In the Press
Playhouse Creatures
Persephone Troupe Beating the Odds
by Wayne Hiltz
The Westmount Times
Getting a new theatre company off the ground and established is certainly no easy feat. Under the direction of Westmounter Gabrielle Soskin, Persephone Productions is trying very hard to beat the odds after a successful run of its second production Playhouse Creatures.
"It's so easy to give up when people wonder how can you think of having another English-Language theatre in this city," said Soskin, who taught drama at Roslyn School for several years during the 1970s, "but with a lot of determination and going slowly one step at a time, I think that it could very well work."
Persephone Productions was incorporated earlier this year. The next important step for Soskin will be to gain charitable status so that the company can properly raise funds from foundations and individuals and start paying the cast and crew. Both comprise either recent drama graduates or those with a few years' experience. The company's mandate is to give young professional artists a chance to show off their skills.
Soskin, who has taught at John Abbott College for nearly 20 years, emphasized that she definitely wants her troupe to become a professional, not a community, theatre. "I want Persephone to be a real entity on the Montreal theatre scene."
A new troupe typically faces the dilemma of not having enough funds to put on a long run that can them lead to fewer theatre critics bothering to show up, write reviews, and take the company seriously.
"It's often not worthwhile to review a play if it's not on for more than a week," she explained, "but the longer you have the theatre, the more expensive it is."
With their production last year of Anna Karenina, the troupe put on a starkly setted eight- day run with a gap of two days in the middle to help build up word-of-mouth buzz.
Persephone productions opened Playhouse Creatures with a Tuesday-to-Sunday run and a more elaborate setting. If they wanted to stop for a few days, the technical crew would have had to spend several hours taking everything down and again putting it back up, Soskin said. That resulted in some supporters not being able to show up since they thought that it was over a two- week period or couldn't make it that week. Still, more than 500 people showed up for the seven shows of Playhouse Creatures. There were two sell-outs and the others were filled to about 70 percent capacity. She's confident that those missing their latest show will come back next time. Soskin commented that enough people say Playhouse Lambert, Lisa Morneau, Stepharue Creatures and were pleased with the quality of the acting and the production.
Because the play is set in 17th-century England, the five actresses (Dawn Lambert, Lisa Morneau, Stephanie Youlande Farrell, Elissa Bernstein and Anana Rydvald) had to master the accent. Indeed, it was very hard to tell that they weren't English. The playwright's script also presented a few problems since it lacked some cohesion and had sharp transitions, she noted.
But the story about pioneering English actresses (women were not allowed on the stage until 1670) appealed to Soskin on several levels. Besides loving plays about the theatre, she identifies with the theme of women struggling and striving to find their own voice.
"I've been a theatre professor at John Abbott for' a long time, but I've never directed or had a strong position until the past six years," she said. "It also goes back to my upbringing when women just weren't directors and very few were playwrights." While her first two Persephone plays featured strong female roles and themes, she wants to take another direction for her next production. Soskin also realizes that she may have to put on more than one show a year if she wants her company to establish a place for itself. With the fierce competition among theatre companies, "people do forget in the year that goes by."
But she also has to balance that need now with her full-time teaching job. After next year's play, Soskin will decide whether her company will be an on-going concern and commit more time and energy to it.
"People who came up to me after the play said 'You're doing a wonderful thing.' Now the other pieces have to fall into place."
Résumé: Gabrielle Soskin de Persephone Productions est en train de bâtir sa nouvelle troupe de théâtre pas à pas. Persephone Productions a déjà produit deux pieces, Playhouse Creatures et Anna Karenina et est maintenant incorporé et cherche le statut de société à but non lucratif afin d'aller chercher l'argent qui financera l'expansion.
Reprinted from THE/LE WESTMOUNT TIMES
by Wayne Hiltz
The Westmount Times
Getting a new theatre company off the ground and established is certainly no easy feat. Under the direction of Westmounter Gabrielle Soskin, Persephone Productions is trying very hard to beat the odds after a successful run of its second production Playhouse Creatures.
"It's so easy to give up when people wonder how can you think of having another English-Language theatre in this city," said Soskin, who taught drama at Roslyn School for several years during the 1970s, "but with a lot of determination and going slowly one step at a time, I think that it could very well work."
Persephone Productions was incorporated earlier this year. The next important step for Soskin will be to gain charitable status so that the company can properly raise funds from foundations and individuals and start paying the cast and crew. Both comprise either recent drama graduates or those with a few years' experience. The company's mandate is to give young professional artists a chance to show off their skills.
Soskin, who has taught at John Abbott College for nearly 20 years, emphasized that she definitely wants her troupe to become a professional, not a community, theatre. "I want Persephone to be a real entity on the Montreal theatre scene."
