. Though, that said, usually it’s clear to me on an intuitive level what form a given project should take. So, there may an intrinsic formal logic at work that I’m just not wholly aware of. I feel I’d need to write another paper to really do justice to this question!”

Along the same lines, since Karasik not only writes in a variety of forms, but also studies, directs and acts – among other duties, such as having served on the board of directors for the Paprika Festival and on the juries of the SummerWorks Performance Festival and the Governor General’s Literary Awards (drama) – the Independent asked him whether he had a preferred balance between all of these “jobs” and how he chooses his projects, or whether they choose him.

“They ‘choose me’ in a practical sense, sometimes: I pay my rent with my artistic efforts, so sometimes I feel the need to go where the work is. Financial considerations aside, writing is the deepest creative need for me, the thing I can’t not do ... but sometimes I reach the end of a productive writing period and all I want to do is act a beautifully written part in a play. Whatever my role in a project, I try (as much as possible) to commit only to work that I find engaging and thoughtful, work that I myself would like to see or read.”

As an example, one could point to The Remarkable Flight of Marnie McPhee.

“I attempted to write a children’s play first of all because the good folks at Young People’s Theatre in Toronto challenged me to, and I was 20 and game,” Karasik explained of how this project arose. “I found myself exploring rather adult themes – the meaning of aspiration, failed dreams, disappointment – in language and with a central character who’d be, I hoped, appealing to kids. And, you know, my childlike side is pretty well developed, so I had a lot of fun doing it, too.

“I guess part of the exercise was to see if I could write a play that would be tons of fun and also mean something. One criticism it received early on was that it was too meaningful in an adult way, that it engaged with adult complexities that could alienate an audience of children. And that might still be true. But I give kids a lot of credit, and I think I’d rather write a children’s play that requires a bit of emotional/intellectual stretching than one that risks making the most perceptive kids in the audience feel condescended to. For me, the process of writing for adults versus for kids differs only insofar as, in my adult plays, sex is a fact and sometimes people swear.”

Haunted is certainly adult fare. Winner of the 2011 Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition and finalist for the 2011 Herman Voaden National Playwriting Competition, Karasik explained, “Haunted came out of my grappling with faith and faithfulness: what it means to have a robust belief in a formally understood divinity, and what it means to be committed to those who are close to you – lovers, parents, children. The story developed out of an embryonic scene, now the play’s first, between a young rabbi and one of his middle-aged congregants, recently widowed. The scene is a grief-counseling session that takes a turn and becomes romantic, sexual. It’s transgressive and strange and emotionally fraught. And it wouldn’t let me go until I’d elaborated a play out of it.”

The première at Chutzpah!, presented by Touchstone Theatre, is directed by Katrina Dunn and stars Patrick Sabongui, Kerry Sandomirsky, Carmel Amit and Kayla Deorkson; sets are by Pam Johnson, costumes by Sydney Cavanaugh, lighting by Adrian Muir and sound by Jeff McMahan.

“I’m thrilled that Katrina Dunn and Touchstone responded so positively to Haunted and decided to program it,” said Karasik. “I directed a workshop version at Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival last August, so I feel I’ve had my kick at the directorial can and it’s been a pleasure (not without some anxiety, of course) to let go, give the reins to Katrina. I’m a big believer that to make theatre is to make peace with the fact that every level of that practice – design, direction, performance, etc. – involves interpretation, a kind of miniature struggle for authorship. I don’t think an author has a right to dictate the direction of a production unless he or she happens also to be the director. That said, of course there are ways of directing a play that are more or less ‘in the spirit of’ the text – that are in good or bad faith – and I’ve appreciated the time Katrina and her company have taken to make sure we’re all on the same page about Haunted’s most important meanings.”

Haunted runs Feb. 27-March 3 at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre; the March 2 matinée features a post-show talk back.

Also at Chutzpah!

The Yellow Ticket is a live, multimedia concert featuring violinist and Klezmatics co-founder Alicia Svigals' original score for the eponymous 1918 silent film The Yellow Ticket, starring famed actress Pola Negri. With violin and vocals by Svigals, the screening also features live piano by Marilyn Lerner, whose work spans the worlds of jazz improvisation, klezmer and 20th-century classical music.

The Yellow Ticket is the first film to explore antisemitism in Imperial Russia and tells the story of a young Jewish woman who hides her identity to study medicine in St. Petersburg. Coerced into prostitution to pay the rent, she is saved by a beloved professor with a secret of his own.

Svigals' score adds a new dimension to the film's themes of ethnic and religious discrimination, human trafficking and poverty, and reintroduces this forgotten classic to audiences across North America.

The 2013 Chutzpah! Festival is one of five New Jewish Culture Network presenters – a league of North American performing arts presenters committed to the creation and touring of innovative projects – being supported by the Foundation of Jewish Culture for this inaugural North American tour of The Yellow Ticket.

The Yellow Ticket takes place on Sunday, Feb. 17, 2 p.m., at the Rothstein Theatre, and there is a post-show talk back.

Tickets

Tickets for all the Chutzpah! events – dance , music, theatre – can be purchased at chutzpahfestival.com (604-257-5145) and ticketstonight.ca (604-684-2787), as well as in person at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.

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