Director and playwright Jordan Laffrenier sees theatre as a way to challenge perspectives, explore race and tell underrepresented stories.Sandro Pehar/Supplied
Jordan Laffrenier was furious with Slave Play the first time he saw it on Broadway.
He was not the only one. The brew of spectacle and sexual role play by Jeremy O. Harris arrived in 2018 at a particularly noisy moment for Black representation, not long after cultural titleholders such as Moonlight and Black Panther. It complicated the celebration with uncomfortable questions. What, exactly, was Harris asking Black people to endure on a stage? Was Slave Play good for Black audiences? A petition demanding the production close attracted more than 6,000 signatures.
“I was just so angered by the idea that Black people who were being presented as enslaved were being presented as caricatures,” he recalls.
Laffrenier, an award-winning director, playwright and dramaturge – and associate artistic director at Canadian Stage in Toronto – has taste that carries weight. But to understand Laffrenier is to realize that his first reaction is rarely his last. And that was the case after he directed Slave Play last fall.
The first act asks whether a vision of historical Black trauma can take place in a bedroom. It opens on a plantation, with masters and servants experiencing a blend of submission, flirtation and degradation. Eventually the setting is stripped away, revealing that the plantation figures are actually three contemporary interracial couples engaged in therapeutic role play.
What Laffrenier found beneath the confrontation was an argument about intimacy. “To love somebody fully, you need to see them fully,” he says, “and to see somebody fully includes their race.”
That realization seems to have outgrown the play itself. A year after directing Slave Play, Laffrenier is arriving at a broader theory of his work. “Every play I’ve worked on is about race in some way,” he says, knowing that the productions may be American-set, but the conversations aren’t. “Some plays make it more explicit.”
Most recently, that theory was tested by Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness, which Laffrenier directed at Canadian Stage earlier this month. That play confines the subject of Blackness to a single apartment and watches what happens when viewpoints clash. It looks at class and gender amid subtle whiffs of respectability politics.
Laffrenier’s life emerged from working-class Hamilton. His mother, who had him at 22, worked three jobs to keep their single-parent home afloat. He remembers his earliest household lessons being anchored by a familiar trifecta: Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and Martin Luther King Jr. It was a vast buffet of Black possibility.
Theatre, though, was never part of the household curriculum. “My first love is math. It’s still math,” Laffrenier says. For years, he assumed he would become an engineer, until a friend got into film school and introduced him to another path. “I didn’t even know that you could go to school for anything artistic.”
Once theatre entered the picture, it connected almost immediately to a need he had always carried.
“It just felt like this was the way to make change,” he says, “and this was the way to, frankly, at that time, tell Black stories.”
Laffrenier’s staging of Wine in the Wilderness platformed a sort of fuller, messier spectrum of Black life he had spent a good deal of time wanting to see given a stage. In 2015, he helped launch Then They Fight, an independent Toronto company founded by young artists who weren’t seeing themselves reflected in the city’s major institutions.
“A lot of the theatre companies in Toronto would never do our work,” Laffrenier says. “There were a few theatre companies that had all-white seasons.” Few people among the writers, directors, dramaturges and establishment leadership looked like him and his peers.
The issue Laffrenier often ran into – and which has long dogged pretty much every other Black theatre-maker – was one of imagination. Not his, but the lack of one caused by a centuries-long pileup of white institutional taste.
“When there’s only one work by a certain group of people, or when there’s no work by a certain group of people,” Laffrenier says, the challenge is how to “fill the imagination” of artistic directors so they can envision “more stories on the stage as part of their seasons.”
Now on the inside at Canadian Stage, Laffrenier treats that power as an obligation. “Power is something that needs to be distributed always. It’s given me a bigger responsibility to the community and all of its members.”
An all-Black room, however, isn’t a promise of a harmonious one. In rehearsals for Wine in the Wilderness, he kept returning to a fundamental question: “What is this thing we do to each other as Black people?”
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The play taught Laffrenier how to ask the question, then handed him a harder answer: Black people can inherit “the language of the oppressor,” then turn around and use it to judge or police one another.
The conclusion it left him with is blunter still: “A revolution that leaves gender hierarchies and class hierarchies intact is no revolution at all,” he says. “A revolution needs to include everyone.”
For all that clarity, Laffrenier seems most interested in whatever disrupts it next – which in this case is directing American Buffalo for Toronto’s Coal Mine Theatre (opening Nov. 8). David Mamet’s play, about three working-class men circling a small-time theft in a Chicago junk shop, terrifies him in part because he reads it as deeply about whiteness.
“I would love to direct the play that people are like, ‘We don’t think Jordan could direct this play,’” he says.
The work he thinks he can’t direct, he has found, often leaves him with even more questions than answers. “I like plays that say things that I’ve never heard before. I like plays that feel like they reveal something about me that felt unknown.”