A new troupe typically faces the dilemma of not having enough funds to put on a long run that can them lead to fewer theatre critics bothering to show up, write reviews, and take the company seriously.
"It's often not worthwhile to review a play if it's not on for more than a week," she explained, "but the longer you have the theatre, the more expensive it is."
With their production last year of Anna Karenina, the troupe put on a starkly setted eight- day run with a gap of two days in the middle to help build up word-of-mouth buzz.
Persephone productions opened Playhouse Creatures with a Tuesday-to-Sunday run and a more elaborate setting. If they wanted to stop for a few days, the technical crew would have had to spend several hours taking everything down and again putting it back up, Soskin said. That resulted in some supporters not being able to show up since they thought that it was over a two- week period or couldn't make it that week. Still, more than 500 people showed up for the seven shows of Playhouse Creatures. There were two sell-outs and the others were filled to about 70 percent capacity. She's confident that those missing their latest show will come back next time. Soskin commented that enough people say Playhouse Lambert, Lisa Morneau, Stepharue Creatures and were pleased with the quality of the acting and the production.
Because the play is set in 17th-century England, the five actresses (Dawn Lambert, Lisa Morneau, Stephanie Youlande Farrell, Elissa Bernstein and Anana Rydvald) had to master the accent. Indeed, it was very hard to tell that they weren't English. The playwright's script also presented a few problems since it lacked some cohesion and had sharp transitions, she noted.
But the story about pioneering English actresses (women were not allowed on the stage until 1670) appealed to Soskin on several levels. Besides loving plays about the theatre, she identifies with the theme of women struggling and striving to find their own voice.
"I've been a theatre professor at John Abbott for' a long time, but I've never directed or had a strong position until the past six years," she said. "It also goes back to my upbringing when women just weren't directors and very few were playwrights." While her first two Persephone plays featured strong female roles and themes, she wants to take another direction for her next production. Soskin also realizes that she may have to put on more than one show a year if she wants her company to establish a place for itself. With the fierce competition among theatre companies, "people do forget in the year that goes by."
But she also has to balance that need now with her full-time teaching job. After next year's play, Soskin will decide whether her company will be an on-going concern and commit more time and energy to it.
"People who came up to me after the play said 'You're doing a wonderful thing.' Now the other pieces have to fall into place."
Résumé: Gabrielle Soskin de Persephone Productions est en train de bâtir sa nouvelle troupe de théâtre pas à pas. Persephone Productions a déjà produit deux pieces, Playhouse Creatures et Anna Karenina et est maintenant incorporé et cherche le statut de société à but non lucratif afin d'aller chercher l'argent qui financera l'expansion.
Reprinted from THE/LE WESTMOUNT TIMES
Creature Comforts
Persephone Theatre's Gabrielle Soskin Makes Everything All Right
by GAËTAN L. CHARLEBOIS
The Montreal Mirror
When I was an acting student at John Abbott College I was, for the most part, terrified of my teachers partly because I didn't understand them.
At least two of them seemed to make it their job to break our will. In the guise of showing us what the real world to theatre was like, they heaped abuse on us like we were their bitches. This had a culling effect: we began first year with over 30 students, finished it with about a dozen (and, in passing, only two actually, got their DEC at the end of three years). It was, by and large, an awful experience and made many of us, including me, sick.
In one memorable incident one teacher took me aside on opening night to tell me he wanted to make further cuts in my role. As his pencil slashed across the script he added, "I'd like to cut your whole character but the play wouldn't make sense."
But in second year, along came dance coach Gabrielle Soskin. She had been educated at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and had had a career as an actor in Great Britain but came to the New World to teach. I was deeply suspicious of her (as were most of us) because her heart seemed to be as big as all outdoors. She, together with movement coach Jon Torel and interpretation teacher Jill Nassivera, realized that we were a wounded group and decided that they would make us healthy again.
Now, 26 years later, Soskin is still at Abbott. Her groundbreaking production of Peter Pan last season, which used actual, flying mechanisms, was, astoundingly, sold out for most of its 30-performance run. But Soskin realized something about her students: they needed to work after they left school. Says Soskin, "So many were floating around after graduation, not getting many chances, not working in the first ten years or so of their careers." In her typically good-sense way, she has done something about that. Last year she formed Persephone Theatre. "It's open to anybody, but they have to have some professional experience or training;' Soskin says. Persephone's first outing, Anna Karenina, played to sold-out houses.
This time out, with April de Angelis's Playhouse Creature, Soskin is not just mounting a showcase for her students, she is also doing something extraordinary. De Angelis is one of the British squadron of pre-and-post- Thatcherite feminist writers, an army that includes Pam Gems and Garyl Churchill, whose works are wholly theatrical, only seeming inadvertently polemical. Churchill's Serious Money, for instance, is simply awesome. In de Angelis's play, we are in the Restoration, when women, for the first time, were allowed on the stage. After that battle was won, however, these women had to fight the continuing little wars in order to be recognized as more than baubles in their respective companies. "They were not seen as artists in their own right; nobody of 'decent breeding' would be an actress;' says Soskin. "They were drawn from the working class, like Nell Gwynn who was an orange seller and went on to become a star, or they were the daughters of fathers who had died suddenly and who had left them no dowry; to be on the stage was better than being a prostitute."
