This is How We Got Here is Métis playwright Keith Barker’s drama about a rural couple dealing with (or avoiding dealing with) their son’s suicide.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
If this pandemic had a playwright laureate, I would nominate Keith Barker for the role. During a tough time in which everyone is missing someone, his plays about loss have deepened in resonance – and found a broader audience.
This is How We Got Here, the Métis playwright’s Governor General’s Award-nominated drama about a rural couple dealing with (or avoiding dealing with) their son’s suicide, was one of the last live shows in Toronto in 2020, completing a critically acclaimed run produced by Native Earth Performing Arts in that long-running Indigenous theatre company’s intimate Aki Studio.
But Barker’s play, infused with humour despite the subject matter, has surprisingly only gained momentum since stages shut down: It won a Dora Mavor Moore Award at that the 2020 virtual ceremony – and was adapted into an audio drama the following year by the CBC-affiliated PlayME podcast.
Now, Native Earth’s production of This is How We Got Here has been invited up to the Shaw Festival to launch its 60th anniversary season this month (Feb. 9 to 19).
It will be the Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., theatre company’s introduction to Barker – who is also the outgoing artistic director of Native Earth and this week was announced as the incoming director of new play development at the Stratford Festival – and his knack for creating fully rounded, down-to-earth characters, which comes from his roots in small-town Northern Ontario.
The way Barker depicts pickup-driving, moose-hunting human beings, Indigenous or otherwise, grappling with grief is as heartwarming as it is heartbreaking; this is equally front and centre in two short pieces he wrote during the past two years that explore the complicated feelings associated with not being given a proper chance to say goodbye to loved ones.
In a little plastic bag, in a tiny jar, on a mantel in the house, an online play commissioned by Stratford Festival for its Stratfest@Home platform, is a simple, but affecting FaceTime conversation between two brothers (Craig Lauzon and Gordon Patrick White) who find an unorthodox way to honour their father after his death from COVID-19.
Likewise, Every Minute of Every Day, an audio play written for Toronto’s Factory Theatre, follows two sisters (Marcia Johnson and Allison Edwards-Crewe) as they revisit favourite places in Toronto, inventing an original ritual to mark a death following a long estrangement.
(Both works of digital theatre are still available to stream – but, be forewarned, both are likely to lead to tears streaming down your cheeks.)
Barker, whose twisting theatre career has taken him from acting to artistic direction with a stint at the Canada Council for the Arts in between, has personally lost people in his life to suicide; he’s spoken of how the “shame and silencing” that comes in its wake informs This is How We Got Here.
But when I got him on the phone on a break from rehearsals to ask why the subject of grief so dominates his work, the 47-year-old connected it to his relationship with his father – who he lost not once, but twice.
The first time was when Barker – who was born in a town called Geraldton, Ont., near Longlac, which he says only people from that area and tree planters are familiar with – was just four years old.
His father, an electrician by trade, ran away with his hairdresser, leaving his mother to raise three children on her own.
Barker's twisting theatre career has taken him from acting to artistic direction with a stint at the Canada Council for the Arts in between.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
That vanishing made the young boy worry constantly that his mom, whose job as a 911 dispatcher for the OPP took the family to Kenora, Ont., then Thunder Bay, would die and leave him parentless.
“I always lived in this world of ‘This person has disappeared from our lives and I don’t want to also lose you,’” Barker recalls. “I spent so much of my life being so scared about what to do when we lose the people we love.”
Studying acting at George Brown Theatre School in Toronto as a young man years later, however, Barker reconnected with his father, who was then living in Brampton, Ont. He had written a letter to him explaining his hurt feelings – and his father replied inviting him to lunch.
The two built a new relationship and, eventually, Barker forgave his dad, as he says in a non-judgmental manner that also is apparent in his approach to his characters, “for the choices he made.”
And yet, a couple of years after Barker graduated from theatre school, his father would vanish once more – again without explanation, this time forever.
During the final visit Barker had with his father, shortly before flying home to Thunder Bay for Christmas one year, the two watched a Leafs game, shared a beer and what the playwright recalls as a “great conversation”; he knew his father had been battling colon cancer, but he had been told he was recovering well.
Two weeks later, Barker’s father died. “I found out after he passed way that he was terminal and everyone knew that he was dying – and he didn’t tell me,” he says.
Barker eventually channelled the pain over unanswered questions from that disappearance into his first play, after he was bitten by the writing bug while helping facilitate Native Earth’s Young Voices Program as an artistic associate at the company from 2007 to 2010.
The Hours That Remain, which would ultimately open the Aki Studio in 2012, concerns a woman named Denise searching for her sister, who has disappeared on B.C.’s Highway of Tears, that notorious stretch where a disturbing number of Indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered.
Driven to the edge of reason by uncertainty, Denise begins to hallucinate her sister and many of other women who have disappeared – until she comes to a realization and the play comes to a shocking conclusion.
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, the Siminovitch-nominated playwright and emcee, read an early draft of this play when she was general manager at Native Earth – and Barker credits her with cementing his pivot away from acting by telling him, “You are a playwright, you need to keep writing.” She’d go on to champion his work through her company New Harlem Productions.
“Keith’s writing has a such a strong emotional centre; that’s what is always the most appealing about a good piece of theatre, characters you can connect to deeply in the short amount of time you have with them,” St. Bernard says. “He really did create that connection for me even on the page.”
The Hours That Remain was both a notable debut – it won a Saskatoon and Area Theatres Award for Excellence in Playwriting – and part of a larger movement that raised awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, which led to the national inquiry being established in September, 2016.
This is How We Got Here, though it is being presented at the Shaw Festival by Native Earth with an all-Indigenous cast (including Shaw ensemble member Kristopher Bowman, who was outstanding in the show in Toronto), is not a play written for actors of any particular background.
“I wanted it to be a show that anybody could do,” Barker says. “This story is a shared story with many different communities.” He’s been touched by the ways different audiences connect to the characters and have told him: “This is so Alberta” or “This so Northern Ontario.”
“Losing your loved ones is part of the life we live,” he says – but adds of his play about to reopen at the Shaw Festival: “I maintain this is still a fun night at the theatre!”
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