Things changed because the women happened to be good and playwrights responded by writing them some of the best - and strongest - roles in world theatre. "That's the joy of this play; says Soskin. "We get the sense, at the beginning, that they are fighting a losing battle for recognition, but we know, by the end, that they have won."
Soskin has been there, done that. "I had precisely the same struggle myself. The power of women in the theatre is relatively recent. In my day, there were virtually no women directors and very few women playwrights. So when I read this piece, I felt a very strong affinity for it."
So here's Gabby, as we called her, with one production, filling several needs - for her students and, apparently, for herself. But there is another need she is filling: the great gaping hole in this city when it comes to any kind of political theatre, particularly feminist theatre.
As we talk about this, and laugh about the tyranny of some of my old teachers, and her colleagues, who, as it happens, were all men, I realize one thing: her heart is still as big as all outdoors.
Reprinted from THE MONTREAL MIRROR
Persephone Theatre's Gabrielle Soskin Makes Everything All Right
by GAËTAN L. CHARLEBOIS
The Montreal Mirror
When I was an acting student at John Abbott College I was, for the most part, terrified of my teachers partly because I didn't understand them.
At least two of them seemed to make it their job to break our will. In the guise of showing us what the real world to theatre was like, they heaped abuse on us like we were their bitches. This had a culling effect: we began first year with over 30 students, finished it with about a dozen (and, in passing, only two actually, got their DEC at the end of three years). It was, by and large, an awful experience and made many of us, including me, sick.
In one memorable incident one teacher took me aside on opening night to tell me he wanted to make further cuts in my role. As his pencil slashed across the script he added, "I'd like to cut your whole character but the play wouldn't make sense."
But in second year, along came dance coach Gabrielle Soskin. She had been educated at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and had had a career as an actor in Great Britain but came to the New World to teach. I was deeply suspicious of her (as were most of us) because her heart seemed to be as big as all outdoors. She, together with movement coach Jon Torel and interpretation teacher Jill Nassivera, realized that we were a wounded group and decided that they would make us healthy again.
Now, 26 years later, Soskin is still at Abbott. Her groundbreaking production of Peter Pan last season, which used actual, flying mechanisms, was, astoundingly, sold out for most of its 30-performance run. But Soskin realized something about her students: they needed to work after they left school. Says Soskin, "So many were floating around after graduation, not getting many chances, not working in the first ten years or so of their careers." In her typically good-sense way, she has done something about that. Last year she formed Persephone Theatre. "It's open to anybody, but they have to have some professional experience or training;' Soskin says. Persephone's first outing, Anna Karenina, played to sold-out houses.
This time out, with April de Angelis's Playhouse Creature, Soskin is not just mounting a showcase for her students, she is also doing something extraordinary. De Angelis is one of the British squadron of pre-and-post- Thatcherite feminist writers, an army that includes Pam Gems and Garyl Churchill, whose works are wholly theatrical, only seeming inadvertently polemical. Churchill's Serious Money, for instance, is simply awesome. In de Angelis's play, we are in the Restoration, when women, for the first time, were allowed on the stage. After that battle was won, however, these women had to fight the continuing little wars in order to be recognized as more than baubles in their respective companies. "They were not seen as artists in their own right; nobody of 'decent breeding' would be an actress;' says Soskin. "They were drawn from the working class, like Nell Gwynn who was an orange seller and went on to become a star, or they were the daughters of fathers who had died suddenly and who had left them no dowry; to be on the stage was better than being a prostitute."
Things changed because the women happened to be good and playwrights responded by writing them some of the best - and strongest - roles in world theatre. "That's the joy of this play; says Soskin. "We get the sense, at the beginning, that they are fighting a losing battle for recognition, but we know, by the end, that they have won."
Soskin has been there, done that. "I had precisely the same struggle myself. The power of women in the theatre is relatively recent. In my day, there were virtually no women directors and very few women playwrights. So when I read this piece, I felt a very strong affinity for it."
So here's Gabby, as we called her, with one production, filling several needs - for her students and, apparently, for herself. But there is another need she is filling: the great gaping hole in this city when it comes to any kind of political theatre, particularly feminist theatre.
As we talk about this, and laugh about the tyranny of some of my old teachers, and her colleagues, who, as it happens, were all men, I realize one thing: her heart is still as big as all outdoors.
Reprinted from THE MONTREAL MIRROR